Historian J. Otto Pohl on the Middle East Conflict (11-6-23)

Posted on November 6, 2023 by Luke Ford

01:00 Who benefits from the Hamas v Israel conflict?
03:00 How much does Russia benefit?
05:00 How much does Iran benefit?
08:00 Who are the most eloquent spokesmen for the Palestinians?
46:20 Azerbijan ethnically cleansed 120,000 Armenians
1:00:00 Working as a school teacher and janitor
1:04:00 Otto’s diversity statement, https://jottopohl.substack.com/p/diversity-and-inclusion-statement
1:42:30 When a nation’s survival is at stake, it will violate international law
1:58:00 The 48 Laws of Power, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-48-laws-of-power/id1651876897?i=1000633447181
2:13:00 Elliott Blatt calls to defend the Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power
2:25:00 5 Signs You’re ‘Overdoing’ Vulnerability (And How To Stop), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_B3afFDPHc
2:27:00 10 Green Flags That It’s (Probably) Safe To Be Vulnerable, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0ibuHmjiXc
2:46:00 Welsh boy treble Cai Thomas (12y) sings Suo Gan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whKw72731L8
Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949: (Contributions to the Study of World History)
by J. Otto Pohl (Author)
The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930-1953
The Years of Great Silence: The Deportation, Special Settlement, and Mobilization into the Labor Army of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1941–1955, https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-years-of-great-silence/9783838216300
https://twitter.com/JOttoPohl1
https://jottopohl.substack.com/
https://www.patreon.com/PohlPosition
https://twitter.com/History__Speaks, YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/58xkw28u Substack: http://tinyurl.com/5n7h4urr Rumble: http://tinyurl.com/mr2bx59n
https://twitter.com/nathancofnas
https://nathancofnas.com/
https://nathancofnas.com/debate-with-kevin-macdonald/
Conservaphobia: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=144168

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Historian J. Otto Pohl on the Middle East Conflict (11-6-23)

I talk to Matt aka ‘History Speaks’ about the Middle East Conflict (11-5-23)

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Luke Ford

01:00 My guest for 2.5 hours is a pro-Palestine PhD student in History, https://twitter.com/History__Speaks
3:14:00 John J. Mearsheimer on America’s Russaphobia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuhQYs_imyo
3:20:00 Is diplomacy possible in the Hamas-Israeli war? Prof. John Mearsheimer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmxFN_arNv4
3:21:00 Dehumanizing Palestinians provides a rationale for occupying Palestinians
3:22:00 President Harry Truman tries to find a homeland for Jews and to be just to Palestinians
3:29:00 Matthew Perry dies, Luke on 60 Minutes in 2003
3:32:00 How to Get Unstuck: Self-Efficacy, Learned Helplessness, and Creating a Growth Mindset, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1nKXKnaZUU
3:36:00 Country people tend to be conservative, city people tend to be left
3:43:30 5 Signs You’re ‘Overdoing’ Vulnerability (And How To Stop), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_B3afFDPHc
3:47:00 Does Israel Share Our Values? A Rejoinder to Sam Harris, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeEQIpZeEBY
4:13:00 A lefty going to a protest is like a Christian going to church
4:16:00 Salt Lake City has the most beautiful women in the country per capita
4:28:00 Tough times
4:49:00 The 4-Hour Work Week, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-4-hour-workweek/id1651876897?i=1000628678180
4:53:00 The 48 Laws of Power, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-48-laws-of-power/id1651876897?i=1000633447181
History Speaks, YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/58xkw28u Substack: http://tinyurl.com/5n7h4urr Rumble: http://tinyurl.com/mr2bx59n
https://twitter.com/nathancofnas
https://nathancofnas.com/
https://nathancofnas.com/debate-with-kevin-macdonald/
History Speaks goes on Destiny, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gce0XXMnPNQ
Conservaphobia: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=144168

In the middle of the show, I ask Nathan Cofnas: “I’m interviewing History Speaks right now. Any chance you’d join me for a stream with him sometime?”

Cofnas responds:

Re Matt’s comments on the show:

“he thought that [the octopus] was a dog whistle to Nazi propaganda” – I said it was “not impossible” that the octopus could have been placed there to allude to Jews/Israel by one of Greta’s handlers. “Not impossible” doesn’t mean it definitely was, or even that it probably was. Incidentally, Richard Hanania agreed with my analysis on that:

“He also was liking a tweet that was referring to a hate crime hoax…at Cooper Union. There was this claim that these Palestinian protesters were hunting Jews in the library”

The tweet I liked didn’t say Jews were being hunted. It said “Jewish students at Cooper Union are in the library as protestors pound on the door,” which is not disputed. The video shows Jewish students in the library, and protestors pounding on the door. I don’t know exactly what happened, and I haven’t endorsed any particular narrative about it.

“I cited…the fact that over and over and over again, that Israel in its wars targets civilians indiscriminately. I cited various UN reports to this effect. And Cofnas responded by basically saying the UN is engaged in systematic…anti-Semitism because of the UN general assembly votes that are very targeted against Israel. My thought was, that doesn’t make any sense….The fact-finding missions that I was citing like the Goldstone report in 2009 have nothing to do with Arab states. So this is just a flimsy argument. You haven’t draw a connection between anti-Semitic Arab states and these UN fact-finding reports which show overwhelmingly indiscriminate attacks on civilians. And then he just got mad and me and said I’m unserious.”

On Twitter, Matt cited a single piece of evidence that UN accusations of war crimes against Israel are credible and not motivated by anti-Semitism: the Goldstone report. I replied that “[Goldstone] expressed regret that his report may have been inaccurate….[He said] ‘civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy’ by Israel.” Goldstone also says: “They [the UN Human Rights Council] repeatedly rush to pass condemnatory resolutions in the face of alleged violations of human rights law by Israel, but fail to take similar action in the face of even more serious violations by other states.” In other words, Matt’s one piece of evidence says the opposite of what he claimed: it says Israel was falsely accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians, and that the UN is biased against Israel. As you can see, he doesn’t have much of a response to this:

“he wanted to debate Eric Striker”

I never wanted to debate Eric Striker, and I publicly refused to debate him.

This is why I’m not interested in further discussion with Matt.

LF: Matt asked me if you ever agreed to debate Mike Enoch.

NC: Striker: never. Enoch: I don’t remember the exact words I used. I said either (a) I would debate him if he read my paper or (b) I wouldn’t debate the kind of person who challenged someone to debate a paper he hadn’t read. Either way, Enoch made it clear that he wasn’t going to read the paper, so a debate was never on the table. I never said anything to suggest I “wanted” to debate him.

Posted in Israel, Nathan Cofnas | Comments Off on I talk to Matt aka ‘History Speaks’ about the Middle East Conflict (11-5-23)

Israel’s October 7 Massacre Hit Kibbutzniks, Not Settlers

Posted on November 2, 2023 by Luke Ford

October 7’s Hamas massacre in south Israel would not have happened against West Bank settlers. Settlers are armed. The kibbutzniks in Israel’s south were not well-armed. They were left-wing peaceniks and they were not prepared to do battle with people who wanted to slaughter them.

Editor David Remnick writes for Nov. 6, 2023 edition of The New Yorker:

The victims of the Hamas attack—the dead, the survivors, the kidnapped—were not settlers or fanatics; they were, in the main, the liberals of Israel, a breed that still speaks (with caveats and shades of difference) about peace and two states for two peoples. They tend to loathe Netanyahu for his hubris and corruption, his disdain for the Palestinians, his attempt to diminish the Supreme Court, and his alliance with such lurid reactionaries as his national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich. Some of the survivors were not especially political; some had come to the previous Kaplan Street demonstrations. They joined groups like Achim Laneshek, or Brothers in Arms, reservists who marched against Netanyahu. After October 7th, they put aside protest for rescue work.

Killers and other predators prefer soft targets to hard targets.

Sep. 8, 2023, political scientist John J. Mearsheimer said to Glenn Loury: “A lot of people argue that this [Russian invasion of Ukraine] of Feb. 4, 2022 violated just war theory or violated international law. That’s correct. Just war theory [and international law] rule out preventive war. This was a preventive war. The war was illegal and unjust but if you are a state and you are faced with what you think is an existential threat, and there’s no doubt that Russia saw Ukraine in NATO as an existential threat, and you launch a war to eliminate that mortal threat, no leader, nor his people, is going to consider that unjust.”

Israel sees Hamas as an existential threat to its existence and thus is determined to wipe out Hamas, no matter the cost.

David Remnick writes:

During the [1995] campaign, he [Bibi] made sure to be overheard when he told a spiritual leader of the Sephardim, Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, “Leftists have forgotten what it is to be Jewish. They think they will put security in the hands of the Arabs—that Arabs will look out for us.” He won the election, and though he has spent occasional periods in the wilderness, he has now been Prime Minister for a total of sixteen years, longer even than David Ben-Gurion.

A few people care about out-groups, but these are not the sentiments to bet on, because overwhelmingly, people don’t care about out-groups. Americans, for example, do not care when Americans commit atrocities against non-Americans. The 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam took the lives of about 400 dead civilians, and the man who directed it, Lieutenant William Calley Jr., got four years of house arrest.

According to Wikipedia, Allied bombing in WWII killed 790,509 – 1,693,374 people. Few Americans cried over these civilian deaths.

I grew up in Australia. The overwhelming sentiment I noticed around my fellow Aussies was that anyone who wasn’t an Aussie was worthless.

David Remnick writes:

As the Israeli right solidified its hold on power, some in the country came to view its draconian anti-Palestinian policies with repugnance. Yair Golan is a retired Army general in his early sixties; he is graying yet as trim as a blade. He was an infantry commander during the second intifada, and then led the Judea and Samaria division, in the West Bank. But he grew increasingly disgusted with the military’s treatment of Palestinians, and he did not keep his views to himself. A speech that he delivered seven years ago at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak caused a furor. Golan, who was then the deputy chief of staff of the I.D.F., warned that Israeli society had grown callous to “the other,” and said, “If there is something that frightens me in the memory of the Holocaust, it is identifying horrifying processes that occurred in Europe, particularly in Germany, seventy, eighty, and ninety years ago, and finding evidence of their existence here in our midst today, in 2016.” He referred to an incident in Hebron in which an I.D.F. sergeant was filmed shooting a Palestinian who had stabbed an Israeli soldier but had already been subdued and was prostrate. “There is nothing easier and simpler,” Golan said, “than behaving like a beast, becoming morally corrupt, and sanctimonious.”

No group graduates from the harsh reality of in-group vs out-group thinking. A few intellectuals here and there may overcome it for a time, but it is not possible for the masses to overcome it because it is not usually adaptive to do so. In-groups who lack a fierce commitment to their own survival don’t survive. With few exceptions, everybody is callous to the other, and that this reality frightens and terrifies Yair Golan simply shows he’s out of touch with how people work. He sought acclaim from the intellectual class by proclaiming precious feelings that are inaccessible to normal people living under threat.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Israel’s October 7 Massacre Hit Kibbutzniks, Not Settlers

Aish: From Christian Missionary to Observant Jew

Posted on October 31, 2023 by Luke Ford

Bluma Gordon writes for Aish.com:

Shannon Nuszen’s mission was to convert as many Jews as possible. Her fealty to the truth sent her in an unexpected direction.

The recent story of Michael Elkcohen, the undercover Christian missionary who masqueraded as an Orthodox Jew and infiltrated an Orthodox community in Jerusalem, sent shockwaves around the world. The father admitted his missionary intentions in 2014 but managed to avoid further scrutiny by relocating to the Anglo community of French Hill. A year ago, a journalist familiar with his confession notified Shannon Nuszen, the director of Beyneynu, a new watchdog organization that exposes missionary activity in Israel, about the couple. They had been spotted using two separate Facebook profiles – one with Jewish identities and one with Christian identities.

“We started an investigation to verify the truth,” Shannon said in an Aish.com interview, “and the week before we planned on releasing the information to leaders, the story exploded in the media when a child who attended the same school as the missionary’s children told her parents that a classmate was telling her friends about Jesus.”

While Elkohen has deleted his social media profiles and now denies the claims, Beyneynu believes they have enough evidence to prove his missionary affiliations – and his act of betrayal to the community that extended their hand to his family. Shannon will release the evidence to the Israeli Ministry of Interior. “It’s my hope that the government and Jewish institutions finally see the need for, at the very least, a department that filters Aliyah applications and stops fraudulent applicants from entering Israel,” says Shannon.

Regarding the Elkohens, Shannon says she hopes that the government will revoke their citizenship and send a strong message to the entire Christian world that although Israel appreciates their social, political, and financial support, they draw the line at missionary activity, fraud, and deceptive tactics against the Jewish people.

I surfed over to Beynenu.com and found this:

Beyneynu is a non-profit organization that monitors missionary activity in Israel and abroad. We collaborate with government and community leaders to raise awareness about the dangers of Jewish evangelism and encourage healthy boundaries in our interfaith relationships. While we strive to maintain a spirit of mutual respect and cooperation with Christian allies of the State of Israel, we also recognize the importance of being proactive in confronting missionary influence and movements in the Jewish homeland. Despite ongoing debates over Jewish identity in Israel for the past 75 years, Christianity has always been considered a line that should not be crossed.

From IsraelNationalNews, March 24, 2022:

Fresh off of a mission on the Ukrainian border, a “Messianic” group that seeks Jews to accept Jesus is setting its sights on Jewish New Yorkers.

Chosen People Ministries is one two Messianic groups that announced plans this week to visit New York and share their gospel this summer, causing alarm for some Jews in the city who say that their practices are disrespectful.

CPM and the International Board of Jewish Missions both released materials that detailed their plan to visit New York.

“I think most Jews are not aware of how aggressive they are in campaigns,” said Shannon Nuszen, founder of the anti-missionary group Beyneynu, which first reported the missionary groups’ plans.

From IsraelNationalNews.com, Feb. 9, 2023:

The Beyneynu anti-missionary organization has sent an urgent appeal to the Israeli Interior Ministry regarding a family of Christian missionaries attempting to infiltrate the haredi community in Jerusalem.

The Dawson family, now styling themselves as the Isaacsons and dressing in traditional haredi garb, were outed 16 months ago in Phoenix, Arizona. Before then, they attempted to infiltrate Jewish communities in Texas, Oregon, and Wisconsin, moving on each time their true identity was exposed.

According to the haredi news site Behadrey Haredim, the family is now in Jerusalem after obtaining three-month tourist visas, and has settled in the neighborhood of Nachlaot, near the Mahane Yehuda open-air market. Nachlaot is an eclectic neighborhood where haredi Jews live alongside religious “hippies,” traditional Jews, and secular Jews, and has in the past been thrown into turmoil after several immigrants from the United States were accused of settling there and conducting missionary activity.

In her letter to the Interior Ministry, Shannon Nuszen, founder and director of Beyneynu, wrote: “We believe that they will ask to immigrate to Israel immediately or at the very least obtain student visas for their children through the Ministry of the Interior.

“It’s urgent that the Ministry of the Interior act immediately to block these people from receiving any visa that would allow them to continue the damage they are causing to Jewish communities with their insidious agenda … We know from first-hand reports from Jewish communities and rabbis in the U.S. that the Dawson/Isaacson family is deceptive, dangerous and very determined to establish themselves in Israel.”

From IsraelNationalNews.com, Feb. 13, 2023:

Beyneynu issued warnings to the Jewish communities in Jerusalem, apprising them of the situation. The next Shabbat, Calev again turned up at the Kol Rina synagogue and was told that his identity was now known and that he should refrain from causing a commotion and please leave – if he so wished, he could request a private meeting with the rabbi.

Beyneynu has written to the Interior Ministry in the hope of preventing the Dawsons from obtaining Israeli citizenship (which they are not legally entitled to).

“It is urgent that the Ministry of the Interior act to immediately to block these people from receiving any visa that would allow them to continue the damage they are causing to Jewish communities with their insidious agenda,” wrote Shannon Nuszen, founder and director of Beyneynu in her letter to the Ministry.

“We know from first-hand reports from Jewish communities and rabbis in the United States that the Dawson/Isaacson family is deceptive, dangerous, and very determined to establish themselves in Israel,” she added. Nuszen also noted that previous bitter experience has shown that Israeli citizenship, once granted, is extremely difficult to revoke even if it can be clearly proven that it was fraudulently obtained.

Concerned citizen, Michael, sends me a letter dated July 30, 2023 that I just received (and he included photographs of about 60 different Facebook posts and pages that support his arguments below):

Dear Mr. Luke Ford,

I want to inform you about a woman working as an undercover missionary named Shannon Nuszen. She is a covert evangelical Christian missionary who is currently proselytizing Jewish adults and minor children without parental consent to convert them to Christianity. There is currently an open case with the Interior Ministry of Jerusalem for Immigration Fraud to deny this woman her papers to make Aliyah, due to the fact that she is practicing Christianity, although this woman claims to be a devout Jew. She hides in the shadows of Rabbi Tovia Singer, who is protecting her due to fear that she will destroy his already tainted reputation. I am urging everyone not to be fooled by her deceitful methods. She outs other Christian missionaries publicly on mainstream media, such as in Aish HaTorah News and Arutz Sheva, Jews are fooled to believe that she is protecting us from horrible missionaries that want to convert us. Shannon Nuszen is hiding in plain sight while pretending to be an Orthodox Jew. Her organization Beyneynu is a cover for her to receive funding for her organization from missionaries around the world… She pretends to be a devout Orthodox Jew… Shannon is currently galivanting in Israel with pastors from the Texas Evangelical Christian Church which she currently attends… She hosts huge parties where she feasts unsuspecting Jews in her home in order to gain their trust, with her pastors present!

On Oct. 30, I emailed Beyneynu the allegations in the letter above. I have yet to receive a response.

Gavriel Aryeh Sanders emails:

Luke:

This tripe you just posted about Shannon Nuszen is 100% wrong. My wife and I have been guests in her home several times. There are no missionaries there. There is no Interior Ministry case to block aliyah. She’s been a citizen for years. Beyneynu does legit work. It’s no cover. I would know. I’ve worked with her on several cases. She’s absolutely no covert missionary.

You must take this post down now. With all the grief we’re experiencing in Israel and among the Jewish people right now, you have to add to it with a spurious posting like this?

Posted in Conversion | Comments Off on Aish: From Christian Missionary to Observant Jew

The Nix (2016)

Posted on October 30, 2023 by Luke Ford

I’m reading Nathan Hill’s novel The Nix. Here are some highlights:

* “Porn is a problem for the whole project of enlightenment,” Alice said. “If otherwise rational, educated, literate, moral, and ethical men still need to look at this, then how far have we really come? The conservative wants to get rid of pornography by banning it. But the liberal wants to get rid of it too, by making people so enlightened they no longer want it. Repression versus education. The cop and the teacher. Both have the same goal — prudishness — but use different tools.”

* “The men in the movement say this shit all the time,” said Alice. “Like if you don’t want to fuck them they wonder why you have such big hang – ups. If you won’t take off your shirt, they tell you not to be so ashamed of yourself. Like if you don’t let them feel your tits you’re not a legitimate part of the movement.”

Posted in America | Comments Off on The Nix (2016)

Idea Deflection Is A Symptom Of Under-Earning

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Luke Ford

One of the 12 symptoms of under-earning according to Underearners Anonymous is: “Idea Deflection – We compulsively reject ideas that could expand our lives or careers, and increase our profitability.”

I’ve been thinking about my character trait of dismissiveness. It’s a reflex with me and it is part of my idea deflection in particular and under-earning in general.

I tend to present a hard cynical exterior to the world and dismissiveness is just part of the package. My cold front keeps others at bay and it keeps me isolated.

One of the tools I’ve learned in 12-step work to work with an unwanted trait is to figure out how the trait serves me, how it hurts, and how I would benefit from the opposite of the trait.

Here’s what I wrote in answer to these questions:

ADVANTAGES: Reduces my options and choices in life and this saves me time and energy. Accurate dismissiveness is a form of clarity. Accurately dismissing things and people reduces my exposure to dangers and wasting time and traveling down unproductive paths. Accurate dismissiveness reduces danger, bad choices, time sucks, unhealthy ways of living and thinking, and reduces my chances of relapsing into my addictions. Accurate dismissiveness is a powerful way of saying yes to top-level choices. Accurate dismissiveness opens me up to what is good and powerful and beautiful and true. It keeps my side of the street clean. It keeps me from getting enmeshed and entangled in people and things I’m better off without.

On the other hand,, I can use ambivalent to maladaptive levels of dismissiveness to keep myself isolated, unattached, uninvolved, at arm’s length from people, it can be a wall that I build to not only keep bad things at bay, but to keep beauty and truth and good people and good possibilities at bay. I can use dismissiveness to keep myself feeling safe by dismissing deeper and more human levels of involvement with other people and with new ideas and new practices. To the extent that I use dismissiveness to shore up my false beliefs about my own greatness and wisdom, I’m living in delusion, not in reality. Once you dismiss somebody once or twice, they’ll likely never offer anything to you again. They’ll dismiss you. So my dismissiveness has cost me potential connection and prosperity. As an employee, I’ve often dismissed or minimized my employer’s concerns, and that has led to disaster. As an employee, I have often felt that I knew better than my superiors and employers, and that has not usually served me. My dismissive attitude has caused other people to dismiss me. I tend to present a cold hard dismissive cynical exterior to the world and that does not endear me to others. That has kept me lonely and isolated and poor. Even people in my life know not to share vast parts of themselves with me because they’ve too often felt the sting of my dismissal.

To the extent that my dismissiveness comes out of my insecurity, it is maladaptive. To the extent it comes out of my security and clarity, it is adaptive.

My maladaptive use of dismissal keeps me isolated, keeps me in delusion, keeps me the skunk at the garden party. It limits my thinking and my choices and my options for interacting with people. It limits my opportunities for prosperity. It keeps my life small. I hurt people with my instinctive dismissiveness, and hurting people hurts me
and lowers my self-respect.

My life would benefit with less maladaptive dismissiveness, with less dismissiveness coming from a place of insecurity, because it would allow me to be more appropriately open to the world, to others, to new ways of thinking and living and connecting. I would be able to see my own errors and shortcomings and inadequacies and so I’d have a more appropriate and accurate appraisal of myself and where I can contribute to the stream of life. Other people would like me more. Dismissiveness is a form of idea deflection, which is a symptom of under-earning. Less of this symptom would likely mean less under-earning. by letting go of this false dismissive self, I could become more of my better self, a more honest self, a less artificial self, a less defended self.

I remember one Shabbos lunch for Orthodox singles where we were all invited to share one thing about ourselves. I shared, “I love sarcasm and irony.”

My therapist responded, “That will really make women want to get close to you.”

One therapist said to me, “You might only heal once you’ve put down your [psychological] weapons [such as dismissiveness and cynicism].”

Another therapist said to me, “I’d hate to see you waste your life in delusion.”

Another therapist said to me, “I’d hate to see you become one of those guys at the bar bending people’s ear about what you could have been.”

When I was once vulnerable with a therapist, she said to me, “This side of you will attract people, not repel them [like you normally do].”

A friend said to me: “You just want to be a celebrity. That’s all you dream of. It’s a dream life, you want, baby. You can’t settle for the prosaic tasks of building up a good life.”

Posted in Addiction | Comments Off on Idea Deflection Is A Symptom Of Under-Earning

Hamas v Israel

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Luke Ford

A friend says: What gets me about how the propaganda front is going is that Hamas clearly attacked Israeli with a mind to the second and third order consequences of their actions; and there’s very little discussion of that among the opinion-forming institutions/forums.

As far as I can tell Hamas miscalculated in the following ways. 1st they didn’t expect to penetrate so far so fast and face so little opposition. 2nd they were expecting a much faster and wilder Israeli response, not the unrelenting bombing, and brief land incursions. 3rd they thought their allies in Hezbollah, Iran etc would give them far more support. That largely hasn’t happened, possibly because Hezbollah’s initial attempts were largely disastrous for them. The IDF seems to have adjusted their doctrine significantly and effectively with the Shiite militia.

My friend in government said that we basically sank all of Iran’s surface ships in response to the hostage crisis under Carter, but it wasn’t until after we accidentally shot down one of their civilian airliners (legitimate mistake) that they “respected our resolve.”

They know this about themselves. And they know that this puts us in a catch 22.
The only means we have for addressing them on their own terms is something that our own culture is, in public, almost completely incapable of understanding much less condoning. Any action that would reclaim our dignity in the eyes of the Muslim world degrades and marginalizes us in the West. And visa-versa.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Hamas v Israel

When The Camera Turns On You

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Luke Ford

I heard a comment once on talk radio that everybody thinks he can act, run a country, and host a talk show.

Acting is largely reacting and a large part of the TV sports broadcast is up-close shots of members of the crowd reacting to the game.

Imagine the camera turned on you and you knew that your face filled the TV screens of millions of people? How would you react?

Some people jump up and down and wave like it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to them. Other people have more muted reactions. I think there are all sorts of age, sex, race and class differences operating here. I just saw a shot of the crowd in the India-England World Series of Cricket match and it appeared that the upper class, well-dressed contingent in this part of the India stadium displayed under-stated smiles while the working class around them whooped and hollered.

When I see someone painted in his team colors, I don’t expect that person to be a six-figure earner. In my life experience, the more intense the person’s fandom, the more desperate the life (and this fandom might dominate in arenas outside of sports such as politics and religion). If you like yourself, you don’t need to lose yourself in a team. If your happiness depends upon the fortunes of your team, you don’t have much going for you.

The more individuated, rational, intellectual, abstract, buffered and disembodied your approach to life, the less likely you’d be to express rabid enthusiasm in any context. I’d expect overall that sports fans are more tribal and right-wing than the average citizen.

Here’s one academic survey on class differences:

…the higher in socioeconomic status you are, the more independently oriented you are likely to be, while the lower in status you are, the more group-minded you are likely to be…

Because lower ranking people have fewer resources and opportunities than those of relatively high rank, they tend to believe that external, uncontrollable social forces and others’ power have correspondingly greater influence over their lives. Success for them, therefore, depends on how well they can “read,” rely on and help out others, the psychologists’ theory holds.

By contrast, those who enjoy more resources and greater class status live in contexts that enhance their personal power and freedom — larger and safer living spaces, the means to buy high-priced goods and experiences, and education that provides access to influential people, ideas and venues. These conditions give rise to a more self-focused approach to life, the theory states.

“With wealth and privilege comes this island of sorts, this increased insularity from others,” as Piff puts it.

I notice that children tend to react more to the camera than do older people and men more than women. Asians, of all the races, seem to react least to the camera.

I heard an observation that while the middle class in America welcome fame, the working class and the upper class generally don’t want it.

Here some random observations on life:

“Happiness is a liability in only one profession — attorney. Clients and superiors see it as a lack of commitment. When you leave at 6 pm, you have to look unhappy at having to leave so early. Opponents in court and depo see happiness as a weakness. Peers are jealous.” (Attorney caller to Dennis Prager)

“Being a gentleman is considered as weakness.” (Next lawyer caller)

* Saying “that ideology matters more than blood relations is a lot like saying that Chicago Bears fans root for the Bears because they believe intellectually in the Bears` Tampa-2 defensive alignment, while Green Bay Packer rooters have chosen their team out of their faith in the merits of the Packers` 3-4 defensive set.”

* “It really can’t be disputed that Jewish American men treat their wives better than men of all other religions by orders of magnitude.”

* “Unless I am wrong, Luke, you basically advocate for the shadow side of everything your father stood for?” (Mate)

* Woman: “Does nothing ever offend you because you are dead inside or because I just don’t matter to you?”

* Chaim Amalek: “You have a history of exposing the underside of every movement/activity you have attached yourself to.”

* Friend: “You just want to be a celebrity. That’s all you dream of. It’s a dream life, you want, baby. You can’t settle for the prosaic tasks of building up a good life.”

* “Luke is like a chrysalis in a chrysalis in a chrysalis, destined to repeatedly molt one identity as he take on another. SDA to orthodox Jew, and now from orthodox Jew to…”

* All of my therapists have told me that when I let my cynical guard down, I am easier to get close to.

* A friend who’s known me since childhood says: “You want everyone to love you. You want to be special to everyone. I so understand you. You have to have been unloved to understand this need.”

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Philosopher Nathan Cofnas on DEI & the Middle East Conflict (10-27-23)

Posted on October 27, 2023 by Luke Ford

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The New Yorker: Jim Jordan’s Conspiratorial Quest for Power – How the Ohio Republican built an insurgent bid for Speaker on the lies of Donald Trump.

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

Jonathan Blitzer writes:

* …online conspiracists began claiming that Starbird and other researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership had colluded with the Department of Homeland Security to censor twenty-two million tweets during the 2020 election. This was, Starbird told me, “a literal misreading” of the group’s findings. But the conspiracy theory had all the key elements to spread widely, starting with the fact that it was politically useful. “People wanted to believe it,” she said.

Allegations began to appear on fringe news outlets, such as the Gateway Pundit. On August 27, 2022, Mike Benz, an ex-Trump appointee who runs an organization called the Foundation for Freedom Online, wrote that his exposé of D.H.S. would provide “the basis for a full-scale bipartisan Congressional committee armed with subpoena power.” The story soon reached Breitbart and Steve Bannon’s podcast. On Twitter, Trump supporters told Starbird to lawyer up.

* Of all the partisans spreading attacks against the researchers, the most significant was initially one of the most obscure. “I don’t think it’s possible to have spent more hours a day on this,” Mike Benz, of the Foundation for Freedom Online, has said. “My wife calls it the man in the box because my whole life has just been listening to this whole network, day and night, and chronicling and archiving and explaining.”

Benz, a lawyer by training, describes himself on his organization’s Web site as “a former State Department diplomat responsible for formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters.” But a recent investigation by NBC News found that several years ago he maintained an online persona under which he posted explosively antisemitic and racist content. In one post, from 2017, he wrote, “If I, a Jew, a member of the Tribe, Hebrew Schooled, can read Mein Kampf and think ‘holy shit, Hitler actually had some decent points.’ Then NO ONE is safe from hating you once they find out who is behind the White genocide happening all over the world.” His inspiration, whom he credited with “putting the puzzle together,” was the alt-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos. A year later, Benz stopped posting under his white-nationalist pseudonym and entered the federal government, taking a speechwriting job in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He joined the State Department in November, 2020, but left a couple of months later, at the start of the Biden Administration.

Since then, as the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, where he appears to be the sole employee, he has focused much of his attention on Renée DiResta, the research director of Stanford’s Internet Observatory and one of Starbird’s co-authors on the Election Integrity Partnership’s final report. DiResta has a number of associations that are easy to misrepresent. As an undergraduate, she interned at the C.I.A. Before joining Stanford, she served as the research director of a controversial cybersecurity firm called New Knowledge. In 2017, during Roy Moore’s Alabama Senate race, New Knowledge experimented with a small-scale disinformation campaign of its own. According to the Times, the effort included creating a Facebook account meant to draw in conservative voters. (DiResta was not working for the company at the time.) The next year, she testified before the Senate on Russian interference in the 2016 election; a team she led then wrote up a report for the Senate Intelligence Committee. On the Web site of the Foundation for Freedom Online, Benz outlined what he called DiResta’s “censorship industry career arc” and wrote that “the prominent role Renee DiResta plays in EIP—a government-partnered Internet censorship consortium—is particularly worrisome and disturbing.”

* On March 2nd of this year, in a Twitter Spaces conversation attended by some thirty-nine thousand users, Benz made contact with Taibbi. “I’ve been hoping to talk to you for a long time because I believe I have all of the missing pieces of the puzzle,” he told Taibbi, according to a recording of the conversation. “You’re someone who can actually communicate the story to a large platform. I can tell you literally everything.” The E.I.P., Benz said, was “the deputized disinformation flagger for D.H.S.” He went on, “Basically, they gave this private group—E.I.P.—D.H.S.-F.B.I. powers to talk directly to the key content-moderation liaisons.” Taibbi responded, “I’m very anxious to talk to you.”

A week later, at Jordan’s invitation, Taibbi and another journalist involved in the Twitter Files, Michael Shellenberger, gave public testimony before the weaponization subcommittee. While they addressed the members, Benz, dressed in a dark suit, sat in the row behind them. Both Taibbi and Shellenberger cited the E.I.P. and the twenty-two million censored tweets, though that figure never appeared in the materials they’d published in the Twitter Files. Afterward, they acknowledged that Benz had helped them with their testimony. Evidently, it was his influence that led Shellenberger to call the E.I.P. “the seed of the censorship-industrial complex.”

* They weren’t alone in relying on Benz. By then, he claimed to have given eight congressional briefings, spoken regularly with congressmen and senators, and addressed members of the House Oversight, Homeland Security, and Judiciary Committees. On March 10th, Jordan sent letters to Starbird, DiResta, and Alex Stamos, the head of Stanford’s Internet Observatory, demanding access to e-mails and other communications with both the government and the tech platforms dating back to January, 2015.

Within days, Taibbi posted another thread in the Twitter Files about the “Great Covid-19 Lie Machine: Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of ‘True Stories.’ ” After the 2020 election, many of the researchers involved in the Election Integrity Partnership had regrouped and launched the Virality Project, making its mission the tracking of online misinformation surrounding covid vaccines. This time, the mechanics of the operation were simpler. D.H.S. was not involved. Researchers posted their findings online each week and sent them to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Surgeon General. Taibbi’s thread, which received more than forty million views, rearranged information that Stanford had already been making available. “Even though all of our work is public, they reframed it as a secret cabal,” DiResta told me. “I study rumors and propaganda, but that doesn’t mean we can do anything to stop them when we become the subject. It’s a problem for the field. What can you do when it happens?”

* When Starbird and I spoke in July, she was about to fly across the country again, this time at the request of the House Homeland Security Committee. Bishop chairs its oversight subcommittee, and he had some more questions. According to multiple Republican and Democratic staffers, Bishop and Jordan were sometimes at odds. Bishop felt that Jordan could be doing more to push the investigation. When I asked one of the staffers what that meant, I was told, “Jordan only pursues most of Mike Benz’s theories. Bishop wants to run down all of them.”

* He described the end goal of Jordan, Benz, and others as the turning of social media into “nato for maga: keep the liberals out, the voters down, keep us in power.”

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