What a way to black-pill peace-loving hippies and get them scared that their own parties could get crashed at any time by murderous barbarians ready to torture and kill them without a second thought! It's enough to make them remove the "coexist" bumper stickers and start calling for a form of jihad on those who have shattered their illusions and given them these terrifying nightmares.
Oct 12, 2023·edited Oct 12, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
> They include things your friends are saying, and your propensity to agree with your friends for social acceptance.
I do end up losing a lot of friends by being unwilling to do this. :-/
Though that same character trait, inverted, does nicely immunize me against pitching my phone in a ditch when someone I like says stuff I disagree with. Not that I actually disagreed with any of this, but it's an amusing image. :D
The echo chamber phenomenon is an outcome of Gideon’s First Law of Sociology, which states “No one thinks of themselves as the bad guy.” Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, mass murders all, likely saw themselves as just doing what needed to be done. As for me and my house, beheading babies pretty clearly defines who the bad guys were this past weekend. My best guess is that Hamas was doing its best to be an example of outrageous behavior simply to poke Israel into behavior that the “best and brightest of the international community”, as they style themselves, will scream about in their favorite echo chamber.
Follow the youtube video. If they wanted to start the worst war possible and do their very best to drag every element of the international community into it, they would kill young beautiful girls, behead babies, and take international hostages. Which is what they did. So depending on their goals, this was a perfectly executed operation achieving it's exact objective. Something to think about.
I wonder how that covers people like me though. I mean ya, I’m sad that happened. However, I could really care less in the grand scheme of things about either of those two countries. I really only care about our country. I don’t want to see us in another war. I’m also sad for the Americans that may or may not have been killed or taken hostage over there. However I think everyone know the risk of being in those countries and what could happen. It’s a gamble they took and sometimes there is consequences. Should possibly thousands more of our American youth be killed in a war because 20-30 some got killed or taken hostage? Is that worth it? I’m more about isolate the warring parties and let them fight it themselves. Tired of seeing our treasure (our youth and taxes) get wasted on other countries troubles. Let’s protect our own borders for a start.
Without getting into right or wrong, because boy that's a deep, ugly hole, this was all an inevitable conclusion when Israel did not exercise its Right by Conquest in 1967. By instead employing what they surely saw as compassion and mercy (concepts generally foreign to middle-east warfare, and human warfare in general prior to the 20th century) and not expelling the Palestinian refugees living there from the territory formerly held by Egypt, they created the inevitability of this October's events, one way or another. Israel made this shit sandwich and someone's going to have to eat it.
Sometimes the choice that is cruel today is merciful to the next five generations.
You don't seem to grasp the fact that the Zionist terrorists that founded Israel depended completely on complex global geopolitics to carry out the dirty deed.
In one sense Israel is little more than a colonial outpost of the West, requiring a western sponsor, thus also requiring a lot of fakery about modern, western norms about ["democracy", ] human rights and that kind of stuff.
My late father was a senior USAF officer (originally a fighter pilot) in the Pentagon that organized air lifts into Israel during several of the Arab-Israeli wars in the early 1970s. He came back from one of those missions and told my mom that the Israelis were "within one day of running out of bullets".
In other words, without the USA's resupply of weapons/bullets, the Arabs would have crushed the Zionists, won the war and "exercised" their "right to conquest" by exterminating the Zionist state. OR, the USA/NATO would have started bombing the Arabs, possibly drawing in Eqypt, the USSR and maybe causing WW3.
" ... dangerously heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, and a second ceasefire was imposed cooperatively on 25 October 1973, to officially end the war.
...
... 1979 Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty, marking the first instance that an Arab country recognized Israel as a legitimate state. Following the achievement of peace with Israel, Egypt continued its drift away from the Soviet Union and eventually left the Soviet sphere of influence entirely."
Also, won't bother getting into all the analysis of faked and manipulated photos, with the rubber dolls and so forth. Even fake atrocities can provoke genuine outrage. This is all very old and basic pys-war stuff.
But, gotta wonder... does game theory really still apply if the whole conflict is fake, and there aren't actually separate interests, just a big Hegelian hoodwink?
I'm a practical person. I don't see much difference in beheading a baby, strangling a baby, running a baby over with a truck, and shooting a baby. It's all just dead babies to me.
Well, sure. But I hope you're not so "practical" that you can't tell the difference between real dead babies and fake dead babies. If that doesn't matter, then there's really nothing left to talk about.
The statement from the Israeli government was that they could not confirm the story, apparently originating with i24 reporter Nicole Zedek, about the forty dead babies of Kfar Aza; full stop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kfar_Aza_massacre
The current official line is that some undisclosed number of children were among those killed, but they won't show us any pictures. Well, except maybe this clearly fake one? http://mileswmathis.com/40babies.pdf
The Nayirah Testimony is prior art, you can find that on Wikipedia too. If you're going to do hot takes in this media environment, you should exercise some caution.
Assuming that the 1600 years of Islamic history, including hostility with Jews, isn't completely a Hegelian blue/red pill matrix created by time travelers, at what point did that history go from being "real" conflict to hoodwink conflict?
When Jews were expelled from Spain by Christians during the Inquisitions and were taken in by the Ottomans?
At the partition of the Ottoman Empire after WW1?
With the Brits giving in to insane Zionist terrorists after WW@ and withdrawing?
When the Zionists stopped buying military equipment from the French in the 1960s and switched to the USA as their supplier?
When Zelensky stated openly and in public that he wants "Ukraine to be a big Israel"?
So the morality is all in the method of choice when one kills babies? Good to know. To clarify, in a practical sense, does that change how one gets charged? Does 1st degree or say aggravated murder get lowered down to a misdemeanor if the head is intact?
In a practical sense, one gets one's entire neighborhood bombed into the very same collateral smithereens on the basis of a real infanticide, a faked photo of an infanticide, or a broken-telephone exaggerated rumor of an infanticide. Hope that helps!
Previously you have defined Moloch as "undesirable saddle points in real-life game theory" but I would quibble with that definition a bit. I think the concept of Moloch includes the idea that tech advancement creates *new* undesirable saddle points. That is, when tech progresses, it creates new ways for people to sell their souls for silver. But I think most rationalists would also agree that technological progress also offers the possibility of new and interesting ways out of these saddle points. I think most people would agree that life today *can be* more rich and meaningful than life 100,000 yrs ago, even though we have more ways to fail. Extending this to your argument about the Israel/Palestine conflict, it seems very possible that new developments could enable new solutions there, even if it is a game-theoretic saddle point.
It's possible. A large percentage of the population has been so jaded by covid that their immediate reaction to anything in the news is "lol false flag psyop". Trust in institutions continues to erode, and the internet (while certainly not perfect) allows for a much more complete story than people had about 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. The old tricks might not work anymore.
The damage done to trust levels through covid disinformation and the following business, in broad strokes throughout society, cannot be underestimated.
I sometimes wonder how different it would be if the pandemic had not hit on an election year with one of the most polarizing set of candidates ever presented.
There probably isn't a good one, but can you cite an example that is generally similar and a good metaphor?
Have you seen Warby of Oz's substack article on the anthropology and evolutionary archetypes (psychological archetypes) involved?
Gerhard Lenski's ecological-evolutionary theory of social evolution, used by Ken Wilber, indicates that the climate, environment, economic modes and geopolitics of trade routes will lock in a "cultural gravity well" that sucks everything modern down into a sh1thole of regressive tribalism.
Can you link to the Warby article you’re referring to? I have read some of his stuff and generally find it interesting.
I also agree that Lenskis theory is relevant, but I wouldn’t characterize it as saying everything leads to Tribalism. New technologies lead to new cultures and vice versa.
As for an example, one that comes to mind is the impact of the printing press. Obviously had many consequences, but one was the end of Catholic dominance and the eventual unification of Germany. It took new technology and cataclysmic conflict to end some of the longstanding rivalries and conflicts.
Lenski's theory has to be turned into a mirror, reversed, to see how disruption leads to disintegration to regression to tribalism. Ronfeldt (TIMN model) explicitly describes such reverse evolution/regression, so he is probably a better reference.
The article has no moral value. Guilty as charged. Reading it seeking moral value, after being briefed repeatedly that it has none, was a misguided attempt. I'm sorry your time was wasted on it.
The author denies any intention of making a (moral) equivalency argument. But the argument he does make indeed lacks historical reality, handily dispensed with as follows: "The history of the Israel/Palestine conflict is so tortured and complicated that I'm going to skip it." Right-o.
What lie do you mean? The first sentence of my reply to Ian Vaughan notes his error in ascribing to the author the intention of making an argument based on moral equivalency. The second agrees with Ian Vaughan's assessment that the author's argument lacks historical reality.
Blocking in substack doesn't have any effect in "newsletter" comments sections, only Notes.
You edited some books, but didn't integrate the idea of meta-narrative analysis into your thinking??? Hopefully you did satisfy your need for ego gratification for a little while while doing something that crucial and socially meaningful.
But you can't even make your point in a coherent way, so "academics". zzzzzzzz
Show that you understand the "historical reality" of using meta-narrative analysis to transcend the quicksand of subjective-emotive narratives.
Otherwise, you appear to be just another egregore junkie, too addicted to moral outrage to think rationally (or meta-rationally).
If you really don't care about any of the particular details or history of the specific ongoing spectacle, and just want to flex some "systems analysis", why not talk about, say, the Hatfields and McCoys? Or that Dr Seuss book about the Yooks and the Zooks, or whatever. It's just distracting!
By the way, the Hatfield-McCoy conflict did actually come to an end. Sometimes these things aren't as interminable as they seem.
The Prophet Jeremiah criticizes the insane war mongers in Jewish leadership (predicting the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians?), and in response, is "cancelled" by those insane war mongers.
Arguing by assertion, twice ("This is not an equivalency argument"), you've created a nice little unfalsifiable hypothesis. Good work. You've even included a Kafka trap: "Your sensemaking apparatus has been compromised." Bravo. And who would not appreciate your acknowledging the "right to be outraged"? Big of you.
1) Ayn Rand would probably support Israel, but also
2) "this article is going to lose its publication subscribers"
Before publication I figured I'd have at least 5 response threads phrased like yours. So far I've got 2. I expect 3 more. If you want to unsubscribe, that's fine, but I also wonder if you would have taken the article differently if it was published a month ago, or a month from now.
I suppose Ayn Rand would have supported Israel, though I don't see what that has to do with my comment. Also, I have not unsubscribed. And no one can know how I or anyone else would have "taken" the article a month ago or a month from now, but I think my perception of your argument's structure would have been the same. And of course (see above) my response "was predicted repeatedly in the article." That's how an unfalsifiable little machine works.
Honestly, I think that people are just born to fight. We love a good scrap and a challenge, we don't back down from one in order to not look weak, and over time, we become dependent on having windmills to tilt at - either because we want to or we need to to make money off of them.
I think, frankly, that this fight is part of their identity and happens to be useful to outsiders. I'm willing to take a chance that my grandchildren will still be hearing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East (I'm 27).
My thoughts on people being born to fight something:
Samuel Bowles' 2008 Ulam lectures at Santa Fe Institute did a deep dive into the evolution of tribal/kinship group wars in ancient human populations. Bowles' team did a bunch of computer modeling, and came to the conclusion, similarly with other sociologists, that war is:
1. old as dirt
2. violent conflict *between* competing kinship groups (tribes) is an important force for creating more social cooperation and altruism *within* a given kinship group.
3. the more social cooperation and altruism within a kinship group (gene pool) the better chances that group has for outcompeting other groups. INHIBITION of "primitive" emotions and instincts by individuals was crucial in the domestication of humans. The part of the human that facilitate inhibition of primitive instincts grew larger under evolutionary selection.
Conclusion: as E.O. Wilson said "the human species is dysfunctional"
In addition, around the time of the Bronze Age collapse, the biological tendency toward inhibition was "upgraded" by the emergence of contemplative spirituality and religion. That allowed for more social order in walled city state societies with complex social hierarchies, honor systems, etc.
I too cannot get emotional about this. Fox News and the media generally has been a textbook case of dehumanizing the enemy and condemning atrocity by accepting different atrocity. I am sympathetic with the everyday people on both sides and hostile to the warpigs on both sides. Most of the people I hear condemning evil are justifying other evil. Evil is this purely destructive attitude seemingly taking over the world. The only good I can see coming from this would be Americans rejecting eternal war and returning to take care of family, friends, community and the local land and waters.
yep. some israeli officials and other insane zionist extremists are now openly calling for the starvation of up to approximately one million children in Gaza.
I mention hawks in reference to both sides, as well as other sides in other conflicts, not to exclude the ramifications of 9-11, Pearl Harbor, and such.
As far as Bibi's unity government is concerned, that's generally what folks do in Israel.
I understand, even if that is “what folks do in Israel”; and I even would agree that Bibi is “hawkish,” at least in regards to how we would use the term defense hawk here in America.
What I allege is that your specific definition of “hawks,” the aspect that they “trade blood for power,” seems to be falsified (at least in this instance) when Bibi went out of his way to give up some power and form an emergency government.
So either your definition or your specific application of it to him is incorrect.
He can only pretend to be a brutal dictator, so by getting "centrists" on his side in a fake "unity" govt, he gains legitimacy for whatever hawkish blood lust stuff he thinks he can get away with within limits, which include the limits of USA support.
The fact that Israel is ruled by a deeply corrupt fake brutal dictator that runs an Apartheid system is appalling and just another of many examples of the grotesque absurdity of a country that has no (formal) "right to exist".
re: meta-narrative analysis vs tribalistic regression/insanity
I had a big argument with an Iranian-American Jew that grew up in Israel, now in the USA, on my facebook timeline if anyone needs an example of the complete insanity and lies that brainwashed, radical Zionist extremists use in their rhetorical structure.
I'm sure it would be easy to find similar on the "other side".
Note: this* is very resonant of the decades of arguments I saw in the Baha'i community between traditionalists vs western liberals.
... a pretty good analysis of the anthropology of religion in the middle east and how it differentiates basic, archetypal assumptions about east-west conflicts by Warby of Oz (academic) ...
The brilliant Warby of Oz writes one of the best, most accessible anthropological explanations of Islam I've ever read.
fwiw, I studied esoteric Twelver-Shi'ism for several decades, along with middle eastern history.
more stuff:
The Prophet Jeremiah criticizes the insane war mongers in Jewish leadership (predicting the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians?), and in response, is "cancelled" by those insane war mongers.
It is.... Sad? Curious? Notable? Unbelievable? 4 months on and the US govt, the US media has yet to make a stink about US hostages taken and held by Hamas. Where is the daily ticker, 'x days since...'? On a tribal level, on a human level, on a national pride level...we just don't care? It would be a whole new horror upon liberation to discover nobody gave a damn. Is it a reflection of living in a virtual online world where every next thing is a momentary outrage that can't sustain concern?
Moloch cares not from where the blood flows, only that it does.
But preferably from babies and cute girls at psy-trance festivals.
What a way to black-pill peace-loving hippies and get them scared that their own parties could get crashed at any time by murderous barbarians ready to torture and kill them without a second thought! It's enough to make them remove the "coexist" bumper stickers and start calling for a form of jihad on those who have shattered their illusions and given them these terrifying nightmares.
At the very minimum, contemplating Moloch on acid will ruin a trip.
> They include things your friends are saying, and your propensity to agree with your friends for social acceptance.
I do end up losing a lot of friends by being unwilling to do this. :-/
Though that same character trait, inverted, does nicely immunize me against pitching my phone in a ditch when someone I like says stuff I disagree with. Not that I actually disagreed with any of this, but it's an amusing image. :D
The echo chamber phenomenon is an outcome of Gideon’s First Law of Sociology, which states “No one thinks of themselves as the bad guy.” Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, mass murders all, likely saw themselves as just doing what needed to be done. As for me and my house, beheading babies pretty clearly defines who the bad guys were this past weekend. My best guess is that Hamas was doing its best to be an example of outrageous behavior simply to poke Israel into behavior that the “best and brightest of the international community”, as they style themselves, will scream about in their favorite echo chamber.
Follow the youtube video. If they wanted to start the worst war possible and do their very best to drag every element of the international community into it, they would kill young beautiful girls, behead babies, and take international hostages. Which is what they did. So depending on their goals, this was a perfectly executed operation achieving it's exact objective. Something to think about.
I wonder how that covers people like me though. I mean ya, I’m sad that happened. However, I could really care less in the grand scheme of things about either of those two countries. I really only care about our country. I don’t want to see us in another war. I’m also sad for the Americans that may or may not have been killed or taken hostage over there. However I think everyone know the risk of being in those countries and what could happen. It’s a gamble they took and sometimes there is consequences. Should possibly thousands more of our American youth be killed in a war because 20-30 some got killed or taken hostage? Is that worth it? I’m more about isolate the warring parties and let them fight it themselves. Tired of seeing our treasure (our youth and taxes) get wasted on other countries troubles. Let’s protect our own borders for a start.
Without getting into right or wrong, because boy that's a deep, ugly hole, this was all an inevitable conclusion when Israel did not exercise its Right by Conquest in 1967. By instead employing what they surely saw as compassion and mercy (concepts generally foreign to middle-east warfare, and human warfare in general prior to the 20th century) and not expelling the Palestinian refugees living there from the territory formerly held by Egypt, they created the inevitability of this October's events, one way or another. Israel made this shit sandwich and someone's going to have to eat it.
Sometimes the choice that is cruel today is merciful to the next five generations.
You don't seem to grasp the fact that the Zionist terrorists that founded Israel depended completely on complex global geopolitics to carry out the dirty deed.
In one sense Israel is little more than a colonial outpost of the West, requiring a western sponsor, thus also requiring a lot of fakery about modern, western norms about ["democracy", ] human rights and that kind of stuff.
My late father was a senior USAF officer (originally a fighter pilot) in the Pentagon that organized air lifts into Israel during several of the Arab-Israeli wars in the early 1970s. He came back from one of those missions and told my mom that the Israelis were "within one day of running out of bullets".
In other words, without the USA's resupply of weapons/bullets, the Arabs would have crushed the Zionists, won the war and "exercised" their "right to conquest" by exterminating the Zionist state. OR, the USA/NATO would have started bombing the Arabs, possibly drawing in Eqypt, the USSR and maybe causing WW3.
web search: "ussr client state support eqypt 1960s 1970s"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War
excerpts:
" ... dangerously heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, and a second ceasefire was imposed cooperatively on 25 October 1973, to officially end the war.
...
... 1979 Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty, marking the first instance that an Arab country recognized Israel as a legitimate state. Following the achievement of peace with Israel, Egypt continued its drift away from the Soviet Union and eventually left the Soviet sphere of influence entirely."
I don't mean to diminish the rhetorical impact of your argument, but the beheaded babies thing is pretty thoroughly debunked by now: https://moneycircus.substack.com/p/insight-beheaded-babies-is-a-century
Also, won't bother getting into all the analysis of faked and manipulated photos, with the rubber dolls and so forth. Even fake atrocities can provoke genuine outrage. This is all very old and basic pys-war stuff.
But, gotta wonder... does game theory really still apply if the whole conflict is fake, and there aren't actually separate interests, just a big Hegelian hoodwink?
Interesting. I was under the impression that the beheaded baby count was vastly lower than the 20 originally claimed, but yet was still nonzero.
If you find any reasonably solid evidence of even one beheaded baby, please let us know.
The Israeli government has backed away from the claim, but it continues to spread.
I'm a practical person. I don't see much difference in beheading a baby, strangling a baby, running a baby over with a truck, and shooting a baby. It's all just dead babies to me.
Well, sure. But I hope you're not so "practical" that you can't tell the difference between real dead babies and fake dead babies. If that doesn't matter, then there's really nothing left to talk about.
I was under the impression that the retraction, if any, was that the dead babies weren't beheaded, not that there were no dead babies. Am I in error?
The statement from the Israeli government was that they could not confirm the story, apparently originating with i24 reporter Nicole Zedek, about the forty dead babies of Kfar Aza; full stop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kfar_Aza_massacre
The current official line is that some undisclosed number of children were among those killed, but they won't show us any pictures. Well, except maybe this clearly fake one? http://mileswmathis.com/40babies.pdf
The Nayirah Testimony is prior art, you can find that on Wikipedia too. If you're going to do hot takes in this media environment, you should exercise some caution.
Assuming that the 1600 years of Islamic history, including hostility with Jews, isn't completely a Hegelian blue/red pill matrix created by time travelers, at what point did that history go from being "real" conflict to hoodwink conflict?
When Jews were expelled from Spain by Christians during the Inquisitions and were taken in by the Ottomans?
At the partition of the Ottoman Empire after WW1?
With the Brits giving in to insane Zionist terrorists after WW@ and withdrawing?
When the Zionists stopped buying military equipment from the French in the 1960s and switched to the USA as their supplier?
When Zelensky stated openly and in public that he wants "Ukraine to be a big Israel"?
How about when Shin Bet created Hamas as a way to destabilize and unseat the PLO?
https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-israel-created-hamas.html
Plenty of hoodwinks to go around. You'd have to be more specific.
So the morality is all in the method of choice when one kills babies? Good to know. To clarify, in a practical sense, does that change how one gets charged? Does 1st degree or say aggravated murder get lowered down to a misdemeanor if the head is intact?
In a practical sense, one gets one's entire neighborhood bombed into the very same collateral smithereens on the basis of a real infanticide, a faked photo of an infanticide, or a broken-telephone exaggerated rumor of an infanticide. Hope that helps!
Another HWFO masterpiece. Thank you.
Previously you have defined Moloch as "undesirable saddle points in real-life game theory" but I would quibble with that definition a bit. I think the concept of Moloch includes the idea that tech advancement creates *new* undesirable saddle points. That is, when tech progresses, it creates new ways for people to sell their souls for silver. But I think most rationalists would also agree that technological progress also offers the possibility of new and interesting ways out of these saddle points. I think most people would agree that life today *can be* more rich and meaningful than life 100,000 yrs ago, even though we have more ways to fail. Extending this to your argument about the Israel/Palestine conflict, it seems very possible that new developments could enable new solutions there, even if it is a game-theoretic saddle point.
It's possible. A large percentage of the population has been so jaded by covid that their immediate reaction to anything in the news is "lol false flag psyop". Trust in institutions continues to erode, and the internet (while certainly not perfect) allows for a much more complete story than people had about 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. The old tricks might not work anymore.
the population in the middle east?
The damage done to trust levels through covid disinformation and the following business, in broad strokes throughout society, cannot be underestimated.
I sometimes wonder how different it would be if the pandemic had not hit on an election year with one of the most polarizing set of candidates ever presented.
There probably isn't a good one, but can you cite an example that is generally similar and a good metaphor?
Have you seen Warby of Oz's substack article on the anthropology and evolutionary archetypes (psychological archetypes) involved?
Gerhard Lenski's ecological-evolutionary theory of social evolution, used by Ken Wilber, indicates that the climate, environment, economic modes and geopolitics of trade routes will lock in a "cultural gravity well" that sucks everything modern down into a sh1thole of regressive tribalism.
Can you link to the Warby article you’re referring to? I have read some of his stuff and generally find it interesting.
I also agree that Lenskis theory is relevant, but I wouldn’t characterize it as saying everything leads to Tribalism. New technologies lead to new cultures and vice versa.
As for an example, one that comes to mind is the impact of the printing press. Obviously had many consequences, but one was the end of Catholic dominance and the eventual unification of Germany. It took new technology and cataclysmic conflict to end some of the longstanding rivalries and conflicts.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/hamas-displays-a-muslim-way-of-war
Lenski's theory has to be turned into a mirror, reversed, to see how disruption leads to disintegration to regression to tribalism. Ronfeldt (TIMN model) explicitly describes such reverse evolution/regression, so he is probably a better reference.
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/david-ronfeldts-timn-and-the-four-forms-of-governance/2009/05/20
both Bauwens and Ronfeldt are on substack!
Your attempt at moral equivalency fails from a lack of historical reality.
^^ This response was predicted repeatedly in the article.
Which demonstrates your uncertainty of the moral value of your article.
The article has no moral value. Guilty as charged. Reading it seeking moral value, after being briefed repeatedly that it has none, was a misguided attempt. I'm sorry your time was wasted on it.
I'll go one further. My entire Substack publication has no moral value, and that's almost entirely the point of it.
The author denies any intention of making a (moral) equivalency argument. But the argument he does make indeed lacks historical reality, handily dispensed with as follows: "The history of the Israel/Palestine conflict is so tortured and complicated that I'm going to skip it." Right-o.
I'm on hour 8 of MartyrMade's 23 hour rendition of the history of Zionism through 1947. https://martyrmade.com/fear-loathing-in-the-new-jerusalem/
I think it's totally fair of the author to jump past all that and get to his point.
Winning comment of the day.
Not the point. But have fun. ‘Bye.
Where’s the lie though? Shit’s been fucked for centuries.
What lie do you mean? The first sentence of my reply to Ian Vaughan notes his error in ascribing to the author the intention of making an argument based on moral equivalency. The second agrees with Ian Vaughan's assessment that the author's argument lacks historical reality.
"Historical reality" according to what particular narrative as conditioned by cultural narratives, propaganda, brainwashing, etc.?
The whole point of meta-narrative analysis and systems theory is to escape from the quicksand of confirmation biases and propaganda.
Do you understand the "historical reality" of systems theory???
Yes. I co-edited four books on systems theory. Probably a good thing for you that you blocked me. LOL.
again:
re: "morals"
Israeli officials and other insane zionist extremists are now openly calling for the starvation of up to approximately one million children in Gaza.
Blocking in substack doesn't have any effect in "newsletter" comments sections, only Notes.
You edited some books, but didn't integrate the idea of meta-narrative analysis into your thinking??? Hopefully you did satisfy your need for ego gratification for a little while while doing something that crucial and socially meaningful.
But you can't even make your point in a coherent way, so "academics". zzzzzzzz
Show that you understand the "historical reality" of using meta-narrative analysis to transcend the quicksand of subjective-emotive narratives.
Otherwise, you appear to be just another egregore junkie, too addicted to moral outrage to think rationally (or meta-rationally).
re: "morals"
Israeli officials and other insane zionist extremists are now openly calling for the starvation of up to approximately one million children in Gaza.
If you really don't care about any of the particular details or history of the specific ongoing spectacle, and just want to flex some "systems analysis", why not talk about, say, the Hatfields and McCoys? Or that Dr Seuss book about the Yooks and the Zooks, or whatever. It's just distracting!
By the way, the Hatfield-McCoy conflict did actually come to an end. Sometimes these things aren't as interminable as they seem.
vacuous drivel
You're right, of course. And what's more, it's in remarkably poor taste.
Here, have something sober and relevant:
https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/hamas-israel-and-the-devil-on-my
Need more outrage? OK, fine:
https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/nobody-can-support-this-once-they
learn how to say something worth reading, tr0ll.
Whatever, angry guy with nothing better to do than monopolize substack threads. You're not exactly putting your best foot forward here.
More vacuous drivel. Stop wasting time with your ridiculous need for sleazy ego gratification.
The Prophet Jeremiah criticizes the insane war mongers in Jewish leadership (predicting the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians?), and in response, is "cancelled" by those insane war mongers.
https://www.tikkun.org/was-jeremiah-a-failure/
www. tikkun. org /was-jeremiah-a-failure/
Arguing by assertion, twice ("This is not an equivalency argument"), you've created a nice little unfalsifiable hypothesis. Good work. You've even included a Kafka trap: "Your sensemaking apparatus has been compromised." Bravo. And who would not appreciate your acknowledging the "right to be outraged"? Big of you.
^^ This response was predicted repeatedly in the article as well.
I admire so much of your work here on Substack. But this post reads like the work of a middle-school dude who has just discovered Ayn Rand.
1) Ayn Rand would probably support Israel, but also
2) "this article is going to lose its publication subscribers"
Before publication I figured I'd have at least 5 response threads phrased like yours. So far I've got 2. I expect 3 more. If you want to unsubscribe, that's fine, but I also wonder if you would have taken the article differently if it was published a month ago, or a month from now.
I suppose Ayn Rand would have supported Israel, though I don't see what that has to do with my comment. Also, I have not unsubscribed. And no one can know how I or anyone else would have "taken" the article a month ago or a month from now, but I think my perception of your argument's structure would have been the same. And of course (see above) my response "was predicted repeatedly in the article." That's how an unfalsifiable little machine works.
Low/zero reading comprehension.
PROJECTION
LOL
b0t
Appreciate this piece very much. One of only two I've read since last weekend that were worth the opportunity cost.
Honestly, I think that people are just born to fight. We love a good scrap and a challenge, we don't back down from one in order to not look weak, and over time, we become dependent on having windmills to tilt at - either because we want to or we need to to make money off of them.
I think, frankly, that this fight is part of their identity and happens to be useful to outsiders. I'm willing to take a chance that my grandchildren will still be hearing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East (I'm 27).
My thoughts on people being born to fight something:
https://open.substack.com/pub/argomend/p/the-good-fight?r=28g8km&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
An entire section of my site dedicated to how we are information overloaded and how we're not dealing with it:
https://argomend.substack.com/t/communication-overhead
Samuel Bowles' 2008 Ulam lectures at Santa Fe Institute did a deep dive into the evolution of tribal/kinship group wars in ancient human populations. Bowles' team did a bunch of computer modeling, and came to the conclusion, similarly with other sociologists, that war is:
1. old as dirt
2. violent conflict *between* competing kinship groups (tribes) is an important force for creating more social cooperation and altruism *within* a given kinship group.
3. the more social cooperation and altruism within a kinship group (gene pool) the better chances that group has for outcompeting other groups. INHIBITION of "primitive" emotions and instincts by individuals was crucial in the domestication of humans. The part of the human that facilitate inhibition of primitive instincts grew larger under evolutionary selection.
Conclusion: as E.O. Wilson said "the human species is dysfunctional"
In addition, around the time of the Bronze Age collapse, the biological tendency toward inhibition was "upgraded" by the emergence of contemplative spirituality and religion. That allowed for more social order in walled city state societies with complex social hierarchies, honor systems, etc.
I too cannot get emotional about this. Fox News and the media generally has been a textbook case of dehumanizing the enemy and condemning atrocity by accepting different atrocity. I am sympathetic with the everyday people on both sides and hostile to the warpigs on both sides. Most of the people I hear condemning evil are justifying other evil. Evil is this purely destructive attitude seemingly taking over the world. The only good I can see coming from this would be Americans rejecting eternal war and returning to take care of family, friends, community and the local land and waters.
https://williamhunterduncan.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-on-the-war
yep. some israeli officials and other insane zionist extremists are now openly calling for the starvation of up to approximately one million children in Gaza.
Taking hostages of your enemy turns out to not be a very effective move when your enemy controls access to water and power for your entire city.
The hawks of both sides demand innocent blood.
You didn't read, or didn't understand the OP.
You mention that hawks “trade blood for power,” in reference to Netanyahu.
How would this fit with him setting up a power-sharing unity government?
I mention hawks in reference to both sides, as well as other sides in other conflicts, not to exclude the ramifications of 9-11, Pearl Harbor, and such.
As far as Bibi's unity government is concerned, that's generally what folks do in Israel.
I understand, even if that is “what folks do in Israel”; and I even would agree that Bibi is “hawkish,” at least in regards to how we would use the term defense hawk here in America.
What I allege is that your specific definition of “hawks,” the aspect that they “trade blood for power,” seems to be falsified (at least in this instance) when Bibi went out of his way to give up some power and form an emergency government.
So either your definition or your specific application of it to him is incorrect.
He can only pretend to be a brutal dictator, so by getting "centrists" on his side in a fake "unity" govt, he gains legitimacy for whatever hawkish blood lust stuff he thinks he can get away with within limits, which include the limits of USA support.
The fact that Israel is ruled by a deeply corrupt fake brutal dictator that runs an Apartheid system is appalling and just another of many examples of the grotesque absurdity of a country that has no (formal) "right to exist".
re: meta-narrative analysis vs tribalistic regression/insanity
I had a big argument with an Iranian-American Jew that grew up in Israel, now in the USA, on my facebook timeline if anyone needs an example of the complete insanity and lies that brainwashed, radical Zionist extremists use in their rhetorical structure.
I'm sure it would be easy to find similar on the "other side".
This is a pretty objective analysis by an "old school" anti-establishment Jewish diaspora Russian-American leftist.
https://yasha.substack.com/p/what-do-you-expect
yasha. substack. com /p/what-do-you-expect
Note: this* is very resonant of the decades of arguments I saw in the Baha'i community between traditionalists vs western liberals.
... a pretty good analysis of the anthropology of religion in the middle east and how it differentiates basic, archetypal assumptions about east-west conflicts by Warby of Oz (academic) ...
The brilliant Warby of Oz writes one of the best, most accessible anthropological explanations of Islam I've ever read.
* https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/hamas-displays-a-muslim-way-of-war/
www .lorenzofromoz. net /p/hamas-displays-a-muslim-way-of-war/
fwiw, I studied esoteric Twelver-Shi'ism for several decades, along with middle eastern history.
more stuff:
The Prophet Jeremiah criticizes the insane war mongers in Jewish leadership (predicting the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians?), and in response, is "cancelled" by those insane war mongers.
https://www.tikkun.org/was-jeremiah-a-failure/
www. tikkun. org /was-jeremiah-a-failure/
-Feb 2024.
It is.... Sad? Curious? Notable? Unbelievable? 4 months on and the US govt, the US media has yet to make a stink about US hostages taken and held by Hamas. Where is the daily ticker, 'x days since...'? On a tribal level, on a human level, on a national pride level...we just don't care? It would be a whole new horror upon liberation to discover nobody gave a damn. Is it a reflection of living in a virtual online world where every next thing is a momentary outrage that can't sustain concern?
The last sentence is accurate. Two groups of human beings want that land and refuse to share it. Thus the violence will continue.