Luke Ford

Great news guys!

According to his own bio: “David Rothkopf is CEO of The Rothkopf Group, a media company that produces podcasts including Deep State Radio, hosted by Rothkopf. He is also the author of many books including Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, Superclass, Power, Inc., National Insecurity, Great Questions of Tomorrow, and Traitor: A History of Betraying America from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump.”

Such weighty and valuable books all.

Mr. Rothkopf writes for The Daily Beast Oct. 18:

The response of the Biden team in the wake of the explosion and fire at the hospital was calm, compassionate and resolute….

But Biden, Blinken, and their team had been clear about their objectives from the start. They saw no contradiction between standing foursquare behind Israel’s right to self-defense, while at the same time calling for respect for the rules of war and for the innocent lives on both sides who might be put at risk in the conflict….

Biden and Blinken not only carefully laid the groundwork for the trip but they scored a victory even before it began.

Biden’s gamble paid immediate dividends when he landed in Israel on Wednesday. Netanyahu immediately tweeted out the first photo of him and Biden hugging, a sign of how much he valued the support of the U.S. president—support that has eluded him for months due to the Israel’s efforts to undercut democracy in his own country. Netanyahu has been under siege since the terror attacks and there is no doubt he saw the Biden visit as a lifeline.

In fact, one of the most remarkable aspects of the Biden trip was the degree to which it marked a turnabout in the relationship between the two leaders…

But on Wednesday, an isolated and weakened Netanyahu welcomed a U.S. president to Israel who was clearly one of the country’s most beloved politicians. Billboards had been erected throughout Israel—even before Biden’s trip—thanking him for his immediate support for Israel…

Biden also delivered a very effective speech outlining the reasons for his support for Israel that was extremely well-received in Israel. The president, during his visit, built upon these steps that had worked, largely by repeating some of the best of them…

Perhaps most striking was he did something that not only conveyed his message brilliantly, but that also showed a degree of self-awareness and even humility in U.S. leaders that has seldom been displayed. He said, “But I caution you, while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

It took a special kind of courage and was profoundly effective. Indeed, the entire speech was extraordinarily well-received. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote, “A simply magnificent, gut-wrenching and inspiring Biden speech in Israel. As an American, a Jew, a human being, I could not be more touched.”

In the wake of the trip, the response from observers in the U.S. and Israel was equally enthusiastic. The gamble had paid off—in large part for all the reasons that successful gambles often do: preparation, experience, and being on the right side of the issues.

Your cynical self might be wondering why Biden is thrusting America into a Middle Eastern tribal war with no vital American interests at stake. That’s because you don’t realize that every Biden-directed thrust into the world is carefully calibrated and optimized for maximum human flourishing. Biden’s using an app that measures the G force of his every stroke into those parts of the world far away from important American interests such as Africa, Ukraine and Israel.

Biden’s using The System. He was messing around on the web and these ads for The System kept popping up and following him around until finally he got that right combination of words and concepts that hooked him into following the dictates of universal human rationality across the bridge to total freedom.

Joe Biden’s a man of the Enlightenment. He understands that human nature is basically good and that with the force of our reason, no longer constrained by ignorance and bigotry, we can create buffered autonomous strategic selves deciding right and wrong unhooked from out-dated and atavistic notions of medieval morality. We no longer need to cling to our guns and our religion because can just follow our individual bliss along the path to ultimate wellness, standing hand-in-hand with the suffering people of Israel and the suffering people of Gaza in one giant human chain of authentic soul connection.

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today
Ah
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace
You
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

During the Vietnam war, President Johnson selected targets for bombing. Neil Sheehan wrote for The New York Times June 15, 1971: “President Johnson and Secretary McNamara continued to select the targets and to communicate them to the Joint Chiefs—and thus eventually to the operating strike forces—in weekly Rolling Thunder planning messages issued by the Secretary of Defense.”

Why would a president try to micro-manage a war like this? Because it is part of the modern liberal conception of the self that we are strategic, buffered, autonomous reflexive beings who shape our own destinies and the world around us by following the dictates of reason. This is different from the traditional conception of the self that we are porous and tragic.

Philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in his 2007 book, A Secular Age:

Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded self—I want to say “buffered” self—and the “porous” self of the earlier enchanted world…
…for the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined in my responses to them.
—by definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and important emotions are outside the “mind”; or better put, the very notion that there is a clear boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, has no sense.
As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me”, to use the contemporary expression. That’s the sense to my use of the term “buffered” here. This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it.

Joe Biden thinks he can master the Middle East and create a buffered conflict between Israel and the Arabs just like the liberal thinks he can create a buffered self that masters meaning and morality.

FIRE, the Foundation of Individual Rights in Expression, notes:

Colleges across the country have instituted problematic “affirmative consent” policies governing sexual activity among students — sometimes called “yes means yes” policies. While the details vary from campus to campus, affirmative consent policies generally require that participants in sexual activity obtain objectively demonstrable consent at every step of a sexual encounter…

It is difficult, absent some kind of recording, for an accused student to be able to demonstrate that he or she received a verbal or other explicit “yes” for a sexual encounter even when consent was, in fact, given. Because many policies require the indications of consent during sexual activity to be “continuous,” or that explicit consent be given for every stage of every sexual encounter (though what constitutes a “stage” is seldom defined), even a written acknowledgment that a person wishes to have sex, such as a text message or the use of a smartphone application to record consent, may not serve as sufficient proof that a party received consent to sexual activity. This leaves those accused of sexual misconduct under “affirmative consent” policies with no way to prove that they actually obtained consent from their partner or partners. As one court put it, under an affirmative consent policy, “the ability of an accused to prove the complaining party’s consent strains credulity and is illusory.” Mock v. University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, No. 14-1687-II (Tenn. Ch. Ct. Aug. 10, 2015).

This notion that sex between college students can be governed by affirmative consent every step of the way is part of the same liberal modern mentality that wants to carefully manage the Ukraine and Israel wars.

From a tradition perspective, sex between people who are not married to each other is likely to be so powerful that it will overwhelm the grandest of plans. From a traditional perspective, war evokes such tribal emotions that it too will overwhelm the grandest of plans. The more intense a situation, the more difficult it is for individuals to act in reasoned, buffered, strategic and autonomous ways. The more intense our emotions, the more tribally we will experience life. The drunker people get, the more right-wing they get.

Rony Guldmann writes in his work in progress Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia:

…the emergence of a peculiarly courtly rationality that “the demand for ‘good behavior’ is raised more emphatically,” and that “[a]ll problems concerned with behavior take on new importance.” This demand for good behavior is the origin of “political correctness,” which projects the norms of courtly etiquette onto the political stage, extending its demand not to offend to an ever-widening array of contexts, extending its scope to include a much broader range of sensibilities and sensitivities. Those so privileged as to enjoy a “relaxation within the framework of an already established standard” have the leeway to establish new standards. And this is what liberals do when they promote “understanding,” “equal respect,” “tolerance,” and related ideals.

Himmelfarb objects that whereas the old Victorians espoused a set of clear, consistent, and commonsensical moral prohibitions, the “New Victorians” of the Left have adopted a convoluted and often contradictory moral code, a “curious combination of promiscuity and prudery.” The New Victorians do not denounce drunkenness but only “those who take ‘advantage’ of their partners’ drunkenness.” They also trivialize rape by “associating it with ‘date rape,’ defined so loosely as to include consensual intercourse that is belatedly regretted by the woman.”15 These currents, argues Himmelfarb, have engendered a new and unprecedented repressiveness. Being straightforward and commonsensical, the old code was “deeply embedded in tradition and convention” and so “largely internalized.”16 By contrast, the morality of the New Victorians is “novel and contrived, officially legislated and coercively enforced.”17 Though the old Victorians have an undeserved reputation as meddlesome moralists and officious busybodies, they would in reality “have been as distressed by the overtness and formality of college regulations governing sexual conduct (with explicit consent required at every stage of the sexual relation) as by the kind of conduct—promiscuity, they would have called it—implicitly sanctioned by those regulations.”

However, what Himmelfarb interprets as the arbitrariness of the New Victorian morality is actually liberals’ more thoroughgoing internalization of the buffered identity. With a high “level of habitually, technically, and institutionally consolidated self-control,” being a given, and so with the buffered identity’s function as a mechanism for organismic self-governance having been securely established, the dangers of drunkenness and promiscuity per se recedes into the background. And so the concern can now shift to the individual’s inner depth, as the innerness of the buffered identity becomes more a fount of self-expression and less a center of self-control, as it was for the Victorians. Victorian character having evolved into modern personality, the nature of interpersonal morality must evolve accordingly. This is not a “curious combination of promiscuity and prudery,” but one more manifestation of the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, of which Victorian prudery was merely an earlier iteration.

These disciplines and repressions are at play in feminist Lois Pineau’s proposal that rape law should presume that a woman has consented to intercourse only when she was offered “communicative sexuality” according to which “mutual sexual enjoyment requires an atmosphere of comfort and communication, a minimum of pressure, and an ongoing check-up on one’s partner’s state.”19 This being what any woman would naturally want, sex that does not live up to this standard is presumptively non-consensual. This standard is sensible because good sex aspires to the same ideals as good conversation. Pineau explains:

“Good conversationalists are intuitive, sympathetic, and charitable. They do not overwhelm their respondents with a barrage of their own opinions. While they may be persuasive, the forcefulness of their persuasion does not lie in their being overbearing, but rather in their capacity to see others’ point of view, to understand what it depends on, and so to address the essential point, but with tact and clarity.”

Pineau believes good sex aspires to analogous ideals. As Elias observes, courtly norms provided “the basic stock of models” that would eventually be disseminated within the wider society, where it would inform expectations about proper behavior and attitudes in a wide range of spheres. And Pineau’s proposal is merely among the latest and most ambitious of such extensions, one which applies the peculiarly courtly rationality, not only to the restraint of sexuality, but to sexuality itself. Courtly etiquette required a language that is “clear, transparent, precisely regulated,” and Pineau is simply transplanting this ideal to the sexual realm as the measure of genuine consent. It is not an arbitrary, convoluted morality, but rather the standard to which any properly “civilized” sexuality must conform…

The buffered self is the self that is defined ontologically by the possibility of disengagement and, normatively, by the demand for disengagement, by the imperative to “take a distance” from “everything outside the mind,” as Taylor says, and thereby establish an “inner base area” through which to distinguish how things are from how they feel. And it is this civilizational imperative that drives the seemingly convoluted morality of the New Victorians. The purpose of communicative sexuality is to advance that imperative and thereby ensure the self-possession required to distinguish authentic, inwardly generated desire from externally induced “pressure.” The requirement that consent be somehow re-elicited and re-issued at every stage of a sexual encounter is intended to promote the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, without which a woman’s true feelings cannot be distinguished from whatever fleeing, merely animal impulses her seducer may have succeeded in stimulating. The sense that “consensual intercourse that is belatedly regretted by the woman” can constitute rape reflects the retrospective insight that the seducer was indifferent to fostering this inner base area and thus bears responsibility for the consequences.

Feminists see themselves as concerned, not with instilling a peculiarly courtly rationality, but with combatting sexual coercion. But what qualifies as coercion depends on how we understand human agency, and how feminists conceptualize coercion presupposes a conception of agency that allows us to draw clear lines between the autonomous and the heteronomous, between an inner base area and the external meanings that threaten to engulf it. Only once these meanings are experienced as an invasive force that compromises our agency—rather than a necessary feature of that agency, as it was for porous pre-moderns—can communicative sexuality seem preferable to a sexuality that is more tacit, animal-like, and impulsive. What a more porous self would experience as the morally neutral fact that human organisms “impress themselves” upon one another on a visceral, pre-reflective level, the buffered identity may experience as the seeds of “domination,” the submersion of consciousness in mere flesh. The acceptable threshold of tolerance for the merely animal having been much lowered, the merely animal is now identified, not only with unambiguous physical coercion—how conservatives define rape—but with the slightest intimations thereof in raw, un-intellectualized animal desire, with anything that, in neglecting an “on-going check-up on one’s partner’s state,” fails to uphold the peculiarly rationality. Hence Pineau’s interpretation of sexual teasing. Teasing is not a power-play that first stimulates and then frustrates animal lust but rather an activity that is “playful and inspires wit.”

This peculiarly courtly rationality is also at play in Anita Bernstein’s proposal that sexual harassment law should center around respect rather than reasonableness of conduct.22 Bernstein argues that “unreasonableness” fails to capture the harm at the heart of sexual harassment, indignity, and invokes a social consensus that is often just a male consensus.23 By contrast, respect is “a commonsensical norm that lay persons understand and apply.”24 Respect is simply the “recognition of a person’s inherent worth.”25 And respectful persons are simply persons who do not “engage in conduct that rejects or denies the personhood or self-conception of another.”26 But then the meaning of respect turns on what it means to deny the personhood and self-conception of another. And this is not obvious. What some would condemn as “disrespect” is only an exaggeration of attitudes that are at play in any normal human relationship. Challenging others’ self-conception is an ineluctable feature of ordinary human interaction. Standing alone, the concept of respect cannot establish any neat lines of interpersonal propriety.