Thursday, March 28, 2024

The Rafah Crossing

Leave it to the French. Plato gave us philosopher kings. Slovenia gave us philosopher clown Slavoj Zizek. But the French have given us a celebrity philosopher, by the name of Bernard-Henri Levy, normally known by his acronym, BHL.

So, if one does not take BHL very seriously as a thinker, his self-promotion and inherited wealth suggests that we are right to do so.


Now, as though to make us look less than astute, BHL has written an interesting op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.


At a time when one side of the pathetic Biden administration is trying to save Hamas from a pending Israeli onslaught while another side is helping the Israelis to cause a minimum of civilian damage in Rafah, BHL explains the stakes. He does so as clearly as very many American writers, writers who are not even celebrity philosophers.


Anyway, given the drumbeat of anti-Israeli sentiment, led by New York Times columnist Tommy Friedman and New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer, it is not surprising to think that the administration is trying to bigfoot Israel into laying off the remnants of Hamas. Nor is it surprising that more and more Americans are allowing themselves to be influenced by administration propaganda-- and are turning against Israel. 


BHL explains:


It isn’t hard to picture an Israel that is sermonized, impeded and prevented from dealing with Hamas the way the U.S. dealt with Al-Qaeda and ISIS a few years back—an Israel forced into defeat.


What would happen if Israel relents under the Biden administration pressure campaign? 


If that came to pass, what would happen? Hamas would declare victory—on the verge of defeat, then the next minute revived. These criminals against humanity would emerge from their tunnels triumphant after playing with the lives not only of the 250 Israelis captured on Oct. 7, but also of their own citizens, whom they transformed into human shields.


This is so sane and sensible that it crosses the mind of a French celebrity philosopher. Why has it not made its way into the little gray cells of our foreign policy leaders?


The Arab street would view Hamas terrorists as resistance fighters. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—nations that signed the Abraham Accords or were leaning toward doing so—Hamas’s prestige would be enhanced. 


In the West Bank as in Gaza, Hamas would quickly eclipse the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, whose image would pale next to the twin aura of martyrdom and endurance in which Hamas would cloak itself.


After that, no diplomatic or military strategy would prevail against the iron law of people converted into mobs and mobs into packs. None of the experts’ extravagant plans for an international stabilization force, an interim Arab authority, or a technocratic government presiding over the reconstruction of Gaza would stand long against the blast effect created by the last-minute return of this group of criminals adorned with the most heroic of virtues.


Hamas would declare itself victorious. Overpowered and outgunned, it had survived. That would have been portrayed as a sign that its cause was just. Try dislodging it then.


And the dimwits who are lost in a reverie about the two-state solution would be exposed as the cowards they are:


Hamas would be the law in the Palestinian territories. It would set the ideological and political agenda, regardless of the formal structure of the new government. And Israel will never deal with a Palestinian Authority of which Hamas is a part. Goodbye, Palestinian State. Hope for peace harbored by moderates on both sides will be dead.


What is the BHL proposal? It is not all that different from proposals noted here:


Instead of putting all their energy into trying to get Israel to bend, leaders should push Hamas to surrender. The Biden administration should redirect the time it is spending in useless negotiations with the Qataris—experts in double-dealing—to calling the Qataris’ bluff by demanding that they push the “political” leaders of Hamas, whom they host and protect, to live up to their responsibilities.


It is not the least of the puzzles in this situation that the world, led by the American State Department is pressuring Israel, but not pressuring Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. And why is no one suggesting that the Palestinians stranded in Rafah might move to Egypt?


By now the world should have risen up against Hamas. BHL explains:


First, the release of all hostages. Next, the evacuation of civilians from the zone of imminent combat. When will the world recognize that Israel, having been forced into this war, is doing more than any army ever did to prevent civilian deaths?


In the end Israel should enter Rafah and put an end to Hamas.


And finally, in Rafah, the destruction of what remains of Hamas and its death squads. Without this military victory, the endless wheel of misfortune will begin to spin yet again, though faster. This is the terrible truth.


While we are bemoaning the flagrant incompetence of the Biden administration we should notice another story, from the Wall Street Journal, reporting that the Pentagon, on its own, is working with the Israeli military to improve the prospects for avoiding civilian casualties in Rafah. 


In two days of meetings between the Israeli defense chief and senior officials in the White House and Pentagon, discussions on Israel’s planned military operation in southern Gaza focused not on how to stop it, but on how to protect civilians during its rollout.


Obviously, this shows us an administration divided against itself, where one hand does not know what the other is doing. It is incoherent and incompetent, leaderless. Now you understand why Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin did not feel the need to inform his superiors of his hospital stay. 


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Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Wednesday Potpourri

First, readers of my blog, and now my Substack, have been ahead of the curve. So it is good to see other thinkers catch up to where we have been for years. Those who subscribe to my writing will feel that they are getting something for their contributions.

Four years ago I wrote that the Democratic and Republican Parties had become the Girl Party and the Boy Party. Now, as of last Sunday, , famed political strategist James Caraville denounced his fellow Democrats for being too feminine. The phrase “preachy females” has gone viral, but why not offer the context.


He told Maureen Dowd:


“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the culture of the Democratic Party, Carville told Dowd. “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’


“If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?’”


Naturally, a lot of people take some serious offense at such thoughts. Calling Democratic women preachy females is not a very nice thing to say. 


And yet…. If you would like a more extensive analysis, check out my analysis from four years ago. 2-12-2020.


The Republican Party has become the Boy Party. Republicans defend gun rights and tend to be more willing to fight wars.


The Girl Party wants to take everyone’s guns away-- an absurdly unrealistic proposal-- and tends to be anti-war, even to the point of being cowardly.


The Boy Party wants people to compete in the marketplace. The Girl Party does not accept the results of fair competition. Believing that the marketplace is rigged, it always leans toward regulating the marketplace, not allowing free competition. 


The Girl Party is risk averse, while the Boy Party is more willing to take risks. Just measure the shrieks of fear coming from the Girl Party when President Trump undertakes a risky foreign policy initiative... as in killing Qassim Soleimani.


Being a cult to the Nature Goddess, the Girl Party opposes industry, manufacturing, commerce and especially anything that involves energy. The Boy Party embraces the Industrial Revolution for all it has brought to all of us.


And naturally the Girl Party wants to provide great free healthcare for everyone. It does not concern itself with the practicalities of Medicare for All or with single payer health care. It prefers sentimentality and caring to the cold hard light of reason.


Like people who have never had to deal with the consequences of their decisions the Girl Party believes that wishing will make it so and that the money will always be there. It sounds like a group that has never made a living or balanced a check book. If you don’t believe me listen to Bernie Sanders.


Second, we have billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, who sits on the board of the Disney Company. Apparently, he is willing to call out the company for producing woke movies that do not make money.

This report comes from the Zero Hedge blog. 


In comments we're sure the left will seize on, the billionaire investor then criticized Disney for pushing woke messaging as opposed to simply making great content.


"People go to watch a movie or a show to be entertained," said Peltz. "They don’t go to get a message."


Elaborating further, Peltz asked "Why do I have to have a Marvel that’s all women? Not that I have anything against women, but why do I have to do that? Why can’t I have Marvels that are both? Why do I need an all-Black cast?" referring to Black Panther.


Third, on the therapy front, Jonathan Shedler rips back the curtain and exposes the truth about therapy influencers. They all have the same line, which ought to be familiar:


Therapy influencers get millions of follows w 1 core message You are a victim & you are a good. Someone else is to blame & they are evil It feels good because it sides with our defenses, not insight & self-awareness In the long run, it’s a self-destructive & self-defeating.


Fourth, a coda to a story that we followed from the onset. It involves the damage done to American schoolchildren by covid lockdowns. 


Daniel Greenfield recommends that we condemn the teachers’ unions who promoted it for systemic racism. Children of wealthy parents found ways to provide tutoring. Poor parents did not have the same options.


Anyway, Greenfield explains:


The Biden administration is on a hunt for systemic racism. Thus far it’s found systemic racism everywhere from the highway system to the military, but the one place it hasn’t looked is among the ranks of the teachers unions who provide much of its cash and its election foot soldiers.


But new data reported by the New York Times shows that the pandemic school closures demanded by teachers unions were the single greatest act of systemic racism in 50 years.


During the pandemic, members of the corrupt teachers union machine demanded school closures to “save lives”. Unwilling to do their jobs, they instead marched around brandishing coffins at political protests while warning that if they had to go and teach, everyone would die.


Education was replaced with the Orwellian misnomer of “remote learning” which parents, students and honest teachers admitted was not actually teaching any of the students anything.


And the newest data backs that up, showing that “in districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math.”


The numbers were even worse for the poorer students who fell behind three fifths of a grade.


The decline in math scores was the worst in 50 years making it a historic setback and while all students suffered during the pandemic, the learning experiences in districts where schools shut were far worse for poorer students, often minorities, than for wealthy or middle class students.


And while the DEI complex and the media have spent years talking about disproportionate impact, it was the Left which was responsible for the worst disproportionate impact in 50 years.


Fifth, the dimwitted California legislators decided to raise the minimum wage to $20.00, thereby giving workers a living wage.


The result-- small businesses across the state are firing employees.


The New York Post has the story:


California restaurants are reportedly laying off staff and reducing hours for other team members in an effort to cut costs ahead of a California state law taking effect on April 1 that will raise fast-foot workers’ hourly wage to $20.


In the months leading up to the wage mandate, California eateries, particularly pizza joints, have established a plan to cut jobs, according to state records obtained by The Wall Street Journal.


Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza — a Menlo Park, Calif.-founded chain of 400 pizza parlors, mostly on the West Coast — have said they plan to lay off around 1,280 delivery drivers this year, according to records that major employers must submit to the state before large layoffs, The Journal reported.


Pizza Hut already sent notices to employees informing them of their last day.


Sixth, on the AI front. I have a minimal understanding of artificial intelligence, so I have wisely chose not to offer comments on it. So, while the investing and tech worlds are thrilling to its advent, Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar offered a cautionary note two days ago:


AI will “change the world”, we are told. It will rad­ic­ally increase pro­ductiv­ity (albeit by dis­rupt­ing mil­lions of jobs). It will cre­ate a huge new wealth pie for the world to share. And, accord­ing to a breath­less ARK Invest report that last week pre­dicted a $40tn boost to global gross domestic product from AI by 2030, it will “trans­form every sec­tor, impact every busi­ness, and cata­lyze every innov­a­tion plat­form”.

It’s the euphoria and sense of inev­it­ab­il­ity in this straight­for­ward nar­rat­ive that makes me nervous. Even if you believe AI will be today’s equi­val­ent of elec­tri­city or the inter­net, we are at the very early stages of a highly com­plex multi-dec­ade trans­form­a­tion that is by no means a done deal. Yet valu­ations are pri­cing in the entire sea change, and then some. A Feb­ru­ary report by Cur­rency Research Asso­ciates poin­ted out that it would take 4,500 years for Nvidia’s future dividends to equal its cur­rent price. Talk about a long tail.


One senior staffer at a lead­ing AI com­pany recently admit­ted to me, when pushed, that the profit assump­tions around the tech­no­logy were based “more on spec­u­la­tion than sub­stance”, and that it has major kinks still to be worked out.


The so-called Mag­ni­fi­cent Seven com­pan­ies have driven AI enthu­si­asm and stock mar­ket gains over the past year. They have pushed the con­cen­tra­tion of the S&P 500 to a his­toric extreme. But as a recent Mor­gan Stan­ley report notes, “index con­cen­tra­tion has his­tor­ic­ally proved self-cor­rect­ing, with some com- bin­a­tion of reg­u­lat­ory, mar­ket and com- pet­it­ive forces, along with busi­ness cycle dynam­ics, under­min­ing static lead­er­ship”. The report says “ana­lysis sug­gests that equity returns have typ­ic­ally strug- gled fol­low­ing peaks in con­cen­tra­tion”.


That com­bin­a­tion of cor­rect­ing factors might include the grow­ing num­ber of Big Tech anti­trust cases and the possi- bil­ity that car­bon pri­cing and copy­right fines will chal­lenge the “free” inputs neces­sary to make a profit.


Whether you see AI as the next tulip bubble or the next com­bus­tion engine, it’s worth ques­tion­ing how the mar­ket is pri­cing this story.


Indeed it is.


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Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Judith Butler's Phantasms

To the best of my discernment Tyler Cowen is a serious economist. Thanks to the Lord, I am not qualified to judge the seriousness of his thoughts about matters economical.

But, yesterday, Cowen opined about one Judith Butler, an intrepid proponent of gender dysphoria and a warrior against what she sees as the advent of worldwide fascism.


If the word crackpot means anything, Judith Butler qualifies. And yet, Cowen takes it all oh so seriously. On his Marginal Revolution blog he writes this:


And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think Butler is more right than wrong.  This is a very good book, and in some critical ways a very libertarian book (again to be clear I think Butler is wrong about most other things).  But on this issue — why so insist on such a rigid male-female set of binary categories?  Why be so afraid of alternative, more flexible approaches?  Why restrict our conceptual freedoms and ultimately our life practical freedoms in such a manner?  Especially when a minority of people — admittedly a small minority but also much larger than the mere category of “trans” — will suffer greatly from such attitudes and such practices?


Of course, all human societies, from the dawn of time, have insisted on binary categories. Has Cowen ever heard of Claude Levi-Strauss’s book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship?


Serious thinkers do not take Judith Butler seriously. She is a symptom of the degeneration of academic thinking in America.


Katha Pollitt in The Atlantic and Andrew Sullivan on his Substack take her apart without working up a sweat.


As Katha Pollitt points out, Butler’s enemy is vast indeed. She is at war against fascism, which she imagines, in her phantasms, to be a clear and present danger.


It is worth paying some attention to this war against fascism, against Hitler and his Nazis, against the radical and non-so-radical right, against the capitalist patriarchy. For someone like Butler, who has never learned to think, these are all the same.


Now, it is worth noting, even if just in passing, that, once upon a time, the European continent was awash in outright fascists and Nazis. For most of the time that fascists did their dirty deeds in that place, the American political leadership, beginning with the great Franklin Roosevelt, basically did nothing.


Intrepid fascist fighters that liberal Democrats are, their great hero sat on his hands for eight years of European fascism, to say nothing of Hitler. As it happens, the liberal intelligentsia has not lived down this dereliction.


And one ought to mention, if only in passing, that the track record of the extreme political left was nothing to admire or extol. After all, Communism produced over 100 millions corpses, most of whom died of starvation. See The Black Book of Communism


And let’s not ignore the fact that Nazism was a shorthand for National Socialism. If you think that radical socialism is going to save us, think again. If you believe that fascism is the sum of all evils, what’s left for communism.


Katha Pollitt finds something disquieting in Butler’s constant harping on the dangers of fascism:


Fascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet. As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own. That definition is so broad and so vague as to be useless. You might even say that “fascism” functions as a kind of phantasm, frightening people into accepting views wholesale without examining them individually. It’s a kind of guilt by association—like comparing critics of your prose to Nixon.


Evidently, we are not dealing with serious thinking. Butler seems to like to keep trotting out the word “phantasm” which means something like phantom.


When you have taken your leave from reality you are left with phantoms, fictional beings that defy reality.


Then Pollitt makes a salient point, one that other commentators seem to have ignored. If gender is a social construction, why would we not believe that transgender identities are socially constructed. 


It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want. Butler seems to suggest that being trans is being your authentic self, but what is authenticity? In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.


And then there is Andrew Sullivan, who takes Judith Butler to school and has the good sense not to use her illiterate pronouns. Apparently, Butler systematically denies realities that do not conform to her mindless beliefs:


For Butler, in matters of sex and the body, nothing is as it appears, the individual has no independent existence or capacity for reason outside social and cultural forces, and even the basics of anatomy, like a penis, are just socially constructed all the way down. There is no independent, stable variable like nature or biology or evolution that can help us understand our bodies, and our sex. Everything is in our heads, and our heads are entirely created by others in the past and present:


He continues:


This is Blank Slatism in its ultimate form, a denial of any independent biological influence on human nature or behavior. The fact that we are a species of mammal, organized around a binary reproductive strategy for millions of years, in which we are divided almost exactly into male and female, and in which there are only two types of gametes, eggs and sperm — and no “speggs” — is, for Butler, irrelevant. It is not even a fact. The sex binary is, rather, a human invention — specifically, a product of American “white supremacy.”


Blaming it on white supremacy is just plain stupid. Sullivan corrects Butler:


 But of all the things you could call “socially constructed,” the sex binary is the least plausible. It existed in our species before we even achieved the intelligence to call it a sex binary. It existed before humans even evolved into the separate and mostly distinct genetic clusters we now call race. How’s that for pre-cultural! It is in countless species that have no access to an array of “practices, discourses, and technologies.” It structures our entire existence. Not a single cell in the body is unaffected by our sex. Our entire reproductive strategy as a mammal is rooted in it. If you can turn even this into a human invention — malleable and indeterminate and a “spectrum” — there is nothing real outside us at all.


So, down with Judith Butler. Cease relying on phantasms. Up with reality.


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Monday, March 25, 2024

The War in Gaza Today

Fair is fair. I have never hesitated to offer sage and sound criticism of positions taken by the New York Times columnist David Brooks. At times it has felt like shooting fish in a barrel. I have never been very impressed by Brooks.

Yet, when Brooks offers us a sane and sensible column about an important topic, we should acknowledge the fact. In a recent column about the situation in Israel and Gaza Brooks made an intelligent suggestion. His idea, namely, was that those who are whining about the Israeli military approach are obliged to propose a better way. As of now, they have not.


At the risk of being repetitious, the simple fact that those who oppose the Israeli military action do not really have a better way identifies them as chronic whiners. One understands that the Biden administration is being run by a chorus of chronic whiners, but you knew that. Heck, even James Carville knows that. He recently said that the Democratic Party is suffering from a surplus of “preachy females.”


Fighting Hamas in Gaza is a problem because Hamas is fighting underground:


The current Israeli estimates range from 350 to about 500 miles of tunnels. The tunnel network, according to Israel, is where Hamas lives, holds hostages, stores weapons, builds missiles and moves from place to place. By some Israeli estimates, building these tunnels cost the Gazan people about a billion dollars, which could have gone to building schools and starting companies.


Hamas built many of its most important military and strategic facilities under hospitals, schools and so on. Its server farm, for example, was built under the offices of the U.N. relief agency in Gaza City, according to the Israeli military.


What is the Hamas strategy? Quite simple, Brooks explains:


Hamas’s goal is to maximize the number of Palestinians who die and in that way build international pressure until Israel is forced to end the war before Hamas is wiped out. Hamas’s survival depends on support in the court of international opinion and on making this war as bloody as possible for civilians, until Israel relents.


As it happens, using civilians as human shields is a war crime, but no one, from the Biden administration on down, seems to care.


Now, for its part Israel has avoided civilian casualties:


John Spencer, … the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point … told me that Israel has done far more to protect civilians than the United States did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Spencer reports that Israel has warned civilians when and where it is about to begin operations and published an online map showing which areas to leave. It has sent out millions of pamphlets, texts and recorded calls warning civilians of coming operations. It has conducted four-hour daily pauses to allow civilians to leave combat areas. It has dropped speakers that blast out instructions about when to leave and where to go. These measures, Spencer told me, have telegraphed where the I.D.F. is going to move next and “have prolonged the war, to be honest.”


Rather than offer up the body counts provided by Hamas, Brooks begins with the question of how well the Israeli strategy is working.


What do we make of the current Israeli strategy? Judged purely on a tactical level, there’s a strong argument that the I.D.F. has been remarkably effective against Hamas forces. I’ve learned to be suspicious of precise numbers tossed about in this war, but the I.D.F. claims to have killed over 13,000 of the roughly 30,000 Hamas troops. It has disrupted three-quarters of Hamas’s battalions so that they are no longer effective fighting units. It has also killed two of five brigade commanders and 19 of 24 battalion commanders. As of January, U.S. officials estimated that Israel had damaged or made inoperable 20 to 40 percent of the tunnels. Many Israelis believe the aggressive onslaught has begun to restore Israel’s deterrent power. 


And yet, the fly in the ointment is what Brooks calls world public opinion. He does not quite say it but the Biden administration has given the green light to those who want to criticize Israel. It has made criticizing Israel acceptable.


Global public opinion is moving decisively against Israel. The key shift is in Washington. Historically pro-Israeli Democrats like Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer are now pounding the current Israeli government with criticism. Biden wants Israel to call off its invasion of the final Hamas strongholds in the south. Israel is now risking a rupture with its closest ally and its only reliable friend on the U.N. Security Council. If Israel is going to defend itself from Iran, it needs strong alliances, and Israel is steadily losing those friends.


Then, Brooks offers the opinion trafficked by the Biden administration through its satrap, New York Times columnist Tommy Friedman. Namely, that Israel must have a plan for Gaza after the war.


The key weakness of the Israeli strategy has always been that it is aimed at defeating Hamas militarily without addressing Palestinian grievances and without paying enough attention to the wider consequences. As the leaders of Hamas watch Washington grow more critical of Jerusalem, they must know their strategy is working.


As noted here in previous posts, it would certainly be a positive step if the Palestinian Authority would step up and offer a plan of its own. If self-determination is the goal of the Palestinian people, they should tell the world how they are going to govern themselves after the war.


If they fail to do so, this tells us that they have no interest in self-determination or even in the well being of their people. Their goal is to establish one state, from the river to the sea, a state and is free of Jews.


After outlining the different proposals, Brooks arrives at the Biden administration position. Which is, for the Israelis to stop now, to quit, leaving the remnants of Hamas in place.


A fourth alternative is that Israel should just stop. It should settle for what it has achieved and not finish the job by invading Rafah and the southern areas of Gaza, or it should send in just small strike teams.


David Brooks rejects the proposal. He explains that Hamas must be defeated. To coin an old phrase: Hamas delenda est.


This is now the official Biden position. The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has argued that Israel can destroy Hamas in Gaza without a large invasion but “by other means” (which he did not elaborate on). The United States has asked Israel to send a delegation to Washington to discuss alternative Rafah strategies, which is good. 


The problem is that, first, there seems to be a budding disagreement over how much of Hamas needs to be destroyed to declare victory and, second, the I.D.F. estimates that there are 5,000 to 8,000 Hamas fighters in Rafah. Defeating an army that size would take thousands of airstrikes and raids. If you try to shrink the incursion, the math just doesn’t add up. As an Israeli war cabinet member, Benny Gantz, reportedly told U.S. officials, “Finishing the war without demilitarizing Rafah is like sending in firefighters to put out 80 percent of a fire.”


This is the coward’s way out, and it is about what we would expect from the Biden crowd.


If Hamas survives this war intact, it would be harder for the global community to invest in rebuilding Gaza. It would be impossible to begin a peace process. As the veteran Middle East observers Robert Satloff and Dennis Ross wrote in American Purpose, “Any talk of a postwar political process is meaningless without Israel battlefield success: There can be no serious discussion of a two-state solution or any other political objective with Hamas either still governing Gaza or commanding a coherent military force.”


Basically, Brooks is correct… until he gets to saying that Israel is responsible for the Palestinian future. Yet, why does he not consider that the Gazans could surrender and give up their hostages-- tomorrow. They would forestall the attack on Rafah and set about rebuilding.


On this last point I respectfully demur:


Israel also has to offer the world a vision for Gaza’s recovery, and it has to do it right now. Ross argues that after the war is over, the core logic of the peace has to be demilitarization in exchange for reconstruction. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, he sketches out a comprehensive rebuilding effort, bringing in nations and agencies from all over the world, so Gaza doesn’t become a failed state or remain under Hamas control.


The Palestinian Authority should make a diplomatic overture and present a plan for the Hamas-free Gaza. It does not do so because the Palestinian people do not want a two-state solution. They want to kill more Jews.


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Sunday, March 24, 2024

Losing Face

Two days ago I reported on some new research about depression. The studies purported to show that depression, in many but not all cases, is signaling that something is wrong. It is telling you to set things right.


In the post I noted that depression signals a social dislocation, a disconnection from other human beings, and that it should be resolved by reconnecting and establishing fruitful contacts.


Most everyone agrees that there is too much depression around. The promise of Prozac has not been borne out.


One understands that the currently fashionable explanation of this problem blames social media and gadgets. Children, especially, spend so much time on their gadgets that they have lost the habit of getting along with other children.


Among its proponents are NYU professor Jonathan Haidt and UC San Diego professor Jean Twenge. I refer to Judith Warner’s counterpoint in her review of Haidt’s new book. She argues that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Warner is not persuaded that Haidt has overcome this objection.


So, allow me a different thesis. Consider the analysis offered by famed Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam. You know him because you know his book, Bowling Alone.


Now, Putnam did a study of multicultural communities, where people of different ethnic backgrounds live in the same neighborhoods. The study is called E Pluribus Unum. The analysis might apply to schools where the bureaucratic grandees believe that there is a special value in mixing children from different cultures.


Putnam discovered that the people who live in such diverse communities tend to hunker down, tend not to get along, tend to avoid each other. Hmmm. Perhaps that is why we suffer from a generalized sense of disconnection.


If people are going to connect they must be playing the same game according to one set of rules. If there are multiple sets of rules you never know which is which, who you might or might not be offending. Ergo, you will withdraw, perhaps into a club where everyone speaks the same language and observes the same customs. 


Add to that the chance that different people have been admitted to a group according to different standards, thanks to affirmative action policies or diversity quotas. When different states declare that aspiring attorneys no longer have to take the bar exam, it is creating two classes of lawyers. The chances of them getting along are diminished.


And of course if different people have different pronouns, different forms of illiterate expression, you are most likely to hunker down, because it is not worth the trouble to remember each person’s different pronouns. It is easier to retreat and withdraw into social media where the risk is lesser.


In other words, social disconnection is built into the current mania about multiculturalism. And if social disconnection is built in, so is depression.


None of this should come as a surprise. As we have noted, the psycho world does not care about social connection. In the most flagrant sense, it tells people, over and over again, not to care about how you look to other people. You should care, it says, about how you feel about yourself.


It’s a formula for social disconnection, for ignoring other people and for not caring about looking good to others. Looking good to others is a moral category. It might include your appearance, whether you follow the dress code and practice good grooming, but it refers primarily to your moral character. And that means whether you are trustworthy, loyal, reliable and decent. That is, whether you are a credit to your community.


So, therapy culture has undermined your ability to get along with other people because it told you to forget about your reputation, about how you look to other people. It is a decisive error.


When you are considered primarily to be a social being, what matters is less your psyche and more your face. That means, you face in both the literal and figurative senses. Dare I make the most obvious observation, namely, that you never see your face directly. You can see its reflected image. You can judge how other people react to you, but you cannot look yourself in the eye.


I have written extensively about face, in my books Saving Face and, The Last Psychoanalyst. See also Tasha Eurich’s book, Insight.


So if you are more worried about what you can get away with than about doing the right thing in order to have a good reputation you have bought the therapy culture.


Within this context depression is redefined as-- losing face. Curing depression involves saving face. Simple and easy, don’t you think?


To make matters slightly less easy, I am obliged to inform you that in Asian cultures there are two forms of face. You lose face when you cease to be a member in good standing of a community. But you also lose face when you lose status and prestige within the community.


If you care to complicate the issue, I would add that you can lose face for belonging to a family where one member has disgraced himself. Losing your good name is like losing face.


One reason we are motivated to do the right thing and to maintain a good reputation is that we share our good name with other family members, even with members of our community. And, at times, we are depressed because we belong to a community whose leaders have embarrassed themselves.


As for the question of cure, consider it this way. If you failed at a task, the cure is success. If you get caught with your pants down, the cure is to pull them up. If you have bad manners, the cure is good manners. If a member of your family has been identified as a scoundrel, you will either need to disassociate yourself from him or persuade him to change his deviant ways. 


But then, if someone disrespects you, insults you, offends you… this causes a loss of face. It requires a response, one that will save face. He is obliged to demonstrate, by his actions, that he is not defined by the demeaning insult.


If people disrespect you, you need to respond by acting like someone who respects himself. 


Rarely do our psycho therapists recognize that the problem here lies with what the philosophers call other minds. Changing behavior must be consistent. Getting it right once does not count. You need to change the minds of other people, to change the way that they see you. 


Among the things you do not do is-- trying to figure out why you failed or why you have bad table manners. Blaming it in your mother does not improve performance and does not teach you good manners.


The same problem exists when you have been traumatized. You will note that the new group of trauma doctors, the ones who recovered and repackaged the Victorian notion of conversion hysteria, do not acknowledge that it’s one thing to remember what happened and quite another to erase it from the minds of other people.


If you have forgotten the trauma, and other people know about it, they might look at you with pity. To disassociate yourself from a trauma you will need to erase it from the minds of other people. This tells us that sharing the information with lots of other people is a losing strategy.


I am happy to inform you that I have some free consulting hours in my coaching practice. If you are interested, email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.