Re: Martin Peretz, Racist Moron

1

Buchanan is not only funny, but right about a surprising amount of stuff these days. It's a little freaky.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 4:58 PM
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Peretz, of course, advocates terrible policies in addition to being a racist loon, making him actually much more dangerous than Buchanan.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 4:58 PM
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What is that supposed to mean? I'm willing to listen to complaints about their tactics, or even to historical justifications for the general shape of the situation, but to say that someone's cause isn't just wrong, but meaningless, treads very close to saying that they shouldn't exist at all. Am I misreading?

Does Peretz hold to the old, infuriating right-wing dogma that "there are no Palestinians"? I haven't heard that one in ages, publicly at least.


Posted by: strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:00 PM
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I haven't heard that one in ages, publicly at least.

You should get out more.


Posted by: slolernr | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:01 PM
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What struck me about the article: since when has being meaningless, unethical, or just plain wrongheaded meant that your side was a losing cause? Plenty of winners are unethical.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:02 PM
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Pooh's close: Krauthammer is, Gawd help us all, worse.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:03 PM
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You should get out more.

I've heard it in private a few times, which is always awkward because half my family's Palestinian. What I tend to heard a lot more of these days, publicly and privately, is "We should wipe out all the Palestinians."


Posted by: strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:05 PM
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half my family's Palestinian

Dude, you mean we're Muslim brothers and you're still mean to me? All the other Palestinians of my acquaintance are much more friendly, you know.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:08 PM
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old, infuriating right-wing dogma that "there are no Palestinians"?

That trope seems to have mostly died out around the time of the first Intifada. Almost everyone accepts now that there are Palestinians, even as they say the sorts of things SJ mentioned.


Posted by: dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:12 PM
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8: What part of "without solidarity among themselves" did you not understand?


Posted by: M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:12 PM
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What does "without solidarity among themselves" mean, especially in the context of acting like lemmings? I mean, if there's one thing lemmings stereotypically/mythically do, it's act in solidarity.


Posted by: slolernr | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:14 PM
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Dude, you mean we're Muslim brothers and you're still mean to me?

Not all Palestinians are Muslim, you know.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:16 PM
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How can people be *both* like lemmings and without solidarity among themselves? Not only is Peretz racist, he's illogical.

I leave it to the philosophers among us to decide which is the greater sin.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:16 PM
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Ah, this thread will attract tenacious trolls, I'm sure.


Posted by: Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:17 PM
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I hope they bring cake this time.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:18 PM
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Teo is sadly correct. Not only are my family Christians, they are, as I may have mentioned before, of that segment of evangelicals or fundamentalists best knows as Krazy Kristians. Which means that not only are they Palestinian, they are also rabidly pro-Israel on political and eschatological grounds. I'm related to the only Palestinian Zionists on the planet.


Posted by: strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:21 PM
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Wow.


Posted by: Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:23 PM
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Ooh, can I come to your place for Thanksgiving, Stras?


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:23 PM
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I'm gonna have enough problems this year as it is, B.


Posted by: strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:25 PM
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Oh, c'mon. It'll be fun!


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:26 PM
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Would "Bush's (Rove's, the Republicans') actions are without ethical meaning" imply "Bush (etc) shouldn't exist at all"?

No, I think it's more likely Peretz has in mind and is unable to well express something like, "The Palestinians have elected a govt dedicated not to the establishment of a fair homeland [full of ethical meaning] but to the destruction of Israel [not so full]". Conceivably by solidarity he means not one person following the next but an interdependence of social responsibility - or he's alluding to Solidarity's non-violence.

In any case he shouldn't be blogging. And of course he would just shut up entirely if he knew what was best for his causes.


Posted by: rilkefan | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:30 PM
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Not all Palestinians are Muslim, you know.

Ah, I did know, but it's clearly not my working assumption. I guess Stras can go on being mean to me; we're having a clash of civilizations, after all.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:31 PM
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I haven't read Peretz at all. I don't even know who he is. But just taking the quote in the post here at face value, I'd say that "without ethical meaning" means that when you send teenagers to commit suicide by intentionally blowing up school buses and pizza parlors, you lose any ethical meaning to what you may be trying to accomplish.

And of course, that's the charitable interpretation. A less charitable view would hold that Hamas, et al, are not merely trying to secure a viable state for the Palestinians, but to destroy Israel and wipe out as many Jews living there as possible. This too would strip the Palestinian cause of ethical meaning.

The most unfair comment Peretz makes in the quoted passage is that the Palestinians "behave like lemmings". There are, of course, Palestinians who disagree with Hamas and want peace with Israel, but they have learned to hide their views, lest they wind up accused of "collaboration with the enemy" and murdered in the street.

Still, it takes a few leaps of logic to infer from the quote that Peretz thinks Palestinians "shouldn't exist at all". My guess is he'd be fine with them existing, if they would stop with the whole kill-the-Jews thing.


Posted by: Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:34 PM
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Of course, my Palestinian relatives can hardly be blamed for their support of hardline anti-Palestinian policies, following as they must their natural lemming-like instincts.


Posted by: strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:34 PM
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I have to admit that I don't really see what ogged was talking about in the quoted passage. But I've read enough Peretz to hold something close to Pooh's position. Peretz is grotesque.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:39 PM
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I guess Stras can go on being mean to me; we're having a clash of civilizations, after all.

I'm not trying to be mean to you, you namby-pamby crymuslim. You're just thin-skinned.


Posted by: strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:40 PM
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You're just thin-skinned.

Am not, meanie.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:42 PM
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Bullies do generally turn out to be thin-skinned.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:45 PM
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Pooh's close: Krauthammer is, Gawd help us all, worse.

Hrm, a decent point.

Re: Buchannan, does he wear his racism as proudly (these days) as does Marty? Peretz's lunacy during the Lebannon incident was...ick...


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:49 PM
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Am not, meanie.

I thought you'd at least compliment my coining of "crymuslim." As in, "Whatsamatter, little crymuslim, did the mean widdle cruise missle kill your wife and family? Well, boo hoo hoo!"


Posted by: strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:51 PM
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"Crymuslim" is indeed brilliant.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:52 PM
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"Crymuslim" was good, but I'm not going to compliment you while you're making me cry my oppressed muslim tears.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:52 PM
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Eh, "crymuslim" is OK.


Posted by: standpipe b | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:56 PM
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Gaijin Biker gets the common rationale and mental frame for Peretz' remarks about "ethical meaning" right in 23. It's hypocritical to the point of bankruptcy, of course -- commentators like Peretz are somehow never wont to see the Israeli cause as "lacking in ethical meaning" because it kills innocents or because some of its supporters are vocal eliminationists -- but it's a fairly routine blood-and-soil talking point.


Posted by: Doctor Slack | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:57 PM
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Umm, Charles Murray? Maybe Ward Connerly? Does Farrakhan count even if as I guess no one here reads him?


Posted by: rilkefan | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:59 PM
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Crymuslim was better before we started talking about how wonderful it is; now it sort of fails to live up to expectations.


Posted by: Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 5:59 PM
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"Crymuslim" is magician buttfucker.


Posted by: standpipe b | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:01 PM
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35 - I suppose Murray still qualifies as mainstream, but only just. He's also nowhere near as unguarded about it, hiding behind a shield of Wanky-Wonkdom. Farrkhan and Connorly don't count as mainstream in my book.


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:02 PM
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"It" being his racism.


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:02 PM
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Farrakhan is hardly mainstream.

I have deja vu.

(pooh-pwned on preview.)


Posted by: dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:03 PM
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Did we have this discussion before? About whether Farrakhan is mainstream?


Posted by: dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:03 PM
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"His" being Murray's.

I could go on like this for hours, sadly...


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:05 PM
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35:I don't read any of those guys; don't ubderstand why others do; and am not particularly thrilled about having such things inflicted on me.

"Lemmings without solidarity" and other logical, methodological, or statistical errors are just too much to bear.


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:07 PM
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Farrkhan and Connorly don't count as mainstream in my book.

Brother Muzone is so disappointed. And Murray's words--if I'm right about who Murray is--don't drip with virulent joy at the thought of violence visiting even innocent members of the relevant group. Krauthammer scares me to death, and I'm not in the relevant group.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:07 PM
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Brother Muzone is so disappointed.

The Game is the Game, he'll get over it.


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:09 PM
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"don't drip with virulent joy at the thought of violence visiting even innocent members of the relevant group"

Is Peretz that bad?


Posted by: rilkefan | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:11 PM
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He can be pretty bad: I remember feeling shocked at some of his Plank posts, and by some of the things I read off the back page in the magazine (in the "Diary").

Although it's possible that you're asking if he writes as badly as the author of the quoted bit: I'm not sure I can say that.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:17 PM
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RF, check the Plank pieces I linked to here


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:28 PM
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Quote from a link from Pooh, supposedly showing virulent racism:
"Oh, yes, a mother and her two daughters were in it. It was their house. By the way, they are now dead."
(followed by a link to as-far-as-I-know simple facts from a run-of-the-mill partisan viewpoint). The quote indicates outrage at Hamas. The family in question was Arab.

I can't really bring myself to care about a bunch of posts you call "plausibly defensible" on an individual level.


Posted by: rilkefan | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:40 PM
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In particular, these back to back posts.

Without apparent irony, he wails (justifiably) about 3 Israeli deaths from rocket fire and then proceeds to not-quite-explicitly minimized 28 Palestinian deaths because the Em-Ess-Em may have overstated the number to as much as 50. I suppose he could just have written "I think an Israeli life is worth at least 10 times as much as a Palestinian life" and it would have been clearer, but I didn't exactly need the Rosetta Stone...


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:42 PM
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Um, why is he racist? How is he any different from some (Irish) Prod that wants to kill all Catholics or vice-versa?

We need better words.

max
['Sectarianist?']


Posted by: max | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:47 PM
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Krazy Kristians

They express their love for Israel by throwing bricks at her.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:48 PM
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Re: Buchanan's occasional humour, I was highly amused when he referred to Canada as Soviet Canuckistan. Possibly the best insult that's ever been tossed in the direction of my home and native land, and it still makes me laugh to think of it.

Peretz disgraces himself with such rhetoric.


Posted by: Invisible Adjunct | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:50 PM
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Soviet Canuckistan

I recently started hearing that all of a sudden. Didn't know the provenance.

And where did "Canadia" come from?


Posted by: dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:56 PM
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52:"Bigoted" works well in most cases, and I think perhaps carries a little more stupidity and irrationality, and a little less implication of loyalism to some particular side at the expense of another.

If "genocidal" gets applied to political entities, I am in big trouble.


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:58 PM
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55: 52 s/b 51


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 6:59 PM
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And where did "Canadia" come from?

Back formation from "Canadian," presumably (though I don't know who did it first). I haven't noticed any particular political overtones to that one.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 7:00 PM
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Soviet Canuckistan

Maybe the health insurance industry is testing out some anti-UHC memes. Canadians = Commies, so you don't want to get your hip replacement for free, do you? Comrade?


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 7:08 PM
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13. Being illogical is the worse sin parce que flawed logic is necessary for racisim, and racism is sufficient to show flawed logic. Mais pas vice versa.


Posted by: Michael | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 7:16 PM
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"Norwegia" was mentioned in "Married with Children".

Because of a housemate, during a brief one-year period around 7 years ago I actually watched TV as much as 5 hours a week. You won't get much more TV trivia from me.

"Czechia" is correct in some languages, probably including Czech where it gets over a million Googles.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 8:04 PM
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50 - Pooh, by that standard of reading I could ludicrously say you're an anti-Semite for minimizing Israeli Arab deaths. By that standard I could find dozens of sensible people who (for saying it's not worth getting n American soldiers killed to save 10*n Sudanese) "drip with virulent joy at the thought of violence visiting even innocent members of the relevant group".

I'm not making an affirmative claim about Peretz - I don't think I've ever seen anything worthwhile from him - but I have the sense that the reaction to him in the post isn't reality-based.


Posted by: rilkefan | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 8:18 PM
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"Without ethical meaning" sounds to me like the sort of phrase an author uses when he wants to generate an aura of profundity but has no idea what he's talking about. I'm not sure the nonexistence thing follows, just because nothing but "boo palestinians!" follows.


Posted by: FL | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 9:16 PM
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But if one is saying that a group of people lacks ethical capacity, isn't that tantamount to saying they are in- or subhuman?


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 9:23 PM
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62: Exactly. Unless we're getting all Augustine-style with our privations, it seems reasonable to say that by "without ethical meaning" Peretz means "evil", which seems to me to be meaningful ethical content, but then I just crash trolleys into each other until they make a big choo-choo train.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 9:30 PM
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B, it's the *cause* that has no "ethical meaning" (honestly, I have no idea what this means, and this is my job). If he meant that the people or the cause have no moral worth or significance, that's easy enough to say, but the phrase as written is a mystery to me.


Posted by: FL | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 9:49 PM
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Well, it's all just doublespeak, innit?

Of course, you can't call Palestinians "rats", so you call them "lemmings." And you don't want to distinguish between civillians and armed, organized paramilitaries, so when you're being polite you say that everyone who's been killed by your army is a "militant" and then you get your fringe element to rail about how calling a militant anything but a terrorist proves a bias against your position.

Anyhow, that's just the ur-fascists up to their same old tricks. "It's not racialist, coz the Palestinians ain't a race!" "How dare you say that this conflict about my heritage is really about power and wealth?!" "Anybody who supports the Palestinians hates all Jews!" "Anybody who likes Jews must support Israel!" "Any Jews who aren't supporters of Israel are self-hating!" "Any Muslims who don't publicly support Muslim terrorists are just lying!" "Real Christians support Israel, because Christianity came from Judaism!" "Centuries of Christian persecution of Jews mean that Jews can't trust anyone who isn't Jewish!" "The left should support Israel, because of the Kibbutzim and human rights abuses in the Muslim world!" "Opponents of Israel are all Stalinist anti-Semites!" "This has nothing to do with oil!" "America needs a friend in the Middle East!"

Of course its all the most vicious, hateful nonsense. What else do you expect?


Posted by: minneapolitan | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 10:04 PM
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65: Do you think that the author is actually being as careful with his language as you are? Because it seems to me that using LB's strict/natural distinction, the natural interpretation here is Palestinians /= moral worth.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 10:08 PM
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FL, he has to have intended to say (even though it's in direct contradiction to what he literally said) that a) validity of their cause can be ethically evaluated and b) it's impossible (for a reasonable person?) to evaluate it positively. Which is basically what you say in 62. I miss metaethics, and did I mention I saw the first part of Tim Scanlon giving a talk on blame today.


Posted by: washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 10:08 PM
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My bet is that he didn't want, for whatever reason, to say their cause of "unethical" or "immoral", but he wanted to convey that they had no moral standing. So, yeah, I think Ogged is misreading. I believe Peretz simply meant to say that the Palestinian cause has no moral justification.


Posted by: Michael | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 10:10 PM
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Also: a group can behave like lemmings (reflexive action) without having solidarity (reflective group-forming).

And comparing a people to lemmings certainly isn't nice, but let's not lose our heads. I mean, political speech is given to extremes.


Posted by: Michael | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 10:25 PM
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I'd say the big problem with Peretz is not so much his rhetoric (odious though it is) as his influential position and advocacy of dangerous policies.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 10:27 PM
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"Norwegia" was mentioned in "Married with Children".

"Norwege" was mentioned in "Salute Your Shorts".


Posted by: Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 10:28 PM
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70: You realize that the third hit on that Google search is from a Neo-Nazi organization, right? Bit of a tautology, those extremists with their extreme speech, eh?


Posted by: minneapolitan | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 10:39 PM
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You realize that the third one down isn't the only result?


Posted by: Michael | Link to this comment | 11- 9-06 11:04 PM
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Also: a group can behave like lemmings (reflexive action) without having solidarity (reflective group-forming).

Yes, it's possible, but it sounds like you're grabbing every slur possible to throw, and then ex post facto coming up with refined analytic arguments showing that it's formally possible for the slurs to coexist. The "lemming" slur is usually thrown at people who blindly follow their group, but apparently an additional slur is needed to deprive these particular lemming os the virtue of group solidarity.

Probably the anti-Peretz argument here relies context -- some degree of familiarity with Peretz's M.O. over the last decade or two. He seems to be edging close close to saying that all Israelis are civilians, and all "Palestinians" are terrorists.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 3:28 AM
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Supposedly, Quebecois separatists have referred to Canada as 'Canuckistan' for a long time hence. (I seem to remember hearing it from a British Columbian at least ten years ago.) Buchanan doesn't get credit for tacking on 'Soviet' either, but he does get credit for making the most waves by doing so.


Posted by: neil | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 5:11 AM
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74: Yes, of course, however, unless your point is that political speech constitutes an area in which we must ignore context, I still think it's pretty telling. If Marty Peretz and the National Alliance both use the phrase "demographic time bomb", for instance, I think we have to assume, based on their other utterances, that they are using it in a manner that is distinct from how, say, a moderate politician describing Social Security reform issues might use it. If a far-rightist in Israel or the US talks about "mixed marriages," I think it's safe to assume that he or she really means something along the lines of "miscegenation", but wants to seem more distant from the people who use that word than is actually the case. "Self-hating Jew" = "race traitor" etc.
I don't really have time for a flame war today, but there is only one side of this debate that consistently and almost uniformly resorts to a language of otherization, comparing their opponents to animals, savages, primitives, non-people, etc. And I think it's right to call them on it.


Posted by: minneapolitan | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 5:36 AM
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then ex post facto coming up with refined analytic arguments showing that it's formally possible for the slurs to coexist.

Explanation of the two slurs might be complex, but it doesn't follow that forming the two judgements is a complex process. Believe me, I'm not about to accuse Peretz of complicated thought. The two slurs could simply stem from two different "observations", and I'm just pointing out that they don't necessarily contradict each other. They could contradict each other, of course. I'm not sure on how, precisely, Peretz means those slurs to be taken.

77. It sounds to me like you just argued "it's eliminationist rhetoric because it's coming out of Marty Peretz's mouth." I'm not one to bother arguing with tautologies.


Posted by: Michael | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 6:42 AM
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65--

"B, it's the *cause* that has no "ethical meaning" (honestly, I have no idea what this means, and this is my job). If he meant that the people or the cause have no moral worth or significance, that's easy enough to say, but the phrase as written is a mystery to me."

I'm reluctant to dip a toe into this, not only because of the sordidity of it all, but because there is seldom a precise answer as to what stupid, confused people mean by their stupid, confused language.

That said: my most charitable version of what MP *might* have had in mind by the "no ethical meaning" line is that it is a variation on the charge of nihilism.

You see, they aren't really fighting for justice or statehood or independence or Islam or any of the things they say they are fighting for. They are fighting out of a nihilistic desire to kill things and blow things up.

That's my best guess at what he was trying to allege.


Posted by: kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 7:34 AM
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I don't really have time for a flame war today, but there is only one side of this debate that consistently and almost uniformly resorts to a language of otherization, comparing their opponents to animals, savages, primitives, non-people, etc. And I think it's right to call them on it.

I'm totally sympathetic to the rest of your argument, but we know this isn't true. The anti-Semitic rhetoric directed toward Israel from Arab leaders and media (and even some European corners) is easily as vile as this, if not more so. My sympathies tend to go with the Palestinians on this issue, but let's not pretend anyone has clean hands here.

Hypothesis: if the PLO had adopted the tactics of Ghandi/King, this would have all been over in the 70s.


Posted by: Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 8:06 AM
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80
don't forget the crucial role of the SCOTUS under Burger in combatting racism.

I think what you really mean is that the PLO should have adopted the tactics of Burger-King.


Posted by: kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 8:17 AM
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Once again, Joe D steps to the plate. You have to really commit to pretending if you want to believe that the obscene language towards the other side only exists on the Israeli or Jewish side of the line.

I'm not sure I agree with this, though: "Hypothesis: if the PLO had adopted the tactics of Ghandi/King, this would have all been over in the 70s." I'm not sure that the Palestinians had accepted the two-state solution in the 70s. Particularly in the absence of such acceptance, Israeli interests in, well, Israel, strike me as much deeper than British interests in India, for example.

The truth is, it's a unbelievably crap situation for both parties. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next couple of years, especially with Baker back on the scene.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 8:31 AM
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Pre-emptive Farber:
"Ghandi" s/b "Gandhi"


Posted by: Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 8:45 AM
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Damn. Google failed me on that.

81 is awesome.

I don't know, Tim. We know what did happen, but we don't know what would have happened if the leadership had been different and had urged different priorities/tactics. I like to think that a compromise could have eventually been reached, even back then, if Arafat had commited his organization to nonviolent tactics. There would have been a hell of a lot more goodwill on both sides, surely.


Posted by: Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 8:51 AM
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80: While you're absolutely right, isn't there a true thing to be said along the lines of "There's only one side from whom otherizing rhetoric is acceptable in polite American discourse"? People on the 'Palestinian side' of the issue who are accepted as respectable, mainstream voices in the US aren't saying rude things about Israeli Jews, they're saying rude things about Israeli policies (they're often accused of sympathizing with antisemitism, but they aren't explicitly saying such things). To get to the horrifically antisemitic stuff, you have to leave the American mainstream.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 8:55 AM
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Hypothesis: if the PLO had adopted the tactics of Gandhi/King, this would have all been over in the 70s.

Of course. Nonviolence is tailor made for occupied peoples. This is the easy case for us pacifists.


Posted by: rob helpy-chlak | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 9:23 AM
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At the beginning of the second entifada, in 2001, a colleague desperate to find support for views she knew weren't justifiable, sent me a piece by Joseph Farah, denying the Palestinians existed, on his authority as a Palestinian. With a few minutes' Googling, I found a piece by him ecstatically contemplating The Rapture, which was all I needed to make my point to her. Farah is I think the most visible Krazy Kristian Palistinian/Palistinians-don't-exist/the-Palistinians-must-be-crushed figure; it can't be a large group.

We took TNR through the eighties into the nineties, until we couldn't stand it anymore. There were many interesting articles then as now, but on the subject of Israel and the Middle East, Peretz's views more-and-more seemed pathological to me. I understand why people who haven't followed this magazine for thirty years want to make a reasonable interpretation for these statements, but really, he means it.

At the beginning of that period, a great many of the people around me were, or thought they were, close to Peretz on these issues. But there has been a great change, partly generational, in that time. Now these views are very marginal; as far as I can tell, he's lost most of what was his readership.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 9:29 AM
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I found a piece by him ecstatically contemplating The Rapture, which was all I needed to make my point to her.

the self contradictory nature of the argument alone didn't do it for her?


Posted by: rob helpy-chlak | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 9:35 AM
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84

81 was low-hanging fruit. still, glad you liked it.

Yasssir Arafat says: have it *your* way!


Posted by: kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 9:43 AM
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To get to the horrifically antisemitic stuff, you have to leave the American mainstream.

Perhaps, but the Israelis aren't too worried about rockets launched by the Aryan Brotherhood from a prison exercise yard or Montana. The rhetoric and actions of those much closer is guaranteed to create and maintain a modern Sparta.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 9:43 AM
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No, it required association of ideas.

Seeing Israel as anything but Light to the Nations has been hard work for people I care about, but by-and-large they've done it, and I commend them for it. I've never had to reevaluate a cherished, regenerative belief of my own like that; I've had it easy.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 9:45 AM
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89 -- Binyamin Netenyahu says: "I deserve a break today!"


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 9:45 AM
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I certainly don't mean to say that by virtue of being outside of the American mainstream such attitudes shouldn't be considered, or shouldn't be frightening -- just that minneapolitan seemed to me to have, while saying something that was actually false, have come close enough to a true statement (that there is in mainstream American discourse a perceptible double standard between the rhetoric that supporters of right-wing Israeli policies use about Palestinans as a class (pretty nasty) and that supporters of left-wing Israeli policies/the Palestinan cause/whatever use about Israelis as a class (as distinct from as about Israeli policies toward Palestinians)) that it was worth pointing out the true (IMO) statement.

I hate talking about Israel/Palestine. I feel so ignorant, and so nervous about saying something offensive, and so unsure of what I think on any kind of global level, that I just get paralyzed.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 9:50 AM
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Seeing Israel as anything but Light to the Nations has been hard work for people I care about, but by-and-large they've done it, and I commend them for it. I've never had to reevaluate a cherished, regenerative belief of my own like that; I've had it easy.

It's a hard thing to do.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 9:52 AM
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92

I'm sorry, but the MacDonald's plan was tried, and failed.

There was a roadmap. It proposed that both parties should get up and get away. To MacDonald's.

But there was never any constituency for it. In particular, Mayor McCheese rejected the plans for partitioning Jerusalem.


Posted by: kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 9:57 AM
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91: The association of ideas is pretty simple. "A bunch of people just tried very hard to wipe us all out. The people around us are saying they would like to do very much the same thing."

Seeing Israel as anything but Light to the Nations has been hard work

I've always thought phrases like "Light to the Nations" were BS and I can remember listening to the UN vote on the radio in 1948. People and states define themselves in reaction to their (perceived) most dangerous enemy. The Israelis have been doing that since the establishment of the state and before; they're not going to stop just because it leads to killing innocent civilians.

(And the concept of "innocent civilian" in the age of nation states with the ability to count, tax, and utilize anyone within their reach is perhaps an issue for a different thread.)


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 10:28 AM
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"I can remember listening to the UN vote on the radio in 1948"

wow--that makes you older than me! Not true of many other bloggers.


Posted by: kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 10:37 AM
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I can remember listening to the UN vote on the radio in 1948

Huh. I always thought Emerson was the seniormost Unfo.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 10:43 AM
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Emerson--puh. A mere babe in arms. Wet behind the ears. Green youth.

Not that he isn't a clever young shaver now and then, I'll grant him that, with his newfangled ideas. But it won't hold up. Time will tell.


Posted by: kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 10:49 AM
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Explanation of the two slurs might be complex, but it doesn't follow that forming the two judgements is a complex process.

No, it's just a matter of madly grabbing for everything that it's possible to throw. Figuring out subtle ex post facto arguments that what Peretz said isn't as silly as it seems sounds to me like a useless form of special pleading.

There is seldom a precise answer as to what stupid, confused people mean by their stupid, confused language.

Peretz is a Harvard prof who's chosen to step into the gutter. No stupidity, no confusion. Just relentless, determined hostility.

The anti-Semitic rhetoric directed toward Israel from Arab leaders and media (and even some European corners) is easily as vile as this, if not more so.

Within the US the eliminationist rhetoric comes from part of the pro-Israel mainstream. To find anti-Semitic eliminationism you have to look at very marginal figures like Farrakhan and the Amrican Nazis. Pat Buchanan is anti-Semitic, and for that and other reasons he's been marginalized in the Republican Party. Theoretically he's not a Republican at all any more, though I think that his third-party activities were trimmed to minimize the damage to Bush.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 10:50 AM
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Indeed, sometimes I feel like Methuselah but I only recently got my Medicare card.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 10:51 AM
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Peretz is a Harvard prof who's chosen to step into the gutter. No stupidity, no confusion. Just relentless, determined hostility.

But not as subtle as Alan Dershowitz.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 10:57 AM
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The impact of age being variable, I think of it in terms of birth presidencies. We've about a half dozen "Trumans" around here. "Eisenhowers" are relatively rare, as are "Kennedys." Late Johnson/Nixon is the next big cohort.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:02 AM
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Aren't people like Cala, Kotsko and w-lfs-n in the frightening Reagan cohort? It doesn't seem right to me that I can hold an adult conversation with someone born in the Reagan years.

I also had no idea that Kid B belonged to the very oldest guard, perhaps mislead by her moniker. I also tend to judge age by bitterness, making Emerson and McManus the oldest of the lot.


Posted by: rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:06 AM
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Also, I'm in the Nixon cohort.


Posted by: rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:07 AM
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Aren't people like Cala, Kotsko and w-lfs-n in the frightening Reagan cohort?

They're not the only ones.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:09 AM
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Technically a Carter baby. I grow old, trousers rolled, etc.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:12 AM
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Tricky Dick forever!


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:13 AM
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Those not given to reminiscing, unlike the Little River Band and I, can go undetected without careful attention. On a gray Friday in the Spring, much like today, I wondered about the absence of women in my own cohort, and was told that two or three were active here every day.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:15 AM
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Also, I'm in the Nixon cohort.

Get out! -- me too.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:19 AM
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I also tend to judge age by bitterness, making Emerson and McManus the oldest of the lot.

If that's the criterion they're mere babes in diapers.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:19 AM
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Nixon.


Posted by: slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:20 AM
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Ford!


Posted by: Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:25 AM
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Oh, wait. Not Ford. Carter.


Posted by: Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:25 AM
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I was born after Nixon's election but before his inaugural, so I shall cling to my Johnson.


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:27 AM
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My parents are both Truman babies.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:30 AM
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My wife was born soon after the swearing in of Eisenhower.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:31 AM
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Just mentioning Ford reminds me of telling my son on Wednesday what a clear impression I had of the personalities of Rumsfeld and Cheney from those years, sideburns and "Barney Miller" political consensus notwithstanding.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:31 AM
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My parents are both Truman babies.

Mine too.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:33 AM
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119 -- wow, you are much younger than your parents than am I.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:35 AM
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My parents were both Truman babies, too.


Posted by: slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:35 AM
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Guess they don't call it the postwar baby boom for nuthin'.


Posted by: slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:36 AM
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Does the construction in 120 work? Does it have a name?


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:37 AM
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(And the concept of "innocent civilian" in the age of nation states with the ability to count, tax, and utilize anyone within their reach is perhaps an issue for a different thread.)

I'd like to hear what you think these abilities of the state have to do with the innocence of civilians.


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:42 AM
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123: It's kind of marginal for me; "than I am" would work better.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:43 AM
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I'm forty years older than my son. My dad was 34 when I was born, his was 40 when he was. As a boy, my grandfather lived during the summer alone with his grandfather, helping him with the chores. He had been born in the 18th century.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:43 AM
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My parents were the kind of baby-boomers who did wild and crazy stuff in their twenties rather than marrying and having kids, as the parents of the Nixon babies here apparently did. Nothing they did was that crazy, but it didn't involve much childrearing.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:47 AM
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Mom and Dad were 23 and 22 when first I laid foot on this sorry earth.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:47 AM
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Some branches of my dad's family have fifty-year generations. We're more like thirty-five.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:47 AM
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My mom was 32 when I was born.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:48 AM
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These are the male lines, of course. We don't even have to go into Saul Bellow/Tony Randall territory for the length of "male" generations to exceed female cumulatively by a lot. So a notable like Millard Filmore can be the same generation as I am, 11th, back to the Planter, 1635. Hannah Fosdick, "mother of us all," was born on the Mayflower.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 11:55 AM
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Hannah Fosdick, "mother of us all"

Among her offspring must of course be numbered Fearless.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:01 PM
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My parents were both born in 1946, both as the first child in their families. I was the first one in our family, and they were just 22 when I arrived. All of my cousins are decidedly younger than me.


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:02 PM
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My mother was 34, hers 32. I don't think the gap between husband and wife has been greater than about six years, on any branch of my direct ancestry, since the companionate marriage became standard in the 19th century. But my grandmother's youngest brother Frank had a son my age; he must have been about fifty years older.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:06 PM
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124: It's simply that, after WW2, I wonder if the concept of "innocent civilian" has any real meaning. It obviously has psychological and propagandiacal (sic) utility but I'm thinking the phrase may now actually apply to only a few isolated tribes in the Amazon basin or the like.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:07 PM
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My parents are both older than apostropher's parents.


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:11 PM
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135: Do you mean to suggest that civilians of any country should be considered morally culpable for that country's policies? Or that states typically behave in wartime as if that were true? Because I think the first choice is the usual justification for terrorism, and is pretty much where Ward Churchill, for example, came down on 9/11, evoking much outrage, as I recall. And then it enables us to do away with quaint concepts like "war-crime". If the second, well, I don't think that's what you're saying, actually.


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:25 PM
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I hate talking about Israel/Palestine. I feel so ignorant, and so nervous about saying something offensive, and so unsure of what I think on any kind of global level, that I just get paralyzed.

Word. I've never been dumped faster in my life than by the girl with whom I made the mistake of trying to convince of a 'moderate' position on I/P. The fact that this came up on a date probably indicates why I remain a bachelor...


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:28 PM
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138: This is basically the issue that's led me to gradually drift away from organized Judaism. There's some mighty circled wagons these days.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:31 PM
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138: This is basically the issue that's led me to gradually drift away from organized Judaism. There's some mighty circled wagons these days.

I'm surprised. I see a lot of Jewish Americans (or at least Demi-Semite Americans) holding moderate to leftist positions on I/P. And various such continually point to Haaretz opinion pages to show that there are Jewish Israelis to the left of them.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:37 PM
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139: True enough about organized positions, but to echo a theme from the other thread, this doesn't reflect where people are as individuals, nor does the organized position on intermarriage.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:39 PM
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140: The thing is, you never know. In that particular instance, I may have already been on thin ice as a demi-semi already.


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:40 PM
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The key word in 139 is "organized." There are lots of Jewish Americans who are moderate-to-leftish on Israel, but go to a synagogue and that's not the kind of stuff you'll hear.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:41 PM
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Yglesias on mid-term Jewish voting trends:

the rightwing Jews have spent a lot of time suggesting that critics of the Bush administration's policies are anti-semites. But for whatever reason, American Jews are still living like Episcopalians and voting like Puerto Ricans (an old New York political joke, nowadays Episcopalians increasingly vote like Puerto Ricans).

Posted by: Stanley | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:53 PM
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Yglesias is great on this issue.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 12:57 PM
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137: I'm thinking that perhaps in a modern industrial state the differentiation between civilian and soldier is an expression of nostalgia rather than of any utility.

Would have the Japanese, if they knew about Los Alamos (and had the capability), been "justified" in a strike at the scientists? How about kidnapping and torturing some of their kids to exert pressure for a sabotaged test?

I guess what I'm getting at is that perhaps the old "Women and children to the lifeboats" is an expression of biological imperatives, and the modern industrial state has contrary imperatives.

The I/P conflict and the arguments about how that is or should be conducted is a good example, I think.

My first approximation: Humans are territorial chimps with the ability to rationalize. We will do whatever we think is necessary, we justify it to ourselves as we do it or later on, and we keep repeating the same patterns with different rationalizations through the ages.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 1:20 PM
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145: Word.


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 1:40 PM
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143, 145, and 147: Also word.


Posted by: mrh | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 1:54 PM
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146:
paragraph 1: sounds like a wish, rather than a fact.
paragraph 2, part one: There's a difference between the average civilian and a scientist working on weapons of mass destruction, so your example is a bad one.
paragraph 2, part two: No.
paragraphs 3,4,5: Oh, sorry, I forgot you're a robot.


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 2:12 PM
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149:

P1) Observation, not wish. You do NOT know me well enough to read my mind.

P2) What's the difference between someone paying for a WMD and someone building it? That distinction doesn't fly in a plain old murder case. How many taxpayers don't know they're paying taxes?

P3) Why not? Dismembering one kid to save Hiroshima and Nagasaki sounds like a reasonable deal in the modern world.

P4) You can do better than that. In any event, do you really see any improvement in *overall* human behaviour since Genghis? Some regions burn themselves out piling up skulls but they're just resting for the next go-around. It looks like it's taking Japan less than a century to start getting over H. and N.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 2:43 PM
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As always, I enter the discussion after things have gone meta and the original topic is a distant memory, but I believe a plausible (if unlikely) reading of Peretz has been missed here.

I think what Peretz may have meant by his comment that the Palestinian national cause lacks "ethical meaning" was that it does not serve as a source of moral inspiration for Palestinians. The Palestinian narrative does not set down the ideal type of person a Palestinian should be in order to achieve their nationhood.

The PLO spent a great deal of effort declaring to the world through words and actions that the Palestinians existed, but they never fully answered the question: What is a Palestinian? (Not the historical accident of living in the pre-1948 British mandate, but the abstract idea of Palestinianism.) Peretz would contrast this with the redemptive notion of the 'hard Jew' rising from the ashes of the destruction of European Jewry (never again, and so on). This is an idea that has played no small role in the development of Israeli identity.

Islamism increasingly plays this role for some Palestinians, and has served as a much more powerful source of inspiration for heroism (or infamy, depending on your perspective) than the arcane details of a land dispute or even the Israeli occupation itself. The "leadership" of the Palestinians, however, have not, by and large, been Islamists (although this is changing) and Arafat took his direction from whatever the latest fad in Arab revanchism was at the time (e.g. Saddam Husayn), following them into destructive ends that should have been foreseen (thus, the lemming bit). He did this largely because he lacked a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve.

The extent to which Hamas (or Fath, or someone else for that matter) changes this condition will determine the future of the Palestinians.


Posted by: Yuri Guri | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 3:07 PM
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150:
P1) Well, I can tell the difference between a soldier and, say, a schoolchild or a grocer, and I assume many, many other people can as well.

P2) Okay, have it your way. What's the logical conclusion to your argument? Why should we accept any constraints? I'm sure he's done something to deserve it, so I think I'll kill my neighbor, take his money, and eat him for dinner. That's what a tiger would do, right? (If it understood money, that is.) I'm sure we have many genes in common with tigers, as well as with chimpanzees.

p3) If I took you seriously I wouldn't be talking to you at all.

P4) The fact that we haven't achieved utopia doesn't seem like a good argument for dispensing with our few little attempts at being better than our worst. I'm leaving to catch a train, so I'm not going to do better than that.

It looks like it's taking Japan less than a century to start getting over H. and N.
What's that supposed to mean?


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 3:10 PM
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151: That would be plausible, I suppose, if there was ever any nuance in Peretz's position on related matters...


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 3:23 PM
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No one admires Genghis Khan more than I do, but I do not think that his practices be taken as the standard for the treatment of enemy civilians.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 4:12 PM
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Biohazard is coming close to giving Ward Churchill's "Little Eichmanns" argument.

I just can't figure out why.


Posted by: rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 4:18 PM
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"The janitors at Los Alamos were like little Eichmanns to the Japanese. So Palestinian olive farmers are little Eichmanns to the Israelis. Therefore the Israelis are allowed to bulldoze their villages.”

Is that the argument on this thread? Maybe I need to read it again.


Posted by: rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 4:26 PM
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154: We now insist Gengis was a bit cranky and prone to excess but regime after regime continues to pile up the skulls, just changing the rationale for the necessity. It might be interesting to calculate the ratio of skulls in piles to the world population through history. I'd bet the misery ratio is close to a constant.

155: 'Cause I'm trying to figure out why not beyond asserting it's not nice or that civilians are civilians and soldiers are soldiers. I'm looking for a way out of my logic. I don't like the conclusion of the "brains in vats" philosophical conundrum but I haven't got a solid answer for that one either.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 4:44 PM
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It might be interesting to calculate the ratio of skulls in piles to the world population through history.

I think the rate of violent death has actually been going down since our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. I also think I read that in a Jared Diamond book. Roughly, the claim was that early hunter gatherer societies had a violent death rate comparable to chimps, and things have been getting steadily better since then.

The common chimpanzee is a violent motherfucker. I'd look all this up, but I don't feel like it.


Posted by: rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 5:07 PM
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Also, I'm told Berube has a good reply to the Ward Churchill nonsense. It isn't even close to a brain in a vat conundrum.

It is really pretty simple as I see it. Not all empires are equally evil, and not all citizens are equally complicit in empire. I think both of these claims are common sense.

I'd come up with a further defense, but I don't feel like it.


Posted by: rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 5:10 PM
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154, 157: the pile of skulls stuff was Tamerlane, not Genghis, who actually treated the peoples he conquered if not well, then he didn't do a whole ton of slaughtering. I point you to this book.

The Mongol-as-slaughterer thing largely came about because they didn't do written history themselves, so much of what we hear about them is stuff written by the formerly conquered after the fact, be it post Kubilai China or 18th Century Europe. (A lot of the more heinous stuff written about him was more Genghis as a stand in for the French Monarchy, pre-Revolution, for example.)


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 5:36 PM
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154, 157: the pile of skulls stuff was Tamerlane

I thought Tamerlane was just some creep the next village over.


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 5:50 PM
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Battlepanda has been suborned. Weatherford is a tool of the Mongol nationalists. Seriously.

There were cities in Eastern Iran where Genghis's men killed every man, woman, child, and dog, and then came back a week later to finish off whoever had escaped.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 6:31 PM
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162: I have no way of evaluating that argument, though it is pretty clear that Weatherford is sympathetic to the Mongols. I'm not claiming he was all sweetness and light, but considering that the Mongols didn't get to write their own history, I find it highly plausible that he was made worse in the traditional retelling.


Posted by: Pooh | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 7:03 PM
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Not all empires are equally evil, and not all citizens are equally complicit in empire.

I wasn't making the "morally equivalent" argument so there was no need to refute it. I'd come up with a further defense, but I don't feel like it.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 7:10 PM
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149 -- If Biohazard were a robot, he would not voice his 5th paragraph in the first person would he? I think that would violate like the second law of robotics or one such.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 7:11 PM
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160: & 162: Tamerlane vs Genghis: If one of them didn't get into the piling of skulls as an art form it's only because he didn't meet anyone from my company's accounting department.

Thanks for the book reference. Amazon thanks you too. (And thanks to bill for his "Quartered Safe Out Here" suggestion in that "Broaden My Horizons, Would Ya?" thread.)


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 7:23 PM
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165: There's nothing in the laws of robots specifically forbidding impersonation of a human (Daneel did it quite well when necessary) and those laws apply only to robots made by your species. In any case, impersonation makes it much easier to accept pizza and Chinese energy deliveries without all that shrieking and fainting stuff.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 7:35 PM
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Huh. So long since I read the book, my vague memory was I. No harming people; II. No lying, exept as this comes into conflict w/(I), III. No hurting yourself, except as this comes into conflict w/(I) or (II) -- I must have at least (II) wrong.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 7:38 PM
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1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Given 1 and 3, it's easy enough to imagine a situation that required a robot to lie, much less permitted it.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 7:52 PM
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Huh. And also by #2, it is kind of easy to imagine a situation where a human being orders a robot to deceive or mislead another human. Unless I suppose being deceived or misled were to be considered a form of "harm" in which case obeying such an order would conflict with #1. And also of course if it were a situation where the robot knew or could reasonably infer that by obeying the order, he would be conspiring with the person giving the order to harm the object of the order.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-10-06 8:00 PM
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The Mongols did get to write their own histories, in Chinese, Mongol, and Persian.

One of my theories is that in its time the Mongol horde was the most rational chain-of-command social organization that ever had been. It was completely bureaucratized, and during Genghis' lifetime everyone was in a well-organized command chain culminating with Genghis at the top.

But it wasn't a merciful or humane organization. The Mongol's believed that they were enforcing the Will of Heaven / God, and that anyone who resisted them was defying God.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 11:28 AM
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John -- what language is Mongol? Is it a Turkic language, or related to Chinese, or something else?


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 11:39 AM
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It's an Altaic language, the main branches of which are Turkic and Mongolic, and which some linguists extend to include Korean and Japanese. If you want to see a Japanese linguist's head explode, ask him about that last bit.


Posted by: Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 12:19 PM
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I thought some linguists also thought that Finnish and Japanese are related?


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 12:28 PM
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What I've read about that (not much) is that it followed from the hypothesis that the Finno-Ugric languages were related to the Turkic languages. AFAIK, most linguists don't buy that, and Japanese linguistics, which should presumably be the best source for scholarship on the origins of Japanese, is seriously compromised by chauvinism. In this book, a linguist revered in Japan suggests that the dialects of Japanese are as diverse as the languages of Europe.


Posted by: Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 12:52 PM
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were s/b are


Posted by: Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 12:53 PM
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175 gets it right; the Ural-Altaic hypothesis really isn't taken very seriously anymore. Altaic itself is actually a pretty controversial grouping--a lot of people have argued that the similarities among the branches are due to long periods of contact rather than genetic relationship.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 1:48 PM
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Is there any serious branch of scholarship as littered with chauvenist kooks as historical linguistics? Or is it just that the ones I'm familiar with (Harappan script, Rongorongo) tend to attract crazy people?


Posted by: Steve | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 2:08 PM
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Not that I know of. It's really a shame.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 2:18 PM
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How could languages have a genetic relationship? Does that refer to the idea that the language used to be spoken by related groups of people? How does that differ from 'long periods of contact'?


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 2:30 PM
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A "genetic relationship" in this sense typically means that the languages have developed out of a common predecessor language, the way that both Spanish and Italian are descended from Latin. Similarly, if various dialects of English (say, Australian English(es) and Indian English(es)) continue to diverge to the point of mutual unintelligibility, those resulting languages would be genetically related. Of course this kind of story is complicated by the fact that the dividing line between "dialect" and "language" is a fuzzy one, as well as by the contributions of other languages over the course of a given language's history. There are theories about what kinds of linguistic elements tend to be contributed by one means (original language of descent vs. contact) or the other, but they are far from universally accepted.


Posted by: redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 2:57 PM
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And my understanding as a layman is that there's very little evidence for some of the things proposed -- there's a school of Russians who have proposed a hypothetical proto-proto-Indo-European called "Nostratic", and both Japanese and (IIRC) Armenians have ideas promoting Japanese and Armenian as somehow centrally related to ghostly mother tongues. Frederick the Great tried the only piece of actual experimental methodology that might have shed light on the matter and it didn't work. Linguists are going to go with whatever seems right to them, which will not necessarily seem right to their cousins across the border.


Posted by: Steve | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 3:14 PM
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It's true that Nostratic and other macrofamilies are generally based on very little solid evidence and are not widely accepted, but many lower-level families are based on very solid evidence derived from the comparative method. Indo-European and Austronesian are the families with the best-developed reconstructions, since both happen to have been spoken by groups of people that moved far away from each other fairly rapidly, leaving interference due to contact a lot lower than in other cases. Other families, where the languages have been in contact for long periods of time, are more problematic to reconstruct, and it's there that you get arguments over whether the family even exists at all.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 3:34 PM
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183: Wouldn't Amerind be a better candidate for "a language spoken by groups of people that moved far away from each other fairly rapidly" than Indo-European.

It seems like there would have been a lot of cross talk between the European Indo-European languages and semetic languages, which are in the Afro-Asiatic family.


Posted by: rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 4:02 PM
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Wouldn't Amerind be a better candidate for "a language spoken by groups of people that moved far away from each other fairly rapidly" than Indo-European.

You'd think so, but no. Amerind is probably the least reputable of any of these macrofamilies. Greenberg proposed it based on very shaky methodology and the Americanists proceeded to tear it apart in journal articles for decades.

It seems like there would have been a lot of cross talk between the European Indo-European languages and semetic languages, which are in the Afro-Asiatic family.

There was definitely a certain amount. Nostraticists try to claim that the two are related based on the similarities, but this is pretty laughable. Contact is a much likelier explanation.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 6:39 PM
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Frederick the Great tried the only piece of actual experimental methodology that might have shed light on the matter and it didn't work.

Namely?


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:05 PM
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I presume he means the bit where he isolated the kids to see what language they would speak without outside influence. I don't think that's actually relevant to the issue of linguistic classification.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:19 PM
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Oh, I see. It totally is: say they all spoke Hebrew. We'd have pretty good reason to believe that Hebrew is the ur-language, no?


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:27 PM
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Sure, but that doesn't have much to do with speculative projects in historical linguistics.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:31 PM
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Yeah, I believe the actual purpose of the experiment was to determine what language Adam and Eve spoke. ("Inarticulate grunting!")


Posted by: Steve | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:32 PM
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You need to think outside the box, Teo! Imagine yourself as a feared and yet intellectual enlightened despot. Now, imagine that someone wants you to do a speculative project in historical linguistics. What would you come up with that would be more deeply satisfying than locking a bunch of children up with deaf-mute nurses?


Posted by: Steve | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:34 PM
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The experiment was a failure, wasn't it?


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:36 PM
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I concede that by the standards of his day it was an impressive experimental design.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:37 PM
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Future research in this area will explore the effects of applying this paradigm to very tall soldiers in very tall hats.


Posted by: redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:40 PM
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I totally thought 193 was going to be Emerson.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:41 PM
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Why?


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:44 PM
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"I concede that by the standards of his day it was an impressive experimental design" is a very John Emerson-esque mode of expression. So think I. Hey BTW did you watch "Cleo from 5 to 7" yet? I just watched it a second time and was enthralled even more strongly than last night.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:47 PM
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"Yet"? I don't recall saying I was going to watch it.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 7:48 PM
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Oh yeah -- I mentioned it in your comments last night and I guess that had fixed you incorrectly in my mind as somebody who was planning to watch it. If you do not have such plans I would advise making them -- this is like the best movie ever and includes as characters at least two or three, and probably more, members of the Mineshaft commenting community.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 8:00 PM
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I'll consider it, but watching movies, like reading novels, isn't really something I do.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 8:04 PM
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I would have thought it was something, like listening to music, which you don't really do.

(Is your Verbot on listening to music, or only on owning it?)


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 8:07 PM
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If that's what F the Great did, he was totally taking a page out of Herodotus: The Egyptians before the reign of Psammetichus used to think that of all races in the world they were the most ancient: Psammetichus, however. when he came to the throne, took it into his head to settle this question of priority, and ever since his time the Egyptians have believed that the Phrygians surpass them in antiquity and that they themselves come second. Psammetichus, finding that mere inquiry failed to reveal which was the original race of mankind, devised an ingenious method of determining the matter. He took at random, from an ordinary family, two newly born infants and gave them to a shepherd to be brought up among his flocks, under strict orders that no one should utter a word in their presence. They were to be kept by themselves in a lonely cottage, and the shepherd was to bring in goats from time to time. to see that the babies had enough milk to drink and to look after them in any other way that was necessary. All these arrangements were made by Psammetichus because he wished to find out what word the children would first utter, once they had grown out of their meaningless baby/talk. The plan succeeded; two years later the shepherd, who during that time had done everything he had been told to do, happened one day to open the door of the cottage and go in, when both children running up to him with hands outstretched, pronounced the word "becos". The first time this occurred the shepherd made no mention of it; but later, when he found that every time he visited the children to attend to their needs the same word was constantly repeated by them he informed his master. Psammetichus ordered the children to be brought to him, and when he himself heard them say "becos" he determined to find out to what language the word belonged. His inquiries revealed that it was the Phrygian word for "bread", and in consideration of this the Egyptians yielded their claims and admitted the superior antiquity of the Phrygians.
From The Histories by Herodotus, Book II (Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1966, pp . 102-103) .


Posted by: Chris | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 8:11 PM
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Didn't Skinner talk about something like this as well? Obviously he has no claim of seniority upon either Frederick the Great or Herodotus.


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 8:14 PM
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Yeah, Frederick pretty obviously copied his methodology from Psammetichus. The kids he used didn't end up saying anything, though, so the experiment was a failure.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 8:16 PM
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Is your Verbot on listening to music, or only on owning it?

Owning it, but that makes listening to it rather difficult.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 8:17 PM
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Are there no radios? No live streaming audio?


Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 8:21 PM
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I didn't say impossible. I generally don't bother, though.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 8:23 PM
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Teo, why this Verbot? This is the first I've heard of it.


Posted by: Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 11:38 PM
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Explanation.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-11-06 11:55 PM
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