Are you feeling demoralized by the psy-ops? (1-14-24)

01:00 Danielle Allen: Justice By Means of Democracy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153926
05:00 Richard Spencer Space on anonymity and dissident politics, https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1746318372705648953
28:00 NYT: How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/us/politics/trump-college-educated-voters.html
38:00 Building the greatest stereo and destroying your family in the process, https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/ken-fritz-greatest-stereo-auction-cost/
50:00 Elites and democracy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153860
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/us/politics/mideast-war-israel-yemen.html
1:04:00 Genocide in Gaza: Dimensions of an Unfolding Catastrophe, Featuring John J. Mearsheimer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxeqfgPzVc&t=2726s
1:11:30 Not a war crime, but GENOCIDE: Prof. John J. Mearsheimer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1CvtfbXPLE
1:20:00 NYT: ‘The Regional War No One Wanted Is Here. How Wide Will It Get?’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153948
1:38:30 Dooovid joins, https://twitter.com/RebDoooovid
1:45:00 Richard Spencer has been neutered
2:23:00 Tunneling for meaning under 770 (Chabad headquarters)
2:35:00 I am the biggest cause of my own misery due to my lack of consideration for others
2:46:00 My Dennis Prager story, https://lukeford.net/blog/?page_id=31620
3:15:00 The Investigator in the Enneagram, https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-5
3:29:50 Patrick Casey
3:33:45 Elliott Blatt joins
4:20:20 Middle East war escalates, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlL9uHaeNqo

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NYT: ‘The Regional War No One Wanted Is Here. How Wide Will It Get?’

This New York Times headline is false. Plenty of people want a wider war in the Middle East. Hamas launched the Oct. 7 attacks to encourage a wider war. Parts of Hezbollah, and parts the governments of Iran and Israel want a wider war. Hezbollah has the capacity to devastate Israel, to level its cities, and to kill thousands of Israelis in hours. Why would they not feel tempted to do that? Iran wants to dominate the Middle East, destroy the Zionist state and drive out America? A massive war with Israel could topple the Iranian regime but it also could topple the Zionist state and make America’s presence in the Middle East more precarious. Many Israeli leaders would welcome a wider war because that would enable them to drive out the Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and possibly even Israel proper and create a stronger, more cohesive greater Israel.

I expect Israel to invade southern Lebanon in the next few months to take out Hezbollah.

There are two philosophical reasons why I think this New York Times headline is dumb. One, people don’t always say what they mean. Just because many leaders in the Middle East said they don’t want a regional war doesn’t mean that is what they all truly believe in all circumstances. Right now, I believe the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah do not want a wider war, but plenty of their compatriots do. Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership depends upon an ongoing war. Once there’s peace, he’s likely out of office and on trial. But he can’t say this publicly. He has to placate the United States in his public pronouncements while placating coalition members to his right in private.

Individual incentives are often different from national incentives and Bibi’s incentives are not necessarily Israel’s incentives.

Two. Liberals believe that people are basically good and that peace is our default state. Trads and people on the right do not believe that people are basically good and do not believe that peace is our default state. They understand that sometimes wars have to be fought to a conclusion to allow a lasting peace.

On the liberal-left side of the political spectrum, there’s an individualist worldview, and more confidence in the power of buffered human reason and agency to manage things (think about LBJ micro-managing the bombing of North Vietnam), while on the right, people believe that we are tribal and driven by many forces more powerful than conscious cognition, and therefore we suspect that life and war are inherently wild and less containable.

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Last week, Stephen Walt told Robert Wright: “The Biden administration is the revenge of the blob. After the Trumpian interlude, you brought back the professionals. The Obama team back in action and taking it on the road.”

The Biden foreign policy team has great confidence in its abilities to manage the world and has created greater disasters than any American administration since WWII.

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The Prager Christmas Dinner

Dec. 25, 2023, Julie Hartman asked Dennis: “What do you do to celebrate Christmas?”

Dennis: “On Christmas day, I don’t listen to classical music. I listen to Christmas music. I revel in the ambience of the day. My wife converted to Judaism. She is as Jewish as I am from the perspective of Judaism, but she comes from a Christian home and we have all of her family over and we have a big Christmas dinner, which I love. I even wear my kipa at the dinner. It’s my way of both reminding everyone that it is the Jew in your family who's enjoying this with you, and while it is not my holy day, it is their holy day. I open up with a prayer.”

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Danielle Allen: Justice By Means of Democracy

Stephen Turner writes:

Works from Harvard in political theory have a special sociological interest because they come from a center of power and indicate the probable rationale for where the elite are next taking the government. The last 50 years have been dominated by Rawlsian redistributionism. Danielle Allen’s new book proposes a radicalization, correcting the flaws of Rawls. But it retains the basic animus of Rawlsianism, which is that justice is fundamentally about equality. The book is deeply indebted to the Harvard milieu and to a large group of interlocutors…

The focus of much of this work has been on diversity, meaning racial difference should be taken into account in normative democratic theorizing under the slogan “difference without domination” — the title of her co-edited collection with Rohini Somanathan. “Domination” is a term taken from a non-Harvard source, Phillip Pettit, who made the interesting move to replace the liberal notion of freedom as “non-interference” by the state (i.e., “negative freedom”) with the idea of non-domination. The point of the replacement was to relativize the goal of limiting power to the common knowledge of the people in the society in question about what was and was not legitimate interference in people’s lives. This meant that state intervention had no absolute limits. Some forms of power which rested on absolute rights of a negative kind, for example, socially disapproved cruelties, could be legitimately limited by the state. But, it also opened the door to “positive” interventions for the good of the recipient, however unwelcome…

…the majority may want coercive acts by the state that the minority regards as unjust and oppressive. And the minority may be oppressed by what is allowed, either by the state or by negative liberties. As Lawrence Bobo puts it, “modern racial inequality relies upon the market and informal racial bias to recreate, and in some instances sharply worsen, structured racial inequality.” Hence, the phrase “Laissez Faire Racism.” These are hierarchies of domination, which unjustly restrict opportunity, power, and influence. Rawlsian notions of justice, which preserve negative freedoms and prioritize redistribution with a market economy, do not touch, and indeed can exacerbate racial injustice, and assume homogeneity. Habermasian notions of deliberative democracy, oriented to achieving a transformative consensus, fail to respect differences that should be preserved. Justice requires something else…

Democracy requires loss: people can vote, but they must “sacrifice” to the majority, which frequently(?) disempowers them. As a result, “democratic citizenship requires rituals to manage the psychological tension that arises from being a nearly powerless sovereign.”9 This turns to the emotional matters. To make these sacrifices acceptable, they should be honored as such, and grievances should be open to redress. And this can happen only if there is a basis in “friendship,” in which we are not strangers but are vulnerable to one another.

“Difference” is a challenge to this: it estranges and allows us to evade the mutual vulnerability necessary for friendship and trust. We need, she concludes, new habits for dealing with one another in spite of difference. Friendship answers this need: “friendship’s basic habits for establishing equality of material benefit, recognition, and agency do the same work as justice….the core practices that are necessary for a relationship to count as friendship are practices to equalize benefits and burdens and power sharing.” There is a further complication, addressed in Allen and Light’s volume: immigration. Can these arguments apply to immigration? To the digital sphere?

So who rules in this new order? On the one hand, she claims to support egalitarian, inclusive, participatory, and self-transformative political liberty. On the other, she concedes that participation will not appeal to everyone. Similarly, the activity of political friendship and the making of bridging ties between quasi-representative group members with parallel figures from other groups, which is at the core of her model, will be for the very few. One gets the uncomfortable sense that she is describing a form of rule in which justice-enlightened multi-tasking people with good connections across groups, like herself, use state power to “steer,” one of her favorite terms, the rest of us.”

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Barack Obama is likely the next president of Harvard

Helen Andrews writes:

Barack Obama…doesn’t need to be paranoid about shoring up his internal power base. His power base is external and untouchable. He doesn’t need to protect an army of loyalists; everyone at Harvard is an Obama loyalist by default…

He is, in his own way, aristocratic. He has the effortless ease of a person to whom everything in life has come easily. He has had a charmed career dating back to his time at Harvard Law when his peers already assumed he would be president of the United States someday. He does not have to worry about what he will be doing for his next job.

The advantage of aristocrats is that they can say no to people. They can be relaxed. They don’t have the anxiety that characterizes everyone in a meritocratic system, the winners as much as the losers. In that sense, appointing Barack Obama president of Harvard would be a return to the institution’s ancient roots.

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