June 9, 2024 The Hill: At least 210 Palestinians reportedly killed during Israeli hostage recovery operation Luke Ford No sacred cows.

The Hill: At least 210 Palestinians reportedly killed during Israeli hostage recovery operation

Posted on June 9, 2024 by Luke Ford

Most people would be glad to kill 210 members of the enemy to rescue four members of their own team.

Israel’s latest hostage rescue operation, which brought four Israeli hostages to safety, also killed at least 210 Palestinians, including children, according to a Gaza health official.
Noa Argamani, 25, Almong Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27 and Shlomi Ziv, 40 were rescued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Israel Police and Israel Securities Authority, the IDF said in a joint statement.
The special operation, a heavy air and ground attack, took place in two different locations in Nuseirat in central Gaza. All four hostages were kidnapped from the Nova music festival, according to the IDF.
The bodies of 109 Palestinians including 23 children and 11 women were taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, and spokesperson Khalil Degran told the Associated Press that more than 100 wounded also arrived to the hospital. In addition, he said the rest of the 210 Palestinians killed were taken to Al-Awda Hospital after the spokesman said he spoke to the director there. But the numbers at that hospital could not be confirmed by the AP.

The New York Times reports June 9, 2024:

But by Sunday, euphoria was already giving way to a harsh reality. The heavy air and ground assault that accompanied the rescue killed scores of Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials. And the operation failed to resolve any of the deep dilemmas and challenges vexing the Israeli government.
Eight months into its grinding war in Gaza, Israel still appears to be far from achieving its stated objectives of dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. And Israelis fear that time is running out for many of the hostages in Gaza. About a third of the 120 that remain have already been declared dead by the Israeli authorities.
At the same time, Israel’s leadership is grappling with an escalation of hostilities across the northern border with Lebanon and battling increasing international isolation and opprobrium over the war in Gaza, including allegations of genocide that are being heard by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The rescue mission “doesn’t solve a single one of the problems that Israel has been facing ever since October 7,” wrote Nahum Barnea, a leading Israeli political columnist, in Sunday’s popular Yediot Ahronot newspaper.
“It doesn’t solve the problem in the north; it doesn’t solve the problem in Gaza; and it doesn’t solve the slew of other problems that threaten Israel in the international arena,” he added.

Why would deaths of the enemy diminish Israeli joy? Gazans have consistently made clear through their choices that they wish the total destruction of the Jewish state. Why would Israelis not feel similarly about the Gazans?

No sane Israel-supporter expected this rescue mission to solve other problems. What a bizarre framing for this Times story.

Nahum Barnea, the great sage, wrote May 26, 2024:

The military incursion into Rafah must be stopped. Not because the International Court of Justice ordered it, but because the cost outweighs the benefit. We can debate for days the judges’ motives, their integrity and their judicial rigor, but it won’t save Israel.

Barnea wanted to stop the incursion that rescued four Israeli hostages and now he wants to diminish the significance of the rescue because it makes him look bad.

I put the phrase “won’t save Israel” into Google News and got dozens of results.

Who seriously argues that any one act by Israel will save Israel? Nobody.

The Times headline: “Israel’s Euphoria Over Hostage Rescue May Be Fleeting”

All euphoria is fleeting. Name me one euphoria that goes on for years.

John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato write in their 2023 book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy:

…when states believe their survival is at stake, they do not hesitate to kill large numbers of civilians if such murderous behavior will help them avoid defeat or massive casualties on the battlefield. Britain and the United States blockaded Germany during World War I in an attempt to starve its civilian population and force the Kaiserreich to surrender. The United States also relentlessly firebombed Japanese cities beginning in March 1945 before dropping atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, to bring World War II to an end and minimize American casualties.

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Livelier Than the Living

Posted on June 9, 2024 by Luke Ford

The more successful and happy I am, the less time I have for reading books because I am too busy with people I love. Abundant time for reading is my solace for losing in life (I have no wealth, power, marriage, and children).

Catherine Nicholson writes for NYBooks.com:

In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment—for those who could afford it—from the pursuits of wealth and power.
“I daily listen to your words with more attention than one would believe, and perhaps I shall not be thought impertinent in wishing to be heard by you,” wrote the Italian poet Petrarch in 1348. His addressee was the Roman philosopher Seneca, who had died nearly thirteen centuries before. Petrarch’s practice of writing to long-dead authors epitomizes—and helped to initiate—the essential double movement of humanist imitatio, the exchange by which schoolboys and scholars across late medieval and early modern Europe formed their ideas, values, images, tastes, and turns of phrase along the lines of an antiquity they were just beginning to regard (but had not yet begun to speak of) as “classical.”
The American scholar Thomas Greene in The Light in Troy, his 1982 study of humanism’s intimate relation to and sense of estrangement from the ancient world, called imitatio “a literary technique that was also a pedagogic method and a critical battleground.” Whom to take as one’s exemplars and how closely to follow them, which models to embrace and which to avoid or improve upon, were subjects of fervent debate. In theory, emulating the best of what had been written fostered expressiveness; “in practice,” Greene allows, “it led not infrequently to sterility.”
…channels the allure, for Petrarch and those who came after him, of a life in books, its pleasures “more intimate and more intense than the satisfaction afforded by other worldly goods.” But such intimacy came at a cost: “A sense of being unsuited to one’s times, a feeling, almost, of extraneousness and alienation.”
There is often a whiff of misanthropy about Petrarch’s passion for books.
…No doubt Virgil, Horace, Boethius, and Cicero had their own human failings—“they may have been difficult and stubborn”; they too may have suffered from halitosis—but in their writings “the flower and fruit of their intellect is undiluted and abounding.” As Bolzoni observes, this is a significant alteration of existing commonplaces about books as mirrors:
“The ghost one encounters through reading is better than the real person; the book remains the mirror of the soul, but it is a mirror that selects the best, that refines the image we see in it, cleansing it of all traces of mundane existence.”
…Reading was a passion in early modern Italy, Bolzoni shows, but it was also a pose, an emblem of “aristocratic detachment” from the pursuits of wealth, power, and social connections, on which access to and ownership of books practically depended.
…Occasionally, one senses some strain in the narrative—a hint of how the self-flattering mythology of reading might compensate, or fail to compensate, for the inability to find other sources of purpose and fulfillment.

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Is Israel Committing Genocide?

Posted on June 8, 2024 by Luke Ford

Aryeh Neier writes for NYBooks.com June 6, 2024 issue:

I have been engaged for six decades in the human rights movement, which has endeavored to restore peace by enforcing International Humanitarian Law…
I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory.

Thank you for your service, Arieh.

Wait! What? Arieh Neier believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza because it obstructs aid to Gazans. That’s it?

Gaza borders Egypt. Egypt decides how much aid gets in through its border with Gaza. So does Arieh think Egypt is committing genocide too? No. He doesn’t even mention Egypt.

Why doesn’t Arieh mention Egypt? Because he only cares about glory for Arieh. He cares nothing about Gazans. And he cares nothing about truth.

Human rights attracts showboats like Aryeh Neier. If he wrote an essay for NYBooks stating Israel was not committing genocide, it would attract no attention. The best way for this man to get on TV is to make flashy pronouncements.

There’s one and only one reliable source for human rights – the nation state. The state extends rights to its citizens. All other rights are wishful thinking.

CNN promotes Arieh May 26, 2024: “Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier, who fled the Nazis as a child, tells Fareed why he has come to the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”

Do you think Aryeh Neier would have been interviewed on CNN if he had come to a different conclusion? He chose the conclusion that got him the most attention, just as he has devoted himself to the cause that gets him the biggest boost to his ego.

Der Spiegel published April 6, 2024: “Why the Founder of Human Rights Watch Accuses Israel of Genocide”

May 13, 2024, the New York Times reported: “…the flow of aid has come to a near-total stop, first closed off by Israel and then further restricted, officials say, by Egypt.”

Politico reported May 21, 2024:

Egypt aid restrictions are complicating Gaza cease-fire negotiations
Aid groups in Gaza say they are running low on fuel and are unable to get more from Egypt, straining their operations on the ground.
“It’s all stopped,” the official said, referring to Egypt’s shipments through the Kerem Shalom crossing.
The move by Egypt has sparked tensions between Cairo and Jerusalem. The current cease-fire deal on the table hinges in part on the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, officials say. If Egypt were to restart the shipments, it would significantly improve the aid situation on the ground, defuse tensions, and potentially allow for talks to restart, according to the two senior administration officials and two other people familiar with the situation.
…Cairo is withholding the fuel in an effort to complicate Israel’s ability to aid the humanitarian effort inside Gaza during its Rafah operation.
“It’s the blood of the response,” said Scott Anderson, the director for Gaza for UNRWA, the main aid group operating in Gaza. “The lack of fuel forces us to choose: Do you keep bakeries running or hospitals running or the sewage pumps running?”

May 24, 2024, Axios reported:

Under U.S. pressure, the Egyptian government agreed to resume the flow of aid trucks to Gaza through Israel, after deliveries were halted two weeks ago in protest of Israel’s takeover of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing.
Why it matters: The Egyptian decision two weeks ago dramatically reduced the amount of aid entering Gaza and exacerbated the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian enclave.

May 26, 2024, Times of Israel reported:

Aid has been piling up in Egypt since Israel launched an operation to take over the Gazan side of the Rafah Crossing with Egypt on May 7. That crossing, in the southern Gaza Strip, was operated by the Palestinians on its Gaza side until Israeli forces captured the area as part of a broader operation in the adjoining city of the same name.
Not wanting to be seen as complicit with Israel’s military operation to take over the crossing, Egypt has refused to reopen Rafah until Israeli troops have withdrawn from the other side.

If Aryeh Neier cares about the plight of Gazans, why does he not mention the role that Egypt plays in their suffering?

If Gaza is an open-air prison, Egypt is equally responsible for that. Yet when I put “Gaza open-air prison” into Google, none of the first ten suggestions is Egypt.

Why does Google only suggest Israel as the sole cause of Gazan suffering?

David Henderson writes for Econlib.org:

There are four sides to Gaza: (1) two sides that border Israel, (2) the side that borders Egypt, and (3) the side that borders the Mediterranean Sea.
The Israeli government prevents people from entering Israel. The Egyptian government prevents people from entering Egypt.
What’s left is the Mediterranean… I can’t find any evidence that the government prevents them from leaving. And a friend who was in the Israeli Defense Force tells me that he has never heard that the Navy prevented people from leaving.

Israel would love for Gazans to leave but no country in the world wants Gazans because Gazans have such a horrible track record of terrorism. Gazans built their own reputation and they’re dying, in part, because of their own creation. They made their bed, they elected Hamas, and they’re paying the price for their choices.

When Palestinians moved into Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, they wrecked those societies. Name me one society that has been more improved than hurt by the presence of massive numbers of Palestinian immigrants. You can’t. Such a society does not exist. Name me one first-world country that has been more improved than hurt by the mass immigration of Muslims. Which such countries have become more prosperous and free? Where has the entrance of large numbers of Muslims raised the average IQ of a first-world nation?

If Palestinians are a curse to every society they move to, why would anyone want them around?

I don’t for a second believe that there is anything inherent in Palestinians in particular or Muslims in general that makes them incompatible with Western civilization. There’s no inherent quality to Palestinians and Muslims. Both groups are where they are in part because of their genes and in part because of their circumstances. When circumstances change, these groups may well change too.

You can’t leave a prison, but you can leave Gaza as hundreds of thousands of people have done (in addition to hundreds of thousands of people traveling to Gaza over the past decade).

Millions of Africans and Middle Easterners crossed into Europe via boats over the past decade. Why do Palestinians lack this enterprise?

Ari Zivotovsky writes for the Jerusalem Post:

…from 1948 to 1967, conditions in the Gaza Strip were harsh. Egypt essentially isolated it, refusing to integrate either the locals or the 200,000 refugees, leading to severe economic conditions. In 1955, a member of the United Nations Secretariat, James Baster, wrote in the Middle East Journal that “For all practical purposes it would be true to say that for the last six years in Gaza over 300,000 poverty-stricken people have been physically confined to an area the size of a large city park.”
In 1967, as a result of the Six Day War that was thrust upon Israel, the Gaza Strip came under Israeli jurisdiction and Jewish Israelis settled in it alongside the Arabs who were there. As one example of a goodwill gesture, Israel helped Gazans plant approximately 618,000 trees.
Between 1967 and 1982, the economic growth in Gaza averaged a staggering 9.7% per annum, bringing an era of economic prosperity. But rather than continue to prosper economically under Israeli rule, the Arabs launched the bloody first intifada in 1987, resulting in hundreds of Jewish and Arab deaths.
In 1994, following the signing of the Oslo Accords, civilian control of most of Gaza was given to the corrupt and murderous Yasser Arafat and his PLO, henceforth known as the Palestinian Authority (PA), and in 2000 the Arabs launched the bloody second intifada.
Due to the Intifada, neither Israel nor Egypt allowed unfettered passage into or out of the Gaza Strip, with Egypt keen to isolate its problematic Sinai Islamist insurgents from the Gazan terrorists.
IN AN unprecedented and – with hindsight – disastrous move, in 2005 Israel unilaterally fully withdrew from the Gaza Strip, forcibly expelling over 9000 Jews from 21 towns. Even more surprising, Israel withdrew from the southern edge of the Strip known as the Philadelphi Route, handing over full border control to Egypt. Thus, began a new era – and since 2005, Gaza has been fully self-governing. European and Arab aid money flowed in and the stage for a flourishing Middle East Singapore was laid.
In early 2006, elections were held in Gaza, and Hamas won a plurality. For the next year and a half there was internecine fighting resulting in over 600 Gazans killed by their own, and by mid-2007 Hamas had full control over the Strip. The “innocent” residents should have known what they were getting – Hamas never hid their terrorist nature and their charter calls for the complete destruction of Israel…
The ongoing Hamas belligerence has indeed led to an attempt by Egypt and Israel to control what comes into Gaza. Does that make it an open-air prison? As will be seen, if it is a blockade, it is not a very successful one.
One of the arguments is that Israel and Egypt restrict movement of the Gazan residents in and out of the territory. On September 19, 2023, Palestinian TV broadcast a program called Emigration from Gaza – what no one talks about, which claimed that in the past 15 years, about a quarter of a million young Gazans had left for abroad.
The bottleneck that has prevented more people from leaving is Hamas bureaucracy and the hesitancy of other countries to accept them. Just last month (Sept 2023) there were violent clashes involving hundreds of young Gazans outside the sole travel agency in Gaza City authorized to issue visas to Turkey.
In a prison, people might try to leave, but it is usually not possible; and if they do, do they return to visit? According to news reports, in July 2022, over 15,000 expatriates returned to the Gaza Strip for the feast of Eid al-Adha. They were excited to visit and reported that the markets were full with plenty of livestock for the festival. There seems to be an awful lot of traffic for a prison!
…life expectancy at birth (75.66 years) is comparable to its neighbors – Egypt (74.7), Syria (74.5), and Saudi Arabia (76.9).
…Is Gaza an open-air prison? In a way it is. There are many restrictions placed on the residents – what they can wear, who they can associate with, what they can think, etc. However, this is not because of Israel or any other external element but rather because of the oppressive, evil, Hamas regime that has been strangling all life in Gaza for 16 years.

In 2010, scholar Samuel Moyn published an important book on human rights — The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History:

* Historians of human rights approach their subject, in spite of its novelty, the way church historians once approached theirs. They regard the basic cause—much as the church historian treated the Christian religion—as a saving truth, discovered rather than made in history. If a historical phenomenon can be made to seem like an anticipation of human rights, it is interpreted as leading to them in much the way church history famously treated Judaism for so long, as a proto-Christian movement simply confused about its true destiny. Meanwhile, the heroes who are viewed as advancing human rights in the world—much like the church historian’s apostles and saints—are generally treated with uncritical wonderment. Hagiography, for the sake of moral imitation of those who chase the flame, becomes the main genre. And the organizations that finally appear to institutionalize human rights are treated like the early church: a fledgling, but hopefully universal, community of believers struggling for good in a vale of tears. If the cause fails, it is because of evil; if it succeeds, it is not by accident but because the cause is just. These approaches provide the myths that the new movement wants or needs.
…In a euphoric mood, many people believed that secure moral guidance, born out of shock about the Holocaust and nearly incontestable in its premises, was on the verge of displacing interest and power as the foundation of international society. All this fails to register that, without the transformative impact of events in the 1970s, human rights would not have become today’s utopia, and there would be no movement around it.
* there is a clear and fundamental difference between earlier rights, all predicated on belonging to a political community, and eventual “human rights.”
* If the state was necessary to create a politics of rights, many nineteenth-century observers wondered, could they have any other real source than its own authority and any other basis than its local meanings?
* [The human rights crusade emerged out of] “the distrust of utopia together with the desire to have one anyway.”
* Amnesty International’s origins in Christian responses to the Cold War had been unpromising, however, and its slow transformation into a celebrated human rights organization makes clear the necessity of distinguishing among the creation, evolution, and reception of such groups. Thanks to its founder Peter Benenson, AI emerged through an interesting and productive improvisation on earlier Christian peace movements. Together with Eric Baker, a Quaker, Benenson intended to provide a new outlet for idealists disappointed by Cold War stalemate, and especially after socialism had been revealed as a failed experiment. After AI’s inaugural May 28, 1961 Observer spread, “The Forgotten Prisoners,” Benenson recorded that “[t]he underlying purpose of this campaign—which I hope those who are closely connected with it will remember, but never publish—is to find a common base upon which the idealists of the world can co-operate. It is designed in particular to absorb the latent enthusiasm of great numbers of such idealists who have, since the eclipse of Socialism, become increasingly frustrated; similarly it is geared to appeal to the young searching for an ideal. . .” Quite strikingly, in private Benenson went so far as to conclude that the outlet AI would provide to idealists made its effects on victims unimportant: “It matters more to harness the enthusiasm of the helpers. . . The real martyrs prefer to suffer, and, as I would add, the real saints are no worse off in prison than anywhere on this earth.”
* Whether or not such activism made a difference on the ground, or in the larger process of constructing international norms, it succeeded first of all in giving meaning (as Benenson once hoped) to engaged lives. It was engagement of a sort whose minimalism was its enabling condition and source of power when other post-1968 alternatives were dying. Though she would go on to help found Helsinki (later Human Rights) Watch as the decade closed, Jeri Laber recalled that in the early 1970s she had never heard the phrase “human rights.” Trained in Russian studies, it was not Soviet activism that hooked her but a searing December 1973 New Republic essay written by AI activist Rose Styron on the renaissance of torture around the world. It led Laber to “do something about it.” Having been a parttime food writer for the New York Times shortly before, Laber placed an op-ed piece in that newspaper based on AI information—the first published—within a year of joining the Riverside Amnesty chapter. “I had found a successful formula,” she noted in a memoir. “I began with a detailed description of a horrible form of torture, then explained where it was happening and the political context in which it occurred; I ended with a plea to show the offending government that the world was watching.”
* If human rights have made any historical difference, it was first in their competitive survival as a motivating ideology in the confusing tumult of 1970s social movements, as they became bound up with the widespread desire to drop utopia and have one anyway. And their substitution of plausible morality for failed politics may have come at a price.
* Today it seems self-evident that among the major purposes— and perhaps the essential point—of international law is to protect individual human rights. “At the start of the new century,” one observer writes, “international law, at least for many theorists and practitioners, has been reconceived. No longer the law of nations, it is the law of human rights.” If that transformation is one of the most striking there is in modern law and legal thought, it is even more surprising that it really began only yesterday. Not only did the prehistory of international law through World War II provide no grounds for this development; for decades after, there would have been no way to believe or even to guess that human rights might become the touchstones they are today. Neither drawing from the humane spirit of founders centuries ago nor the recoil to World War II’s atrocities, human rights for international lawyers too are rooted in a startling and recent departure.
* one of the most fascinating testaments to the breakthrough of “human rights” in the late 1970s is the response of philosophers, who after a moment of confusion about their novelty assimilated them to natural rights principles that were themselves being revived.

Posted in Egypt, Gaza, Human Rights, Israel | Comments Off

The Biggest Lies In Contemporary Discourse

Posted on June 8, 2024 by Luke Ford

* The New York Times reports June 9, 2024: “Israel’s Euphoria Over Hostage Rescue May Be Fleeting”

Is there any euphoria that isn’t fleeting?

The same Times article continued: “The audacious [hostage rescue] operation did little to resolve the many challenges facing Israel’s government.”

Did anyone claim that it would?

* Nahum Barnea wrote May 26, 2024:

The military incursion into Rafah must be stopped. Not because the International Court of Justice ordered it, but because the cost outweighs the benefit. We can debate for days the judges’ motives, their integrity and their judicial rigor, but it won’t save Israel.

I put the phrase “won’t save Israel” into Google News and got dozens of results.

Who seriously argues that any one act by Israel will save Israel? Nobody. Salvation for individuals and nations is an ongoing project. It does not descend from above. Nobody is coming to save you.

What are real moral categories vs fake moral categories? Real moral categories go back in time. Allegations of racism and imperialism are recent made-up moral categories.

Here’s a 2018 paper examining real moral categories:

A complex web of social and moral norms governs many everyday human behaviors, acting as the glue for social harmony. The existence of moral norms helps elucidate the psychological motivations underlying a wide variety of seemingly puzzling behavior, including why humans help or trust total strangers. In this review, we examine four widespread moral norms: Fairness, altruism, trust, and cooperation, and consider how a single social instrument—reciprocity—underpins compliance to these norms. Using a game theoretic framework, we examine how both context and emotions moderate moral standards, and by extension, moral behavior. We additionally discuss how a mechanism of reciprocity facilitates the adherence to, and enforcement of, these moral norms through a core network of brain regions involved in processing reward. In contrast, violating this set of moral norms elicits neural activation in regions involved in resolving decision conflict and exerting cognitive control. Finally, we review how a reinforcement mechanism likely governs learning about morally normative behavior.
…if a core component of morality is that humans share a set of codes and beliefs that dampen selfish inclinations, it is important to examine what those moral strictures might be. We make the case that there are four fundamental moral norms—fairness, altruism, trust, and cooperation—that play a prominent role in shaping many everyday social interactions. While there are other possible candidate norms that could be included (e.g., norms of respect, justice, harm, and so forth), these four norms are sufficiently general enough to be applicable to a wide array of moral behavior (e.g., trusting that an individual will not be harmed by others), while also having enough specificity to capture unique behavioral patterns across them. Here we argue that these norms of fairness, altruism, trust, and cooperation are all subserved by, and rooted in, a single mechanism—reciprocity—that enables people to make flexible moral decisions across a range of social contexts.

What are traditional values? Here’s a good summary:

1. Traditional values provide a sense of identity and belonging. When we embrace traditional values, we connect with our cultural roots and heritage. This helps us to understand who we are and where we come from, giving us a sense of belonging and identity. Traditional values provide a framework for our beliefs and behaviors, and they help us to make sense of the world around us.
2. Traditional values promote social cohesion. When we share common values, we are more likely to work together and support each other. Traditional values promote social cohesion by encouraging people to work together towards common goals. This helps to build stronger communities and promotes a sense of unity.
3. Traditional values promote personal responsibility. Traditional values emphasize the importance of personal responsibility and accountability. When we embrace these values, we take ownership of our actions and are more likely to make responsible decisions. This helps us to become more self-reliant and independent.
4. Traditional values provide a moral compass. Traditional values provide a moral framework that helps us to distinguish between right and wrong. They help us to make ethical decisions and guide our behavior towards what is good and just. This is particularly important in a society where moral relativism is becoming increasingly prevalent.
5. Traditional values promote stability and order. Traditional values provide a stable foundation for society, promoting order and stability. They help to maintain social norms and prevent deviant behavior. This is particularly important in a world where social norms are becoming increasingly fragmented.
6. Traditional values promote family values. Traditional values emphasize the importance of family and the role of the family unit in society. They promote strong family bonds and encourage parents to take an active role in the upbringing of their children. This helps to build stronger families and promotes family values.
7. Traditional values promote respect for authority. Traditional values emphasize the importance of respecting authority and following rules and regulations. This helps to maintain law and order and promotes a sense of discipline and respect for authority.

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Russian Decency

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Luke Ford

Zhenya Bruno writes for NYBooks.com:

In the investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko’s new book about Russia, resistance is carried out through small, discreet acts…
There was a flash of confidence in her eyes, a claim that certain lines should not be crossed. Elena Kostyuchenko gives us a term for this certainty. She calls it decency: “A decent person follows established rules,” she explains. “They obey their elders. They don’t insist on their rights.”

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No Comfort in Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Luke Ford

Fintan O’Toole writes for NYBooks.com:

What we encounter, then, is nothing so comforting as imperfect men causing trouble that will be banished by their deserved deaths. It is men who embody the hurly-burly that, contrary to the predictions of the witches at the start of Macbeth, is never going to be “done.” Hamlet and Macbeth, Othello and Lear are distinguished in these dramas by the illusion that they can determine events by their own actions. They have, they believe, the power to say what will happen next. But no amount of power can ever be great enough in an irrational world. The universe does not follow orders. That, as Miss Prism might have said, is what Tragedy means.
It is nice to imagine a time when these plays could be loved for their poetry alone. It would be a delight to think that their pleasure would be that they speak, as Horatio has it at the end of Hamlet, to an “unknowing world/How these things came about.” But there is not yet a world that does not know the violence of these plays or the fury with which reality responds to all attempts to force it to obey one man’s will. There is no place in history where “Be not found here” is not good advice for millions of vulnerable people. We return to the tragedies not in search of behavioral education but because the wilder the terror Shakespeare unleashes, the deeper is the pity and the greater the wonder that, even in the howling tempest, we can still hear the voices of broken individuals so amazingly articulated. They do not, when they speak, reduce the frightfulness. They allow us, rather, in those bewildering moments, to be equal to it.

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The Workings of the Spirit

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Luke Ford

Peter Brown writes for NYBooks.com:

A new history of Christianity traces its transformation over a thousand years from an enormous diversity of beliefs and practices to Catholic uniformity…
Peter Heather’s Christendom is a colossal book written by a colossus in the field. Aptly subtitled “The Triumph of a Religion,” it covers a millennium, from the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in 312 to the baptism of Grand Duke Mindaugas of Lithuania, the last pagan ruler in Europe, around 1250.
Heather resolutely rejects the romantic notion that Christianity rose to the top of late Roman society by its intrinsic merits alone, without the help of the powerful. His attitude is close to that of J.B. Bury, who argued that “it must never be forgotten that Constantine’s revolution was perhaps the most audacious act ever committed by an autocrat in disregard and defiance of the vast majority of his subjects.”
To justify this view, Heather offers a cogent analysis of the structure of Roman upper-class society and its relation to the Roman state—a relation that made elites peculiarly vulnerable to pressure from a Christian court. If pressure was exercised by Constantine and his Christian successors on the wider population, it was the gentle violence of a state that lacked the strength and organizational capacity of modern dictatorships. The late Roman state was not “a decadent Leviathan,” as many scholars from the 1930s onward deemed it to be. These scholars saw the later empire as a warning for their own society, faced with the rise of totalitarian states in Europe and with what struck some of them as the ominous expansion of government associated in America with the New Deal. As a result, they greatly exaggerated the Roman Empire’s coercive powers.
Heather points out that the late Roman state could not enforce an ideology; it was too “rickety.” But it could seduce. Its immense ambitions depended on networks of friends and clients that stretched from the court to the lower reaches of the gentry in a never-ceasing waterfall of favors asked and favors received. If one wanted to get anything done, one had to please someone. And ideally this was someone who had pleased the emperor and those around him.
Once the emperor made plain that he was an orthodox Christian and that he would shut the “divine ears” to the petitions of heretics, Jews, and pagans, the message trickled down with surprising speed. A confessional state was born.

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Leaving The Fold

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Luke Ford

I just renewed my subscription to NYBooks. It is such a gorgeous publication.

From NYBooks.com:

All religious autobiography hinges on a drama of escape. The convert speaks from a vantage of liberation, having been freed from the shackles of sin, looking back on the years he lived in bondage, a “prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness,” as Thomas Merton puts it in The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), his celebrated memoir about becoming a Trappist monk. The deconversion narrative relies on the same arc, but in reverse. The apostate wins her freedom by fleeing the prison of institutional religion. Each narrative is, of course, a lie. The believer, even after he has glimpsed eternity, must continue to live in the world with other fallen humans and his own wayward flesh. Anyone who has left the church finds, inevitably, that secular life has plenty of constraints and disappointments of its own. What drives the narrative impulse is that first, ecstatic taste of freedom—of having borne witness to something as formless and vast as the night sky…
In her mid-twenties she was living in Paris and writing scores for a music publisher when her father died, a trauma that hit with seismic force. Although she and her siblings had not been raised religious—neither parent was a churchgoer—her grief succeeded in convincing her that she had (so to speak) a father in heaven….
Conversion experiences are always the least convincing part of a faith narrative. It would be easy to chalk this up to secularization, our loss of faith in the reality of faith itself, but the problem, I think, is broader than that. (“And then I realized—” the poet Robert Haas once observed, is “the part of stories one never quite believes.”) Epiphanies, those watermarks of shifting internal states, consist of pure, untested potentiality. Coldstream’s passages about her contact with the divine during those early years of prayer are, fittingly, vague to the point of meaninglessness…
…few things are more disappointing to the new convert than religious laxity. But Coldstream makes little effort to put these complaints in perspective, to see them as the follies of youthful purity, or to consider why her aloofness and superiority are so alienating to the other nuns, most of whom are cradle Catholics. Recalling how she was often chided for her “convert’s enthusiasm”…
…As I read page after page of schoolyard bullying and mean-girl snubs, I could not help but long for a different storyline, one in which Coldstream fully embraces her prophetic megalomania and does what so many saints have done—disappearing into the desert, climbing to the top of some ragged mountain, calling on a complacent church to find its way back to its pioneering ideals..
Lucy is one of many nuns who over the years succumb to mental illness and are forced to leave the convent, a fact that Coldstream attributes to prolonged repression. The religious call to “self-immolation,” the tireless effort to conquer temptation and suppress one’s true feelings, is unnatural, she writes, because “the shadow side of the psyche…cannot be kept down for ever.” This is an odd about-face, given her original complaints about religious laxity. She was the one who wanted more self-immolation. But in trying to account for the growing tension she experienced—her attempts to suppress her artistic, solitary, and prophetic nature—and the array of personal dysfunction she witnessed at the convent, she ends up concluding that the problem is the unnatural discipline of monasticism itself. The ascetic life that survived two millennia of Christianity had finally, at the dawn of the third, become untenable.

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Decoding Joe Biden (6-5-24)

Posted on June 6, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 In which room and in which clothes do you watch this show?
03:00 New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West,
https://www.amazon.com/New-Cold-Wars-Invasion-Americas/dp/0593443594
13:00 Stephen Walt: Biden’s Foreign Policy Problem Is Incompetence, https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/06/04/biden-foreign-policy-gaza-ukraine-foreign-policy-incompetence/
20:00 Shut Up Joe Biden, https://newrepublic.com/article/153762/mighty-mouth
25:30 DTG: Slavoj Žižek: When is a shark not a shark?, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/slavoj-zizek-when-is-a-shark-not-a-shark
28:00 Tom Landry’s trick plays were designed to make him look smart, not to win Super Bowls
33:45 Eastern Europeans enjoy irritating people
40:00 Why is everyone on steroids, https://www.gq.com/story/why-is-everyone-on-steroids-now
49:40 Zizek is a classic secular guru
50:00 How Zizek is like the streamer Destiny
51:00 Dr Delgado’s anti-White scholarship, https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/dr-delgados-anti-white-scholarship
54:00 The Tower and the Sewer, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/06/20/the-tower-and-the-sewer-why-liberalism-failed-deneen/
1:07:50 What is psychodynamic therapy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6eel0K24MQ
1:10:00 Remember when the intelligence community and the MSM said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation?

Full transcript.

Podnotes AI summary: I am curious if you have a special room for watching the show or wear specific clothes like your Sunday best. Ever thought of writing to me about why you watch or what you do during it? Maybe there’s art or drinks you prefer while viewing? I imagine a dedicated space and attire that honors our soul connection.

I’m reading David Sanger’s book on new cold wars, China’s rise, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and America defending the West. It mentions Biden’s involvement in Ukraine in 2014 – classic Biden overstepping his abilities unlike Obama who was cautious with foreign policy.

Obama resisted war with Russia over Crimea to avoid dire consequences for the U.S., adhering to “Don’t do stupid shit” as his motto. He knew Ukraine wasn’t vital to US security just as current conflicts don’t affect American welfare directly.

Biden is framing his reelection around defending democracy globally but Americans aren’t interested in overseas conflicts like those in Ukraine and Gaza – they want domestic focus instead.

Ukrainian morale is low; Putin seeks ceasefire; Europe and the U.S. support negotiations but Biden pushes forward. The U.S.’s role should be checking China rather than meddling elsewhere.

In other news, debates rage on political retribution and Trump accuses opponents of plotting jail time against him – claims without basis stirring media frenzy.

Decoding gurus discussed Zizek, noting how some figures use dramatic language for attention which can be tiring despite occasional necessity for radical change highlighted by historical revolutions like Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement succeeding partly due to more extreme threats behind it.

In the 1979 Super Bowl, The Cowboys started strong against the Steelers, dominating with their run game in a single drive before a fumble turned the tide. Tom Landry’s call for a double reverse led to disaster, and Pittsburgh recovered, ultimately winning.

Mandela’s revolutionary stance is often criticized as mere attention-seeking, but violence and populist uprisings can be essential for change. Revolutions are complex; France swung between republics and monarchies until finding its current state.

A friend chose silence over confronting middle-aged men discussing Israel and Gaza—a wise move considering how heated such debates can get. Ideals can lead to either positive change or disaster; they’re not inherently good or bad.

Steroid use has surged as people seek external solutions to internal problems—whether it’s radical politics, religion, or physical enhancement through performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). The risks include health issues like kidney damage and mood disorders. Education around PEDs is lacking among users and medical professionals alike.

Rituals that seem transgressive may actually reinforce social bonds within certain ideologies or institutions—inversion of status during rituals releases social tension. Nation-states sometimes engage in hypocritical actions contrary to their stated values out of perceived necessity or practicality.

Philosophers like Zizek challenge us with thought experiments rather than empirical evidence—valuable for provoking thought but not always grounded in scientific rigor. While philosophers’ interpretations vary widely, they serve an important role in questioning societal norms.

He’s a guy with strong opinions, commenting on social and political issues. He thinks he’s not liked but sees himself as an iconoclast. Despite claiming to be unpopular, his ideas are widely discussed, even in major publications that warn against taking him lightly.

Talking about critical race theory (CRT), Richard Delgado is criticized for suggesting aggressive solutions to racial injustice. His work implies violence might be necessary, which the author finds dangerous and irresponsible. The author renews their subscription to insightful essays that explore different ideologies.

Alfred Adler’s personal experiences led him to create psychotherapy as a distinct form of mental health treatment from Freudian psychoanalysis. Psychotherapy has since evolved into various approaches still used today.

The Canadian Association of Black Lawyers criticizes proposed auto theft amendments for being ineffective and disproportionately affecting minority communities. Meanwhile, misinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop was spread by politicians and media before the 2020 election.

Ideological commitments have both rational arguments and emotional resonance; great novelists like Conrad and Mann understood this dual nature well. Political analysis should consider both aspects rather than seeking “gotcha moments” that dismiss people’s stated reasons for their beliefs.

A skilled psychoanalyst views us in two ways: as truth-seekers and self-deceivers. This dual analysis applies to current ideological movements too. For the New York Review of Books author, a key conservative strand is Catholic post-liberalism, which values community over individual rights and aims for the common good.

This perspective challenges liberal individualism and prioritizes national well-being. It envisions democratic institutions serving specific peoples rather than abstract principles. The author argues that people seeking meaning through dramatic ideological shifts may actually be filling voids from lacking personal connections.

In discussing critical race theory (CRT), there’s debate on whether its extreme ideas permeate K-12 education. Some claim CRT isn’t taught at this level, but foundational concepts are often introduced early on in other subjects like math without controversy.

The essay also touches on right-wing strategies to influence U.S institutions and criticizes post-liberals for not focusing enough on transforming society through Christian teachings from the ground up. Instead, they seem drawn to cultural wars which could lead to disappointment in secular America.

Ultimately, the writer suggests that young people attracted to these ideologies might be better off nurturing their minds and souls instead of getting entangled in political struggles – implying that inner peace comes from self-contentment rather than external battles or historical narratives.

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New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West

Posted on June 6, 2024 by Luke Ford

David Sanger writes:

It was classic Biden: He inserted himself into a complex dispute half a world away, convinced that his long experience in diplomacy and personal touch could make a difference. Like a hostage negotiator, Biden was trying to build a rapport with Yanukovich even as he tried to talk him down, to convince him to take a deal that the European Union — along with the Russians — had brokered to guarantee elections by the end of 2014 and end the crisis. Under that plan, Yanukovich would have stayed in power in the interim..
For President Obama, the urgent question was how to respond to Russia’s move into Crimea. It was a clear violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Biden and Victoria “Toria” Nuland, the Russia hawk who was serving as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, were pressing him to act. Biden himself was eager to make Moscow “ pay in blood and money,” as my colleagues Glenn Thrush and Ken Vogel later reported.
Obama resisted the effort. Don’t get me into a war with Russia, he warned his aides repeatedly. That, first and foremost, was his goal. Such a war would not only be a new conflict with potentially unimaginable consequences for the United States — it’s a different calculus taking on a nuclear – armed state — it would, Obama believed, believed, become a fundamentally losing battle. Obama told his aides that Russia would always care more about the Ukrainians than Americans would. Intervention, in Obama’s view, would have been a violation of the guiding principle of foreign policy that he once boiled down for reporters on Air Force One into one pithy phrase: “Don’t do stupid shit.”
The fate of Crimea, Obama determined, was important but hardly a core U.S. security interest. In public, he sought to downplay both the geopolitical significance and the impact that U.S. involvement would have. “ The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non – NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he later said.
In Belgium, less than a week after the annexation, Obama had already made up his mind. “ This is not another Cold War that we’re entering into,” he said. “Unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology.”
…IN THE END, Washington’s response to the Russian incursion into Crimea was typically tepid. Obama spun out a handful of executive orders sanctioning individuals and organizations for their roles in Ukrainian corruption or the Russian annexation. The U.S. military conducted exercises with European allies and shored up its presence on the continent. There was nothing that would ruin Putin’s day.
Mild as the American moves seemed, the Europeans did even less. What they were mostly interested in, they were quick to emphasize, was the opportunity to stabilize the situation and allow cooler heads to prevail…
For much of his political career, Joe Biden had played the role of the hard – liner when it came to Russia. He had pushed for NATO expansion, despite Putin’s protests. So it wasn’t a surprise when he sided with the relatively small group of Obama aides seeking a harder line and real weapons for the Ukrainians. At the same time, he was careful not to be caught publicly disagreeing with Obama, recalled Toria Nuland.
Biden used his weekly lunches with Obama to press for the kind of lethal aid that might make a difference in the war for the Donbas. “Biden was the pit bull for defensive weapons,” Nuland told me. “He especially wanted Javelins sent,” she said, referring to the powerful American anti – tank missiles that Obama declined to ship, for fear they would be provocative…
Part of this drive stemmed from the deep ties Biden had built with people in the region, stretching back decades. It was why he led the American support for anticorruption reforms in Ukraine — including his support, now infamous, in accordance with established U.S. policy at the time, for firing the corrupt chief Ukrainian prosecutor.
What tainted Biden’s initiative were the activities of his troubled younger son, Hunter Biden, a lawyer and lobbyist with a long record of addiction problems and poor judgment. Hunter appeared to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars — starting in 2014 — to sit on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that was also under investigation for corruption. But when Obama aides broached the potential conflict of interest with Biden during their first presidential campaign, he lit into them — the blind spot Biden has often had when issues touch his family — and told them to back off. Biden maintained that his son was an independent adult and that there was no crossover between their work.
Later, Biden’s aides would cite his early work in Ukraine to make the case that he was always a Russia hawk — and that his support for Kyiv was the product of years of scar tissue as he tried to aid a country that often undercut its own interests.

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