coffee_enjoyer
☕️
No bio...
User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
5hr ago
Kushner is Modern Orthodox, attended a yeshiva school growing up, and financially supports Orthodox Jewish institutions. He has studied the Tanya and visited the grave of Schneerson, and so it is reasonable to assume that he agrees with their view that —
the souls of the gentile nations come from the three impure kelipos and “they contain no good at all.”
[With regard to] the Tanya’s statements that the three impure kelipos do not possess any good at all, the intent is not that they do not possess a spark [of G‑dliness] at all. For without a spark of good, it is impossible for any entity to exist. (Although their existence comes from an encompassing light; nevertheless, we are forced to say they possess some type of spark.) This spark, however, has become so separated and darkened, that it is as if it is evil, i.e., it has no feeling at all for G‑dliness.
The particular denomination which Kushner attends and financially supports also teaches that compassion in gentiles is forbidden, and that consequently you are not allowed to have concern for them dying and are in fact obliged to not aid them when they are dying, which you can find in Chapter 10 of Avodah Kochavim of the Sefer Hamada section of the Mishneh Torah, a work read annually among the members of his congregation (and when they finish reading the work there is an enormous celebration).
All well and good to believe these things in private, but IMO we can’t afford to have someone like this possess an iota of influence in middle eastern foreign policy decision making. They are under no obligation to care about the lives of American which are lost, in fact they are under an obligation to not care about them.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
8hr ago
And when we have finished blaming Trump, we still have the important question of how to prevent this from happening again. The obvious answer is to significantly curtail the influence of pro-Israelis, as this is the second war they managed to get in just 23 years. Israeli lobbying is unusually influential in America, and so we can simply curtail it to regain sovereignty. Why allow the risk of another war? Especially in light of Epstein!
America can also act as a self-interested nation. This means preventing Israel from ever having so much influence again. America can do a number of things to protect her sovereignty: banning Israeli visits on American soil, pruning all areas of government and journalism from pro-Israel subversives, and so forth. Surely it is not the case that only Israel can act in a self-interested manner, but America is obliged to act without any consideration of their interests. The chief interest of any nation is securing absolute sovereignty, and punishing those with traitorous foreign loyalties outside the borders.
The person at fault here is Trump
for being manipulated by Israel, yes, and if Americans recognize this then they can cut off the possibility of this ever happening against. Which is in their national interest.
Other nations leaders' are trying to convince America to do stuff all the time
And none of them have the influence machine of Israel, or the unheard of ethnoreligious dimension of loyalty. Our chief negotiator with Iran believes, as a religious dogma codified in his sacred scripture, that the lives of his fellow Israelites are more important than those of Americans. It is not in America’s interest to allow these people to have any influence, whatsoever.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
9hr ago
Kent immediately resigned when the war started rather than waiting until the war seemed to be going poorly. He had been against new wars in the Middle East since 2021. His wife died in a terrorist attack; He served 11 combat tours. In early 2024 he warned that an Iran war would be a disaster. Why should anyone doubt that he believes what he says and is acting with good intentions? It’s hard to even imagine a more sincere person.
Consider whether the reality of the situation is best described in the language of bias and scapegoats, and whether the problem is Nick Fuentes or the people who just got us into a literal war.
-
A foreign nation successfully persuaded the President to wage a costly and unjust war on their behalf despite the protests of the entire USIC and most of his appointees. The only appointee who was supportive of the war is Hegseth, who secured his nomination through the approval of the Jewish community via Norm Coleman, a pro-Israel shill and the leader of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
-
Lindsey Graham, a closeted homosexual who visits Tel Aviv every two weeks (except during the war when he replaced his visits with Disney Land — odd), was integral to persuading Trump about Iran, using the soundbites he learned from Mossad, in Israel.
-
Trump’s favorite news program, the Mark Levin show, is run by a pro-Israel shill with a close relationship to this foreign country.
-
Our negotiating team was comprised of two Jews with a close relationship to this foreign country, and they apparently lied about the negotiation progress.
-
The extent of foreign interference was so significant that the head of our counter-terrorism resigned to tell the American public, a man who formerly served directly under the DNI, which oversees pretty much all intelligence between the USIC and the executive branch.
-
During our mission to rescue a lost pilot, Israeli journalists jeopardized the safety of hundreds of Americans by reporting first on the second lost pilot.
The takeaway for the average American is not going to be “aw, the innocent scapegoat Israel is getting blame”, it is probably going to be “get these people as far away from power and influence as humanly possible”, which I think is the rational assessment based on two decades of their pernicious influence. Trump is 80yo, the Israelis should not have the influence they have on him, not with the team of 140iq psychologists behind them who know exactly how to zero-day his personality vulnerabilities.
Another way to put it: okay, we have blamed Trump, and he should get blame, but is that where the blame should stop? What about the false-ally — the traitor-ally — that tricked us into war by taking advantage of the cognitively-vulnerable 80yo Trump? It is more useful to blame this entity, because they may continue to exert a pernicious influence on American politics into the future.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
21hr ago
If this is real, I wonder which party a two-week ceasefire benefits. I would think Iran, because it allows them to reorder and replenish the missile cities while determining new strategies re: launchers. But maybe it’s better for America, insofar as it staves off economic woes? I have no idea. I also wonder what influence the GCC is exerting, and how this war changes their opinion on US v Iran, if at all.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
23hr ago
https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
The problem with trying to use a non-robust definition of genocide is that it allows someone like Hitler to cause the same destruction simply by thinking cleverly for twenty minutes. This is why you need to work with robust definitions of terms of art here. Imagine, for the sake of argument, an Egyptian Hitler in the year 2040ad. This hypothetical Führer may declare that he will “destroy Jewish civilization forever” because they are “animals”. What would we intuitively understand is being referred to by these remarks? And if our Pharaonic Führer proceeded to target with his air superiority the civilian infrastructure, medical institutions, technical instititions, scientists, and so forth, all while threatening water desalination plants and the electric grid, I don’t think anyone would doubt his genocidal intent. It’s pretty clear he would be intent on destroying in substantial part the population of his victims.
I don't believe you actually believe Trump intends to murder "a significant portion of the members of the civilisation" (please tell me if I'm wrong)
He threw his support behind a plausible genocide just last year. Why would you doubt that he would do it this year? Causing starvation and preventing infant formula from entering the Gaza Strip is, also, a textbook act of genocide, as it is “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”. Trump supported this. Why would he not support it against Iranians, whom he has already dehumanized?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in (substantial) part is an act of genocide, and I don’t see another means by which Trump can cause “a whole civilization” to “die” “never to be brought back again” without inflicting such destruction. You can’t bring an entire nation to “the Stone Age” because “they’re animals” without consciously inflicting such destruction on the members of the group.
rather than the obvious reading that he's referring to the society
If Iranian “society” is defined as a national or ethnic group, or, in its Shia adherence, a religious group, then you can’t aim to destroy the “society” either. If Trump’s actions are designed to destroy a substantial part of the Iranian population according to nationality, ethnicity, or religious identification, through (say) targetting enough civilian infrastructure that it necessarily destroys a substantial part of the population, then that’s an act of genocide. We also don’t have to use words with a specific connotation; we can just say that it’s not in the interests of the human race to do such things because it’s an act that is unnecessary and really bad for wellbeing, and thus those who do it should face a Nuremberg-style tribunal as deterrence for future defectors of the norm.
If so, why didn't he just say that?
Why didn’t he just say “regime” or “political party”? Why did he choose the word civilization, which has never been used to refer to a regime before? I’m having a hard time imagining how you can destroy a civilization forever, without intentionally destroying a significant portion of the members of the civilization.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Have we forgotten that polls are inaccurate when it comes to predicting actual voters?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Right. The reason that Trump has disgraced America more than Jackson, implying that Jackson’s conduct is considered genocidal, is that we are 220 years of moral progress away from Jackson, and everyone should know that destroying an entire civilization forever is wrong. Though I find the comparison inexact for other reasons (low total loss of life by Jackson; the aggressive raids of Indians; that Indians did not actually have a valuable civilization unlike Iran; that Indians were given reservations; that Iran is filled with 90mil people; that the conduct does not provide America any benefit or expansion).
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Supposing that Jackson’s actions did constitute genocide, there are 200 years of moral progress separating our era from his, which I think does make Trump’s threat of eternal civilizational destruction more shameful.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Netanyahu is not an American president.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again
This is genocidal rhetoric. What do you even say at this point? We are clearly in the wrong. Trump has disgraced America more than anyone before him. The Republican Party may be over for the next decade. Perhaps endless immigration will simply be our punishment from God for allowing the bloodthirsty to occupy the government.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
I think we probably lost lives. There’s the video of a helicopter crashing down; it makes no sense that all the aircraft were somehow stuck in mud when there was no mud in the area; the propellers in one photo are bent as if they crashed while in use; Iranian news showed a skull in the wreckage. Downplaying fatalities is important here for morale reasons: because of the Easter holiday, because Trump fired all those generals who opposed his plans, because Trump-Hegseth have a particular eye for PR, and because Trump wants to make a ground invasion seem easy. We will see, eventually, but perhaps not for some years.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2d ago
It is a quintessentially tasteless tweet
-
Posting a message about your enemy living in hell on Easter, the joyful day celebrating Christ rescuing sinners living in hell
-
Posting it on TruthSocial, which I imagine is only populated by evangelicals who care a lot about the holiday
-
Threatening to destroy civilian infrastructure, which again, is on Easter morning, and presenting it in the language of an easter basket
-
Concluding with Praise be to Allah (???????)
-
Posting no other Easter message the rest of the day
-
Coming off as desperate, not at all in control
My running hypothesis is that the rescue operation went poorly and handicapped his judgment.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
3d ago
I wonder if the rescue operation went really poorly, and he tweeted this in an unusually exhausted and stressed state. He might even be mad at Jesus right now, hence praising Allah on Easter (lmfao), as I’m sure his team prayed before the operation. I don’t know.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
5d ago
The psalm promotes the Good of the community, even as it emphasizes the absolute weakness of the single individual, in the following ways:
-
Submitting humbly to God for salvation is a way to (implicitly) practice the emotional and cognitive state of submitting to other authorities generally, especially if your belief system tells you that all civic authority is ordained by God. If you want the greatest and strongest army, 99% of the men must submit to authority, and the remaining 1% must submit to Reason. Without our even knowing, the rehearsal of the psalm (from the heart) makes us more liable to submit to authority by increasing our familiarity and pleasure with a humble spirit. An army of the obedient will always win against an army of the strongwilled. Individual weakness (or the factual recognition of such) promotes collective strength, and this only increases as technology increases.
-
Living is experientially horrible at least sometimes for everyone, and more often than that for too many people. The psalm allows a man to suffer while still remembering his communal belonging and allegiance, which is beneficial lest you drift too far away from civic obligation & shared memory from excessive sorrow. Hence: Yet you are holy, enthroned in the praises of Israel. In you our fathers trusted; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame. And: I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you: You who fear the LORD, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! The psalm also allows the sufferant to externalize and dramatize his feelings, which may be cathartic, or at least enjoyable as complaining always is. (Perhaps another example of “redirecting an activity to the Common Good” is the Song of Songs: if it is really just a thinly-veiled allegory for sex, then it perfects the act of sex and flirting — dare I say gooning — by presenting it within the terminology of the Collective: You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners. Turn away your eyes from me, for they overwhelm me— Your hair is like a flock of goats leaping down the slopes of Gilead. If you are going to be horny anyway, at least remember how awesome the Sacred is in the process, so that when you’re no longer horny, your memory of it has improved by 0.05%; perhaps, even, your interest in Jerusalem has increased because it has been associated with a beautiful woman?
-
For the person singing the psalm, the memory of suffering is shifted toward a struggle of good and evil, a dimension which it may not have previously had. When (or if) his health returns, he has a newfound hatred of evildoers and love for the good.
-
The psalm-singer will interpret his return to health as his plea being answered by the Almighty, and regardless of whether this is materially accurate it will promote an array of good behaviors. His vows must now be thankfully fulfilled: praising in the congregation; telling others of the goodness of God; perhaps some resources distributed to the poor as suggested by God elsewhere; perhaps more honest dealings in business; etc. The importance of conveying the goodness of God to others is not just so that the Temple’s income is increased, but so others will read the tropological stories of the Bible, fear evil, gather prosocially, etc. But the priests getting some extra meat doesn’t hurt either, after all they are literate and somewhat learned.
-
Humility, in at least one of its manifestations, is the valuation of other people more than yourself, and this implicitly makes our fulfillment of socially-good acts more satisfying. If you don’t follow other people highly, how satisfying is it to do good to them? But if you value them highly, more than yourself, then it is deeply satisfying and memorable. If you want to promote a society where the rich share resources with the poor, and the healthy help the sick, and the sane the insane, etc, it is helpful to promote humility even just because of the fruit of social peer value salience. Hence: I am a worm and not a man (and He will love you even if you are a worm).
-
Awe and trust are good in themselves, especially if there is nothing you can really do, like someone suffering in antiquity. Even if the psalm-singer dies, he is dying with trust and awe, which is preferable to dying in agony. If we have to pick our poison it should be the sweetest poison.
I enjoy unconventional theology, and so I am not Trinitarian, but IMHO Christ championing this Psalm does two things (apart from the obvious fulfillment of prophecy):
-
It inoculates the Christian from doubt and anguish. The Son of God, the Everliving Lord, experienced real doubt (in my view). The Christian then, when doubting, can look at the Perfect Lord and be strengthened in commiseration.
-
This greatly increases the tragic dimension of the crucifixion, which is an angle I find compelling lately as the grounds for the most impactful atonement theory. “Substitution” doesn’t quite cut it, IMO. There is a lot of power in the notion that God wants us to behold the very nature and consequence of sin by looking at the crucifixion; we can grasp, in a way, how God sees the invisible outcome of our evil intentions and misdeeds, through the hyper-salient Sacrifice of Christ. God, being all-wise, sees no difference between the evil of someone kicking a puppy and the evil of someone gradually introducing commensurate pain in the lives of others through the accumulation of small errors (calling your brother a fool; being unforgiving; being greedy and lazy; etc). We do not see it this way, because have limited human understanding, but this doesn’t quite absolve us of all responsibility. Christ, for our sake, became “sin”, clearly, in its full evil, so that we can see all the unseen pain that sin introduces in others. For this theory to work, though, the suffering of Christ must be perfect. He must experience genuine alienation, hopelessness, and despair, because these are some of the worst pains a human can experience (more than the physical!). And so Christ’s genuine doubt, and His genuine unwillingness (let this cup passeth), magnify the suffering, which magnifies evil, which magnifies errors, which magnifies our aversion to committing such errors beginning from the heart.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
5d ago
I’m curious what Russia and China will do behind the scenes, and what they’re currently doing without our knowledge. They must realize that the war provides the chance to get anything they want from America if it continues to impact Israel. By backing Iran they may be able to secure Ukraine, Taiwan, maybe even Alaska and Hawaii (who knows?). They have the ultimate Trump Card — pun intended — if they are able to replenish and support the Iranian missile threat against Israel, as this would compel Israel to pressure the Americans they control into making enormous concessions to end the war. This is, unfortunately and obviously, the problem with having such a close relationship with a rogue regime, while allowing their loyalists to accrue so much wealth and power in your homeland.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
7d ago
There are similarities between the medieval approach to the Bible and literature, but the differences are too significant to usefully classify them together under the same umbrella term. A medieval Christian did not read the Bible for entertainment, but usually heard the text within a solemn (and multisensory) context with the specific aim of learning from God as sole authority. The normal context of digesting the Bible was distinct from that of literature, even among those who were literate, as they engaged in rich devotional activities. Among literate monks who were taught the Bible for the purpose of teaching the masses, the books were analyzed allegorically and tropologically, yet this was always oriented toward something of Christ or the moral life. Symbols in Isaiah were not considered in light of what an author had in mind, but in light of what God was saying about Christ and what Christ was saying about the urgently-important things which a man had to know and believe. There was no interest in discerning whether the text was written well (an early complaint against the Greek gospels was that they were written poorly, and the early church fathers did not disagree). They had no interest in dissecting the structure, plot, character development, authorial intent, milieu, or anything else which characterizes the modern appraisal of literature. The Bible was treated in a contextually and psychologically distinct way, and analyzed in a distinct way, from the modern treatment and analysis of literature. (Modern “Bible study” has a lot more in common with literature. But that’s an aberration from the medieval era. The master masons who built the cathedrals might have never read the Bible and instead kept a devotional book at home, and the monks who commissioned the cathedrals did not read it as literature in the sense in which we we understand the category).
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
7d ago
This is an area where I find utilitarianism helpful. What’s the purpose of art? If art is to increase collective wellbeing, however indirectly, then a lot of literature is worthless. It’s endless yapping and bickering, shilled by a class of people with a high verbal IQ who are paid to professionally yap and have no interest in considering the longterm outcome of their recommendations, and yet somehow have authority on what people should read. The great cathedrals were built by men who had no concept of literature, and every horrible monstrosity of today was designed by some pretentious bespectacled architect who surely claims to love “literature”. All of my civilizational enemies are well-read.
The teacher assessment was a survey on their grades, so not quite subjective. Re the second study:
substantial impacts to Roma minorities
Unfortunately, if the teachers of the Roma students are more likely to be Roma themselves (likely), then they would lie on both grades and teacher surveys, which explains their unique results. A researcher can’t come out and say “we found a significant finding, but only among Roma, therefore it should be ignored”, sadly, as there’s political correctness which prevents an academic from noting that the entire Roma culture is based on scheming and cheating and stealing. Really, Roma populations should be excluded from most studies. But if you look at this:
First, looking at short-term GPAs (Panel A), we find only small impacts which, in most cases, do not reach significance at conventional levels. There is an improvement of 2% SD, on average, for students in the self-learning treatment, but it is only marginally significant (at the 10% level)
Next, looking at medium-term and long-term GPAs (Panels B and C), we find some evidence that the impacts of our intervention on academic achievement become stronger over time, particularly for specific groups. Impacts, on average, are estimated at 3% SD (significant at the 5% level) for the teacher-delivery treatment one year post-treatment, with no significant impact for the stu- dent self-learning arm. Even if these are still small impacts, they are notable considering the short duration and relatively low intensity of our intervention and that evaluations of human capital interventions often yield fade-out effects over longer time periods (Hart et al 2023; Bailey et al 2020; Bouguen et al 2019)
There are just not many studies that have measured the effect of a grit intervention (or any proxy for “hard work” ideology) on academic performance, .
This study in Germany finds a “4% improvement in GPA”: https://media-api.suub.uni-bremen.de/api/core/bitstreams/69dec0aa-d690-4c4e-94ab-a82b460fbdc7/content
And there’s this one: https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/Alan%20Boneva%20Ertac%20Grit%202019.pdf which finds
In the second follow-up in Sample 2, which we administered approximately 1.5 years after the intervention, we still find a positive and significant treatment effect of 0.19 standard deviations for math (permutation p-value =0.026) and a positive albeit insignificant effect for verbal scores. Similarly, for Sample 1 where we have data from a 2.5 year follow-up, we find that the treatment has a persistent effect on standardized math performance. In particular, the treatment raises student achievement in the standardized math test by 0.23 standard deviations (permutation p-value =0.044).
A 0.23 SD change in a typical high school GPA is a change of 0.14, which translates to 1.7% higher annual earnings. That kind of sucks! Because there’s a significant wellbeing cost if somebody believes that they have an obligation to always “try their hardest” for optimal results under the belief that this secures their success. And if all that this can do is bring a 70k yearly salary up to 72k, it’s just not worth it. If you told a youth that their hardest work will only move the needle by 1.7% annual earnings, he would probably conclude in himself that it’s not worth it to be faithful to the “gospel of hard work”. Maybe there’s another study that finds a greater effect and I haven’t seen it?
The Iran War is beginning to alarm even the neocons
Robert Kagan has a new article in the Atlantic blasting Trump for the Iran War. This is somewhat significant. Kagan is an arch-neocon who supported every previous war in the Middle East. He was a major proponent of the Iraq War, acting as the media arm of the Israel Lobby. The neocons of the 00s were the mostly-Jewish “decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq”, a pointless war that cost 3 trillion dollars, 35,000 American casualties including 4,500 dead, 200,000 direct civilian deaths by violence, and 1,000,000 excess civilian deaths in total, while indirectly leading ISIS to form among the disenfranchised and dispossessed former Ba’athist commanders (what did you think regime change consisted of?), a lapse in judgment which would cause the refugee crisis in Europe (with all the consequent rape and mayhem), the decimation of Iraqi and Syrian Christian communities, and myriad other human tragedies. It is important, I think, to continually remember how retarded that was; it is so recent, yet never sufficiently referenced in its full scope. (“Another Iraq”, yeah, but do you remember precisely how dumb that was?). Kagan’s criticism of the Iran War is interesting also because it retroactively informs us about the thinking behind the necon’s push for Iraq, given his prominence in that elite circle.
No state in the Middle East (including Iraq in 2003 and Iran today) ever posed a direct threat to the security of the American homeland. Iran has no missiles that can reach the United States and, according to American intelligence, would not until 2035. Access to Middle Eastern oil and gas has never been essential to the security of the American homeland. Today the United States is less dependent on Middle Eastern energy than in the past, which Trump has pointed out numerous times since the Strait of Hormuz was closed.
The United States has long sought to prevent Iraq or Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but not because these countries would pose a direct threat to the United States. The American nuclear arsenal would have been more than adequate to deter a first strike by either of them, as it has been for decades against far more powerful adversaries. What American administrations have feared is that an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would be more difficult to contain in its region, because neither the United States nor Israel would be able to launch the kind of attack now under way. The Middle East’s security, not America’s, would be imperiled. As for Israel, the United States committed to its defense out of a sense of moral responsibility after the Holocaust. This never had anything to do with American national-security interests. In fact, American officials from the beginning regarded support for Israel as contrary to U.S. interests. George C. Marshall opposed recognition in 1948, and Dean Acheson said that by recognizing Israel, the United States had succeeded Britain as “the most disliked power in the Middle East.” During the Cold War, even supporters of Israel acknowledged that as a simple matter of “power politics,” the United States had “every reason for wishing that Israel had never come into existence.” But as Harry Truman put it, the decision to support the state of Israel was made “not in the light of oil, but in the light of justice.”
Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.
America’s interests in the Middle East have always been indirect and secondary to larger global aims and strategies. During World War II, the United States led a coalition of nations that depended on the greater Middle East for oil and strategic position. During the Cold War, the United States assumed responsibility not only for the defense of the Jewish state but for the defense and economic well-being of European and Asian allies who depended on Middle Eastern oil. After the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the George H. W. Bush administration believed that failing to reverse that aggression would set an ominous precedent in the aborning “new world order.”
That sense of global responsibility is precisely what the Trump administration came to office to repudiate and undo. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, which has dramatically shifted the focus of American policy from world order to homeland security and hemispheric hegemony, appropriately downgraded the Middle East in the hierarchy of American concerns. A United States concerned only with defense of its homeland and the Western Hemisphere would see nothing in the region worth fighting for. In the heyday of “America First” foreign policy during the 1920s and ’30s, when Americans did not regard even Europe and Asia as vital interests, the idea that they had any security interests in the greater Middle East would have struck them as hallucinatory.
One would be hard-pressed to find any nation in the world that has been reassured by the Israeli and American war against Iran, other than Israel itself. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gulf state leaders are “privately furious” with the U.S. for “triggering a war that put them in the crosshairs.” Despite its impressive power, the United States was unable to protect these countries from Iran’s attacks; now they have to hope that Trump will not leave them to face a weakened yet intact and angry Iranian regime but will instead double down on America’s long-term military commitment to the region, including by putting ground troops in Iran. Israelis should also be asking how far they can count on the Americans’ dedication to this fight. A United States capable of abandoning long-standing allies in Europe and East Asia will be capable of abandoning Israel too. Can Israel sustain its new dominance in the region without a long and deep American commitment?
The unintended effect of the war, in fact, may be driving regional players to seek other great-power protectors in addition to the United States. Trump himself has invited the Chinese to help open the strait, and the Chinese are actively courting the Arab and Gulf states. The Gulf states are not averse to dealing with Beijing and Moscow. Neither is Israel. It sold management of a container terminal in the port of Haifa to a Chinese company, despite objections from the U.S. Navy, which uses the port. Israel, practically alone among American allies, refused to take part in sanctions against Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran for reelection in 2019, some of his campaign posters showed him shaking hands with Putin under the tagline a different league. No one should blame Israelis for this. They are an independent nation and can be expected to do what they feel they need to do to survive. Americans may have a sentimental or religious attachment to Israel, but Israelis cannot afford to be sentimental in return.
That is especially true given this administration’s cavalier attitude toward international responsibilities. The Iran war is global intervention “America First”–style: no public debate, no vote in Congress, no cooperation or, in many cases, even consultation with allies other than Israel, and, apparently, no concern for potential consequences to the region and the world. “They say if you break it, you own it. I don’t buy that,” Senator Lindsey Graham, arguably Trump’s most influential adviser on the war, said.
For Europeans, the problem is worse than American disregard and irresponsibility. They now face an unremittingly hostile United States—one that no longer treats its allies as allies or differentiates between allies and potential adversaries. The aggressive tariffs Washington imposed last year hit America’s erstwhile friends at least as hard as they hit Russia and China, and in some cases harder. Europeans must now wonder whether Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran makes it more or less likely that he will take similarly bold action on Greenland. The risks and costs of taking that undefended Danish territory, after all, would be far less than the risks and costs of waging the present war. Not some EU liberal but Trump’s conservative friend, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently warned that American actions have produced a “crisis in international law and multilateral organizations” and “the collapse of a shared world order.”
[…] Friends and allies will be ever less willing to cooperate with the United States. This time, Spain refused American use of air and naval bases in its territory. Next time, that could be Germany, Italy, or even Japan. Nations around the world will come to rely not on American commitments and permanent alliances but on ad hoc coalitions to address crises. No one will cooperate with the United States by choice, only by coercion. Without allies, the United States will have to depend on clients that it controls, such as Venezuela, or weaker powers that it can bully.
Funnily enough, one of Kagan’s last predictions just came true: Italy joined Spain in closing down its airspace this morning.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
8d ago
That’s not what happened in the 60s. There was a movement that actively sought to make Western culture seem worse than it was through propaganda. The entire civil rights movement was based on the idea that White people were acting irrationally for not wanting to be around a group that was more violent and disordered, for instance. And when reality gets in the way of someone’s preconditioned beliefs, they are more apt to doubt reality rather than their social conditioning, which we see in all manner of political topics. Somebody raised to believe that everyone is absolutely equal will look at racial crime data across three continents and adjusted for income and conclude that reality is wrong, and their media-driven conditioning is correct. That’s just how conditioning works.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
8d ago
for a lot of things (eg test prep) people often don't like doing it, but they will be better off if they do
Right but there’s scant evidence that hard work, as some communicated message or “gospel” or internalized value, through its enacting or though its belief, modifies a person’s ability to do this. The ceiling of the influence of grit etc when genetics are controlled is 4.4% on school performance, but even this doesn’t tell us to what extent that can be modified anyway. Some studies find very little effect / barely significant findings on GPA for interventions aimed at increasing grit / hard work. No effect longterm when a student self-learns grit in a module.
As a gospel this is a very poor gospel indeed, quite bad news in fact, because you are damning the vast hordes of the relatively unsuccessful to endless self-criticism under the false belief that it was their fault they failed — when it likely was never in their hands to begin with.
The mysterious and parabolic sayings of Jesus are not orthopraxic jurisprudential rulings. But the Mishneh Torah is all about orthopraxic jurisprudential rulings. These are two different religions. The Mishneh Torah is the authoritative redaction of the Talmud and read worldwide by the Orthodox like Jared, as binding rules for life. The mysterious sayings of Jesus have never been distilled down to concrete actionable prescriptions (unlike His specified commandments) but are elaborated upon according to the spirit of the reader. You can see here how Aquinas has collected different readings on the "fathers against sons" saying. Or see how a Pope interprets it. You can't draw a comparison between this and Maimonides, because they are handled differently according to the different conventions of the religion. Or in other words, when Jesus says something mysterious it is meditated upon; when the Mishneh Torah says something, it is both meditated upon and implemented within one’s daily life.
Note that we are now, in a sense, staking the possibility of starting WWIII on the presumption that a particular Orthodox Jew does not follow the most important work in his religion, a work read and studied annually by the observant adherents of his denomination. Why would we we even risk these odds, when we can just say “actually, the ~0.8% of the US population who believes this can’t exercise any foreign policy influence”. We can even append “unless they make some kind of vow or public display of condemnation for these specific verses” to the end of that stipulation, if we want to be abundantly tolerant. But as is, having this guy decide the safety of Israel in a conflict against their mythical enemy Persia does not seem rational to me, as his values do not represent the values of 99% of Americans.
More options
Context Copy link