Israel, America, Jews, Others

[Brant Gaede]

On another thread also in Ed's Corner they are talking up a storm about Israel and, not only derivatively I suspect, Jews, but not Israelis--I think it's because not all Israelis are Jews.

Let me start with the establishment of Israel. Gone done. If we want to talk about all the bad things that happened back then and the bad and not so bads involved and damn Israel thereforth, let us also talk about slavery, the Indian wars, The Mexican War, "The Civil War," the Spanish Amrerican War, what the US Marines did to the residents of the Phillipines, WWI, etc. Obviously the US of A doesn't deserve to exist. No? Aside from lessons to be learned and applied--get over it.

Now I love the Jews. What does this mean? It means I love people regardless of their natural racial or ethnic collectives. Or, I love too the Japanese, French, Arabs, Persians, Russians, Germans, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.--all human last I looked. I tend to love the Jews individually especially because they're so intelligent and productive and decent if that is manifested in those Jewish individuals I am aware of, a lot of whom fit the bill. I will also hate individuals regardless of the aforementioned collectives who do bad and evil things. So I have this basic people-love orientation until I have reason to ramp it up or down qua individuals, even the imperialistic Han Chinese.

In WWII we--feel free to opt out of this "we"--hated the Japanese because of Pearl Harbor and other hateful things. That was war. We smashed that collective with all the force that could be applied. Immediately--or soon enough for immediately--the Japs were the Japanese and we were friends. My uncle, who was shot up by the Japs (he just died) in 1943 had a Japanese girlfriend when he fought in B-29s over Korea in the early 1950s. (He left her crying on the dock, but that's another story.)

In considering US foreign policy respecting Israel, the fact that Isreal has nukes means we have to comport ourselves as a nation to that nation as a strong--implicitly strong--ally so Israel won't have a greater felt need to use those nukes when it considers itself endangered. Once the nukes start flying--however delimited--the cat that's been in the bag since Himoshima and Nagasaki will be out plus all the other unintended and unforeseen consequences. This is part and parcel of today's geo-political reality. If it is wanted by the sundry powers that be to let Israel alone to fend for itself--won't that also mean the fascist anti-Semitic liberals (some of them Jews even) do the same?--of course they won't (boycott Israel!)--then Israel gets to do what it feels and thinks it needs to, x the United States, to protect itself. Screw oil wars. They are relative trivials. The Middle East in turn is not half the geo-political problem of the South China Sea and other countries off China's coast. And if anyone doesn't think WWIII--a real WWIII (not The Cold War)--isn't possible thanks to countries other than Russia mucking around in Ukraine, that anyone is dellusional or ignorant.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

You come and I go.

I'm going to be traveling the next two days. I will have a laptop with me, but hardly any time to look at it.

btw - My focus in the Israeli thing is the propaganda. Of course I know not all Jews are Israelis (and not all Israelis are Jews). I was merely bringing to light the true meaning of what people intend when they constantly overemphasize Israel-bashing.

It's bigotry pure and simple.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Michael, while it may be "bigotry pure and simple" there's no argument there. I know envy--I have a little flash of it every now and then (which I analysize to the point of "poof!"--it's gone). The same with bigotry. I just can't gear up enough to write about either very much never having been much on the receiving end--or if being on that not much aware of what was going on.

Barbara Branden got into fights as a girl because of bigotry--yes, anti-Semitism in Canada. I'm not Jewish and I'm not black. Watching the annual rodeo parade in Tucson as a boy a (rare) black woman wended her way through the crowd and another boy shouted out, "Nigger!" It got her in a terrible start and she hurried away. In college the campus journalist--a Jew--out in the open (but only I heard him)--effectively called me an American Nazi because in those days I was a conservative (prior to reading Atlas Shrugged the following summer). Why he thought that made me a Nazi is still beyond me, but that is my only memory of bigotry against me as such though I may have got some for my brains in high school--but that would have been not to a known collective--from some kids of Italian, not Jewish, extraction. I liked the Jewish kids in my high school; there were a lot of them. I knew about Jews becasue of the Holocaust, but had never knowingly experienced any prior to moving east when I was 16.

Barbara once told me about her mother in Russia, how her mother and her family were terrorized by the Cossacks. The anti-Semitism in Europe still seems all over that place including, especially, the so called "intelligentsia" (but really the liberal-fascists) of the left. A lot of true liberalism seems built into the Jewish tribal DNA. Maybe a lot of it is defensive if not appeasement reactive to centuries and centuries of anti-Semitic bigotry with Israel as the current locus-focus for that. How convient for the bigots.

--Brant

white boy

(my father was an anti-war, anti-Semitic American-Firster nationalist to the point of some serious New York City notoriety before I was born--and a German-phile Bristish-phobe of German blood, though he never got as far as the German-American Bund: people like him helped make Roosevelt turn away Jewish refugees from Europe though you might not believe the general level of acceptable bigotries right here [in River City] in the 1930s)

(I'm only posting on this thread this month--if I post again this month at all)

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

Barbara and I would get into it a bit at times (always with love, though). She told me she had worked for the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation (he's the Nazi hunter guy) and the grandfather of my own children was a Muslim. She was very hurt by the hatred leveled at Jews and I could not agree with excessive statements that would damn my own children. You can imagine what some of our discussions were like.

(I really miss her.)

I grew up around bigotry and consciously rejected it. I never could resonate with it anyway.

I want to write more, but I have to finish getting ready and get on the road.

Michael

[Ed Hudgins]

Brant - Nice summary of the Israeli-Jewish situation. And since I'm arguing that judgments must be made in context, here's an obvious one, indeed, one that defines Israel, about Israeli nukes.

Jews have been persecuted and subject to repression and slaughter for millennia. The Zionists from the late 1800s were determined to create a place where Jews could live in peace. The Holocaust confirmed in the most dramatic fashion imaginable how right they were about the dangers. And, of course, Israel was attacked by neighbors at the time of independence and many times since, as well as being subject to terrorist attacks. So the Israeli Jews rightly say, "Never again."

So when they see a threat they deal with it firmly. Period. This is serious shit. This is life and death.

And Israelis know that culture and values matter. They know the soil from which the governments of their neighbors spring. They try to make peace where they can, eg., with Sadat in Egypt. But, as they saying goes, Palestinians never miss and opportunity to miss an opportunity, and have done so for decades.

And the Israelis are not naive. They know that there are millions of Iranians who don't like that country's theocracy and would welcome peace. But they also know that the religious fanatics who rule that country are building nukes which they intend to use to wipe out Israel.

So they have no concern for whining critics half a world away with their fingers dancing across keyboards nitpicking this or that policy. The Israelis have their fingers on different buttons. This is life and death.

And the Israelis indeed prefer life. That tiny country, between 1994 and 2013, racked up a cumulative GDP of over $3 trillion. That's not from foreign aid. That's from wealth creation. We see technological an medical advances coming out of that country every day. For decades the best Israeli policymakers had hoped their country's economic dynamics would lead its neighbors to be peaceful economic partners. They hoped especially that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would make trade, not war.

But that is still a distant dream. So Israel must be diligent.

[Brant Gaede]

Israel let Arafat back into Gaza and has been paying for playing the appeasement game ever since.

--Brant

but the US should not be a player in that--though likely was: The US needs to attend primarily to its own geo-political situation which is much too much interference abroad--not suggesting isolationism is any kind of ideal, but a lessening of foreign entanglements, especially gratuitous ones, over time is

[Mark]

The U.S. government's alliance with Israel is indeed a gratuitous one we would be better off without. I respectfully disagree with Brant that the past history of Israel is irrelevant to us today. Israel has a past history of belligerency, mendacity and deceit towards the U.S. and it should be considered when evaluating current events.

... the fact that Isreal has nukes means we have to comport ourselves as a nation to that nation as a strong--implicitly strong--ally so Israel won't have a greater felt need to use those nukes when it considers itself endangered.

In other words Israel will start World War III unless the U.S. does what Israel wants. If true, this extortion is all the more hateful considering the history of Israel's thermonuclear bomb.

Take it from someone who has read a lot of Jewish apologetics: self deception is part of Jewish culture. Jews steeped in this culture (of course some reject it completely) are able to utter blatant falsehoods such as "everybody hates the Jews," "Jews throughout history have been innocent," "Israel is always hated for its virtues," "a medical advance comes out of Israel every day" with complete sincerity. Their self-deception makes them believable, that is, it makes them good liars.

Speaking of the history of Israel, I’m still waiting for Ed to comment on the attempted assassination of President Truman. I don't think uttering context over and over will help him much.

　

[Brant Gaede]

It's not that Israel would start WWIII by using nukes only that the likelyhood of its using them runs up and down the scale depending on what is going on and it's not desirable to let that genie out of the bottle for it could become commonplace. Consider North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and the western nuclear powers and other yet to be ones.

Did you know some would-be assassins from Puerto Rico almost got Truman in Blair House? At one point only one Secret Service man with a Tommy Gun was between a gunman and the President?

--Brant

no more food stamp aid for Puerto Rico!

Iraq has weapons of MASS DESTRUCTION!!!!!

The Gulf of Tonkin

". .. we shall bear any burden . . . ."

yeah, the state is evil, but why are you chasing Jews around the table?

white men roped a black man and dragged him to his death behind their pickup truck in Texas--care to dump on me for being a white man?

[Mark]

Yes, there were two attempted assassinations of Truman. The proto-Israeli one was the first. (Link provided in my post above.)

Speaking of Iraq, during the Bush administration, Israel's fifth column inside the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans" helped fool Bush and Congress into invading Iraq. Reasonable men are concerned about this even though -- or rather because -- they'd like to be left alone to tend their vegetables.

I chase Christians round the table because I'm sick of their damn lies that ultimately injure me and mine.

I meant to write Jews, excuse me, and it should go without saying that I mean the bad Jews. But even to say bad Jews won't help. If you refer to red balls obviously you don't mean all balls are red, but when the color is bad and the balls are Jews you're an anti-semite.

[Brant Gaede]

I don't think there's any anti-Semitism as such manifested here on OL. I do think there's a lot of implicit resentment of Israel complicating US foreign policy and Jews get thrown into that mix for Israel is a Jewish state. Some libertarians care not a whit for a "socialist" country off a far coast of a major sea, but they want no foreign entanglements whatsoever. Even if that is taken as an ideal it can't be easy getting from here to there and libertarians are notorious for not dealing with the here and now and the getting there. I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to that; it leaves you room for your own life.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I agree there is no explicit anti-Semitism that happens here, but I also know that if someone like me does not step in and say something, the talk starts becoming Jew this and Jew that, or the euphemistic version, Israel this and Israel that.

It reminds me of the Muslim this and Muslim that, or the euphemistic Islam this and Islam that crap I sometimes contest.

The arguments are always the same (nooooo... not meeeeee... this isn't bigotry, it's blah blah blah) and so is the manifest hatred. If you leave it alone, it starts all over... and over... and over...

I can listen to well-reasoned arguments, but not prejudiced talking points from those who never say anything different unless called on it.

If it pisses them off that someone sees this and says it out loud, well,.. it pisses them off.

What they do pisses me off.

Michael

[anthony]

The best thing I can add to this is that Jews now and then can piss me off as much as any other race

religion or people can. No more no less.

Dont ask me about Israelis -my relatives included-

the loudest, brashest, most opinionated bunch, ever.

Ah, but I still love them.

Hmm.

Sometimes.

[BaalChatzaf]

The best thing I can add to this is that Jews now and then can piss me off as much as any other race

religion or people can. No more no less.

Dont ask me about Israelis -my relatives included-

the loudest, brashest, most opinionated bunch, ever.

Ah, but I still love them.

Hmm.

Sometimes.

It goes like this. There are very few Jewish boys who are born without a smart-ass gene. It is the bane and the glory of My People.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Ed Hudgins]

Michael – I again thank you—and on this thread, Brant—for bringing reason and balance to the discourse. I tend to post my pieces and then go on to other pieces or TAS projects; I just don’t have the time to spend in long discussions and, in cases where I judge interlocutors to be beyond hope, it is a waste of my time.

But I’ve offered additional thoughts here because we see manifest a problem all-to-prevalent among some libertarians and Objectivists: the dropping of context, the inability to deal with complex situations because of a tendency to want to fit every issue into a black-white straightjacket when, in fact, there are shades of gray, though some of those shades are darker and some clearly lighter.

In the discussion here, we don’t see a back and forth over, say, wisdom or folly of Israel’s settlement policies on the West Bank (I say it’s the latter). We see the same sort of moral equivalence error of those who argued decades ago that there was little difference between the Soviet Union and the United States. After all, The U.S. repressed blacks, abused Native Americans, blah, blah, blah.

I appreciate that part of the problem is the desire of libertarians to fit a complex reality to any overly-simplistic ideology concerning the nature of the world.

But I also argue that there is an epistemological problem, a failure of reason.

One of my longer-term projects is to develop materials for teaching and training in thinking and judgment from childhood on. This is not just logic classes. It would certainly build on insights of Montessori but it would be much more. It would involve training against the psycho-epistemological errors outlined so well in Shermer’s The Believing Brain. It would take account of the work in recent decades concerning how a child’s mind actually develops. Exciting stuff, but that’s for a future book!

[Brant Gaede]

There's a basic confusion manifest here and elsewhere about Jews, foreign policy and Israel--to wit, foreign policy is properly nation to nation and what individuals do and say respecting that is an adjunct or derivative or irrelevant.

Israel is behaving precisely like the little country it is--or trying to--respecting other nations and all the extant bearing-down-on-sundry forces, and it must, can and will push back. Power butts up against power. To inform, say, US policies toward Israel in terms of these persons or those persons is noise, usually noxious. Perceived self interest butts up against perceived self interest in terms of actual power all over the world in various ways and diplomacy without any power or strength behind it is also noise--ineffectual noise at that.

To attack Israel in terms of what Jews do is simply circular for it ignores what really makes things go round, namely Jews are human beings, just like the rest of us are human beings in the precise sense aliens from Mars could not or ever be. Everybody deserves their humanity, even Hitler. But Hitler deserving his humanity means that in the name of humanity he is to be held accountable to the point of killing him, but not because he was German or even a Nazi, but because he grossly traduced himself to the point of murdering Jews (and others) because they were Jews, which is, again, circular. To prepare for the Holocaust to come the Nazis first dehumanized the Jews. Hitler was never dehumanized, he was always judged as a human being and found more and more wanting, but not completely. That's why he put a bullet in his brain. It was the only humanity he had left. Murder-suicide. A pitiful moral gesture so small you need a microscope to discern it--both the gesture and the humanity. We would have to let the man from Mars off the moral hook, even while killing the invading men from Mars (or bacteria infecting a body), not that SOB. Yes, to basically dehumanize even a Hitler is circular. (Hitler is Hitler is evil [wrong], Hitler is a human being is Hitler is evil

.)

This is the source of bigotry generally and anti-Semitism specifically: the refusal to see and acknowledge the basic humanity of people of the Jewish faith or ethnicity. Same, same, elsewhere: some members of different Muslim sects go at each other tooth and nail, for instance.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

... I’ve offered additional thoughts here because we see manifest a problem all-to-prevalent among some libertarians and Objectivists: the dropping of context, the inability to deal with complex situations because of a tendency to want to fit every issue into a black-white straightjacket when, in fact, there are shades of gray, though some of those shades are darker and some clearly lighter.

Ed,

To overextend the metaphor, there is black and white and there is gray. Both exist. But I find often people who think in one metaphor or the other (things are only black and white or things are only shades of gray) miss something bigger. There is the entire spectrum of color.

One of my longer-term projects is to develop materials for teaching and training in thinking and judgment from childhood on. This is not just logic classes. It would certainly build on insights of Montessori but it would be much more. It would involve training against the psycho-epistemological errors outlined so well in Shermer’s The Believing Brain. It would take account of the work in recent decades concerning how a child’s mind actually develops. Exciting stuff, but that’s for a future book!

I am convinced that we think in stories at root. Stories come before concepts and they frame our concepts, but discussing this goes well beyond the scope here. I wish you well on your project and I humbly suggest you look into storytelling.

Because I can't resist saying something, here is a surprising direction I have been looking into.

The Department of the Defense is on board with neuroscience and story. If you get a chance, look into a relatively recent DARPA project called Narrative Networks. It's fairly hard to come by anything on this program other than a 2011 request for proposals (for The Neurobiology of Narratives and a lot of news articles at the time worrying about DARPA getting into mixing neuroscience with propaganda, see here and here for typical examples, and here for a later and slightly better version from the BBC) but I have found an increasing set of articles I have been collecting on narrative and defense topics that has been sponsored by the government. An early one (from 2005) is Storytelling and Terrorism: Towards a Comprehensive 'Counter- Narrative Strategy' (that link is a PDF) by Dr. William Casebeer, who is in charge of the Narrative Networks project.

I just ordered The Believing Brain by Schermer because you talked about it--and it looks pretty good. The only problem I have with the evolutionary biology approach to cognitive errors is that the evolutionary biology folks tell imaginary stories of the past (generally pretty good suppositions like a man running from saber-tooth tigers and so forth), then use them to explain the development of the different parts of the brain in terms of thinking that favored survival and/or reproduction. Apropos, there's a guy who does evolutionary biology on the mating end I like a lot, Geoffrey Miller. (See The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature and Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior.)

This does not take into account neuroplasticity (physically changing the brain through thinking alone), which I believe might have been with the human race for a long, long time. And if that is the case, the primary shaper of the brain's development would have been (and still is) stories, not just experience. fMRI scans are currently showing that stories seemingly simultaneously interconnect more areas of the brain than almost any other directed mental activity. And they sync the fMRI results between the brains of listeners and tellers in real time (see here for example).

Just the release in the brain of oxytocin (the feel good hormone) from stories alone is enough to see a physical effect on the brain at the immediate hormone-secreting range.

Incidentally, the following has little to do with this post, but as I was hunting down DARPA links (and going even further down the rabbit hole than I already have gone), I came across a most interesting dude, a guy named John Robb.

He wrote a book called Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. I just got that, but that's not why I think he is interesting. He is apparently doing his next book on the American Dream--here is his blog where he is developing his ideas: Home Free America. He wrote an entry that described the American Dream and enlightened self-interest in terms that are practically Objectivist: Why the People Running Our Economy are Clueless. Here's a quote from that post (which is worth reading in its entirety--the book he refers to is the one he is writing):

Here’s a classic example from the testimony of Alan Greenspan to Congress in relation to the 2008 financial crisis. Alan was, arguably, the person with the most power over the economic system in the world, for over a decade. Yet as you will see in the testimony, he’s completely clueless. In it, he professes that he didn't understand why so many bankers, acting out of rational self interest, didn’t do the right thing.

Alan Greenspan: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

Congressman: “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”

Alan Greenspan: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I've been very distressed by that fact.”

Of course, it is understandable why Alan is confused. His entire life is built on the study of economics. Economics is a soft academic science that is predicated on the idea that people act solely on the basis of rational self interest, and that the economy produces wealth only because people act in this manner. Of course, as this book has proven again and again, this assumption is a terrible error. A falsehood and a lie we've been told again and again until people think its true.

Capitalism doesn’t produce wealth because people are greedy or selfish to a fault. Capitalism does it because people are building a better life for themselves by following the structure and discipline of the American Dream. Economic independence is one indicator this pursuit is working, but so is the ability to build a product or deliver a service that makes it possible for other people to improve their lives too.

I like this explanation because it puts value-for-value trade in different terms.

As to the American Dream, this is a core story just like religions have their core stories. And it's a good one.

According to my thinking right now, I don't think people believe the weird things you find in religion because of cognitive biases and overused heuristics, etc., that evolved from cavemen running from hostile dinosaurs.

I think people accept these implausible beliefs within the core stories they use for their lives simply because they have not found better stories that work for them.

From this perspective, Rand did mankind a huge benefit by creating a new core story in Atlas Shrugged. Her book sales show that AS--which has the best story of all her writing--resonates with book buyers far more than any of her other books. And, to the chagrin of people who promote visions of the future based on other core stories, the damn book--that damn new core story--just won't go away.

To get back to your quote from the beginning of this post, if you want your shades of gray and context and the like, it's OK to look to reality. That's the typical approach when discussing values in O-Land. But that hardly ever works as a full explanation. At least it does not persuade many folks. I say look at the core stories people use to frame their lives. That starts to explain a hell of a lot. And if you get them to change their core stories, you don't need to do anything else to persuade them. They do the rest on their own.

Michael