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Cookin. Much lower proportion of right-wing trolls here than at +972.
The irony here is that Al Jazeera is showing ever-increasing signs of coordinating itself with the Saudi-led crackdown across the region. It is not too smart to fall into the Saudi trap of imagining that everyone who polemicises against Israel is on the side of the angels. Sometimes your enemy's enemy is just another enemy.
I think you have to be prepared for Albright & Co at ISIS to provide what looks like authoritative technical documentation for what are in fact completely bogus claims. They did this with regard to the imaginary Syrian nuclear reactor bombed by Israel on Sep 6 2007, about which the best detailed critical article is still Seymour Hersh's of Feb 11 2008, which is here:
link to newyorker.com
You can't argue with Richard, if you're me, because half your comments get censored. This is not Richard's fault, but Phil's. His capacity to endure serious disagreement is distinctly limited. Despite his protestations of "naivety" and "idealism," he is playing a classical tough-cop con-cop game, dedicated to establishing that Jewish liberals are the salt of the earth, and anyone who steps outside that framework can expect to have their views censored.
I assume my reply to Mr Witty turned Phil's delicate stomach. In any case, it doesn't appear above.
The term "civilians" is being used in an incantatory way throughout this thread. What I mean by this is that the mere presence of the term automatically establishes the point to be proved: if they were "civilians," then shooting them was wrong, end of discussion. But in this case they weren't "civilians," because riding around east of the red line is a politico-military act of aggression, whatever kind of uniform or non-uniform the riders wear (khaki and/or tallit & kippot). Jeffrey brings a bit of political sociology to the discussion when he distinguishes between the dormitory dwellers near the line, who commute to work west of it and are too politically stupid to grasp that living to the east of it is a politico-military act of aggression, and those who live in places like Kiryat Arba, and know exactly what their act is. But being too politically stupid to appreciate the implications of one's acts is no excuse.
I must say though that as far as domestic US politics goes, Marcy Wheeler ('emptywheel') is hard to beat for subversive gossip and speculation. It was she who single-handedly brought down the Bush 43 regime, dealing it the decisive psychological blow by dubbing its press secretary, Dana Perino, "pig missile".
Firedog for many years has featured this disagreeable subdomain:
link to attackerman.firedoglake.com
I think Spencer Ackerman's banner illustration speaks for itself.
It's nice to see the dancing Israelis in there; this makes it just a little bit harder to claim that everyone who asks questions about 9/11 is a raving nazi:
I cannot believe these people didn't recognise Max. His distinctive 'chinless wonder' profile must be known from Dan to Beersheva.
I do find it interesting that the basis of these photos is sexual taunting. And that no one has remarked on this fact. It can hardly be because it is too obvious to remark upon.
Both the Muslim calendar day and the Jewish calendar day begin at sundown on the previous day.
I was thinking, as it happens, how the pop-culture West is just basically terrified of Islam. One of my hobbies is music, and I was reflecting on the trend for neo-paganism that swept the music scene in the 1980s and 1990s. I have been looking over my record collection, especially the most relevant genre, which is known as 'neo-folk', and it's very revealing. The neo-paganism takes every conceivable form, from fake druidry and wicca to kabbalah and gnostic christianity. It avoids everything Islamic like the plague. So, my assessment is, this is a deep-rooted cultural panic, and it will throw everything, including the kitchen sink, at us. It has more to do with childhood cultural-religious identity than it does with any particular events. The general theme is 'the death of the West'. I think that sums it up quite accurately, too.
If one wants to understand the Muslim world from a Marxist point of view, one is rather stuck with Trotskyites. Maxime Rodinson is the classic author for this: he wrote "Islam & Capitalism," "Islam & the Russian Empire," and "Marxism & the Muslim World," all of which seem to be good starting points. He also wrote a number of books about Israel and the Jews, which are probably not so useful except as apologetics.
It was Deutscher in that same interview who came up with the simile of the man jumping from the window of a burning house and crippling someone by landing on him, then treating his victim with contempt; this in spite of the fact that the zionist mass colonisation of Palestine got under under way in the 1920s, not the 1930s. Ali has seen fit to reprint the entire Deutscher interview as an appendix to his "Clash Of Fundamentalisms" too. The fact is that Trotskyism has always had sympathies with zionism. Half the US and UK Trotskyites became neocons, and the other half became utopian hand-wringers. Ali's comprehension of the Muslim world is distinctly limited; he comes from a high society family in Pakistan and prefers to talk about the tiny poetry-reading middle class there, rather than the masses.
Goldberg hasn't reached the Shimon Peres level of delirium, though:
There is some truth in the claim that some strata of Sunnism would like to see Shiism attacked. Those strata are few but fairly powerful. They include the wahhabi ulema and the wahhabi-inspired jihadists. But it is certainly an exaggeration to say that the Sunni regimes are shaking in their shoes with terror of a "nuclear-armed Iran".
Someone on my own blog has cited James Petras' statistics of news content to prove that really and truly the oil industry is not pro-war and never have been. The statistics seem to show this; but I have a sense of nonsensicality about it. Could it be that the zionist lobby has been acting as a sort of ventriloquist's dummy for the oil industry? I cannot explain things otherwise, unless zionist power in the US is much greater even than it appears, and the zionists actually own the oil industry, and can tell it to keep quiet.
blockquote cite doesn't work the way the instruction beneath the comments box says it should; blockquote here works just the way it does everywhere else. :-)
I have been pondering the supposed conventional wisdom that smashing Iran is a zionist thing rather than a USAian thing. I am not so sure that that's true. At the time of the Iraq-Iran war, the zionist consensus was that Iraq was a real threat to Israel and Iran was not. Israel even shovelled a few armaments Iran's way, though you might say this was just part of a strategy to get Iraq and Iran to go on destroying each other.
Nowadays it is true Iran generates lots of bloodcurdling anti-Israel invective, and also supports Hezbollah. But the Iranians always seem to me to be pragmatists; if Israel had stuck to the old 'strategy of the periphery' and gone on supporting Iran, then in return Iran would probably have encouraged Lebanese Shiism to take a much more placatory form.
I think the real reason it has not is that US zionists, who control the spigots of US military (and other) funding to Israel, have over-enthusiastically leapt onto an anti-Iran bandwagon that at least originally had more to do with oil. The US oil companies want Iran's oil, just like they wanted Iraq's. US zionists may be serving the purposes of the oil lobby, rather than purposes that really make any sense in zionist terms.
If this is so, then Israel is actually in a very bad position. If they had been able to ignore this pressure from US zionists, so keen to cater to the desires of the oil multinationals, and if they had clung onto the old 'strategy of the periphery,' they would have been able to achieve something like a regional balance of power. As it is, assuming Iran does get somehow knocked out of the regional equation, Israel will find itself facing a vastly more powerful and highly armed Sunnism with no counter-balancing factor. I think the day is approaching when the US and even the oil industry will find that it can no longer control Saudi Arabia, and the convenient assumption that Al Qaeda was and is just an extremist aberration of Wahhabism will be stripped away.
Mr or Ms Wondering Jew, whether anybody approves or not of the possibility of Iran "getting the bomb" is besides the point. The USA neither owns nor controls the world. For various reasons, not least the perspectival skew caused by pervasive zionist influence, the US has never come anywhere near to comprehending the dynamics of western Asia. It has however spent fifty years or so destroying all progressive, secularist and progressive nationalist forces throughout the continent. As a result, anti-imperialism there has taken a sort of neo-feudal religious form. But the US and its allies cannot blow all this anti-imperialism away except by reducing the continent to radioactive wasteland. Talking of which, Bonkers Bolton has told Fox that Israel must attack Iran within the next six days, or before the Buhshehr reactor is loaded up, which is scheduled for the 21st inst. What a laugh, eh.
Related to this; Goldberg makes one claim I find hard to believe:
I'm interested in the underlying debate about whether Israeli regional war strategy is really subordinate to US regional war strategy or not. Michel Chossudovsky says it is:
link to globalresearch.ca
You and your queasy stomach. Perhaps you might consider how 'Mooser''s persistent attempts to humiliate me by misquotation make me feel.
As you say, vanished away. But doubtless Mooser's remarks will remain.
I find this sort of dismissal really disgusting:
Zionist propagandists are a horrible mixture of the unthinkingly stupid parrots and the horribly intelligent manipulators. Whoever invented the term "Pallywood" is one of the latter sort. The word is just smart-alecky enough to get repeated by the parrots, without having any meaning except a lying one, which no one bothers to point out, and this how the best propaganda always works. So I shall point out the lie: Hollywood is a real place, full of enormous studios, with a collective operating budget of tens if not hundreds of million dollars a year. "Pallywood" does not exist; there is no such place; there are no studios; there is no budget. As for "the openly anti-Semitic propaganda in the Palestinian and Arab media," it has nothing to do with the question of whether videos such as this can be faked, which may be why you said "not to mention," and then mentioned it anyway, just to snow the readers.
Well, I could be wrong about eGuard; some of his, her, or its comments earlier made sense. but that one is aggressively nonsensical. I get lots of these on my own blog. I post some story similar to this and someone replies "you mean you already prostituted your own child?" or something equally nonsensical.
I offered another example a week or so ago: Yasam, the special riot police:
link to mondoweiss.net
Interesting example of aggressive nonsensicality from eGuard there; this is a technique that zio-trolls use a lot, to throw spanners in the works, get people off balance etc.
This piece of boilerplate apologetics didn't come from e.g. the Prime Minister's Office; it came from Masgav's PR office. Masgav (the Border Police) is widely regarded by ordinary Israeli Jews, and I suspect by ordinary israeli policemen and women too, as a bunch of gestapo thugs. Most countries nowadays have one or two specialised units such as this, which are distinct from and worse than the regular police. It's always worth delving into the details for a bit, it offers greater realism and indeed credibility. I don't feel worried that anyone will reply, why are you telling us this, are you making apologies for them? because this is an intelligent readership, not like the ignorant herd which promotes wild generalisations about whole national groups :-)
This over-aged jewish biker bit of yours is as phony as hell.
the quote thing doesn't work the way the instructions beneath the comment box say it ought to work; it works the way the blockquote instruction normally works.
Wasn’t hitler from Belgium originally?
I thought he was one of those Litvaks.
However, there is a real 'Hegelian Strategy' in action in the US Jewish Left, and arguably Seymour Hersh is part of it, like Chomsky and our very own Phil Weiss. In my opinion, insofar as the concept of a ‘Jewish people’ is thinkable, it is a religious concept, so that is the level on which I speak of ‘the Jews’, and from this point of view, comparison of their activities with e.g. ‘the Christians’ is appropriate and legitimate, whereas comparison with those of e.g. ‘the French’ is not. I think that the real purpose of Phil's activities, and those of the visible 'Jewish Left' in general, is to obscure this. In my opinion, their real purpose is to maintain the intelligibility of the social category of ‘secular Jews’, i.e. persons definable as Jews not by their religious affiliation but purely by kinship, so as to make anti-judaism appear to be a form of racism, rather than anti-religiosity. This is why Phil's causes, like Chomsky’s, are purely tokenistic and impractical. They are chosen solely to be attention-grabbers.
Yes -- notice especially the final paragraph: "Islamist terrorism cannot be understood without acknowledging the extent to which its networks are being used by Western military intelligence services, both to control strategic energy resources and to counter their geopolitical rivals. Even now, nearly a decade after 9/11, covert sponsorship of al-Qaeda networks continues." And then he refers us to this Seymour Hersh article from Mar 2007:
link to newyorker.com
I don't know where you are, rmokhtar, but I imagine you can access amazon.com:
link to amazon.com
The most recent and useful one is "The War On Truth". The new one isn't out yet. Nafeez Ahmed teaches at a British university. Here is his Wikipedia entry:
link to en.wikipedia.org
and here is his blog:
link to nafeez.blogspot.com
It seems to make a difference if one includes his middle name when searching.
I've switched off the option to do this in my blog, because I realised it was just acting as troll bait: I had literally hundreds of people following the comments and nothing else.
Well, I'm afraid I have been reading this sort of incantation online for six or seven years now and it has got me absolutely nowhere, it just repeats itself without achieving anything, which suggests that it is not signal but noise. Look at this typical abracadabra from one of your sources, Kev Boyle, wheover he is:
I already discussed Gordon Duff and Wayne Madsen on the thread on here about Wikileaks.
In fact, this has propelled me into ordering three books by Ahmed Rashid and two by Tariq Ali, to go with my collection of Nafeez Ahmed ones. I think it is worth getting all this right. It is far too easy to blame the obnoxious zionists for everything -- and there are persistent reports that Mossad has been combining with the Indian secret service RAW to set up pseudo-jihadi outfits hither & yon to make things worse.
Well, I know that. But it makes no difference now. The thing has a mind of its own, obviously. And however ambiguous the relationship between it and the Saudi ruling class is, obviously in many ways their activities are mutually reinforcing. For instance, the dominant ideological trend in Pakistani Islam is wahhabi, as adapted by the Deobandis, and this is thanks to the vast sums the Saudis have quite legally spent there. You don't have to be a neocon to see this. The interesting thing is that Al Qaeda never, or almost never, directly attacks Jewish or zionist interests, despite its rhetoric. The 9/11 WTC attacks were not what they seem, by most accounts. In any case, they performed an extremely useful function for the owners of the WTC, getting rid of an asbestos-ridden debt trap and substituting a huge insurance payout. So I can understand to an extent why one is tempted to see Al Qaeda as a facade. But since reading Nafeez Ahmed in particular, I have been forced to admit that it is not. Western agencies continually hitch a ride on it, but it has a mind of its own.
Obviously Israel grabs whatever covert and overt power it can get, and it tends to do it in such a uniquely obnoxious way that it is very tempting to regard it as the root of all evil. But on the other hand, no matter how reluctantly, I have been forced to concede that Al Qaeda really does exist, and that it is neither a creature of the CIA nor of the Mossad. It's a really nasty phenomenon, in fact, merrily blowing Muslim states apart from north Africa to southern Russia to Oceania. You have to bear in mind that the Saudi ruling class alone has $1,000b in western assets (the peoples' republic of China has about $2,500b, i.e. only two-and-a-half times as much). So maybe we should have listened to Michael more. :-)
Blue Line history in much greater depth:
link to pulsemedia.org
Fisk has this to say:
I suggest that instead of trying to be more rigid, you try to be more unpredictable. Break your own rules sometimes and say uncharacteristic things. Then you might get let back on, irrespective of your views. The reason for banning you, I'm sure, is that you are just robotically predictable, which turns readers off in droves and wastes space. It's essentially the same thing as banning spammers: they say nothing genuine, they are human robots.
It's not like the Israelis to not grab every centimeter they can. They should move the fence up to the goddam line. That would eliminate the ambiguities. Ambiguities are dangerous around there.
Tell me why the fence isn't on the blue line, then.
It just struck me that quite probably the encrypted file contains all the material that Gordon Duff, Wayne Madsen, etc are complaining is missing: all the State Dept stuff that directly implicates the Mossad, which as I said on another thread is definitely out there playing black ops, along with the Indians. So Wikileaks is saying, if anything happens to our wunderkind Julian, then you are going to see stuff you ain't seen before :-)
I have to add: Manning said he also had access to a vast quantity of State Dept cables. How he had this access I don't know, but since it is Manning himself who says he had it, this doesn't imply another source with greater access than his.
Now this is interesting -- and quite correct, I looked and the file is there all right:
Expert Cautions about Intelligence Trap in WikiLeaks 'Insurance' File
Fars News Agency, Aug 4 2010
An Iranian IT expert warned here on Wednesday that a mysterious download file posted by the WikiLeaks website, labeled as 'Insurance', is likely a spy software used for identifying the information centers of the US's foes. Hossein Mohammadi told FNA on Wednesday:
The Tongans... this sounds like Hunter Thomson's 300-pound Samoan attorney.
Moonkoon, the demarcation is an inevitable result of the fact that each intelligence agency only has immediate access to its own sources, not to those of any other agency. Material correlated at CENTCOM is material that arrives there as a result of being collected in the field by army intelligence. Material collected by CIA or State Dept, on the other hand, does not go to CENTCOM but to Arlington or Foggy Bottom (love that name), as the case may be. Although there are occasional media flaps about this, the material is never pooled. Inter-agency requests can be made through the intelligence intranet, but not at random or en masse. Only the National Security Council at the white house has automatic rights to see the digests of the products of all the agencies. The idea of appointing a Director of National Intelligence was to give him some inter-agency powers, but even so, the demarcations remain, for very good reason.
Now Wikileaks does not have some sort of magic funnel into the NSC or the DNI's office; it is dependent on the sources it happens to have, which in this case are obviously lower-level, like Manning. What you see is what they get.
Here is a huge file attacking Wikileaks, compiled in March by someone calling themselves Arthur Zbygniew, mainly based on Wayne Madsen's subscribers-only newsletter, which I do not trust at all:
link to arthurzbygniew.blogspot.com
um... Britain, Germany, Canada and China, at least, just to go by their contents page:
link to wikileaks.org
I'm not sure who is playing devil's advocate here against whom, but just taking the questions at face value, I would say first of all that like conspirologists in general, this man Duff has not got any specific hard evidence to back up anything he says. Much of what he is complaining about is unrelated to the issue, and in a perverse way this fact itself is part of his complaint, i.e. why doesn't the Wikileaks material talk about x, y and z? As far as I can see, the answer is that most of the things he is interested in, if they exist, would be in CIA and State Dept reports, not in army intelligence reports, which is what these obviously are. To me these look like the remainder of Bradley Manning's material, correlated at CENTCOM during routine army field intelligence analysis, which is what Manning did.
Assange is just the spokesman. Wikileaks is a large collaborative operation run by volunteer committees. Personalisation is always the first mass media tactic, and pathologisation the next.
I have seen some attacks on Assange that are so peculiar they are almost comical. Some of them come from what I would normally think of as 'our side', the anti-war side. But 'our side' contains quite a few right-wing cranks, sort of small-scale Pat Buchanan types but without the constant mass media glare to make them moderate their statements. For instance, 'Veterans Today' senior editor Gordon Duff. This is one of those operations so dominated by one man that it seems a little phony as an online newspaper. But his version may amuse you because of its loopiness:
link to veteranstoday.com
Bla bla bla:
The hasbara dept of the Magav (the border police) is on the case:
Israeli Police Claim Video of Crying Palestinian Boy Was Staged
Robert Mackey, NYT Lede Blog, Aug 5 2010
Israel’s border police force insisted in a statement on Thursday that video of a 5-year-old Palestinian boy reacting with dismay to the arrest of his father this week in the West Bank, which has been broadcast internationally, was staged. The video was shot near Hebron on Monday as the boy, Khaled Jaber, watched Israeli officers detain his father for illegally tapping into water pipes meant to serve Israeli settlers and soldiers to irrigate his family’s crops. While the Jaber family told Haaretz that the boy’s grief was spontaneous, the border police said, “the family chose to make cynical use of a 5-year-old boy” who had been “well instructed and directed.” The official statement added:
Some Israelis and their supporters have suggested for years that video that might attract sympathy for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation is routinely staged and dismissed such scenes as “Pallywood” productions. The police said the arrests were made “for disturbing the peace and attacking police” officers during “enforcement activities against water thieves in the southern Hebron Hills.”
A quick google search suggests this article was actually written specifically for Mondoweiss. I think this is rather remarkable. The article is of professional quality and should be, at the very least, on IPS.
Well, there ya go. Being an impecunious drop-out didn't stop you getting married. Someone else was as crazy as you were. I wasn't so lucky :-)
I only said that if I had been Jewish I would probably have been married long ago. Perhaps I would not have become such an impecunious drop-out if I had been Jewish. Certainly there would have been more people eager to suggest to me methods of having it both ways, i.e. being whatever sort of radical I wished and still managing to earn a living. This is not because Jews have some sort of sneaky subterranean support network, simply because Jews are more familiar with these sorts of political career dilemmas than Anglos are.
I don't think these sort of attitudes are any more than rationalisations of class instincts. The basic class instinct is to fear the hostility of those whose class position is beneath one's own, and to look for acceptably civilised ways of ensuring that their hostility never takes the form of violence.
You'll have to stop trying to be laconic and start trying to be clear, Mooser, if you want me to get even the faintest idea of what you're saying.
Just to round out my instant class analysis, let me add that the middle-middle class includes not just 'professional intellectuals' but professionals of all sorts. However, the days are gone when all doctors, all teachers, or all lawyers could be defined as 'professionals' in this sense; most are clearly lower-middle class, parts of gigantic mass industries in which they have no personal influence or power whatsoever. But senior members of all these professions are middle-middle class; hospital consultants, independent medical specialists, prestigious lawyers, and important academics with public personas. Also, I should have placed industrialists alongside bankers as upper-middle class. The terms 'middle-middle class' and 'upper-middle class' correspond to the french 'petit-bourgeois' and 'grand-bourgeois', and of course major industrialists are 'grands bourgeois'. But it is important to remember two things about industrialists: one, they normally operate on borrowed capital, and are thus dependent on bankers; and two, their relationship to the nation-state is slightly less flexible than that of bankers, who in principle have no national allegiances at all. Nowadays, big industry has been conglomerised and has lost its relationship to the nation-state, which has led to the export of industrial capital to lower-wage parts of the world, one of the main reasons for the breakdown of US society. This could not have happened in Henry Ford's day. Under certain circumstances, big industrialists can make common cause with landowners against bankers, which is precisely what happened in Germany to bring about the emergence of the nazi ruling coalition.
What I am trying to do here is show the objective determinants of political attitudes, specifically, Jewish ones. If anyone thinks this approach is excessively 'objective' and misses something important about 'the Jewish spirit', then we can discuss it. I do not exclude subjective factors, even at the level of whole nations, hence my interest in Jung (who burned his own fingers when he discussed this in the 1930s and thereafter kept quiet about it).
I have a theory about the fashion for wearing baseball caps backwards. I suspect it started with the Nation of Islam. As you know they are given to slightly off-beat interpretations of Muslim practices, of which wearing a brimless cap is one. I think the reason for this is that you can keep it on while praying, which involves putting your forehead to the ground.
I remember assuming that dropping out would become a mass movement, in which case Marcuse's theory that the lumpenproletariat would become the new revolutionary class would have been proved to be correct, but clearly it did not.
When I say "a slightly more elevated level" what I mean is that, in the West at least, Jews have tended to be selected in a fairly large proportion for middle-middle class roles. However, the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suffered from a degree of discrimination which prevented this, and subsequently many migrated to Western Europe and the Americas bringing with them a considerable amount of accumulated bitterness.
The middle-middle class includes professional intellectuals, managers, import-export merchants, and medium-ranking officials in the governmental apparatus. Many individual Jews have selected themselves for upper-middle class roles, as bankers in particular. The upper-middle class is the financial elite, excluding the landowners. In the traditional scheme of class stratification, the upper class is entirely composed of hereditary landowners and their families; often their children assume senior positions in the armed forces, the government, or the religious establishment, because under primogeniture they can't all inherit the landed estates.
The middle-middle class, as its name suggests, is the class pivot of any society. The middle-middle class tend to see themselves as enlightened moderates, perhaps a little dismissive of both the right-wing pretensions of the upper class, and the left-wing pretensions of the working class. Middle-middle class social philosophy reflects this too; it tends to be simultaneously progressive and liberal, which is a combination whose internal contradictions come to the surface in times of extreme social stress.
I think a lot of this can be understood in class terms; the petit-bourgeois pride in being educated, and a set of assumptions about the kinds of jobs educated people should be able to get. But in an imperialist world, class is frequently mixed up with ethnic determinants, quite deliberately, because this is an imperial strategy. The British were especially good at this; for instance, they imported an entire lower middle class from the Indian subcontinent to their possessions in east Africa and the Caribbean. Thus, when a working-class revolt took place, it hit these people, who acted as class buffers, rather than hitting the true colonial and postcolonial rulers, who were absent or well concealed, and the British papers could report it as an outbreak of savage racial hatred, thus obscuring the carefully constructed element of class rule. Now, if you can understand that, you can understand how larger, external forces, driven by a number of empires successively, pushed the Jews into a similar though slightly more elevated position. But the Jews had a choice, a hundred years ago: to join the international movement against imperialism and colonialism, or to become part of it. Had it not been for zionism, the Jews would I think overwhelmingly have joined the anti-imperialist global current. Many of course did.
Could this have anything to do with the convenient rocket attack?
Washington backs Israeli Arrow II upgrade
UPI, Aug 2 2010
The US and Israel have agreed to upgrade Israel's Arrow II anti-ballistic missile into a longer-range version, the Israeli Defense Ministry said. The agreement, which will cost the US an estimated $100m, will create the Arrow III missile, designed to intercept incoming missiles from as far away as Iran. Arrow III, to be jointly produced by Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing, will join the Iron Dome and Magic Wand systems in providing multi-layer anti-ballistic missile protection. The US-Israeli Arrow agreement last month comes after Obama in May approved $205m in special aid for Israel to establish 10 control centers for the Iron Dome system. Late last month Israel's defense ministry said it intends to buy more Iron Dome missile interceptors after it deploys the controversial anti-missile system starting in November. The mobile Iron Dome system, being developed by Rafael, is designed to intercept short-range rockets and artillery shells especially coming in from the Gaza Strip and Lebanon where Hamas and the Hezbollah have fired thousands at Israel in the past. First deployment will be along the border of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip from where homemade rockets are fired daily into Israel. After deployment along the Gaza border, it will be used along the Lebanese border, where the Israeli government claims Hezbollah has an inventory of more than 40,000 rockets ready to be fired at Israel. Last month Iron Dome intercepted multiple rocket barrages mimicking Qassams and Katyushas, the mainstay of Hamas and Hezbollah attacks. Iron Dome missiles determined which incoming rockets were threats and which were headed toward open fields.
AP confirms Egyptians said "Hamas":
link to google.com
There is some juggery-pokery going on over what the Egyptian govt spokesman said about these rockets that hit Eilat & Aqaba. According to JPost, he said they were "Hamas' work":
link to jpost.com
But according to all the other reports (e.g. AFP, Ynet), he said "Palestinian factions."
I put this on the wrong thread. It should have gone here:
Washington backs Israeli Arrow II upgrade
UPI, Aug 2 2010
The US and Israel have agreed to upgrade Israel’s Arrow II anti-ballistic missile into a longer-range version, the Israeli Defense Ministry said. The agreement, which will cost the US an estimated $100m, will create the Arrow III missile, designed to intercept incoming missiles from as far away as Iran. Arrow III, to be jointly produced by Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing, will join the Iron Dome and Magic Wand systems in providing multi-layer anti-ballistic missile protection. The US-Israeli Arrow agreement last month comes after Obama in May approved $205m in special aid for Israel to establish 10 control centers for the Iron Dome system. Late last month Israel’s defense ministry said it intends to buy more Iron Dome missile interceptors after it deploys the controversial anti-missile system starting in November. The mobile Iron Dome system, being developed by Rafael, is designed to intercept short-range rockets and artillery shells especially coming in from the Gaza Strip and Lebanon where Hamas and the Hezbollah have fired thousands at Israel in the past. First deployment will be along the border of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip from where homemade rockets are fired daily into Israel. After deployment along the Gaza border, it will be used along the Lebanese border, where the Israeli government claims Hezbollah has an inventory of more than 40,000 rockets ready to be fired at Israel. Last month Iron Dome intercepted multiple rocket barrages mimicking Qassams and Katyushas, the mainstay of Hamas and Hezbollah attacks. Iron Dome missiles determined which incoming rockets were threats and which were headed toward open fields.
I have been saying for literally years that Hamas was not responsible for the initial salvos of any given rocket attack, though once Israel has retaliated as it always does by striking some known Hamas official's home, Hamas counter-reprises. In addition, there is a code of honor which to some of us cynics seems misguided, whereby Hamas is extremely reluctant to condemn whoever it was who fired the initial salvo, even when it seems highly posssible that it was a provocateur cell run by the Israelis themselves.
They're both greek words, but irony is a quality inherent in the events themselves, whereas sarcasm is a manner of speech drawing attention to it. I've completely lost track of who is supposed to be being ironic about what. It doesn't really matter; much as we might endeavour to maintain an air of salon urbanity around here, there are hundreds of professional and amateur jewish hate merchants crawling this site and others like it, looking for juicy examples of apparent anti-semitism they can adorn their own sites with, as I know to my cost, and this is why I object to being saddled with nonsensical bogus quotes like "Jews prevented me from getting married."
Just ignoring your own irony there and taking the question straight, I looked in my dictionary and found that there is no word in classical hebrew for 'irony'.
Yes, well, we all know about Robert Graves and Jewish women. Laura Riding's real name was Laura Reichenthal. She did write one half-way good couplet, which I always misquote slightly (to perfect it):
Actually, thinking about it, Mooser, it's worse than the zionist propagandists. They normally keep their misrepresentation within the limits of what could be claimed on enquiry to be accidental. But there is simply no resemblance at all between "The Jews prevented me from getting married," which is what you claim I said, and "If I had been Jewish, I would probably have gotten married," which is what I actually said. Maybe, just maybe, Mooser, you suffer from a species of compulsive dishonesty, and in some obscure way I have brought it to the surface.
Mooser, your penchant for misrepresentation is characteristic of something: zionist propaganda maybe.
I could go looking for references for the pre-1900 religious zionist forerunners. It's a matter of interpretation.
Sometimes Abe makes me smile:
“The fact that there are bigots who espouse a position that you have doesn’t mean you’re a bigot,” Foxman said.
I don't really agree. Jung's approach is agnostic in the sense that he tries not to make any statements implying that the beings people encounter in their dreams and visions are 'real' or 'unreal'. I should say he leans towards the idea that they are 'real' in the sense that they are the product of more than just the individual's unconscious fantasy life, or the individual's learned cultural imagery. They are innate, or to be exact, the propensity to generate them is innate. The contents, the 'archetypes', derive from a 'collective unconscious'. Whether this 'collective unconscious' is encoded in the genes somehow, he is a bit vague on, understandably, since he really does not want to get into the question of 'racial' differences.
Funnily enough, people on the US extreme right, basically the christian right, from the John Birch Society through to Alex Jones and co., have always claimed that the crypto-communists who run the democrat party and the UN, or the 'globalists' (which are the villains in place of the communists nowadays), use 'the hegelian dialectic' to manipulate the US public. I have seen explicit and extensively argued examples of this from as far back as the Clinton era, but as I say I think it goes back to the JBS. Anyway, they formulate it in terms of 'problem-reaction-solution', by which they mean that the 'globalist' government creates a false 'problem' such as a faked-up emergency or security threat, waits for the 'reaction' of public anxiety, and then proffers a 'solution', viz. increased domestic security via a police state. Needless to say, all this has nothing to do with Hegel, but to these characters Hegel is right alongside Marx as a sinister European manipulator. Whether your experimenters got the idea from this popular literature I do not know, but there's plenty of it out there.
Oh, I see what you mean. It's intended to work as an exposé of how the manipulated consensus is engineered. I hadn't grasped that.
I cannot bring myself to look at that Delphi link. Call me highbrow, call me snooty, call me an intellectual elitist, I don't care, but when the military give themselves philosophical airs and graces it is even worse than when business management gurus do it. They drive their mental bulldozers over the delicate flowers of thought and preen themselves on their sophistication. I could give examples.
well, it would be a long trek, from London, anyway ;-)
No, it's alive. It's the real self. Thinking of the ego as the self is like thinking of the rear view mirror on your car as the car. The part of your mind that thinks and chatters isn't actually the real self, but it constantly attempts to speak in the name of the real self, in the transparent hope that if it constantly flatters the real self and offers it ready excuses for everything it might conceivably do, the real self will remain supine and let the chattering pseudo-self go on pretending to be in charge.
I prefer Jung to Freud because he manages to make the conduct of the real self more intelligible. For him, it isn't just a reservoir of instinctual impulses as it is for Freud, it is a sort of mystical total self, and it cares surprisingly little about everyday life; even a whole life wasted may not perturb it, rather suggesting it has one foot in eternity, or knows that reincarnation is a fact, or something like that, that makes this particular life seem fairly trivial by comparison.
The way politics reflects these behaviors is also interesting. We all know certain countries, don't we, that seem all too ready to play the role of ever-understanding spokesmen and explainers for other, bigger countries that remain inexplicably docile?
What I mean by way of contrast is that for Spinoza the entire universe is one single deterministic mechanism, working itself out in every detail by rigorous cause and effect. It may be conscious, as a whole and also in every part, but this consciousness or self-awareness does not affect its behaviour, which is completely determined in a mechanical way. As I said, this is the same as the classical stoic view. What it might mean to say 'conscious as a whole and also in every part' is very hard to conceive, and in my opinion Spinoza is not too good here; I suggest reading Leibniz alongside Spinoza for this.
But the freudian Id is a creature of free will. It even indulges in what something akin to what I described as 'randomisation'; this is what Freud means by calling it 'polymorphously perverse'.
I am not sure why I am writing all this; possibly it's an obscure way of asking Annie for a date :-)
I don't think the analogy is exact. The freudian Id is alive, it isn't some sort of automatic mechanism. The difficulty in discussing psychoanalysis is that we have to learn to distinguish between the discursive self, the voice in the head that constantly chatters away and defines in words who or what we are supposed to think we are, and the Id, which is the real self, but doesn't talk at all, and sometimes sulks for years or even decades before suddenly erupting, after which we say, somewhat mendaciously, that "we don't know what got into us."
Sartre argued that there could not possibly be any such thing as an unconscious self, that it was a contradiction in terms, and that our disavowal of its contents was sheer "bad faith". I'm afraid this is just frecnh rationalism. It does exist, and it is the real us, and yet at the same time it seems quite alien to our discursive, thinking pseudo-selves. Jung is I think better on this, because he freely uses religious and mystical imagery to illustrate what he means.
But in any case, the unconscious self is alive, not a mechanism.
I like Husserl. He is somewhat zen-like in his incessant attempt to get us "to the things themselves." His method, the so-called "phenomenological reduction," is similar to a zen method; it attempts to see "the things themselves" without interposing any kantian "synthetic a priori"s, and the point of it, like zen, seems to be that it can't be done. However, people have gone in a great many different directions while still waving husserlian flags, such as Heidegger, whose mystical concept of "the gods" derives I think from a belief that we had fewer preconceptions before we invented monotheism, and Sartre, who I'm afraid got precisely nowhere with it.
There are some phenomena that I think behave in a hegelian way: intellectual trends and fashions seem to me to do so. In the process, they detach themselves from physical reality and not infrequently become their own opposites while preserving some elements of their original forms, exactly as Hegel's ideas do. I do not think Marx and Engels were wise to use the hegelian method to develop their own views of history (let alone "nature"), but it was the intellectual fashion of the day. I don't think the dialectical method applies to things which are not the products of human minds in the first place.
Spinoza actually believed in universal determinism and the absence of free will. His therapeia is the same as that of the Stoics: the recognition of necessity. I should think twice before adopting this view. My own opinion is that we have free will, thanks to something in our brains that acts as a sort of randomiser, like in "The Dice Man", and makes us generate random alternatives, and occasionally try them out experimentally.
I remember that film (obscured by clouds) with the pink floyd soundtrack. I took my elder sister to it, and she was not impressed, and seeing it through her eyes (a left wing geography teacher) I was rather enbarrassed myself.
Well, that Annie's New Letters blog could almost be yours. The attitude seems very similar. But no matter. I have some thoughts for you and for people in general about your actual topic in this post.
First of all, public opinion can be manipulated in a completely and purely technical way, and in fact I would go so far as to say that the functions involved are merely arithmetical sums: number of plugs, intensity of plugs, duration of plugs, all relative to airtime as a whole, or page space as a whole, devoted to pushing a given point of view. I think that's all there is to it. The larger the aggregate, the simpler the function, as in statistics generally. A roomful of particles will behave completely predictably, but the smaller the sample of air particle the greater its unpredictability. And as you know, public opinion polls are based on exactly this same statistical principle. I think it is because a very large part of the mind is devoted simply to working out what everybody else thinks, and this part can very easily be bluffed by the monopolists who control the mass communication channels. I am still aware of this part of my own mind, as sometimes being virtually dominant, and I have been fighting it all my life.
Now turning to the issue itself, secular jewish identity: you may have noticed on an adjacent thread I mentioned the "jubus", the jewish buddhists. This story is worth thinking about from several angles. First, just descriptively, one can imagine the would be organiser of the jubu community saying, korean buddhists, japanese buddhists, thai buddhists, indian buddhists, nepali buddhists, tibetan buddhists, etc ad infinitum, all have their own communities, their own meeting halls, even their own rituals in their own languages, so why not us? It sounds perfectly reasonable, but... on the other hand... 'jewish identity' is itself exactly the sort of rationalist, conscious-mind-based problematic that buddhism is all about overcoming. See what I mean?
I say that 'jewish identity' is a 'problematic', because it is not a way of looking at things so much as a way of formulating a problem: if i am a jew, then what does that mean? And this problem appears to be insoluble, unless at some point you buy the faith package. Everything else melts away into mere auto-suggestion: we're nice, we've always been progressive, if only people didn't hate us we could find out what we are.
Well, I like you, anyway, for whatever that's worth. I think that in general western jews are exactly like other westerners but more so. The quest for some basis for believing in oneself is quite universal among westerners, and it would be childish to say that they all learned it from jews. It's omnipresent. But a buddhist would surely say, it's all just mind chatter, ego chatter.
But where's your blog, Annie? You can build it into your ID on here, you know; I did.
You have a blog, Annie? I'd like to read it. Where is it?
Jewish identity... it certainly does keep popping up, just when you think you've given it the slip. Do you remember the "Jubus" -- jewish buddhists? Whatever would the buddha have said?
"Normal people will never say, “I am afraid to put my children on a plane with Zionists.”
They already do, droves of them, all perfectly normal, whatever that means.
Schwarzman, maybe you never got William Burroughs' memo:
"A paranoid is just someone who knows what is really going on."
Throughout the entire period of the existence of soviet communism, social-democrats (meaning supporters of the second international) conspired with western liberals against it. The 1960s were full of social-democratic anti-communist groups; the CIA specialised in creating them all over the world, and particularly in europe. The undercover collaboration of the ADL with the secret police of apartheid south africa is a quantum leap, but it was also rationalised as anti-communism. Jeff's dates suggest that this collaboration against the anti-apartheid 'communists' went on until about the time the soviet union collapsed, at the end of 1991. It would have undermined the ADL's anti-racist facade completely if it had been allowed to become widely known. The alliance between center-left (or left-liberal) US jews and black rights activists in the US broke down in the late 1960s at least partly because of israel's collaboration with apartheid south africa.
The modern state exists because modern capitalism could not exist without it. The ultimate achievement of marxist economics is the theory of the falling rate of profit. Marx was still working on this at the time of his death, and in my opinion his development of it is needlessly complex. Very few people subsequently have understood it properly -- certainly Engels didn't understand it, and he edited vol 3 of kapital, which is why it is such a mess, though the actual chapter on the falling rate of profit is more or less OK.
If you recall, the axiom of marxist economics is that human labor power is the only factor of production not paid for at its full value. At least in a competitive economy, which is what the model the theory uses is based on, each entrepeneur buys capital equipment, raw materials, and labor power, but the first two have already had all of the profit generated in their production and sale extracted from them. This theory assumes that profit is an objective quantity generated in the process of production and sale, not some sort of infinitely variable subjective quantity dependent solely on demand, as liberal economists claim. Profit in this theory is generated by the employment of live labor power and nothing else.
Now, in any given industry, each entrepreneur has an incentive to automate ahead of his competitors, thus lowering his unit costs and enabling himself to grab market share by underselling his competitors. But when they all catch up, the industry as a whole employs less labor and thus generates less profit. A completely automated industry generates no intrinsic profit at all, though it can run indefinitely at cost. Refusal to recognise this leads to an artificially 'profitable' economy supported by the state in various ways, since after all high-tech is essential, profit or no profit. And eventually the state exacts its quid pro quo, by saying, well, if we have to subsidise high-tech anyway, it might as well make stuff directly for us, i.e. arms.
So there you have the entire marxist theory in a nutshell.
I couldn't follow your pretzel-brained example if I tried, Mooser. I think in straight lines. When I say I like a girl with spirit, it's because I really do like a girl with spirit. It doesn't of course follow from that that she will like me back. Very few humans of either sex are completely independent of herd opinion.
Mooser, something seems to have put your moose jaw out of joint today. But I suppose your chivalry is touching in its old-fashioned way :-)
Yes, they do, but I had my eyes on a couple that weren't. The one I got furthest with was "Aize Kif". I would give the link to my parallel text version of it, but somehow I don't like advertising my own blog on here.
Mooser, I try to avoid capitalising anything, except for the proper names of persons and places, the initial letter of each sentence, and the first person pronoun. Isms are not persons. If you look hard enough you will find that I don't capitalise any of them: jews, judaism, islam, muslims, buddhists, hindus, communists, fascists, nazis, any of them. Buddha himself gets a capital B, he being a person. I can't guarantee that I'm 100% consistent in following these rules, which evolve and change slowly as time goes by, but I can certainly guarantee that I am not singling out jews for lower case treatment.
Chomsky is not a marxist; he is a self-proclaimed, life-long anarchist. If he was a marxist, he would have some constructive suggestions to propose, whereas being an anarchist he has none whatever, except quixotic and utopian ones like "boycotting the USA".
I still am rowan berkeley. But I'm quite happy for the labelling machine to just call me rowan. I don't want to seem overly formal. But it is a fact that I have always used my real name on the internet, which makes it very easy for the thought police to google me and find outrageous quotes. I have never used pseudonyms.
I don't mind at all if sometimes people imagine that I am in fact jewish. My life would have been much more straightforward if I had been, and I might very well have had a wife and even daughters, none of which has happened. But it gives me some pleasure to confuse people who assume from my political views that I hate jews and then suddenly realise that I quite like them.
I think one of my main conscious motives was to be able to translate hebrew song lyrics into english. I have a lot of israeli rock and punk music, and often the lyrics sound thoroughly subversive. I have managed to produce rough translations of one or two lyrics by hadag nachash, which did indeed turn out to be subversive almost to the point of nihilism. I quite often put tracks onto youtube and post them on my blog, but nobody seems to play them.
As for yiddish, I really do not like the sound it makes at all, whereas hebrew is music to my ears. There are a few people who can make hebrew sound almost as horrid as yiddish, but obviously they aren't singers; they are generally elderly politicians. As for sexuality, I don't feel too old for that. There seems to be little evidence of men outgrowing their sexuality.
God, yeah, and I've paid for it too. As the old timers know, I got kicked off my hebrew course because of something I said on here -- something about Silverstein and Levy and the WTC, as I recall -- but to be fair, they were looking for a pretext to kick me off it anyway, not wanting someone like me to be able to read the hebrew press, let alone chat up israeli girls. The thing is, I find the sound of hebrew irresistibly sexy. I always have. It's "harsh", so maybe that says something about my sexuality ;-)
"mark my words i will be back"
I like a girl with spirit ;-)
I don't think 'tikkun olam', which merely means 'putting the world to rights', is a specifically jewish idea. But calling it that attaches to it a whole train of baggage, revolving around the idea that the jews are the misunderstood heroes of history.
I can think of another semi-nice thing to say about judaism: kabbalah is extremely interesting, but you have to handle it with extreme care. I think the best place to start is with Gershom Scholem's historical treatments of it. Using those, you can see how it derives from neoplatonism and alexandrian gnosticism, which are important, but the moment it becomes judaised it loses all its intellectual rigor and becomes a sort of metaphysical rorschach blot into which anything can be written. Its very vagueness is interesting: everything in it can be interpreted on multiple levels, and usually is. The qlipot or shells were originally material bodies as such: spirit fell into the body and got trapped in it. But after judaisation, the qlipot become the 'other nations', and the original, gnostic, mataphysical point was totally lost.
"Why is this person posting here?" What a lovely old-fashioned way of saying that if you do not cowtow to the required sentimentalisms you should be gagged.
I do realise that Phil has his reflexes. Also, of course, he does not live in vacuum. Whenever anything especially 'nauseating' is allowed to appear in these comments threads, I imagine his hate mail redoubles. I get jewish hate mail myself. I got one from someone called "jewzilla" yesterday. It said, "Still unemployed and jerking off in a three room flat, are we?" I should be so lucky, to get three rooms :-)