Day 16 Of The Israel v Hamas War (10-22-23)

01:00 Why did Joe Biden visit Israel? https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153185
03:00 Thomas Baden-Riess says he’s right
05:00 Failed Islamic Jihad rocket achieves more than successful rocket launches,
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/opinion/biden-speech-israel-gaza.html
07:00 The rocket that hit the Hamas hospital, https://www.wsj.com/video/video-analysis-shows-gaza-hospital-hit-by-failed-rocket-meant-for-israel/120A1C22-BA32-418E-8837-BC4141FEFB00.html
11:30 Who’s attracted to radicalization, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-julia-ebner-extremist-networks-radicalisation
23:30 Dooovid joins, President of Detroit synagogue found stabbed to death outside home, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/10/21/synagogue-fatal-stabbing-detroit/
38:00 Rodney Martin joins
42:00 ​64% of Palestinian refugees taken in by Denmark in 1992 now have criminal records, https://voz.us/the-shocking-revelation-about-palestinians-and-crime-in-denmark-the-vast-majority-have-been-convicted-of-crimes/?lang=en
44:00 Why Egypt Leaves Palestinians in Gaza to Die, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/why-egypt-leaves-palestinians-in-gaza-to-die
1:58:00 When we’re prone to radicalization, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-julia-ebner-extremist-networks-radicalisation
2:00:00 I changed how I did things after my Saturday night massacre stream with Jim Goad, https://rumble.com/vefngp-the-art-of-debate-w-jim-goad-nick-fuentes-baked-alaska-irony-bros.html
2:06:00 My turning points, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=151532
2:21:20 The Middle East Problem with Dennis Prager, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRuFIt7ea74
2:25:00 Sam Vaknin on Israel v Hamas, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5MyhC4uksk
2:29:00 The Coming Victimhood Apocalypse, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98ClG056HiM
2:35:00 Liberal conceptions of ethical sex and war, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153185
2:49:00 Wellness by Nathan Hill, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153203
2:55:00 Gaza and Israel: The Start of WWIII or an Isolated Conflict? || Peter Zeihan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OagYlYna75Y

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Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

Michael Lewis writes in his new book:

* He didn’t mean to be rude. He didn’t mean to create chaos in other people’s lives. He was just moving through the world in the only way he knew how. The cost this implied for others simply never entered his calculations. With him it was never personal. If he stood you up, it was never on a whim, or the result of thoughtlessness. It was because he’d done some math in his head that proved that you weren’t worth the time. “You’re always going to be apologizing to different people, and you’ll do that every day,” said Natalie.

He’d occasionally surprise her with some kindness — for example, after he’d met privately with President Clinton, and asked him what the United States might do if China invaded Taiwan. Whatever Clinton had told Sam had prompted him to seek her out afterward and suggest that she move her parents out of Taiwan.

* “My mom is working full – time on the effectiveness of political campaign donations, and my brother is in DC with policymakers,” Sam said, returning Anna Wintour’s face to his laptop. “We’re doing a decent amount to see just how hard we can make it to steal an election. It’s sad that’s the forum we have to fight in, but it is.”
For a surprisingly long time, Sam’s spending on American elections had flown under the radar. Back in 2020, he’d sent $5.2 million to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign without anyone asking or even thanking him for it. He was Biden’s second – or third – biggest donor, and yet the campaign had never even bothered to call him. Since then, Sam had tossed tens of millions more dollars at one hundred different candidates and political action committees (PACs), in ways that made his identity difficult to detect. It was yet another game — How to Influence American Politics — that he was learning by doing, and it was pretty fun, especially when you had the special power of invisibility. But then he “fucked up,” as he put it. He let it slip in some interview that he was thinking of hurling a billion dollars into the next presidential election. That remark had awakened the beast.

* Natalie Tien was prepared for Anna Wintour’s people to be disappointed when she told them that Sam wouldn’t be there. It was their outrage that surprised her. “They called and shouted and said Sam will never set foot in fashion again!” said Natalie. So much for pulling more women into crypto. Natalie didn’t understand why the Met Gala was such a big deal. Sam’s last – minute decision not to go would not create anything like the havoc caused by some of his other internal calculations. CEOs had flown to the Bahamas under the mistaken impression that Sam had agreed to buy their companies. The World Economic Forum had to scramble to fill a stage and cancel media interviews after Sam decided, the night before he was meant to deliver a big speech in Davos, not to. Sam had failed to fly to Dubai to give the keynote at Time magazine’s party for the world’s 100 Most Influential People, even after Time had named him to their list and flattered him in print. “In a crypto landscape ridden with scams, hedonism, and greed, Bankman – Fried offers a kinder and more impactful vision brought forth by the nascent technology,” Time had written, the week before Sam stiffed them. Tyra Banks and will.i.am and all the rest of the world’s other most influential people were treated to hastily prepared remarks delivered by a not entirely sober FTX employee named Adam Jacobs, who was bewildered to be standing in for Sam. “I’m like, What is the head of payments doing giving this speech?” said Jacobs. “Why am I drinking with will.i.am?”
But the people at Time magazine hadn’t made a stink. No one except Anna Wintour’s people did: the general rule of life as late as May 2, 2022, was that Sam got to be Sam.

* When I’d asked Sam for a list of people who could describe what he was like before the age of eighteen, he’d taken a deep breath and said, “That’s slim pickings.” He suggested his parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried. He mentioned that he had a younger brother, Gabe. Apart from that, he said, he had no early relationships that would cast any light on him, and there were no experiences in his childhood that mattered much. “I’m a little confused about my childhood,” he said. “I just can’t figure out what I did with it. I look at the things I did, and I cannot successfully add up to twenty – four hours a day. I daydreamed some. I read some books. I played some video games, but that wasn’t until high school. I had one or two frien ds I’d hang out with now and again.” The names of those friends, with one exception, would not ever spring to mind. He was happy to supply me with his date of birth: March 5, 1992. Beyond that, he didn’t have much to say, and didn’t think his childhood had anything to say about him — which struck me as odd, as he had spent roughly two – thirds of his life in it.

He’d gone to school for thirteen years with other children. He’d been admitted to colleges, which would have required teachers to write him recommendations. His parents were well – known professors. Most Sundays, I’d learn, Joe and Barbara hosted a dinner that guests remember fondly to this day. “The conversation was intoxicating,” recalls Tino Cuéllar, a Stanford law professor who would go on to become a judge on California’s supreme court and then head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Fifteen percent of it was what was going on in your life, fifteen percent was politics, and the rest was ideas. How we thought about what we thought about — aesthetics, music, whatever.” Sam had been at those dinners but could not think of any one of their guests who’d be worth my talking to. Pressed, he suggested I call his brother, who was now employed by Sam to distribute Sam’s money to political candidates. Gabe, three years younger, told me that I was wasting my time. “We weren’t close growing up,” he said, when I reached him. “I don’t think Sam liked school that much, but I don’t really know. He kept to himself. I would interact with him as another tenant in my house.”

Sam’s parents were only a bit more helpful. Sam had been their first child, and so it had taken them longer than it might have to figure out that there was no point in parenting him by any book. “Childhood was a funny thing for Sam,” said Joe. “He was never comfortable with kids, or with being a kid.” They’d briefly attempted to inflict upon him a normal childhood before realizing that there was no point. The trip to the amusement park was a good example. When Sam was a small child, his mother had located a Six Flags or Great America park. She’d hauled him dutifully from amusement to amusement until she realized Sam wasn’t amused. Instead of throwing himself into the rides, he was watching her . “Are you having fun, Mom?” he asked finally, by which he meant, Is this really your or anyone else’s idea of fun? “I realized I had been busted,” said Barbara.

By the time Sam was eight she had given up on the idea that his wants and needs would be anything like other children’s. She remembered the instant that happened. She had been at Stanford for over a decade, a frequent contributor of difficult papers to academic journals. “I was walking him to school, and he asked me what I was doing,” recalled Barbara. “I told him I was giving some paper, and he asked, ‘What’s it on?’ ” I gave him a bullshit answer, and he pressed me on it, and by the end of the walk we were in the middle of a deep conversation about the argument. The points he was making were better than any of the reviewers’. At that moment my parenting style changed.”
To their friends who came to dinner on Sunday nights, Joe was always light, Barbara more serious. Joe was funny, Barbara trenchant. Gabe was a bright and cheery little kid whom everyone loved. Sam was always a presence, but he was quieter and more watchful and less accessible than his little brother. To their dinner guests it seemed that Joe and especially Barbara were both a little afraid for, and of, their elder son. And that they were concerned about how he would ever fit into the world. “We worried that Gabe’s light was going to shine, and Sam would hide his under a bushel,” said Barbara.

Sam himself took a bit longer to recognize the gulf between himself and other children. He didn’t really know why he didn’t have friends the way other kids did. Between the ages of eight and ten, he was sideswiped by a pair of realizations that, taken together, amounted to an epiphany. The first came one December day during the third grade. Christmas was approaching, and a few of his classmates brought up the critical subject of Santa Claus.

The Bankman – Frieds weren’t big on the usual holidays. They celebrated Hanukkah but with so little enthusiasm that one year they simply forgot it, and, realizing that none of them cared, stopped celebrating anything. “It was like, ‘Alright, who was bothered by this fact? The fact that we forgot Hanukkah.’ No one raised their hand,” Sam said. They didn’t do birthdays, either. Sam didn’t feel the slightest bit deprived. “My parents were like, I dunno, ‘Is there something you want? Alright, bring it up. And you can have it. Even in February. Doesn’t have to be in December. If you want it, let’s have an open and honest conversation about it instead of us trying to guess.’ ” Sam, like his parents, didn’t see the point in anyone trying to imagine what someone else might want. The family’s indifference to convention came naturally and unselfconsciously. It was never, Look how interest ing we are, we don’t observe any of the rituals that define so many American lives. “It’s not like they said, ‘Gifts are dumb,’ ” recalled Sam. “They never tried to convince us about gifts. It didn’t happen like that.”

None of what the Bankman – Frieds did was for show; they weren’t that kind of people. They just really thought about what they did before they did it. In his twenties Sam would learn that his parents had never married. In silent protest of the fact that their gay friends could not legally marry, they’d joined in a civil union. And they never said a word about it to their children, or to anyone else, as far as Sam could tell. Later, Sam understood that “they were clearly being driven by a different underlying belief system.” As a small child he knew only that there were things other children took for granted that he did not.

* Sam had heard of God too. “God was like a thing on TV,” he said. “God came up. But I didn’t think anyone actually believed in God.” It told you something not just about Sam but about his upbringing that he could live for almost ten years inside the United States of America without realizing that other people believed in God. “I never asked myself, ‘Why does God come up if no one believes in it?’ ” he said. “I had never gone through that process before. I hadn’t drilled down into ‘Do people believe in it?’ ” Now Henry was telling him not only that he believed in God but that his parents did too. So did lots of other grown – ups. “And I freaked out,” recalled Sam. “Then he freaked out. We both freaked out. I remember thinking, Wait a minute, do you think I’m going to hell? Because that seems like a big deal. If hell exists, why do you, like, care about McDonald’s? Why are we talking about any of this shit, if there is a hell. If it really exists. It’s fucking terrifying, hell.”

This was Santa all over again, only worse. God — or rather the fact that anyone believed in him — rocked Sam’s world. Just sideswiped his view of other people and what was going on inside their minds. He tried to confront adults — mainly friends of his parents’ who came to dinner — about God. He always found it easier to talk to grown – ups than to children and had always been better at it than other children — a fact he attributed to the idiotic childishness of other children. His parents’ friends were at their dinner table every Sunday, and available for inspection. “I’d ask them, ‘Do you believe in God?’ They’d equivocate — like, say something about a Being that started the Clock of the Universe. And I’d think, Quit fucking around: it’s a binary question. Just yes or no.” He didn’t understand the unwillingness of even really smart grown – ups to get the right answer to this question. “It was weird to me,” he said. “I never understood why people bothered pretending about this shit.”

* In some deep way, he sensed, he remained cut off from other human beings. He could read them, but they couldn’t read him. “There were some things I had to teach myself to do,” he said. “One is facial expressions. Like making sure I smile when I’m supposed to smile. Smiling was the biggest thing that I most weirdly couldn’t do.” Other people would say or do things to which he was meant to respond with some emotional display.

* He felt nothing in the presence of art. He found religion absurd. He thought both right – wing and left – wing political opinions kind of dumb, less a consequence of thought than of their holder’s tribal identity. He and his family ignored the rituals that punctuated most people’s existence. He didn’t even celebrate his own birthday. What gave pleasure and solace and a sense of belonging to others left Sam cold. When the Bankman – Frieds traveled to Europe, Sam realized that he was just staring at a lot of old buildings for no particular reason. “We did a few trips,” he said. “I basically hated it.” To his unrelenting alienation there was one exception: games. In sixth grade Sam heard about a game called Magic: The Gathering . For the next four years it was the only activity that consumed him faster than he could consume it.

* In their day jobs, his parents continually wrestled with the tension, in American law, between individual freedoms and the collective good. Both identified, broadly speaking, as utilitarians: any law should seek not to maximize some abstract notion of freedom but rather the greatest good for the greatest number. They never pushed their views on Sam, but Sam of course heard them. And his parents mostly made sense to him. Around the time he stopped reading books, he turned to utilitarian message boards on the internet. He might not have felt connections to individual individual people, but that only made it easier for him to consider the interests of humanity as a whole. “Not being super close to that many particular people made it more natural to care not about anyone in particular but about everyone,” he said. “The default wiring I had was, ‘Yeah, there’s not anyone who doesn’t matter. So I guess I should care the same amount about everyone.’”

* Sam would later explain:

“When I was about 12 years old I was first becoming politically aware and started to think through social issues. Gay marriage was a no brainer — you don’t have to be a hardcore utilitarian to see that making people’s lives miserable because they’re completely harmlessly a little bit different than you is stupid. But abortion was nagging me a bit. I was pretty conflicted for a while: having unwanted kids is bad, but so was murder.”

Then Sam framed abortion as a utilitarian might. Not by dwelling on the rights of the mother or the rights of the unborn child but by evaluating the utility of either course of action.

“There are lots of good reasons why murder is usually a really bad thing: you cause distress to the friends and family of the murdered, you cause society to lose a potentially valuable member in which it has already invested a lot of food and education and resources, and you take away the life of a person who had already invested a lot into it. But none of those apply to abortion. In fact, if you think about the actual consequences of an abortion, except for the distress caused to the parents (which they’re in the best position to evaluate), there are few differences from if the fetus had never been conceived in the first place. In other words, to a utilitarian abortion looks a lot like birth control. In the end murder is just a word and what’s important isn’t whether you try to apply the word to a situation but the facts of the situation that caused you to describe it as murder in the first place. And in the case of abortion few of the things that make murder so bad apply.”

* He’d always just thought that he’d wind up being some kind of professor, like his parents. “I had sort of implicitly assumed that academia was the center of morality,” he said. “It was where people were at least thinking of how to have the most impact on the world.”

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Wellness by Nathan Hill

Daphne Merkin writes for The Atlantic:

A Worthy Heir to David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon

In Wellness, Nathan Hill recounts a love story, but also much, much more.

…That Nathan Hill comes charging onto this depleted fictional scene with Wellness, a behemoth of a novel (624 pages, or nearly 19 hours of audio, if that is your pleasure), is all the more noteworthy as a result. The book swarms with characters, ideas, and sociological evocations, taking place over several decades: At one level, it is the straightforward up-and-down-and-up-again story of a relationship between two lonely souls, Jack Baker and Elizabeth Augustine, but it detours to reflect on the art market, real estate, interior design, parenting, sex, and many other topics. Hill, whose 2016 debut novel, The Nix, was as epic in scope as Wellness, is more reminiscent of the aforementioned Victorian novelists, with their energy and range, than he is of contemporary ones.

Based on Merkin’s recommendation, I bought the book on Audible, and when I’m out walking, instead of listening to podcasts or to music, I’m listening to this and I’m laughing:

* “That’s the first externality.”
“And what’s the second?”
“The second is divorce.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not that I’m implying anything specifically about you guys ,” Benjamin said, smiling broadly. “It’s just, you know, fifty percent of all marriages?”
“Uh – huh.”
“And a lot of couples now choose to cohabit after a divorce. For the kids.”
“They keep living together after they break up?”
“Oh sure. Many couples find it ideal. They have their own bedrooms, their own separate entrances. So in the event of divorce you can continue living in the same place with minimal traumatic disruption for Toby. And how nice would that be for him? No weekends away from home, no dispiriting sleepovers at Dad’s depressing little empty apartment.”
Jack looked at his wife. “Are you planning on getting a divorce?” he asked.
“Jack, it’s our forever home,” she said. “Shouldn’t it accommodate all possibilities?”

* The song that all the little children were right now exuberantly singing was a popular dance number about a woman getting really drunk at a nightclub and having haphazard sex with a stranger and then blacking out so she doesn’t remember any of it the next day.

Except, no, that wasn’t exactly right. The song the children were actually dancing to and performing in front of their parents was — you had to listen carefully — a remake of that other more debauched song, this new version having been superficially edited, the adult singer replaced with a dulcet preteen, the most raunchy lyrics replaced with family – friendly alternatives. It was now a song sung by children, for children, part of a series of child – appropriate pop covers that was the only music ever broadcast during these playdates at Brandie’s big suburban Park Shore house. It murmured low in the background, usually, unless the kids decided, as they had today, that they wanted to put on a show. And so here they were, the kids, eight of them, ages six to eleven, all twirling, hopping, hands in the air, sometimes bobbing up and down in a kind of proto – twerk, staging in the living room their vague impression of how pop stars act in music videos. Meanwhile, the parents watched, clapped, hooted, and generally displayed maximal self – esteem – boosting support and encouragement.

* That very day, he searched the web for ways to tone one’s belly, which was when ads for the System began their assault. He saw the first one on Facebook, between two posts from his father in which, as usual, the old man was ranting, angrily, in all capital letters. That month’s worrying headlines had delivered so much grist for the elder Baker’s mayhemed mind: there was rioting in Missouri ( TERRORISTS! ), and airstrikes in the Middle East ( DIVERSION! ), and migrants drowning in the Mediterranean ( CRISIS ACTORS! ), and Ebola surging in Africa ( CORPORATE PLOT! ).
Jack, as usual, debated and commented and fought with his father, but ignored the ad.
Then he saw it again, this cryptic ad for something called the System, it suddenly appeared outside of Facebook, on some random website, up there in the top banner, and then the ad began following Jack around the web, showing up all over the place, cycling through slogans until it found the one that called to him most:
DON’T WORK HARDER, WORK SMARTER
HUGE GAINS, NO NOISE
THE DATA – DRIVEN ROUTE TO RIPPED ABS
And so on.
The System’s whole allure seemed built on the promise that it somehow peered into your body and extracted the most consequential data, data that would then be used to build a personalized, optimized workout program.

* the Needy User algorithm, which identifies users who have been on Facebook for less than a certain threshold amount of time, or have less than a certain threshold number of connections with other users, or whose edges are less than a threshold level of robustness, and it categorizes these users as “needy,” and it assigns them a “neediness value,” and this value is then sent back to EdgeRank and added to the user’s edge score, which score then becomes so large that the needy user’s ranking goes way, way up, and thereafter any actions they take — their posts and links and photos and favorites and such — appear right there at the very top of all their friends’ newsfeeds.
The subjective experience of this, for Lawrence, is that he’s never once in his life felt more fully and uncomplicatedly accepted and loved.
Any little action he takes, anything that sends the tiniest ripple into the network, comes back as a wave of appreciation and support. He chooses a profile picture, and his friends seem to love it . He posts about the Chiefs game, and his friends seem to love it . Even just his comments about the weather and the wind generate a flurry of positive response.
It is the most contact he’s had with the wider world in years.
He’s a man who was once well known among the rancher families of the Flint Hills, and it turns out that many of these families are, surprisingly, now on Facebook, and further, they are so happy to see him, finally, after his long withdrawal, and it’s at this point he understands: This is why people join Facebook . This is what all the fuss is about. It feels friendly, lively, fun — people post jokes and comic strips and hilarious photos of cats and dogs and pictures of their children doing adorable things and inspirational quotes from celebrities or the Bible, and soon Lawrence learns about the “share” function and very quickly he’s also sharing just these things, never failing to draw nice little comments from his small pack of friends: “Wonderful, Lawrence!” “Thank you, Lawrence!” “God bless you, Lawrence!”

* They find a view of the world that agrees with them, a spot that feels safe and secure, and they plant themselves on that spot and don’t move. Because if they did move, their certainty and security and safety in the world would fall apart, and that’s too scary and painful to contemplate. So people prefer their illusions — that the world is definitely a simulation, or that acupuncture is a thing, or that juice cleanses work, or that Ebola was created by the government. It’s a little assertion of sovereignty amid the chaos. In the face of insurmountable threats and distressing precarity and pain, the body longs, more than anything, for certainty. You could say that certainty is, in fact, the flip side of pain — it’s what pain looks like reflected off the fun – house mirror. When I see people on Facebook express their loud inflexible certainty about some political thing, what I believe they’re actually saying is I am in great pain, and nobody is paying attention . This is also true for people who believe deeply in soulmates, like, say, your husband. What Jack really needs is the illusion of certainty…

* “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home .”

This might be the first novel I’ve read this year.

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Joe Biden’s Hero’s Journey To Israel And Back

Great news guys!

According to his own bio: “David Rothkopf is CEO of The Rothkopf Group, a media company that produces podcasts including Deep State Radio, hosted by Rothkopf. He is also the author of many books including Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, Superclass, Power, Inc., National Insecurity, Great Questions of Tomorrow, and Traitor: A History of Betraying America from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump.”

Such weighty and valuable books all.

Mr. Rothkopf writes for The Daily Beast Oct. 18:

The response of the Biden team in the wake of the explosion and fire at the hospital was calm, compassionate and resolute….

But Biden, Blinken, and their team had been clear about their objectives from the start. They saw no contradiction between standing foursquare behind Israel’s right to self-defense, while at the same time calling for respect for the rules of war and for the innocent lives on both sides who might be put at risk in the conflict….

Biden and Blinken not only carefully laid the groundwork for the trip but they scored a victory even before it began.

Biden’s gamble paid immediate dividends when he landed in Israel on Wednesday. Netanyahu immediately tweeted out the first photo of him and Biden hugging, a sign of how much he valued the support of the U.S. president—support that has eluded him for months due to the Israel’s efforts to undercut democracy in his own country. Netanyahu has been under siege since the terror attacks and there is no doubt he saw the Biden visit as a lifeline.

In fact, one of the most remarkable aspects of the Biden trip was the degree to which it marked a turnabout in the relationship between the two leaders…

But on Wednesday, an isolated and weakened Netanyahu welcomed a U.S. president to Israel who was clearly one of the country’s most beloved politicians. Billboards had been erected throughout Israel—even before Biden’s trip—thanking him for his immediate support for Israel…

Biden also delivered a very effective speech outlining the reasons for his support for Israel that was extremely well-received in Israel. The president, during his visit, built upon these steps that had worked, largely by repeating some of the best of them…

Perhaps most striking was he did something that not only conveyed his message brilliantly, but that also showed a degree of self-awareness and even humility in U.S. leaders that has seldom been displayed. He said, “But I caution you, while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

It took a special kind of courage and was profoundly effective. Indeed, the entire speech was extraordinarily well-received. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote, “A simply magnificent, gut-wrenching and inspiring Biden speech in Israel. As an American, a Jew, a human being, I could not be more touched.”

In the wake of the trip, the response from observers in the U.S. and Israel was equally enthusiastic. The gamble had paid off—in large part for all the reasons that successful gambles often do: preparation, experience, and being on the right side of the issues.

Your cynical self might be wondering why Biden is thrusting America into a Middle Eastern tribal war with no vital American interests at stake. That’s because you don’t realize that every Biden-directed thrust into the world is carefully calibrated and optimized for maximum human flourishing. Biden’s using an app that measures the G force of his every stroke into those parts of the world far away from important American interests such as Africa, Ukraine and Israel.

Biden’s using The System. He was messing around on the web and these ads for The System kept popping up and following him around until finally he got that right combination of words and concepts that hooked him into following the dictates of universal human rationality across the bridge to total freedom.

Joe Biden’s a man of the Enlightenment. He understands that human nature is basically good and that with the force of our reason, no longer constrained by ignorance and bigotry, we can create buffered autonomous strategic selves deciding right and wrong unhooked from out-dated and atavistic notions of medieval morality. We no longer need to cling to our guns and our religion because can just follow our individual bliss along the path to ultimate wellness, standing hand-in-hand with the suffering people of Israel and the suffering people of Gaza in one giant human chain of authentic soul connection.

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today
Ah
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace
You
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

During the Vietnam war, President Johnson selected targets for bombing. Neil Sheehan wrote for The New York Times June 15, 1971: “President Johnson and Secretary McNamara continued to select the targets and to communicate them to the Joint Chiefs—and thus eventually to the operating strike forces—in weekly Rolling Thunder planning messages issued by the Secretary of Defense.”

Why would a president try to micro-manage a war like this? Because it is part of the modern liberal conception of the self that we are strategic, buffered, autonomous reflexive beings who shape our own destinies and the world around us by following the dictates of reason. This is different from the traditional conception of the self that we are porous and tragic.

Philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in his 2007 book, A Secular Age:

Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded self—I want to say “buffered” self—and the “porous” self of the earlier enchanted world…
…for the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined in my responses to them.
—by definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and important emotions are outside the “mind”; or better put, the very notion that there is a clear boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, has no sense.
As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me”, to use the contemporary expression. That’s the sense to my use of the term “buffered” here. This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it.

Joe Biden thinks he can master the Middle East and create a buffered conflict between Israel and the Arabs just like the liberal thinks he can create a buffered self that masters meaning and morality.

FIRE, the Foundation of Individual Rights in Expression, notes:

Colleges across the country have instituted problematic “affirmative consent” policies governing sexual activity among students — sometimes called “yes means yes” policies. While the details vary from campus to campus, affirmative consent policies generally require that participants in sexual activity obtain objectively demonstrable consent at every step of a sexual encounter…

It is difficult, absent some kind of recording, for an accused student to be able to demonstrate that he or she received a verbal or other explicit “yes” for a sexual encounter even when consent was, in fact, given. Because many policies require the indications of consent during sexual activity to be “continuous,” or that explicit consent be given for every stage of every sexual encounter (though what constitutes a “stage” is seldom defined), even a written acknowledgment that a person wishes to have sex, such as a text message or the use of a smartphone application to record consent, may not serve as sufficient proof that a party received consent to sexual activity. This leaves those accused of sexual misconduct under “affirmative consent” policies with no way to prove that they actually obtained consent from their partner or partners. As one court put it, under an affirmative consent policy, “the ability of an accused to prove the complaining party’s consent strains credulity and is illusory.” Mock v. University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, No. 14-1687-II (Tenn. Ch. Ct. Aug. 10, 2015).

This notion that sex between college students can be governed by affirmative consent every step of the way is part of the same liberal modern mentality that wants to carefully manage the Ukraine and Israel wars.

From a tradition perspective, sex between people who are not married to each other is likely to be so powerful that it will overwhelm the grandest of plans. From a traditional perspective, war evokes such tribal emotions that it too will overwhelm the grandest of plans. The more intense a situation, the more difficult it is for individuals to act in reasoned, buffered, strategic and autonomous ways. The more intense our emotions, the more tribally we will experience life. The drunker people get, the more right-wing they get.

Rony Guldmann writes in his work in progress Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia:

…the emergence of a peculiarly courtly rationality that “the demand for ‘good behavior’ is raised more emphatically,” and that “[a]ll problems concerned with behavior take on new importance.” This demand for good behavior is the origin of “political correctness,” which projects the norms of courtly etiquette onto the political stage, extending its demand not to offend to an ever-widening array of contexts, extending its scope to include a much broader range of sensibilities and sensitivities. Those so privileged as to enjoy a “relaxation within the framework of an already established standard” have the leeway to establish new standards. And this is what liberals do when they promote “understanding,” “equal respect,” “tolerance,” and related ideals.

Himmelfarb objects that whereas the old Victorians espoused a set of clear, consistent, and commonsensical moral prohibitions, the “New Victorians” of the Left have adopted a convoluted and often contradictory moral code, a “curious combination of promiscuity and prudery.” The New Victorians do not denounce drunkenness but only “those who take ‘advantage’ of their partners’ drunkenness.” They also trivialize rape by “associating it with ‘date rape,’ defined so loosely as to include consensual intercourse that is belatedly regretted by the woman.”15 These currents, argues Himmelfarb, have engendered a new and unprecedented repressiveness. Being straightforward and commonsensical, the old code was “deeply embedded in tradition and convention” and so “largely internalized.”16 By contrast, the morality of the New Victorians is “novel and contrived, officially legislated and coercively enforced.”17 Though the old Victorians have an undeserved reputation as meddlesome moralists and officious busybodies, they would in reality “have been as distressed by the overtness and formality of college regulations governing sexual conduct (with explicit consent required at every stage of the sexual relation) as by the kind of conduct—promiscuity, they would have called it—implicitly sanctioned by those regulations.”

However, what Himmelfarb interprets as the arbitrariness of the New Victorian morality is actually liberals’ more thoroughgoing internalization of the buffered identity. With a high “level of habitually, technically, and institutionally consolidated self-control,” being a given, and so with the buffered identity’s function as a mechanism for organismic self-governance having been securely established, the dangers of drunkenness and promiscuity per se recedes into the background. And so the concern can now shift to the individual’s inner depth, as the innerness of the buffered identity becomes more a fount of self-expression and less a center of self-control, as it was for the Victorians. Victorian character having evolved into modern personality, the nature of interpersonal morality must evolve accordingly. This is not a “curious combination of promiscuity and prudery,” but one more manifestation of the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, of which Victorian prudery was merely an earlier iteration.

These disciplines and repressions are at play in feminist Lois Pineau’s proposal that rape law should presume that a woman has consented to intercourse only when she was offered “communicative sexuality” according to which “mutual sexual enjoyment requires an atmosphere of comfort and communication, a minimum of pressure, and an ongoing check-up on one’s partner’s state.”19 This being what any woman would naturally want, sex that does not live up to this standard is presumptively non-consensual. This standard is sensible because good sex aspires to the same ideals as good conversation. Pineau explains:

“Good conversationalists are intuitive, sympathetic, and charitable. They do not overwhelm their respondents with a barrage of their own opinions. While they may be persuasive, the forcefulness of their persuasion does not lie in their being overbearing, but rather in their capacity to see others’ point of view, to understand what it depends on, and so to address the essential point, but with tact and clarity.”

Pineau believes good sex aspires to analogous ideals. As Elias observes, courtly norms provided “the basic stock of models” that would eventually be disseminated within the wider society, where it would inform expectations about proper behavior and attitudes in a wide range of spheres. And Pineau’s proposal is merely among the latest and most ambitious of such extensions, one which applies the peculiarly courtly rationality, not only to the restraint of sexuality, but to sexuality itself. Courtly etiquette required a language that is “clear, transparent, precisely regulated,” and Pineau is simply transplanting this ideal to the sexual realm as the measure of genuine consent. It is not an arbitrary, convoluted morality, but rather the standard to which any properly “civilized” sexuality must conform…

The buffered self is the self that is defined ontologically by the possibility of disengagement and, normatively, by the demand for disengagement, by the imperative to “take a distance” from “everything outside the mind,” as Taylor says, and thereby establish an “inner base area” through which to distinguish how things are from how they feel. And it is this civilizational imperative that drives the seemingly convoluted morality of the New Victorians. The purpose of communicative sexuality is to advance that imperative and thereby ensure the self-possession required to distinguish authentic, inwardly generated desire from externally induced “pressure.” The requirement that consent be somehow re-elicited and re-issued at every stage of a sexual encounter is intended to promote the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, without which a woman’s true feelings cannot be distinguished from whatever fleeing, merely animal impulses her seducer may have succeeded in stimulating. The sense that “consensual intercourse that is belatedly regretted by the woman” can constitute rape reflects the retrospective insight that the seducer was indifferent to fostering this inner base area and thus bears responsibility for the consequences.

Feminists see themselves as concerned, not with instilling a peculiarly courtly rationality, but with combatting sexual coercion. But what qualifies as coercion depends on how we understand human agency, and how feminists conceptualize coercion presupposes a conception of agency that allows us to draw clear lines between the autonomous and the heteronomous, between an inner base area and the external meanings that threaten to engulf it. Only once these meanings are experienced as an invasive force that compromises our agency—rather than a necessary feature of that agency, as it was for porous pre-moderns—can communicative sexuality seem preferable to a sexuality that is more tacit, animal-like, and impulsive. What a more porous self would experience as the morally neutral fact that human organisms “impress themselves” upon one another on a visceral, pre-reflective level, the buffered identity may experience as the seeds of “domination,” the submersion of consciousness in mere flesh. The acceptable threshold of tolerance for the merely animal having been much lowered, the merely animal is now identified, not only with unambiguous physical coercion—how conservatives define rape—but with the slightest intimations thereof in raw, un-intellectualized animal desire, with anything that, in neglecting an “on-going check-up on one’s partner’s state,” fails to uphold the peculiarly rationality. Hence Pineau’s interpretation of sexual teasing. Teasing is not a power-play that first stimulates and then frustrates animal lust but rather an activity that is “playful and inspires wit.”

This peculiarly courtly rationality is also at play in Anita Bernstein’s proposal that sexual harassment law should center around respect rather than reasonableness of conduct.22 Bernstein argues that “unreasonableness” fails to capture the harm at the heart of sexual harassment, indignity, and invokes a social consensus that is often just a male consensus.23 By contrast, respect is “a commonsensical norm that lay persons understand and apply.”24 Respect is simply the “recognition of a person’s inherent worth.”25 And respectful persons are simply persons who do not “engage in conduct that rejects or denies the personhood or self-conception of another.”26 But then the meaning of respect turns on what it means to deny the personhood and self-conception of another. And this is not obvious. What some would condemn as “disrespect” is only an exaggeration of attitudes that are at play in any normal human relationship. Challenging others’ self-conception is an ineluctable feature of ordinary human interaction. Standing alone, the concept of respect cannot establish any neat lines of interpersonal propriety.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Joe Biden’s Hero’s Journey To Israel And Back

Israel, Hamas & the Tragedy of Survival (10-15-23)

01:00 Land belongs to the people who can seize it and protect it
22:00 Israel, Hamas and Gaza: Q&A w/ Peter Zeihan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxXJOqqNFVM
28:30 George Friedman on Where the Conflict Goes from Here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl34LRjZlBE
31:30 Concepts Illuminate & Obscure Reality, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153136
43:30 Sam Vaknin on Russia’s incentive to support Hamas, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4JeMbNeVfM
1:13:30 Charles Murray: I urge everyone to take a look at this examination of Claudine Gay’s role in the Roland Fryer affair.
1:14:00 Harvard Canceled its Best Black Professor. Why? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8xWOlk3WIw
1:22:40 Psychology of (Israeli-Palestinian) Conflict, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CekIfKX70iU
1:30:00 Elliott Blatt joins to talk about Israel v Arabs
1:43:00 The Charles Johnson Question, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=147595

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Israel, Hamas & the Tragedy of Survival (10-15-23)