In his Oct. 7, 2024 “Israel Update” video with the Hudson Institute’s Middle East analyst Michael Doran, gay right-wing Israeli historian Gadi Taub selected this as his dumbest media commentary moment of the week: “[Journalist] Ilana Dayan speaking on CNN to Christiane Amanpour who asked her about the horrible death tall in Gaza including she said 16,000 innocent children… Ilana Dayan is trying to explain why she is under such a strong impression of October 7 that she primarily sees that, but she confesses Israel does not cover Gaza’s suffering enough. this is how our elites are — the supplicants of progressive elites elsewhere because what any sane Israeli journalist, and there are very few of these, should have said is that why are you asking me when these [Hamas] people are deliberately using their children as human shields and then you want me to take responsibility for that? These [Israeli] elites are looking up to elites [elsewhere], their their sense of solidarity and belonging is closer to elites in other countries than they are to their own people and this becomes especially poignant since they think of themselves as provincials and they want to rise up to the tier of the metropolitan elites where the real elites are, the real cultured people are Christian Amanpour, who are the real people with a moral compass, so they end up kissing the feet of anti-semites and playing to CNN biases with which are tinged with with anti-Semitism. This is not just a dumb take on the news, this is infuriating. Ilana Dayan is called the Barbara Walters of of Israeli TV so she’s the dean of highbrow journalism and she has the fanciest Israeli accent with the knitted brows and and the thoughtful look in her eyes and the rimless glasses, she’s like the epitome of intelligence and conscience and yet what she does in the end when faced with something like that is she grovels at the feet of a nasty CNN anchor.”
Michael: “I need to get a knitted brow and rimless glasses. I’ve never mastered that look — thoughtful, pensive.”
Ilana Dayan:
This discourse by Gadi Taub made me wonder if there are certain physical manifestations of the elite point of view and of the counter-elite view. Take Tucker Carlson for example. I can’t think of any elite commentator who makes Tucker’s dramatic facial postures. Could we detect who has the elite worldview vs the counter-elite worldview just by looking at someone without listening to anything they’re saying? Did Tucker’s expressions change as he became more populist?
Tucker the Populist:
Tucker today presents himself differently from the Tucker of the 2000s. He no longer wears a bowtie. He’s more flamboyant and he pulls more funny faces today.
Here are some photos of Tucker when he co-hosted the CNN show Crossfire:
In the Alexander Technique world, I heard the intriguing idea that each emotion requires a particular alignment of our musculature, and without that alignment, we can’t access the emotion. To feel depressed, for example, there needs to be a depression of one’s muscular alignment in the direction of a sag. To feel joy, you need an upward direction in your alignment, and so on. Each thought requires an increased level of muscular tension. You can’t think through an idea without having more muscular tension than when you are not doing mental work.
Are the gestures of populist politicians more flamboyant than those of establishment politicians? Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, for example, seem more expressive than normal pols.
Nigel Farage:
Donald Trump:
Is there a cognitive and physiological change when you change your politics? Does embracing a particular politics develop a certain physiological reaction? Is there a correlation or a causation between one’s politics and one’s physiology?
After the presidential debates of June 27 and September 10, and the vice-presidential debate of October 1, there was much discussion in conservative circles about the mannerisms of the TV anchors. They were variously described as smug, constipated and stilted. These states are a reflection of a physiological state.
I am curious about the embodiment of the conservative and liberal worldviews. Between ages 19 and 22, I flirted with Marxism, and I recollect that I experienced a different physiology during those times that I imagined that Marxism was truth. On the other hand, I’ve been more extremely right-wing and racist than I am now, and I think I experienced a different physiology in those extreme states.
I think I can usually tell somebody’s politics by his physiognomy. Physiognomy might have some relationship to certain cognitive and physiological patterns.
