The experts have spoken

The critic of the PMC defends designers, even if she doesn't "love" them. The critic of expertise defends experts. Rt'd by Jäger, who also rt's an Israeli sociologist hawking a symposium in Jerusalem. East or West? Fucking genius. New tags for Mirowski and Agnotology, because I've said it all before.

I don't love the term "designer economy" but the article gets right to the heart of what Philip Mirowski called "the agnotology" - post industrial economics just throwing up its hands and saying we don't know and can't know how to plan economically.https://t.co/8N1xkkoYYo

— catherine liu (@bureaucatliu) February 21, 2023

📣Is neoliberalism dead or have the reports of its death been exaggerated?

If you have thoughts on this Question, please consider answering our CfP!

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The last modernist utopias: Israel, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Noēma from The Berggruen Institute, and Neom: Salafist Star Trek. Star Trek was never a democracy, but they're the good guys. 

Noēma's art. I should add it to my collection of illustration, political fantasies and architectural kitsch. I'll add Daston and Galison, and Eric Heller.

Some fun I delayed having. "The Designer Economy" by Nils Gilman and Yakov Feygin, both previously here: making the case against small business (Feygin), and citizenship (Gilman).

Gilman and Feygin

In a design framework, economic policy focuses on constructing and reaching a specifically envisioned future. This is different from traditional industrial strategy: It doesn’t “pick winners,” but rather pushes government agencies to have a broad awareness of technological and economic trends in order to promote specific potentialities. In contrast to planned economies or developmental states, a Designer Economy’s primary focus is on a dynamically changing future, and it aims to produce tools to enable various actors in the economy to adapt to these changes in a matter that preserves the public’s preferences through iterative experimentation.

From the first link: to a planning paper put of by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Seriously.

The Joint Staff J7 supports the CICS and the Joint Warfighter through joint force development to advance the operational effectiveness of the current and future joint force.

This paper, written by the Deployable Training Division (DTD), helps inform both the joint warfighters and key functions within theJ7, notably lessons learned, doctrine, education, and future joint force development. In addition to this paper, the DTD has also developed an overarching Joint Operations Insights and Best Practices Paper and numerous other focus papers that share insights and best practices for various challenges observed at joint headquarters. All of these papers are unclassified for broad accessibility. I commend these papers for your reading. 

From the second link:  Charles F. Sabel, "Beyond Principal-Agent Governance: Experimentalist Organizations, Learning and Accountability" 

Introduction

The success of LPF, like the success of similar populist movements that preceded it in Austria, France, Switzerland and elsewhere, raises grave questions about the legitimacy of democratic inputs to public decision making and the efficacy of public action however decided. At the very least these successes signal an impaired responsiveness of the democratic state to its electorate: a democratic deficit. Coming at a time of economic well being, shifts in party allegiance of a magnitude not seen since the 1920s are thus widely and rightly seen as extending beyond democratic criticism of this or that incumbent government into a protest against the way contemporary representative democracy works....

My central claim is that current debate over bottom-up and top- down governance reform—in disregard of the lessons of contemporary, practical success in collective problem solving—ignores important organizational innovations, without which the reallocation of control rights to civil society actors is unlikely to result in the social learning about the effective pursuit of the broad, imprecise goals—‘effective’ or ‘adequate’ education— implied by the turn to service-oriented solidarity. I argue further that these innovative, problem solving institutions, though not intrinsically democratic, can be configured in ways that address familiar problems in representative, deliberative, direct and associational democracy; and that, so configured, they are compatible with the Dutch tradition of sharing democratic sovereignty between parliament and extra parliamentary bodies. The core of the paper discusses the principles informing these new organizations; illustrates their operation as regulatory rule makes and providers of a new kind of public service; and speculatively defends their democratic aptitude in general and in the setting of consensual democracy characteristic of the Netherlands.

The third link is to John Dewey, The Public and its Problems

Gilman and Feygin, further in

Rejecting anti-government rhetoric and instead celebrating competent operators is thus a crucial first step. Managing a successful Designer Economy requires a cadre of experienced, entrepreneurial and independent government officials. Today, however, government service is difficult to enter due to a labyrinth of byzantine rules and processes. Moreover, public servants lack social prestige and are often underpaid relative to what they can earn in the private sector; a McKinsey partner earns much more than a congressional staffer or a Commerce Department GS-15. Many staffers are overworked, underpaid and can’t make ends meet in long-term government service. 

As a recent report by New America found, congressional staffers with specialist knowledge had virtually disappeared; most saw their posts as stepping stones to consulting and lobbying work. This prevents the government from benefiting from institutional knowledge, experimentation and “learning by doing,” which marks out the most successful industrial policy experiences. Increasing government pay in order to recruit and retain talent, therefore, must be central to the project of enabling the Designer Economy.

Government agencies also need explicit, legislated authority to do economic design work. The role of government in the era of the Design Economy is to coordinate between agencies, business and labor to find a consensus on specific futures and agreements on how to get to these goals. In an insightful interview with Ezra Klein, the Roosevelt Institute’s Felica Wong called these “coordination” problems. The federal government must be empowered to override blocking factions, particularly at the state and local levels. For example, the Department of Energy needs more authority to designate new, interstate transmission corridors and, if necessary, build and operate high-voltage inter-regional transmission lines. 

Government analysts need to be trained and empowered to collect and systematize new, granular micro-data on real production processes. Not only has the U.S. government become worse at monitoring and understanding what the real economy looks like and does at the detailed level required for effective design work to take place, it has also lost the ability to flexibly and rapidly make decisions. Streamlining decision-making will allow the government to do more than build or enable the private sector. Instead, it can become a bottleneck detective, finding ways to solve potential problems before they derail efforts to achieve desired goals. This means gathering and sharing information with interested parties — another coordination problem.

Twice they link to Ezra Klein.

A problem of our era is there’s too little utopian thinking, but one worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” a leftist tract that puts the technologies in development right now — artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant-and cell-based meats, and genetic editing — at the center of a postwork, postscarcity vision.

“What if everything could change?” he asks. “What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time — from climate change to inequality and aging — we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness? What if, rather than having no sense of a different future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun?”

Happy talk ordoliberalism? Mr Blandings build his dream state, and his dream body. Even Hollywood has a better understanding of dystopia. And the whole thing is described as a nationalist project, competing with foreign adversaries. Without citizenship? Make up your fucking minds.

Sabel and Joshua Cohen, the political philosopher from "Apple University"

"Global Democracy"

Abstract

In this Article, we describe an emerging arena of global administration. We claim that this arena, not bounded by a state, raises accountability problems of a kind different from those addressed by conventional administrative law. And we argue that measures designed to address these problems will have potentially large implications for democratic theory and practice.

Our argument starts from the premise – stated here without nuance – that something new is happening politically beyond the borders of individual states and irreducible to their voluntary interactions. To distinguish these developments from what is commonly called "international law and politics," we use the term "global politics." The emergence of global politics is marked by a proliferation of political settings beyond domestic boundaries. This proliferation expands the range of relevant political actors, while shifting our understanding of political units and of relations among them: the emergence of human rights as limits on Westphalian sovereignty was a first step in this shift, but not the last.

"the emergence of human rights as limits on Westphalian sovereignty".  Human rights against democracy. And liberals complain about judicial review. 

Gilman was once a regular reader of this blog, and he followed me on twitter. Until he blocked me.

distinctions without differences LLC

John Quiggin,  professor of agnotology  (etc.), speaks out forcefully against epistocracy (ditto).

And then a followup.

The last two paragraphs.

I just saw this review of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols which is obviously relevant. A crucial requirement for a successful defence of expertise is that we avoid defending authority based on mere punditry.

I’ll leave it to readers to discuss which areas of public policy discussions are dominated by expertise, which by punditry, and which by conflict between the two.

You can't make this shit up

The super-ego is a supreme narcissist

Below is almost nothing but quotes and links, even if a few are to this blog.
"Show don't tell"
(also continuing this)

Adam Phillips in the LRB

Like all unforbidden pleasures self-criticism, or self-reproach, is always available and accessible. But why is it unforbidden, and why is it a pleasure? And how has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so impressed and credulous in the face of our self-criticism, unimaginative as it usually is? Self-reproach is rarely an internal trial by jury. A jury, after all, represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy. Self-criticism, when it isn’t useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be, is self-hypnosis. It is judgment as spell, or curse, not as conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma not over-interpretation. Psychoanalysis sets itself the task of wanting to have a conversation with someone – call it the super-ego – who, because he knows what a conversation is, is definitely never going to have one. The super-ego is a supreme narcissist.

 Leiter posts and recommends, Peter Railton's Dewey Lecture, "Rupture Liberation, and Solidarity"

Like most philosophers, I suspect, I wasn’t a particularly good fit with high school.

...When I reached the sections in Philosophy, something hit home. As before, I’d reach for the most impressive-looking books, thick volumes like Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. And there in black and white were the problems that tormented my teenage soul: Do we have free will? Can we ever have knowledge? Do I even know myself? What is human nature, or a good society, and can morality exist without God?

So here, in these philosophers, was stuff that seemed just as hard as the physics and chemistry that were bringing me to New York. Moreover, philosophers seemed to value a lack of confidence—telling me, not to ignore my doubts and get back to studying, but to push my uncertainty as far as it could go. Sartre explained why this is inescapable—only by self-deception can we hide from ourselves the fact of choice and the depth of our inability to anchor life in external or internal certainties. Like it or not, we were in the end responsible for who we are and what sort of world we inhabit. I wanted to study and understand science, but I wanted to live philosophy. In short, I was in ’way over my head, and my solitary night-time ramblings got longer and darker.

My self-absorbed angst got put in its place, however, by events happening in the world around me. Demonstrators in the South, civilly demanding nothing more than equal rights, were harassed by an angry and contemptuous white populace, set upon with police dogs, splayed against walls and sidewalks by high-pressure hoses, and beaten to the ground before our eyes on the evening news.

...A wave of anger spread across campus and hundreds came to a mass meeting that afternoon in Memorial Church. They decided to initiate the first Harvard strike since students had walked out of class to protest rancid food in the 1700’s. Three days later, 10-12,000 students tramped across the Anderson Memorial Bridge over the Charles River to the Harvard Stadium, and debated a whole body of questions that had only been on the agendas of partisan groups a week before: “How must Harvard be changed?

...Why now? As in civil rights struggles and the war in Vietnam, innocent people are being killed— their lives cut short, their promise lost, and their families and friends devastated. It’s just too late in the day for “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. Our children, our students, the young faculty forced to live for years with insecure or term-limited jobs—they are under unprecedented levels of stress, and this is showing itself in rising public health statistics for depression and anxiety. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for post-secondary students, and rising. And its chief cause is untreated depression. Twenty percent of college students say their depression level is higher than it should be, but only 6% say that they would seek help, and still fewer actually do.

From the misery of a suburban high school student in 1965 to the misery of graduate students 50 years later, with references to other things in between. "Rupture Liberation, and Solidarity" Disruption (again). See also Robert Paul Wolff.

Railton is a "moral realist", as Wolff must be as well ["On the basis of a lengthy reflection upon the concept of de jure legitimate authority, I have come to the conclusion that philosophical anarchism is true."] but that leads us back also to Aaronson, and David Enoch.

More from Aaronson.

“The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic”
No, I’m not talking about me! 

Check out an amazing Nautilus article of that title by Amanda Gefter, a fine science writer of my acquaintance. The article tells the story of Walter Pitts, who [spoiler alert] grew up on the mean streets of Prohibition-era Detroit, discovered Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in the library at age 12 while hiding from bullies, corresponded with Russell about errors he’d found in the Principia, then ran away from home at age 15, co-invented neural networks with Warren McCulloch in 1943, became the protégé of Norbert Wiener at MIT, was disowned by Wiener because Wiener’s wife concocted a lie that Pitts and others who she hated had seduced Wiener’s daughter, and then became depressed and drank himself to death. Interested yet? It’s not often that I encounter a piece of nerd history that’s important and riveting and that had been totally unknown to me; this is one of the times. 

Update (Feb. 19): Also in Nautilus, you can check out a fun interview with me.

From the article on Pitts

In 1923 [McCulloch] was at Columbia, where he was studying “experimental aesthetics” and was about to earn his medical degree in neurophysiology. But McCulloch was a philosopher at heart. He wanted to know what it means to know. Freud had just published The Ego and the Id, and psychoanalysis was all the rage. McCulloch didn’t buy it—he felt certain that somehow the mysterious workings and failings of the mind were rooted in the purely mechanical firings of neurons in the brain. 

Though they started at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, McCulloch and Pitts were destined to live, work, and die together. Along the way, they would create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, the first computational approach to neuroscience, the logical design of modern computers, and the pillars of artificial intelligence. But this is more than a story about a fruitful research collaboration. It is also about the bonds of friendship, the fragility of the mind, and the limits of logic’s ability to redeem a messy and imperfect world.

I'd read the piece weeks ago, and made my usual comment. There's nothing anti-mechanistic about Freud's arguments. The question is the nature of the mechanism.

"the limits of logic’s ability to redeem a messy and imperfect world." The mind is either mechanical or it's not. You can't have it both ways. 

Consciousness is not calculation it's conflict. Two mechanical processes, calculation and conditioned response, mandate different responses to the same stimuli. The haze that results is what we call sentience.

Of course Freud wanted it both ways too: he wanted to transcend mechanism. Vulgar anti-Freudians -and "geeks" are the most pathological of anti-Freudians- celebrate one aspect of it, as if computational mechanism were freedom.

I posted a comment on Aaronson's page for him to read, since I knew he wouldn't post it. It's cruel, but useful in the face of stupid arguments over science and anti-science, and "agnotology".

Everything below, except for the Von Neumann quote, I've been posted 1, 4, 5 times before.
-

Some notes on logic and empiricism:

Crooked Timber -Comment 312 by "Magistra"
One of the things that occurs to me from reading Scott Aaronson@213 (and some other posters), is that some people feel far more unhappy with ambiguity than others: they want really strict, precise rules about what is right and what is wrong. And I wonder whether that kind of personality it connected with a strong mathematical/scientific bent

Comment 313 by "hix" -But there is another aspect too. One just starts to despise unclear rules when one notices that whenever there is ambiguity about rules, that ambiguity is sytematically used to favour certain types of people and disadvantage others.

Comment 317 Scott Aaronson-
magistra #312 and hix #313: Yes and yes!

WVO Quine-
Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned.

[Fantasies of a world of language without meaning. For "Evening Star" and "Morning Star" read "Palestine" and "Israel".]

Oskar Morgenstern -“[Gödel] rather excitedly told me that in looking at the Constitution, to his distress, he had found some inner contradictions and that he could show how in a perfectly legal manner it would be possible for somebody to become a dictator and set up a Fascist regime never intended by those who drew up the Constitution."

[See references to Gödel and David Addington (Cheney advisor and theorist of executive power)]
Sanford Levinson and Jack Balkin, "Constitutional Crises" http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/LevinsonandBalkin.ConsitutionalCrises.pdf

Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, "Engineers of Jihad"
http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/2007-10.pdf

Abstract. "We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms. This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists. We consider four hypotheses that could explain this pattern. Is the engineers’ prominence among violent Islamists an accident of history amplified through network links, or do their technical skills make them attractive recruits? Do engineers have a ‘mindset’ that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism, or is their vigorous radicalization explained by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries? We argue that the interaction between the last two causes is the most plausible explanation of our findings, casting a new light on the sources of Islamic extremism and grounding macro theories of radicalization in a micro-level perspective."

John Von Neumann- "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"

[The Character of Dr Strangelove was based on Von Neumann]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/10/gabrielle-giffords-shooting-grammar-extremist

"Former friends have recounted that [Jared Lee] Loughner had a fixation for grammar and words, saying that he challenged Giffords at a previous public meeting with the impenetrable question: 'What is government if words have no meaning?' "

Wall St. Journal 2009. http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB123275572295011847

Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor's bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile's trajectory back to an "enormous, stupid mistake" made 30 years ago.

"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah.

[In 1987 Israel deported Mubarak Awad the Christian founder of The Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence, while allowing Ahmed Yassin to preach.]

Yaakov Peri, former head of the Shin Bet: “We did not create [Hamas], but we did not hinder its creation.”

[Before the election in 2006 Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings, which it has maintained since, and removed the call for destruction of Israel from its manifesto.]

[Yassin in 2004, shortly before his assassination] https://web.archive.org/web/20040430114615/http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/675/re1.htm

[A good post from 2008 by the wife of a former member of the NSC under Nixon and Carter.]
https://vintage.justworldnews.org/2008/03/condis-anti-hamas-plot-the-vanity-fair-version/

But as I know– because I was the conduit of one of these threats– threats of lethal violence were sent by the Israelis to any Palestinian “independents” who might be even considering joining a Haniyeh-led government. As a result, none of them did; and the government that Haniyeh ended up forming was 100% Hamas.

...I have written about it before. It was Ziad. The threat was conveyed to me by Ziad’s and my mutual friend Ze’ev Schiff, a decent man who had been extremely close to successive generations of the leaders of Israel’s security establishment for half a century before his death last year.
To be specific, when I spoke with Ze’ev on the phone before I went to Gaza in March 2006– and he did help me to get in– he asked if I was going to see Ziad, who was then widely reported to be considering an offer from Hamas to be Haniyeh’s Foreign Minister (as he subsequently became, during the brief life of the 2007 national unity government.) I said yes. He said– and he repeated this a couple of times to make sure I got the meaning clear– that I should tell Ziad he would face “the worst possible consequences” if he joined the Haniyeh government, and that he said this “on good authority.”
I did pass the message on to Ziad.
Ziad also faced considerable family-based pressure from the Americans since his three children from his first marriage were at college here in the US, and I suppose if he had joined the Haniyeh government and then tried to visit them here he could be arraigned on all kinds of charges of aiding and abetting terrorists. But Ze’ev’s words about “the worst possible consequences” struck me as constituting a more severe and immediate threat.

[On Gaza recently in the London Review of Books. Both pieces include a lot of data.]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n15/mouin-rabbani/israel-mows-the-lawn
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/nathan-thrall/hamass-chances

Low-information rationality and agnotology at Crooked Timber.

Discussing Israel
by HENRY on NOVEMBER 7, 2004 

One of the things that I find most depressing about discussions on Crooked Timber and elsewhere is that it seems to be absolutely impossible to have a civil argument about Israel and the Palestinians. I’m now very reluctant to post on Israeli or Palestinian politics, as, I suspect, are my co-bloggers (and very probably bloggers elsewhere). For some reason, it seems to be difficult for supporters and critics of Israel’s policy to argue reasonably with each other – or at the least, the unreasonable voices very quickly swamp the reasonable ones. Why? And why do arguments on this issue become so much more heated more quickly than on other issues, given there is at least some potential for agreement (barring the crazies on both sides, most people seem to be prepared to accept some kind of two state solution)? 

NB - lest this post become an example of what it’s seeking to criticize, I’m going to be especially ruthless in deleting comments that I think are unhelpful or that lay the blame all on one side in an overheated way. 

Update: to be clear about my deletion policy for this post – if all you have to say is that (a) the treatment of Palestinians is part and parcel of the plot to oppress brown-skinned peoples everywhere, or (b) that Palestinians are inherently untrustworthy and all bent on destroying Israel, or anything even vaguely along these lines then please take your comments as already stipulated – whatever their intrinsic merits, they’re part of the dialogue of the deaf that I’m complaining about, and will be deleted.

Snide claims to distance, pretension to objectivity, the air of superiority and refusal to engage, to question foundational assumptions even as to basic logic: the contradictions of liberal ethnic nationalism. Except for a glib reference to lebensraum that I wouldn't make now, my arguments haven't changed.

Their beliefs have changed but not their methodology, and the result is unacknowledged drift.

As my mother said about Rawls: "He's not interested in people. He's interested in ideas!"

updated

You could call all of this a repeat. The only difference between Iraq and Israel is that liberals in the Anglo-American sense of the term are Zionists or have friends who are. The anger against Israel is growing, but the professional class of academic technocrats who divide the world of ideas between serious and and not and people between expert and folk, lags behind.

Global Post, These are the images from Gaza that are too graphic for many US news outlets to publish  Updating, AFP/Getty etc.

This time from the horse's mouth: Israel prefers Al Qaeda to Hezbollah. Oren's defense of Israel amazingly uses all the standard colonialist arguments. Only the most historically illiterate audience would fail to see that. Anyone who refuses now to admit that Zionism is founded on colonial logic, apartheid or no, is lying.





Allan Sørensen, Middle East Correspondent, Kristeligt Dagblad on Twitter: "Sderot cinema. Israelis bringing chairs 2 hilltop in sderot 2 watch latest from Gaza. Clapping when blasts are heard."

When Bombs Receive Applause "On a hilltop a few kilometers from Gaza Israelis sit with popcorn to follow the bombing of the area."

Blumenthal: Netanyahu government knew teens were dead as it whipped up racist frenzy

J.J. Goldberg, of all people, in The Forward:
Unruly Hebron Clan Pushes Hamas — and Israel — to Brink
Ex-Shin Bet Chief: Israeli Illusions Fueled Blowup
How Politics and Lies Triggered an Unintended War in Gaza

More of the sort of repeat linked above. Henry Farrell retweets Jim Henley

It goes downhill from there. Farrell always likes claims for disinterested reason against emotionalism, even when those claims are based on manner more than data. Again, see the link at the top of the post. The tweet Henley is responding to reads: "I am anti-killing, anti-death, antiwar. I don't support Hamas, but I don't support idiotic policies of Israeli government either."


I tried to explain to Henley that Israeli behavior was both idiotic and illogical, but reason left had no room for evidence.  Henley is so emotionally invested in the success of amoral practical reason that he can't tell the Machiavellian from the pathological: the Israelis must be right technically, to allow him, while as rational as they are, to attack them for their errors in morality. He's playing word games "in the garden on the mind." His beautiful mind.

Michael: A rebel was being arrested by the military police, and rather than be taken alive, he exploded a grenade he had hidden in his jacket. He killed himself and he took a captain of the command with him...it occurred to me the soldiers are paid to fight, the rebels aren't
Roth: What does that tell you?
Michael: They can win.

"You know, you never beat us on the battlefield."
'That may be so, but it is also irrelevant." *

Bertram links to Goldberg, a right wing Zionist who—pace Henley—sees his dreams at risk. Bertram would never link to an anti-Zionist Jew let alone an Arab, even a participant in non-violent resistance. But call it progress. The comments range from decent to absurd and worse. I'd comment but I've been banned for years.

Zionism is the climate denialism of liberal politics. Given the amount of space on the page dedicated to dissecting the irrationalism of American conservatives, "agnotology" and the "Overton Window", you'd hope such people would have a richer sense of irony. I lost that hope decades ago.

I have been a lawyer for many years, and then got a chance to teach at a non-lawyerly academic institution. I loved it; I loved playing in the garden of the mind. Eventually, however, it became clear to me that academics and non-academics have very different approaches to ideas. Academics, though it sounds odd to say it, don’t take ideas seriously. For academics, ideas are games.

Henley: "I disapprove of Israel's conduct. I am simply seeing it clearly." He recommends this as an example of his clarity.[archive.org]

---
* The first exchange above is from the Godfather Part II; the second is from a meeting between American and North Vietnamese officers in Hanoi in 1974.  I wish I could assume readers recognized both.

The first comment  by repeat commenter "js" on the most recent post by Corey Robin

(Around the time that I started commenting here, ~4-ish years ago, I remember being told that there was an informal avoidance of Israel/Palestine issues around here. I can imagine 15 very good reasons for such a policy, but I’m also glad you’re helping kick it right out the window, so to speak.)

Of course no one around is able -willing- to model the various changes in the Anglosphere that made this possible. People have been given permission to say things they would not have said in the past. A paradigm in the US has shifted; the situation of the Palestinians has not, etc.  "Value free science", "The disenchantment of the world", "Agnotology", The irrationalism of others,  ad infinitum

Robin gets into an argument (compressed here)

R--As someone who identifies as Jewish—who periodically goes to shul, celebrates some if not all of the holidays, and tries at least some (ahem) of the time to get off the internets for shabbos— 

MCJ--Since you mentioned it, may I ask, respectfully: ...are you a believer? 

R--The fact that you’ve since gone on to say that I am a believer — without me ever having said a damn thing about what I do or don’t believe of the Jewish faith — only confirms my initial impression of you (not just on this issue but several others): you assume you know more than you do.

Why not just read Philip Roth and Marx? "...get off the internets for shabbos."
What do you say to someone so confused about himself, and his motives for anything?

more comments, in order but unrelated except in their stupidity.

Roy Belmont- The point was that Polish anti-Semitism might have some real-world causes – not justifications, causes.

Robin- As for whether observant equals believer: the reason I don’t want to get into that is that in my experience many people come to that discussion with a lot of baggage about the relationship between ritual and belief, baggage that I think has its roots in Christianity.

Robin- To this Jew, when I hear that kind of talk — you’re a race, you’re a gene, you’re a this, you’re a that — I feel a bit like what I imagine some women feel like when men start talking at them about things they (men) know nothing about or at least know far less about than the women they’re talking to at the moment. Not a perfect analogy, but I hope you get the point.

Mattski- My perspective is shaped by being raised by parents, one from a Jewish lineage and the other Catholic, both of whom soundly rejected their religious traditions. But I have a lot of Jewish relatives and friends. So, how to understand? It is more of a community, or a tribe, and less a question of what you believe. Indeed, the whole belief fetish seems to me mostly a Christian thing.

MatF- Zionism… it’s pretty much a paradigm case of 19th century nationalism– particularly with inventing a new language…

Christianity was not the first religion to spread beyond its culture of origin, and Modern Hebrew is not Esperanto, but Jews don't proselytize. That's one of the reasons Judaism maintains not only a cultural but genetic continuity.  My father was bothered by the fact that the state would not allow him the option of claiming Jewish or Semitic as ethnicity. As it is he had to describe himself as white. Arabs now make the same complaint, except for those who can call themselves African American.

Robin's focus on religion is the result of his appearance; the remnants of faith are his only relation. In my own experience I've never met a non-religious Jew who worried about following specifically religious tradition. And Robin renders Judaism as Sheilaism, with added defensiveness and pedantry. Watching him I'm realizing he knows white people don't understand the Jewish experience, as they don't understand the black experience.  Whatever he'd said I'd never  really thought of him as Jewish; now I see his fear.

Zionism is Garveyism. Robin's insecurities make him sympathetic to fundamentalist nationalism but he can't allow himself to follow it. His moralism papers over his conflicts, but moralism is conservative by definition.  Hypocrisy creeps in. There's nothing religious about studying Yiddish, or even the Talmud. "The history of nonsense is scholarship." Robin wants think of himself as a humanist but he's too full of fear, and the pride that covers it like scar tissue.

Remembering an article I read by a religious writer who toured various immigrant religious organizations in NYC and became worried that the people he met and the communities they were a part of were isolated from the larger inter-ethnic community.  But of course he met people in temples and churches, not restaurants and bars.

Repeats of repeats of…  "The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known."

One mention in the post of the Palestinians as such. Four polite references to "Israel/Palestine".

Atrios has been on a tear recently. "I know almost nothing about Iran." He really is an amazing character.  A citizen of the most powerful nation in the history of the world and a proud know-nothing.
The posters and commenters at Crooked Timber would never be even that honest.

And the settlement expansion Netanyahu cancelled two weeks ago is back on.

Robin's post is now on three sites: Crooked Timber, linked blow, his own site, and Mondoweiss.
The comments at Mondoweiss, a few of them,  are the only ones worth reading. The authors face the issues directly, having grown up with them as experience rather than idea.  No Arabs that I see on any of the pages, and not many Jews that I can tell on pages other than Mondoweiss, though a few of the commenters there are Mizrahim. Read the comments on all three to understand how cultural, linguistic and political change takes place and where it originates: in people with an intimate, empirical awareness of actions and events.
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Is our children learning?
Call it progress


Corey Robin, 2011, and as always: the links are to my own comments.
He wouldn't have written the post above -he wouldn't have been so public- even one year ago.

The Overton Window has moved.  It only makes sense that the first person at CT to admit to anti-Zionism is a blue-eyed Jew. The rest will follow; he's given them permission. And at some point Quiggin will consider putting Israel before the ICC, and of course will refer to opponents in the language of "Agnotology" [etc.] arguing that his own scientific understanding allowed him to come to the only logical conclusion.  Lets wait for the lies to start. Ain't Enlightenment grand?

Theory follows events; rationalism follows the path formed by lived experience. Robin is still the same asshole he's always been, and just as mediocre. Same for the rest of them.

Bloomberg

The dethronement of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood party is giving rise to a new political power. The ultra-conservative Nour Party was the only Islamist group to support the military-backed plan to topple Mohamed Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood organization that fielded him for office. The move has cast them as political power brokers, evidenced by their scuttling, at least for now, of Mohamed ElBaradei’s appointment as prime minister. 

“The Nour Party for the time being has a veto power over major decisions because the new order needs at least one major Islamist party on its side,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in the Qatari capital. “It’s never been so influential.”

AA

Does the fierce Saudi defense of the Sisi coup not give you any pause?

Sarah Carr
On Sheep and Infidels

Before I begin, let me state some facts, so that when people begin the ad hominem attacks they can try to rein them in within the following boundaries:

I voted for Mohamed Morsi in the second round of the presidential elections (to keep Ahmed Shafiq out).

I am one of the administrators of a blog called “MB in English” that features English translations of awful statements of a sectarian, conspiratorial or bonkers nature that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) intends for domestic consumption only.

I am against army intervention in politics.

I state all this because Egyptian politics and society in general are currently split along identity lines in a way that they have never been over the last three years. This problem is so chronic that the merits or flaws of an argument are almost entirely determined by who is making the argument, considered through a haze of fury and suspicion. 

...On 4 July, the day after Morsi’s removal, I went to the Nasr City sit-in. There was a line of tanks about a kilometer from the entrance checking bags and bothering journalists. Behind the tanks, barbed wire had been put in place. Two men stood five meters apart in silence, both carrying pictures of Morsi.

A man went past them and began shouting. He was an engineer with a lisp who explained in a desperate tone that he did not take part in the 25 January protests but that these protests taught him “how to state an opinion and protect it.” He had voted for Morsi in both rounds of the elections, but insisted that he was at the protest not to support an individual, but “an idea.”

“I learned democracy from the elite. So I voted. But I have learnt that there is no revolution and no democracy,” he said.

As he was talking, a man nearby started screaming in the direction of the army while holding up a poster of Morsi. He was so furious that he succeeded in pulling his poster in two, at which point he crumpled into a ball on the ground and wept.

On Saturday I attended the somber and low-key funeral of Mohamed Sobhy, a father of two who was shot in the head outside the Republican Guards Officers’ Club. Eyewitnesses say that this happened after he put a Morsi poster on the barbed wire in front of some troops who seem to have gotten nervous. In total, four men died at the protest.

I saw his body half an hour later, covered in a sheet and surrounded by bewildered protesters. I tried to tweet the picture but the network was not cooperating and it would not send. So I tweeted that a man had been killed and his body was still here and that I was trying to send a picture for all those who I know would say I was lying.

The problem is not that people did not believe me after the first tweet (it is always good to be cautious). The problem is that they were disputing that a man had died even when the photo was uploaded. One man responded: “he doesn’t have Egyptian features.” Others suggested it was an old photo. When a video appeared and it was no longer possible to dispute the fact that a man had been shot outside the Presidential Guards Officers’ Club in Cairo at the same date and time as the pro-Morsi lot were alleging, attention turned to his injuries. Sobhy was facing the army when he fell to the ground, and blood gushed out of the back of his head.

The lack of serious discussion of world politics among US liberals is more than simply worthy of note.  The limits of normative debate, and curiosity, are more and more clear, and the arrogance of the elite is the worst of it. More and more arrogant the less they have to say. The world moves on.

Below is Crooked Timber's link list.

11D, 3 Quarks Daily, A Fistful of Euros, Atrios, Balkinization, Best of Both Worlds, Blood and Treasure, Brad DeLong, Cosma Shalizi, Corey Robin, Critical Mass, Daily Kos, Daniel Drezner, Digby, Ed Felten, Edge of the American West, Ezra Klein, Feminist Philosophers, Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald, The Inverse Square, Jacobin, Jim Henley, Joshua Marshall, Juan Cole, Kevin Drum, Lawrence Solum, Lawyers, Guns and Money, Leiter Reports, Making Light, Marc Lynch, Marginal Revolution, Mark Thoma, Matthew Yglesias, Maud Newton, Michael Froomkin, Miriam Burstein, Naked Capitalism, New Left Project, The New Inquiry, Pharyngula, Political Theory Daily Review, Politics, Theory and Photography, Russell Arben Fox, Slugger O’Toole, Sociological Images, Steven Johnson, Steven Poole, Talk Left, Tapped, The Virtual Stoa, Tim Lambert, Timothy Burke, Uncertain Principles, Yorkshire Ranter

Beyond a few exceptions there's really not much there. The foreign policy types are American nationalists. Juan Cole is there for his writing on the Iraq war.  He's not an Arab, let alone an angry one, and they don't refer to him anymore, since he refuses to separate Israel from other issues in the region.  I've said all this before. There's a link to Jacobin but not Jadaliyya, to a journal about political ideas but not to one about politics as such, and culture.  It'd be too much to expects links to AbuKhalil, or Phil Weiss. They link to Marc Lynch, a knowledgable strategist of American power, but not Josh Landis. They link to two people at Foreign Policy, but why Drezner, and not Walt? The only excuse for that his friendship from the beginnings of blogging. That and the fact that Farrell likes to criticize Walt as a theorist while ignoring his observations on politics; we're back to ideas again. Their Greenwald link is outdated.  Following the link at the end of the previous sentence will remind you of the history.

Here's AA's July archive, full of links.  Arabist links to the NYT

CAIRO — As President Mohamed Morsi huddled in his guard’s quarters during his last hours as Egypt’s first elected leader, he received a call from an Arab foreign minister with a final offer to end a standoff with the country’s top generals, senior advisers with the president said. 

The foreign minister said he was acting as an emissary of Washington, the advisers said, and he asked if Mr. Morsi would accept the appointment of a new prime minister and cabinet, one that would take over all legislative powers and replace his chosen provincial governors. 

The aides said they already knew what Mr. Morsi’s answer would be. He had responded to a similar proposal by pointing at his neck. “This before that,” he had told his aides, repeating a vow to die before accepting what he considered a de facto coup and thus a crippling blow to Egyptian democracy. 

His top foreign policy adviser, Essam el-Haddad, then left the room to call the United States ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, to say that Mr. Morsi refused. When he returned, he said he had spoken to Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, and that the military takeover was about to begin, senior aides said. 

“Mother just told us that we will stop playing in one hour,” an aide texted an associate, playing on a sarcastic Egyptian expression for the country’s Western patron, “Mother America.”

Academic distance in the name of "science" devolves into the passivity seen both in the powerful and the damned. Irony is the glory of slaves, but the irony of the powerful is perverse.  Daniel Drezner's tone is one of snide superiority and contempt: moralizing prurience. Like Yglesias and Holbo, he plays to an audience while fully aware his own sleazy mediocrity. Robin and Bertram are moralists, but very selective in their targets: self-preservation comes first.

repeat. Yglesias: "terroritories"

After the last depressing news from the Middle East I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied terroritories. [sic] The result would probably be out-and-out war with the neighboring Arab states, but Israel could win that.
All forced population transfers are humanitarian disasters, of course, but so is the current situation. It's not like there's not any room in the whole Arab world for all these Palestinian Arabs to go live in, it's just that the other Arab leaders don't want to cooperate.

AP

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration wants to find a way to avoid labeling the overthrow of Egypt’s Islamist president a “coup” to keep crucial aid flowing to the Egyptian military without violating American law, U.S. officials said Monday.

While not directly ordering a pre-cooked outcome of a legal review into Mohammed Morsi’s ouster last week, the officials said Monday that the White House has made clear in inter-agency discussions that continued aid to Egypt’s military is a U.S. national security priority that would be jeopardized by a coup finding. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal administration deliberations.

The legal review being led by State Department lawyers has not been completed, but under U.S. law, a coup determination would require a suspension of all non-humanitarian aid to Egypt, including $1.3 billion that directly supports the Egyptian military.

John Quiggin refers to the Overton Window and Agnotology, without irony.


"Only elsewhere in the region"

I'm not asking Israel to be Utopian. I'm not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I'm not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's security and for its status as a Jewish state.

"Jimmy! Get the PHD!" [true story]

On Obama's debate, a repeat from 4 years ago, and from another: Obama is a black man who's lived most of his life in a white man's world. He's a Prep School Negro. He's been a politician his entire life.

On whether Obama was at least partially "affirmative action hire":  After the election a story got linked around (an email to TPM[?]) about a man who went to vote before making up his mind, finally choosing Obama because he didn't want to be "on the wrong side of history". This was noted with approval.

On the hyped video. No one comments that both Clinton (Arkansas) and G.W. Bush (Texas) tailored their accents to fit their audience.

Obama, Rahm Emanuel and Jews as the highest of high yella. I've imagined Rahm's oration to his boss about how to play the game and win. "Keep your head down, motherfucker!"
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Agnotology, again, (and context).

A commenter at the second link: "STOP IT. This is becoming like a thread of vaccine deniers arguing about the doctors who are pooh-poohing them."

"Quiggin",  "The irrationalism of others", etc.

"...represents the worst of Crooked Timber, maybe their greatest exemplar of Taylorism and Fordism: a fundamentalist technocrat more left wing and less polished than DeLong."

Various posts on the relation of Anglo-American/ "Analytic" and "Continental" philosophy. In late Feb. Leiter linked to Gary Gutting in the Times, posting a passage from Gutting

These differences concern their conceptions of experience and of reason as standards of evaluation. Typically, analytic philosophy appeals to experience understood as common-sense intuitions (as well as their developments and transformations by science) and to reason understood as the standard rules of logical inference. A number of continental approaches claim to access a privileged domain of experience that penetrates beneath the veneer of common sense and science experience. For example, phenomenologists, such as Husserl, the early Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty try to describe the concretely lived experience from which common-sense/scientific experience is a pale and distorted abstraction, like the mathematical frequencies that optics substitutes for the colors we perceive in the world. Similarly, various versions of neo-Kantianism and idealism point to a “transcendental” or “absolute” consciousness that provides the fuller significance of our ordinary experiences.

Other versions of continental thought regard the essential activity of reason not as the logical regimentation of thought but as the creative exercise of intellectual imagination. This view is characteristic of most important French philosophers since the 1960s, beginning with Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. They maintain that the standard logic analytic philosophers use can merely explicate what is implicit in the concepts with which we happen to begin; such logic is useless for the essential philosophical task, which they maintain is learning to think beyond these concepts.

Continental philosophies of experience try to probe beneath the concepts of everyday experience to discover the meanings that underlie them, to think the conditions for the possibility of our concepts. By contrast, continental philosophies of imagination try to think beyond those concepts, to, in some sense, think what is impossible.

Another more recently by Jon Cogburn at NewApps. The best thing there is a comment by John McCumber

Current discussion of the analytic-continental divide is unlikely to reach substantive conclusions because so much of it ignores a salient fact: that one approach is consonant with the rational choice ideology of the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, while the other—just by its emphasis on history—questions it. Such a circumstance is bound to introduce distortions into both approaches, and philosophers need to locate and remove those distortions.

If they do, one thing they will find is an intellectually nimble and critically alive combination of both approaches I call “situating reason;” but there are doubtless many other such amalgams as well. In the present state of discussion, however, none of them will ever see the light of day. Can it be that—unless we change our ways—the main thing standing in the way of philosophy is philosophers?

Another post at NewApps by John Protevi. Worth reading for the quoted passage by Adrian Moore
Moore:

Another facet of the break between them [Hegel and Nietzsche] is interestingly reflected in one of the contrasts between analytic philosophy and [continental] philosophy.... Both Hegel and Nietzsche have a particular concern with difference and specifically with change.... In analytic philosophy, by contrast, there is typically a greater emphasis on identity.* But not only that; there is also typically a prioritization of identity. It is extremely difficult for analytic philosophers to think of difference in anything other than negative terms; that is, to avoid thinking of what is different as what is not the same, or as what does not have some feature that some given thing does have.** The philosophers whose work we shall be exploring later [e.g., Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze] reverse this prioritization. And in this respect Hegel is closer to the former. He too construes difference negatively. Not so Nietzsche. Nietzsche fully anticipates what is to come. The positive construal of difference, as something that betokens affirmation and something that is itself to be affirmed, is profoundly Nietzschean.*** (399; italics in original)

For more on Protevi, see here and here

The observations are all obvious, and the defensiveness of the responses (not included here) are predictable. Students ideologize the writings of their masters even more than the masters do themselves. Ideologies relating to sense are distinct from those of method or technics, but they're all ideologies. The former are preferable only depending on how they're managed. All philosophizing is definable as reification since theory is required to precede action. Continental philosophy theorizes and therefore reifies otherness and the inevitability of error rather than acting on or through an understanding. In democracy practice precedes theory. Analytic philosophy wills away the possibility of substantive, foundational, error entirely.

Repeating the last post: Lessons for solidarity Palestine can teach us

As a South African who has lived and suffered under apartheid and spent nearly thirty years of my adult life in its jails for resisting it, I can and do humbly claim to know something about the meaning of apartheid.

...Israel’s separate roads, defacto Mixed Marriages Act, trials by military courts, the unfair allocation of resources (particularly water), racist citizenship laws, assigning and denying rights to people on the basis of ethnicity, the destruction of the homes of indigenous people who have lived and worked the land for centuries to make way for newcomers who share a common gene pool with the rulers, the uprooting of olive trees, detention without trial, pass laws, the tiniest pieces of land given the to largest part of the population … I know of no other word for this but apartheid.

It's less the claim that what the author says is "true" than the fact that what he says is discounted by those who think it isn't, not actively, by arguing, but in silence. If there is to be a Jewish State for a Jewish people, codified in law, why not a German state for a German people? If ethnocracy for one why not for all? Is that liberalism? If you believe it is then you should argue the case. No one does. For many liberals in the Anglo American tradition it's enough to say: "We define ourselves as Liberal Zionists, therefore Liberal Zionism must be possible." Difference is denied, and with it the validity of a Palestinian response.

Again, the issue is less "truth" than engagement. More repeats: The rules of evidence in law are such that it does not matter whether illegally obtained evidence is potentially dispositive. What matters is the method by which it was obtained and the dangers of those methods setting a precedent. In arguing that Zionism is racism or that anthropogenic global warming exists, you can't fall back solely on claims of reason and arguments concerning agnotology. After all, everyone I know who uses that term is also a principled defender of Israel. The point is not that others live in glass houses, but that we all run the risk.

An object lesson.

John Quiggin "The discussions here and elsewhere on agnotology/epistemic closure have established the existence of a set of mechanisms on the right for propagating ignorance and protecting it against factual refutation. These mechanisms have some obvious benefits, particularly in mobilising resistance against policy innovations, and tribal solidarity against outsiders of all kinds." 

John Mearsheimer "The story I will tell is straightforward. Contrary to the wishes of the Obama administration and most Americans – to include many American Jews – Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own in Gaza and the West Bank. Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a “Greater Israel,” which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. In other words, it will cease being a Jewish state, which will mean the end of the Zionist dream."

Not a new point but becoming more popular because over time more obviously true. The two-state solution was always a racist one—liberal ethnic separatism is still an oxymoron—but it might have worked. You'll never understand how reason slips into unreason unless you can imagine yourself slipping. Quiggin's arrogance is laughable, more than that it's obscene: blithe superiority is a form of moral passivity. He's not thinking he's assuming, and since this was pointed out to him, politely at first, he's now lying, to himself and then everyone else.