* The more you watch this campaign cycle, the more you see what a scam these political consultants are running.
I see these “experts” on TV just pulling out predictions out of thin air. They’ll be wrong and come back next week and say “Well, I’ve been wrong on Trump this far, har, har, har, but I really think next week is the end.”
Where do they get their ideas about what does or doesn’t work in elections? Do they use statistical methods and publish in peer review journals? Do they engage in any form of hypothesis testing? Not a single one of them does from what I can see.
Jeb! blew everyone out of the water when it came to fundraising. This was supposed to be his “shock and awe.” Imagine in sports, if you had the highest payroll in the league, and you found the best players and coaches. Yet you were the worst team in the league. That doesn’t happen because sports has objective measures of excellence.
Political consultants serve two functions. First, it’s lining their own pockets. Second, it’s about convincing everybody, through your “expertise,” that whatever policy you want is good politics. You get immigration reform by convincing every candidate that they have to support immigration reform, because if they oppose it they’re never getting elected anyway.
* Donald Trumps biggest expenditure is jet fuel and airport fees. Then comes for hiring the auditoriums he speaks at. Just me guessing. And right now jet fuel is cheap! If Trump get elected he will have a deflating and deflationary economy to deal with in 2017. This is what it is looking like.
And during the 1930 deflation-depression Roosevelt threw out a million or two Mexicans. Deflations are not kind to illegal immigration.
* Here’s a story on Mike Murphy, Bush campaign consultant:
“Over the past 35 years, he has been a cutthroat operative in campaign war rooms, a prophet of big-tent conservatism in cable news green rooms, and an aspiring filmmaker in TV writers’ rooms. Along the way, he has elected a slew of high-profile Republican governors like Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and made enough money to buy himself a house in the Hollywood Hills, apartments in Manhattan and Miami, 38 square miles of land in Nova Scotia, and an array of pricey toys, from a Mercedes-Benz to a private Piper Meridian plane that used to shepherd him back and forth from Sacramento.”
I’m really curious about those 38 square miles of land he owns. Even if the land was dirt cheap, that’s a lot of land to buy.
There sure is a lot of money to skim in all of those political campaigns. When the mob skims from the casinos, that’s bad, but skimming from political campaigns sure looks like a safer way to get rich.
* A Dem consultant I follow on Twitter was miffed at a Trump comment. Trump said he didn’t understand why campaigns paid for internal polling when the networks did it for free. Trump really is threatening the political order here, potentially killing off the political science industry or at the very least exposing it as not being all that scientific.
* He’s proven the consultants are just sucking up money like banksters and producing about as much useful services. I can’t wait to see the Overton window get shoved towards air-launched catapults to return the criminal invaders back across the border.
He wins in a couple of big states and immigration won’t just be on the table, it’ll be ‘what’s for dinner’. Any and all politicians will have to address the issue like it or not. It’ll be sitting on the table like a Christmas ham come November.
* The political consultants are frauds. They raise and spend money, keeping a healthy percentage for themselves.
Which is why they hate Trump. He has proven they are dopes who are completely unnecessary. That’s the real reason they are furious.
* The public will flock to restrictionism once it’s presented as one of the acceptable options. In fact, the Eisenhower option already has plurality support:
If there’s a fight over immigration, and you have a restrictionist Donald Trump on one side, and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan on the other, the people will support the anti-immigration alpha male over the two open borders stiff. The only question is how much Trump will change after the primaries are over.
* It’s been interesting watching the professional Right go berserk over Trump. A big part of it is the fact he is viewed as an existential threat to their racket. The massive nonprofit industry here in the Imperial Capital exists in large part on the claim that they pick the candidates and develop their positions. Therefore, no one outside the business can ever be allowed in without permission.
They don’t see it that way. Talk to any of these people off the record from either side and you quickly see they are blinkered to the point where they may as well not be “us” anymore. I call them pod people because they are so immersed in their world of petty politics, red team versus blue team, they have lost all contact with the rest of us.
There are a lot of similarities between now and the late 70′s and early 80′s. The Great Progressive Awakening is on the decline. The old guard is being challenged by people they used to think of as undesirables. The party coalitions are breaking apart. The difference is the lack of a Cold War and the new threat of mass migration, but maybe those are interchangeable.
Historical analogies are not perfect. Forty years ago global capitalism did not exist as a driving force in politics. Mass communications is another huge difference. Anti-racism and egalitarianism were not religions that defined the ruling elite. Reagan was brought to power by elements of the ruling class, while Trump is backed by outside elements.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on The Political Consultancy Scam
Amy Cuddy’s famous finding is the latest example of scientific overreach.
By Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung
As practicing statisticians who work in social science, we have a dark secret to reveal: Some of the most glamorous, popular claims in the field are nothing but tabloid fodder. The weakest work with the boldest claims often attracts the most publicity, helped by promotion from newspapers, television, websites, and best-selling books. And members of the educated public typically only get one side of the story.
Consider the case of Amy Cuddy. The Harvard Business School social psychologist is famous for a TED talk, which is among the most popular of all time, and now a book promoting the idea that “a person can, by assuming two simple one-minute poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful.”
In the future, the human race will be ruled by women who look like Phoebe on Friends.
The so-called “power pose” is characterized by “open, expansive postures”—Slate’s Katy Waldman described it as akin to “a cobra rearing and spreading its hood to the sun, or Wonder Woman with her legs apart and her hands on her hips.” In a published paper from 2010, Cuddy and her collaborators Dana Carney and Andy Yap report that such posing can change your life and your hormone levels.
But when somebody attempted to replicate Cuddy’s popular study using a more sufficient sample size than Cuddy’s 42, they instead got a tiny negative effect size.
COMMENTS:
* If you want to understand posture and power, watch a video of Vladimir Putin talking to any other world leader (virtually all of whom are taller than him). He only moves his eyes when speaking to them.
* The photos of Putin and DiCaprio having a stare-off are a pretty memorable.
* How seriously are we supposed to take Amy Cuddy as a social scientist when her photo features a cleavage revealing front? It’s clearly a posed shot, so she had the option to go with something less attention whoring.
* Someone should do a study about above average looking women and their ability to fool the world with dubious scientific claims. Cuddy and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos etc.
* We know that there is a strong mind-body connection, so feeling more dominant by making yourself look more dominant shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. We also know that placebo effects are real and powerful.
Here are three classic experiments in autosuggestion that you can try on yourself. Two are quick; one takes a while:
One, imagine that you have a peeled lemon in your hand. Try to see it. Feel the weight. Smell it. Now remove a section. Take it to your mouth. Bite down on the lemon.
Did your mouth just water?
Two, the next time you have an ache or hurt, rub the affected body part lightly but quickly while saying or whispering over and over to yourself, so fast that it’s a slur, “Ca passe” (Pronounced “sah pass.”)
Did the pain become less or go away?
Three, and this one takes some time, say to yourself every day, several times before falling asleep, and whenever else the urge strikes, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” It sounds hokey, but try it for at least a month.
One that I came up on my own and have been using for about the last six months is every time I have the urge to say, “Life sucks” I say, “Life is good!” instead. It seems to be helping.
* As far as persuasion goes, Angela Merkel seems to have been extraordinarily effective. Yet I’d wager she’s never been in danger of winning the face of Revlon contract.
Her whole approach and demeanour is more redolent of a hospital matron – the senior nurse – from 1950s England. Assertive body language is a big part of the cluster that makes that effective. It fires off Über matriarch response mental sub-routines, especially in men.
Whereas Amy Cuddy seems mainly to be advertising her tits, which, to be fair to her, are appetisingly well presented and likely to fire off a ‘I’d like to play with those’ mental response sub-routines, at least in normal men. If I click on her TED talk video, which I haven’t just yet, it would be motivated more by lasciviousness than interest in her message.
I suspect I’m not alone.
* “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”
The French psychologist Émile Coué came up with this phrase as a form of curative therapy and it was quite well known 90 years ago.
One of the funniest short stories in the English language, P.G. Wodehouse’s “Mr. Potter Takes a Rest Cure” begins with the title character trying to soothe his nerves on a rest cure trip to the English countryside, murmuring the phrase repeatedly. Predictably for a Wodehouse story, total hilarity and a nervous breakdown reign by the end of the story.
* The attractive woman power pose demonstrated by an attractive woman. Leading with what she feels are her best physical attributes, teeth and tits. Like I’m not supposed to notice. I’m certain that shit is working with the zit-covered cucumbers she works with. I’d hit it. I see a future for her at Fox News.
* I think this power posing sounds like it comes from NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). I think that power posing works more for the poser (actor) in creating a state of mind which then influences others. Former FBI agent, Jack Shafer, has a whole book on these body language techniques: The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over. Many self-help and motivational writers have been saying this kind of stuff for over a century, from Orison Swett Marden to Tony Robbins. Robbins is especially big on this kind of stuff like power posing. But it goes back further than this. Aristotle said, “Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.” Donald Trump, in his book Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education In Business and Life, says, “A great portion of life and business involves acting. Life is a performance art, no matter what field you are in. I’ve come to understand that fact over the years, and it’s a helpful thing to realize.”
* I noticed back in the 1990s that my shyness was less of a problem if I were chewing gum: my facial muscles were already in motion, so I was much quicker with a quip or a smile, making me much more outgoing. On the other hand, chewing gum is kind of gross, so I don’t do it anymore.
* Yeah, there are so many sophisticated rational people out there who dismiss this self-help and motivational stuff as total BS. What Cuddy is saying sets off my BS detector. Meanwhile, I always read articles about how the hyper-successful guys buy into this BS and swear by it. Multi-billionaires like Marc Benioff, Paul Tudor Jones, and Ray Dalio are Tony Robbins devotees (Fortune: Tony Robbins, The CEO Whisperer). Entertainment mogul (and professional sports teams co-owner– LA Dodgers, Golden State Warriors), Peter Gruber, has been a Robbins devotee for over 30 years and swears by him. Donald Trump swears by Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Larry Ellison read and was strongly influenced by Think and Grow Rich as a kid.
* “Fake it til you make it” is par for the course. One wonders if power posing fits in that category, that she faked the results until enough people believed them, when she made it.
I have tested the idea on a small scale. It definitely works, both with students and in my own life. Whether that is due to a rise in testosterone or is simply the placebo effect (which is probably the leading source of cure in medicine: you get better because you believe the physician will help you get better. The book here is The Biology of Belief, in which a knee surgeon discovers that, of three groups of patients, there is no statistically significant difference in how the patients who received placebo surgery feel from patients who received the major and minor surgery [he was testing to prove the latter was equally effective, and instead discovered something else]) matters little to whether it is effective.
One does not walk around power posing, though. One does so before an interview, for example, to psych oneself up for the meeting.
* I once heard Terry Gross interview Michael Caine on “Fresh Air”. It was interesting as he actually talked about the craft of acting – how to convey things through body language. He said that the best way to portray powerful men was to not move or gesture much, as powerful men make other people do the moving. He also had observed that the best way to be menacing was to stare unblinking.
* If power posing didn’t work, they wouldn’t teach it to cops and soldiers during training. The problem is, most everyday interactions don’t need that level of aggression. CEOs who are successful aren’t necessarily power-posers, they’re just guys with more energy, relentlessness, enthusiasm, and, most importantly, follow-throughness. The ability to get things done creates an atmosphere in which other people just hand you lots of authority because they don’t want all that responsibility, they don’t want to do all that work, and they don’t care to take any of the blame if things go wrong.
It takes at least two people to create a leader. One who chooses to be one, but another who chooses not to be.
* I don’t know about power-poses, but that decollete Amy Cuddly sports definitely works. In some ways the world is a very simple place.
* Tony Robbins is 6’7″ or more, with a huge head and appendages. Power posing works well for him.
It only works for little people (like Putin) if they already have power.
People sense whether you’re projecting actual power, or just posing.
* I took a class in my MBA program entitled “Negotiate with Power.” The long-time, excellent 76-year old professor advised that, in business, a reasonably competent good-looking woman is dangerous. And by dangerous, he meant she’s more likely to prevail in all business situations.
* I’ve noticed that women who chew gum are more promiscuous than women that don’t.
* The fascinating thing about the power pose is how it may start a positive feedback mechanism. While one may not initially feel powerful through the pose, if the substrate to your catalyst acts as though you are powerful this may enhance your confidence and cause you to act more dominant.
In my experience I think this only applies to people who want to be the submissive or those who are not looking to challenge you. Essentially, you can lord over an army of betas or female equivalents but against a true competitor or someone who understands the “game” it is an easily penetrated veneer.
At the very least, it is worth a try. The benefits can be high and the risks are low. Of course, actually being interesting and having a good personality is challenging. This could be a good mechanism for the dull and boring.
* Amy Cuddy and Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer both have backgrounds in ballet. Ballerinas probably always have excellent posture.
* Right, it’s the COMBINATION that counts. Arnold has presence but also personality, humor(often self-parodying as well as deprecating of others), and wit.
He wasn’t just some muscle guy lug.
Power pose will work if you have something to back it up with.
But without it, it will actually do more harm.
Suppose you have razor-sharp wit and can verbally duel with anyone.
So, if you go for power-pose, the confidence suits the ability.
But if you aren’t too bright, the power-pose will only make you look more ridiculous cuz you’re pose will be seen for what it is: hollow.
This is why a dork acting tough actually makes him seem weaker. His inability to back up his style with substance accentuates his weakness.
So, power pose has to be commensurate with actual ability.
* Amy proves what I’ve been saying for decades – it’s all about the hot girls. It’s an unintended consequence of the feminist deal struck in the 1970′s to put more women women on talk shows and news shows.
Men will watch hot girls on TV endlessly without caring what they are saying. Women watch hot girls on TV because they are fooled into thinking that this is a concession to women and feminism, and of course women are always interested in looking critically at each other, what they are wearing, etc. Therefore hot girls please everyone.
I’m pretty sure it works like this: 1 in 200 women are photogenic enough for local TV and 1 in 50 has a 120+ IQ so they won’t make fools of themselves while talking. Ergo, 1 in 10,000 women are suitable for TV. That’s who we get on TV. Never mind that there might be plain looking women who have actual knowledge or expertise, and of course there is no point in mentioning men who are endlessly more experienced etc.
Because it’s all about the hot girls!
* I know someone who works with pilots in aviation pilot psychology. He once told me that female computer voices are used in navigation because they get male pilot attention, and they get it quickly.
* Zach Braff is the worst. There have been many talented Jewish comedy-dramatists, but Braff must have made it in the business through connections. This guy is unfunny, repulsive, and untalented. How is he able to keep making movies? Garden State was awful. This is unbearable:
Zemeckis can certainly make a movie. He’s a pro’s pro. But his crowd-pleasing antics can go too far, as in FORREST GUMP, a vomit bag movie. THE WALK is better, but it too is a push-button affair. Zemeckis does a lot of neat things, but everything is meant to put a smile on your face. The final walk is amazingly presented but more as visual effect — or entirely as visual effect — than drama. All movies are magic, but we know THE WALK is all CGI, so that takes away some of the wonder. Still, pretty amazing. But the phony French accents by Levitt and others are really grating.
There are intelligent movies and then there are movies that make you feel intelligent. MARTIAN is such a movie. The audience can congratulate itself that it’s not just watching spaceship battles and explosions but the methodology of survival with grounding in real science. It’s like science fiction as homework. While that may flatter the geeks and pseudo-smart, most people are gonna tune out. So, the other half of MARTIAN is essentially frat-boy-out-of-funds-trying-to-survive-on-macaroni-and-beer-for-a-month movie: accessible. It offers the fun stuff along with the ‘serious’ stuff. It works, but it’s so contrived and calculated. Also, because Damon’s main purpose is to lighten things up since too-much-science-stuff may grow dreary, his character has no gravitas. He is just a dude. Also, with him talking to the camera half the time, it’s appealing to the millennial generation that yammers into webcams endlessly and is into non-stop texting and selfies.
In a crucial way, THE MARTIAN doesn’t get what science fiction is about. Science Fiction is not really about science or scientific stuff. Good sci-fi has some grounding in science and technology, but they are really used as launch pads for philosophical and spiritual quest. Science Fiction is supposed to be more like Scientology.
It is futurism as myth. It is a strange combination of rationality and fantasism. Science fiction foresees a future transformed by science and technology, but the character of this science/technology must be fantastical beyond what today’s science/technology is capable of. Or, in cases where the science and technology are within the realm of the possible, the emphasis must be on truths that cannot be explained by reason or solved by science. It can be cosmic, as in 2001, or psychological, as in A.I.
Ultimately, what makes a movie like 2001 so powerful isn’t the technology but sense of truth beyond technology and the man’s mastery of the world. Science and technology do not fully explain or solve the key question in A.I., TRON LEGACY, or BLADE RUNNER.
In contrast, THE MARTIAN offers no truth beyond hard science(or what appears as hard science). Even GRAVITY went further because of the metaphoric use of space and gravity as the emotional state of the astronautess. In THE MARTIAN, what you see is what you get, and that’s it. It’s more like science fact-ion.
* A general pattern with Slate is that it has been getting girlier over time because the female audience is usually more desirable to advertisers than the male audience. It now has a woman editor. It’s not bad, but it’s focused more on female concerns now than when it had a male editor, and so it’s less interesting to my male brain.
* Nothing says Serious Scientist to me like a blond with a great smile and nice tits.
* Whenever anything bad is happening in a movie, just say “OMG where is the hot girls who will save the day?” And then she appears! She might be an incredibly cute nerdy girl who can program anything instantly, or an amazingly hot authority figure girl who just tells the problem to go away – are you starting to get it?
Now that women are the equals of men in every way, even in the armed forces, you can look forward to many, many more instances in which male characters need to be rescued – always by hot girls!
It’s all about the hot girls. Men can basically take the rest of this millennium off, I guess, except for the men who make sure that everything works – for the hot girls!
* Attractive women are, relatively speaking, easy-going and nice people. People have been nice to them all their lives, so they’re less likely to have developed the resentments that produce angry feminists and leftists.
When a nice person develops leftist sympathies, it comes from a mistaken but remediable belief that the leftist program is about being nice to people.
The dangerous, irremediable, kind of leftist is the kind who’s attracted to it because he/she looks to politics as a way to hammer the people he/she hates — the attractive people who wouldn’t date them in high school, the successful people who have fewer advanced degrees.
Posted inScience|Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Power Posing and the Social Science Replication Crisis
I love the new Showtime series Billions, but the race thing doesn’t ring true. There are a lot of blacks on the show and the interactions between them and the other characters are entirely without racial tension. I see no condescension or resentment or favoritism or tribal feelings coming up. That doesn’t ring true to me.
This show goes in for all the passions but race. In real life, 99% of people prefer to live around, work around, socialize and pray with members of their own race and yet this show is colorblind. Well, all the lead characters are white, because generally speaking, non-blacks don’t watch TV shows and movies with blacks in leading roles.
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About 25% of YULA kids are on pot, about 10% of Shalhevet kids. At YULA, you have yeshivish rabbis teaching MO kids, who don’t pay them much mind. At Shalhevet, you have MO rabbis teaching MO kids, so there’s more connection. In MO Israeli yeshivot, about half the kids are on pot.
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The indictment against Japan for overexpansion boils down to its decision to start a war with the United States, which had roughly eight times as much potential power as Japan in 1941 (see Table 6.2) and went on to inflict a devastating defeat on the Japanese aggressors.
It is true that Japan had picked fights with the Red Army in 1938 and 1939 and lost both times. But as a result, Japan stopped provoking the Soviet Union and the border between them remained quiet until the last days of World War II, when Japan’s fat e was clearly sealed. It is also true that Japan invaded China in 1937 and became involved in a lengthy war that it was unable to win. However, not only was Japan reluctantly drawn into that conflict. but its leaders were confident that China, which was hardly a formidable military power at the time, would be easily defeated. Although they were wrong, Japan’s failure to win a victory in China was hardly a catastrophic failure. Nor was the Sino-Japanese War the catalyst that put the the United States on a collision course with Japan.137 American policymakers were clearly unhappy about Japanese aggression in China, but the United States remained on the sidelines as the war escalated. In fact, it made little effort to help China until late 1938, and even then it offered the beleaguered Chinese only a small package of economic aid.
Two stunning events in Europe-the fall of France in June 1940 and especially Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941-drove the United States to confront Japan, and eventually led to Pearl Harbor. As Paul Schroeder notes, “The United States did not seriously consider stopping the Japanese advance by force of arms, or consider Japan as an actual enemy, until the Far Eastern war had become clearly linked with the far greater (and, to the United States, more important) war in Europe.” In particular, it was “opposition to Hitler which began to condition American policy in the Far East more than any other factor.”
The Wehrmacht’s victory in the west not only knocked France and the Netherlands out of the war, but it also forced a badly weakened United Kingdom to concentrate on defending itself against a German assault from the air and the sea. Since those three European powers controlled most of Southeast Asia, that resource-rich region was now an open target for Japanese expansion. And if Japan conquered Southeast Asia, it could shut down a considerable portion of the outside aid flowing into China, which would increase Japan’s prospects of winning its war there. And if Japan controlled China and Southeast Asia as well as Korea and Manchuria, it would dominate most of Asia. The United States was determined to prevent that outcome, and thus in the summer of 1940 it began working hard to deter further Japanese expansion.
Japan was anxious to avoid a fight with the United States, so it moved cautiously in Southeast Asia. By the early summer of 1941, only northern Indochina had come under Japan’s control, although Tokyo had been able to get the United Kingdom to shut down the Burma Road between July and October 1940 and the Dutch to provide Japan with additional oil. It seemed by mid-June 1941 that “even if there were little hope of real agreement” between Japan and the United States, “there remained a chance that some kind of temporary and limited settlement might be reached.”’41 At the time, it did not seem likely that they would be at war in six months.
Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, however, fundamentally altered relations between Japan and the United States and sent them hurtling down the road to war. 142 Most American policymakers, as noted, believed that the Wehrmacht was likely to defeat the Red Army, thus making Germany the hegemon in Europe. A Nazi victory would also have left Japan as the hegemon in Asia, since the Soviet Union was the only great power with an army in Asia that could check Japan.143 Thus, if the Soviets lost to the Germans, the United States would have found itself confronting hostile hegemons in Asia as well as Europe. Not surprisingly, the United States was bent on avoiding that nightmare scenario, which meant that the Soviet Union had to survive the German onslaught of 1941 as well as any future German offensives.
Unfortunately for Japan, it was in a position in 1941 to affect the Soviet Union’s chances for survival. In particular, American policymakers were deeply worried that Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the east and help the Wehrmacht finish off the Red Army. Not only were Germany and Japan formally allied in the Tripartite Pact, but the United States had abundant intelligence that Japan was considering an attack on the beleaguered Soviet Union, which Japan had fought against just two years earlier.
To preclude that possibility, the United States put tremendous economic and diplomatic pressure on Japan in the latter half of 1941. The aim, however, was not simply to deter Japan from striking the Soviet Union, but also to coerce Japan into abandoning China, Indochina, and possibly Manchuria, and more generally, any ambition it might have to dominate Asia. 14s In short, the United States employed massive coercive pressure against Japan to transform it into a second-rate power.
The United States was well-positioned to coerce Japan. On the eve of World War It Japan imported 80 percent of its fuel products, more than 90 percent of its gasoline, more than 60 percent of its machine tools, and almost 75 percent of its scrap iron from the United States.146 This dependency left Japan vulnerable to an American embargo that could wreck Japan’s economy and threaten its survival. On July 26, 1941, with the situation going badly for the Red Army on the eastern front and Japan having just occupied southern Indochina, the United States and its allies froze Japan’s assets, which led to a devastating full-scale embargo against Japan.147 The United States emphasized to Japan that it could avoid economic strangulation only by abandoning China, Indochina, and maybe Manchuria.
The embargo left Japan with two terrible choices: cave in to American pressure and accept a significant dimunition of its power, or go to war against the United States, even though an American victory was widely agreed to be the likely outcome.148 Not surprisingly, Japan’s leaders tried to cut a deal with the United States in the late summer and fall of 1941.
They said that they would be willing to evacuate their troops from Indochina once a “just peace” was reached in China, and they maintained that they would be willing to pull all Japanese troops out of China within twenty-five years after peace broke out between China and Japan.149 But U.S. policymakers stuck to their guns and refused to make any concessions to the increasingly desperate Japanese .I SO The United States had no intention of allowing Japan to threaten the Soviet Union either in 1941 or later in the war. In effect, the Japanese would be defanged either peacefully or by force, and the choice was theirs.
Japan opted to attack the United States, knowing full well that it would probably lose, but believing that it might be able to hold the United States at bay in a long war and eventually force it to quit the conflict. For example, the Wehrmacht, which was outside the gates of Moscow by November 1941, might decisively defeat the Soviet Union, thus forcing the United States to focus most of its attention and resources on Europe, not Asia.
Furthermore, the U.S. military, a rather inefficient fighting machine in the fall of 1941 , might be further weakened by a surprise Japanese attack. Capabilities aside, it was not certain that the United States had the will to fight if attacked. After all, the United States had done little to stop Japanese expansion in the 1930s, and isolationism was still a powerful ideology in America. As late as August 1941 , an extension of the one-year term of service for those who were drafted in 1940 passed the House of Representatives by only one vote.
But the Japanese were not fools. They knew that the United States was more likely than not to fight and likely to win the ensuing war. They were willing to take that incredibly risky gamble, however, because caving in to American demands seemed to be an even worse alternative. Sagan puts the point well: “The persistent theme of Japanese irrationality is highly misleading. . . . [T]he Japanese decision for war appears to have been rational. If one examines the decisions made in Tokyo in 1941 more closely, one finds not a thoughtless rush to national suicide, but rather a prolonged, agonizing debate between two repugnant alternatives.”
Considering that America is dramatically over-involved in Israel against America’s own interests, what will happen when a nationalist and a populist takes control of the USA?
Contrary to myth, most Americans don’t give a damn about Israel.
If Trump wins by an overwhelming margin, he will have a free hand to shape American policy more in line with American interests.
Because hell hath no fury like a Donald scorned and because his election could dismantle the pro-Israel bloc in Congress.
Trump has expressed general support for Israel but has steadfastly refused to join the pack of GOP candidates who routinely hand over the reins of America’s Middle East policies to Netanyahu. Even Israel-loving Evangelicals are flocking to his side, despite the fact that he hasn’t canonized Netanyahu as his patron saint. Trump hasn’t promised to call “my good friend” Netanyahu first thing when he gets into the White House, like Carly Fiorina; he hasn’t pledged to refrain from making peace or even “lecturing” Israelis, like Ted Cruz; he certainly hasn’t endorsed the annexation of the West Bank, like Mike Huckabee, or described the Palestinians as “an invented people” as Newt Gingrich did in 2012.
Much has already been made of the fact that Trump isn’t beholden to “right wing Jewish money”, mainly that of Sheldon Adelson. He made that point rather rudely and crudely when he appeared before the RJC in December. “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” Trump said. “Isn’t it crazy?” He added, “You want to control your own politician.”
But Trump is not only debunking the myth that Jewish money or support for Israel is essential for any aspiring GOP candidate: he might actually break the pro-Israel coalition that has been the mainstay of Netanyahu’s support in Washington and has fueled Bibi’s desire to see Mitt Romney replace Obama in 2012 and see Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz or even Jeb Bush go to the White House in 2016.
Not only is Trump not an interventionist or neo-conservative Republican of the kind that adores Netanyahu, it is this group that opposes his rise most vehemently and most vocally. Some of the neocons most closely identified with Netanyahu and right wing Israel, such as Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton and former CIA director James Woolsey, have been gravitating towards Ted Cruz; Kristol has even floated the idea of forming a third party if Trump wins. If Trump gets into the White House, you can rest assured that this wing of the Republican Party will be one of the last to get invited.
Posted inIsrael|Comments Off on What Would A President Trump Mean For Israel?
There is nothing that is human that is foreign to me. There is nothing Hitler did that is not inside of everybody. For instance, most people wish that their enemies would simply disappear. Israelis wish that Palestinians would simply disappear, just as many Europeans for centuries have wished that Jews would simply disappear. Different groups have different interests, and there is no safe mid-way point between being a subject nation and being a growing empire.
The strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must. (Thucydides)
Every victimology contains a nationalism, every nationalism a victimology, and every nationalism contains the capacity for genocide. If Israel needed to drop nuclear bombs on its enemies at the cost of 100 million Arab lives to preserve its Jewish state, it would do so, as would any other nuclear country under attack. There is no limit to the number of outsiders that any group will kill if it needs to do so to survive.
States and people will do whatever is necessary to survive.
* Germany’s aggressive foreign policy behavior was driven mainly by
strategic calculations. Security was always a burning issue for Germany because of geography: it is located in the center of Europe with few natural defensive barriers on either its eastern or its western flank, which makes it vulnerable to invasion. Consequently, German leaders were always on the lookout for opportunities to gain power and enhance the prospects for their country’s survival. This is not to deny that other factors influenced German foreign policy. Consider, for example, German behavior under its two most famous leaders, Otto von Bismarck and Adolf Hitler. Although Bismarck is usually considered an artful practitioner of realpolitik, he was motivated by nationalism as well as security concerns when he started and won wars in 1864, 1866, and 1870-71. Specifically,
he not only sought to expand Prussia’s borders and make it more secure, but also was determined to create a unified German state.
There is no doubt that Hitler’s aggression was motivated in good part by a deep-seated racist ideology. Nevertheless, straightforward power calculations were central to Hitler’s thinking about international politics. Since 1945, scholars have debated how much continuity links the Nazis and their predecessors. In the foreign policy realm, however, there is widespread agreement that Hitler did not represent a sharp break with the past but instead thought and behaved like German leaders before him. David
Calleo puts the point well: “In foreign policy, the similarities between imperial and Nazi Germany are manifest. Hitler shared the same geopolitical analysis: the same certainty about conflict among nations, the same craving and rationale for hegemony over Europe. The First World War, he could claim, only sharpened the validity of that geopolitical analysis.” Even without Hitler and his murderous ideology, Germany surely would have been an aggressive state by the late 1930s…
The best way to determine whether an aggressor such as Japan or
Germany was engaged in self-defeating behavior is to focus on the decisionmaking process that led it to initiate war, not the outcome of the conflict. A careful analysis of the Japanese and German cases reveals that. in each instance, the decision for war was a reasonable response to the particular circumstances each state faced. As the discussion below makes clear, these were not irrational decisions fueled by malign political forces on the
home front…
Furthermore, even though Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler all lost their bids to dominate Europe, each won major battlefield victories, conquered huge tracts of territory, and came close to achieving their goals. Only Japan stood little chance of winning hegemony on the battlefield. But as we shall see, Japanese policymakers knew that they would probably lose, and went to war only because the United States left them with no reasonable alternative…
The German decision to push for war in 1914 was not a case of wacky
strategic ideas pushing a state to start a war it was sure to lose. It was, as noted, a calculated risk motivated in large part by Germany’s desire to break its encirclement by the Triple Entente, prevent the growth of Russian power, and become Europe’s hegemon. The precipitating event was a crisis in the Balkans between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, in which Germany sided with the former and Russia with the latter.
German leaders clearly understood that they would have to fight a
two-front war and that the Schlieffen Plan did not guarantee victory. Nevertheless, they thought that the risk was worth taking, especially since Germany was so much more powerful than either France or Russia at the time, and there was good reason to think that the United Kingdom might remain on the sidelines. 121 They almost proved right. The Schlieffen Plan narrowly missed producing a quick and decisive victory in 1914.122 As political scientist Scott Sagan notes, it was for good reason that the French
referred to their last-second victory near Paris in September 1914 as “the Miracle of the Marne.”123 Moreover, Germany almost won the subsequent war of attrition between 1915 and 1918. The Kaiser’s armies knocked Russia out of the war in the fall of 1917, and they had the British and especially the French armies on the ropes in the spring of 1918. Had it not been for American intervention at the last moment, Germany might have won World War I.1 24
This discussion of German behavior before World War I points to an
anomaly for offensive realism. Germany had an excellent opportunity to gain hegemony in Europe in the summer of 1905. Not only was it a
potential hegemon, but Russia was reeling from its defeat in the Far East and was in no position to defend itself against a German attack. Also, the United Kingdom was not yet allied with France and Russia . So France stood virtually alone against the mighty Germans, who “had an opportunity without parallel to change the European balance in their favor.” Yet Germany did not seriously consider going to war in 1905 but instead waited until 1914, when Russia had recovered from its defeat and the United Kingdom had joined forces with France and Russia. 126 According to offensive realism, Germany should have gone to war in 1905, because it
almost surely would have won the conflict.
Nazi Germany (1933-41)
The charge against Hitler is that he should have learned from World War I that if Germany behaved aggressively, a balancing coalition would form and crush it once again in a bloody two-front war. The fact that Hitler ignored this obvious lesson and rushed headlong into the abyss, so the argument goes, must have been the result of a deeply irrational decisionmaking process.
This indictment does not hold up on close inspection. Although there is no question that Hitler deserves a special place in the pantheon of mass murderers, his evilness should not obscure his skill as an adroit strategist who had a long run of successes before he made the fatal mistake of invading the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Hitler did indeed learn from World War I. He concluded that Germany had to avoid fighting on two fronts at the same time, and that it needed a way to win quick and decisive military victories. He actually realized those goals in the early
years of World War II, which is why the Third Reich was able to wreak so much death and destruction across Europe . This case illustrates my earlier point about learning: defeated states usually do not conclude that war is a futile enterprise, but instead strive to make sure they do not repeat mistakes in the next war.
Hitler’s diplomacy was carefully calculated to keep his adversaries from forming a balancing coalition against Germany, so that the Wehrmacht could defeat them one at a time. 127 The key to success was preventing the Soviet Union from joining forces with the United Kingdom and France, thus recreating the Triple Entente. He succeeded. In fact, the Soviet Union helped the Wehrmacht carve up Poland in September 1939, even though the United Kingdom and France had declared war against Germany for having invaded Poland. During the following summer (1940), the Soviet Union stood on the sidelines while the German army overran France and pushed the British army off the continent at Dunkirk. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, France was out of the war, the United States was not yet in, and the United Kingdom was not a serious threat to
Germany. So the Wehrmacht was effectively able to fight a one-front war against the Red Army in 1941. 128
Much of Hitler’s success was due to the machinations of his rivals, but there is little doubt that Hitler acted skillfully. He not only played his adversaries off against one another, but he went to considerable lengths to convince them that Nazi Germany had benign intentions. As Norman Rich notes, “To conceal or obscure whatever his real intentions may have been, Hitler dedicated no small part of his diplomatic and propagandistic skill. In his public speeches and diplomatic conversations he monotonously intoned his desire for peace, he signed friendship treaties and nonaggression pacts, he was lavish with assurances of good will.”
Hitler surely understood that the blustery rhetoric of Kaiser Wilhelm and other German leaders before World War I had been a mistake. Hitler also recognized the need to fashion a military instrument that could win quick victories and avoid the bloody battles of World War 1. To that end he supported the building of panzer divisions and played an important role in designing the blitzkrieg strategy that helped Germany win one of the most stunning military victories of all time in France (1940).30 Hitler’s Wehrmacht also won stunning victories against minor
powers: Poland, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece. As Sebastian Haffner notes, “From 1930 until 1941 Hitler succeeded in practically everything he undertook, in domestic and foreign politics and eventually also in the military field, to the amazement of the world.” If Hitler had died in July 1940 after France capitulated, he probably would be considered “one of
the greatest of German statesmen.”
Fortunately, Hitler made a critical mistake that led to the destruction of the Third Reich. He unleashed the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union in June 1941, and this time the German blitzkrieg failed to produce a quick and decisive victory. Instead, a savage war of attrition set in on the eastern front, which the Wehrmacht eventually lost to the Red Army. Compounding matters, the United States came into the war in December 1941 and, along with the United Kingdom, eventually opened up a second front in the west. Given the disastrous consequences of attacking the Soviet Union, one might think that there was abundant evidence beforehand that the Soviet Union would win the war, that Hitler was warned repeatedly that launching Operation Barbarossa was tantamount to committing national suicide, and that he did it anyway because he was not a rational calculator.
The evidence, however, does not support this interpretation. There was little resistance among the German elite to Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union; in fact, there was considerable enthusiasm for the gambit. For sure, some German generals were dissatisfied with important aspects of the final plan, and a few planners and policymakers thought that the Red Army might not succumb to the German blitzkrieg. Nevertheless, there was a powerful consensus within the German elite that the Wehrmacht would quickly rout the Soviets, much the way it had defeated the British and French armies a year earlier. It was also widely believed in
both the United Kingdom and the United States that Germany would
defeat the Soviet Union in 1941. 134 Indeed, there were good reasons to think that the Red Army would collapse in the face of the German onslaught. Stalin’s massive purges of his army in the late 1930s had markedly reduced its fighting power, and almost as if to prove the point, the Red Army performed badly in its war against Finland (1939-40). Plus, the Wehrmacht was a finely tuned fighting force by June 1941. In the end, Hitler and his lieutenants simply miscalculated the outcome of Operation Barbarossa. They made a wrong decision, not an irrational one, and that sometimes happens in international politics.
A final point about Germany’s two failed attempts at hegemony. Haffner wrote during the Cold War of the wide belief that it was “a mistake from the very start” for Germany to have attempted to dominate Europe.136 He emphasized how members of “the younger generation” in what was then West Germany “often stare at their fathers and grandfathers as though they were lunatics ever to have set themselves such a goaL” He notes, however, that “it should be remembered that the majority of those fathers and grandfathers, i.e., the generation of the First and that of the Second World War, regarded the goal as reasonable and attainable. They were inspired by it and not infrequently died for it.”
* He quotes a Japanese general on trial for war crimes in 1946: “Haven’t you ever heard of Perry? Tokugawa Japan believed in isolation; it didn’t want to have any thing to do with other countries and had its doors locked tightly. Then along came Perry from your country in 1853 in his black ships to open those doors; he aimed his big guns at Japan and warned, if you don’t deal with us, look out for these; open your doors, and negotiate with other countries, it learned that all those countries were a fearfully aggressive lot. And so for its own defense it took your country as its teacher and set about learning how to be aggressive. You might say we became your disciples. Why don’t you subpoena Perry from the other world and try him as a war criminal?”
* Japan was principally concerned with controlling three areas on the Asian mainland: Korea, Manchuria, and China. Korea was the primary target because it is located a short distance from Japan (see Map 6.1 ). Most Japanese policymakers surely agreed with the German officer who described Korea as “a dagger thrust at the heart of Japan.” 14 Manchuria was number two on Japan’s target list, because it, too, is located just across the Sea of Japan. China was a more distant threat than either Korea or Manchuria, but it was still an important concern, because it had the potential to dominate all of Asia if it ever got its act together and modernized
its economic and political systems. At the very least, Japan wanted
to keep China weak and divided.
Japan was also interested at different times in acquiring territory in Outer Mongolia and Russia. Moreover, Japan sought to conquer large portions of Southeast Asia and, indeed, accomplished that goal in the early years of World War II. Furthermore, Japan had its sights on a number of islands that lie off the Asian continent. They included Formosa (now Taiwan), the Pescadores, Hainan, and the Ryukyus. The story of Japan’s efforts to achieve hegemony in Asia, however, unfolded largely on the Asian continent and involved Korea, Manchuria, and China. Finally, Japan conquered a large number of islands in the western Pacific Ocean when it went to war against Germany in 1914 and the United States in 1941…
In case anyone still had doubts about Japan’s intentions, its foreign ministry issued an important statement on April 18, 1934, proclaiming that East Asia was in Japan’s sphere of influence and warning the other great powers not to help China in its struggle with Japan. In effect, Japan fashioned its own version of the Monroe Doctrine for East Asia.
On Tinder, every man is a Jew whose fate is determined in Mengele-like fashion by the choice of women to swipe right (to the hard labor of internet dating) or left (to the gas chamber of rejection). Tinder = Nazism.
The student at the heart of Rolling Stone‘s discredited gang-rape story has been ordered by a federal judge to turn over her communications with the magazine and author Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and even her counseling communications with the University of Virginia, though they won’t be made public.
UVA Associate Dean of Students Nicole Eramo is suing Rolling Stone for $7.5 million, claiming its portrayal of her and her interactions with Coakley are defamatory. Judge Glen Conrad earlier signaled he would force Coakley, who is not a party in the case, to turn over some communications that are relevant to Eramo’s claims against the magazine.
(Though Coakley is still identified only as “Jackie” in the litigation and mainstream media coverage, her full identity has been public for months and her status as a gang-rape victim is in serious doubt, so The College Fix has decided to fully identify her going forward.)
Conrad wrote in his memorandum opinion that Coakley’s claimed privilege for being an alleged rape victim doesn’t protect her because federal restrictions only apply to the admissibility of sexual-behavior evidence at trial, not their relevance in discovery, which is what Eramo is seeking.
It is “reasonable and proportionate” for Eramo to obtain Coakley’s communications with Rolling Stone, Erdely and “Eramo/UVA” as evidence of defamation and negligence by the magazine, especially because it has already turned over its communications with Coakley, Conrad wrote.
Perhaps the most notable part of Conrad’s ruling is his dismissal of Coakley’s claim that her counseling sessions with Eramo and Emily Renda (another UVA employee) are protected by “patient-counselor privilege” – a legally dubious claim that nonetheless became a PR nightmare for the University of Oregon in a countersuit against an alleged rape victim suing that school.
Virginia law on the privacy of sexual-assault victims provides an explicit exemption for court orders, Conrad wrote:
The court is unaware of any authority that holds that [the relevant law] creates a patient-counselor privilege, and the court declines to do so in this case. In addition, the statutory language permits disclosure of protected information in response to a court mandate, which provides further support for the court’s finding that the statute does not establish an evidentiary privilege. Even assuming that the court could find that this statute establishes a patient-counselor privilege, it appears that Jackie may have waived such privilege by voluntarily disclosing the contents of her communications with Eramo and UVA to defendants.
Communications between Coakley’s pseudonym “Haven Monahan” and her friend Ryan Duffin, as well as Monahan’s communications with anyone else Coakley gave Rolling Stone before its article was published, must be turned over:
One of the main issues in the defamation action is defendants’ due diligence in relying on Jackie as a source for the Article. Plaintiff argues that defendants could have interviewed Ryan Duffin and others about Jackie’s story and her credibility as a witness, but failed to do so. As such, these communications are relevant and proportionate as they will help resolve the question of what the defendants could have discovered about Jackie’s story and credibility if they had interviewed Jackie’s friends.
Only Coakley’s communications about the Rolling Stone article before her last public comment to The Washington Post Dec. 5, and not the “details of her alleged assault,” must be turned over, Conrad ruled:
The crux of the dispute in the defamation action is defendants’ portrayal of Eramo and Jackie’s communications with Eramo/UVA . The specific, graphic details about what may or may not have occurred on the night of September 28, 2012 have no bearing on these issues.
Posted inAcademia, Journalism, Rape|Comments Off on Judge: Jackie Coakley not covered by patient-counselor privilege in ‘Rolling Stone’ defamation suit
