A Knife To A Gunfight

It comes as a physical relief to read someone agreeing with me about The Propaganda War that Israel (and the Jews) is losing so badly.  That Edgar Davidson comes at the argument from a different angle, and does it brilliantly, makes it just that much better.

I make a simple, technical argument, informed by Edward Littwak's theory of strategy,
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace
which goes something like this.  If you just got your clock cleaned, and survived, learn from your enemy.  What did he do?  How did he do it?  And can you do it back to him?  The rest is footnotes.

It's obvious why we are losing The Propaganda War:  we are not doing anything of the sort.  Instead of fighting fire with fire, we are failing exactly as Sean Connery describes his enemy in his 1987 movie,

The Untouchables
"Just like a WOP to bring a knife to a gunfight"

Here is how Edgar Davidson puts it,

On the appropriate response to antisemitic lies

I will attempt to make this very simple using the following hypothetical analogy:

Jackie White looks after her 80 year old mother Iris who has been house bound in London with dementia for 10 years. One day a man Patrick Bates with a history of psychopathic violence and delusions, tells the local media that Iris has been murdering street children in Brazil every day for the last 10 years and that he plans to kill her to stop this.

What should Jackie's reaction be? Should she:

a) Attempt to counter the accusations of Patrick Bates by providing proof of Iris's long-term disabilities and explaining what a caring woman she has always been.

or

b) Expose Patrick Bates as the liar and dangerously insane psychopath that he clearly is.

If she chooses a) she has already entered into a narrative in which 'both sides' are talking about whether or not Iris is a child killer. A reasonable 'headline' for the media would be:

"Jackie White denies her mother is a child killer"

If she chooses b) she has put the focus solely on the dangerous Patrick Bates. A reasonable headline would be:

"Lying madman threatens to kill 80-year-old housebound woman with dementia"

Given the obvious preference for b) can anybody explain to me why, in response to the obvious lies and blood libels about Israel originating from psychopathic killers like Hamas, Israel supporters choose the equivalent of option a) above and hence ensure that:
The lies and blood libels ("Israel massacres children", "Israel is an Apartheid state" etc) become the focus of the discussion
The lies and blood libels get repeated ad nausea and hence become intrinsically associated with Israel
The systematic lying and psychopathic behaviour of the Palestinians and their supporters is totally ignored.

What he said.

No Silver Lining

So, you think you have plumbed the depths of human depravity?  Think again.

The 28 May 2016 edition of the Washington Post has a "Visual Stories" item about religious students in Senegal,
The thought they were going to religion school.

Young boys in daaras (religious schools), chained and beaten, sometimes raped, and exploited for street beggary.  Read it and weep.

At the very bottom of this sordid story are the parents.  Desperate people desperately looking for a way out of grinding poverty.  A husband and wife tell how they could not afford to support their three children, so the parents "gave away" their children to a local daara hoping they will be well educated.

Everything about this story is awful, beginning with their hope.  If you know anything about the Muslim tradition of education, you must know that the hope is futile, from the beginning.  

In Muslim religious schools, young boys are taught to recite the Koran.  Even in this little thing, there is less than meets the eye.  The vast majority of Muslims are not Arabs and they know no Arabic.  The boys are taught to read the Arabic script, to pronounce the words, to memorize, and nothing else.  They do not understand a word they read.

In the life of the mind, this practice does not even rise to the level of a low bar.  For example, because Greek letters are used in mathematics, over the years I have developed enough familiarity with the Greek alphabet that I can appear to read Greek words.  I have no idea what I am saying.

Even if the boys actually learned the stories of the Koran, so what?  Can you imagine less useful knowledge, in the 21st century?  Yes, of course, Christians learn their Bible, too.  But, unless you are going to be a priest or a minister, you will learn something else, as well, something more practical.

So, what's left?  The boys learn no useful skill, and they do not even learn the Koran, as we understand the concept of learning.  Years of terrible abuse, with nothing, nothing to show for it.  It is a comprehensive loss.

In the West, we have a saying:  Behind every dark cloud there is a silver lining.  And that, dear friends, is the unique blessing of the West.

Higher Education Fraud

One has to ask: does the NY Times editorial board read their own newspaper?

In a May 21 article,

http://nyti.ms/241R4s2

the board anguished over the fact that "the familiar assumption — graduate from college and prosperity will follow — has been disproved in this century." Their analysis, "the economy does not produce enough jobs that require college degrees." And their conclusion, "public policy has failed to address the stagnation."

Oh, public policy has failed, alright, but not in the way the NY Times seems to think.

On May 28, 2010, almost exactly six years ago, the NY Times published the article, "Placing the Blame as Students Are Buried in Debt", in which they profiled a young woman who borrowed money she will never pay back to graduate from an insanely expensive school with an economically worthless degree.

First, no banker in the history of humanity has ever earned a living by lending money to people who cannot pay it back. That banks have been doing just that, with abandon, can only mean a politician is behind it. Only bad public policy can encourage banks to lend money for "an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies."

Second, the universities are violating their part of the bargain.  If we, as a society, are going to subsidize college degrees, the colleges, for their part, must offer economically valuable degrees.  They are not doing that.  The 2010 NYT article poignantly ends with the young woman saying,

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back”

Since that article, there has been a steadily increasing drumbeat of articles, in the NY Times and elsewhere, documenting the horror that college has become for a burgeoning number of young people.  Across the country, more and more young people, who should not have gone to college in the first place, are not finishing college, walking away with nothing except toxic levels of debt, and realizing that "going to college is the worst thing they had ever done."

Why does the NY Times want to double down on this failed public policy?  One of the first rules of military strategy is, "Never reinforce defeat."  It is time to pull the plug on this educational nightmare.

Our Intellectual Elite Are Idiots.

Donald Trump is right:  our intellectual elite are idiots.  Case in point:  Robert Kagan in today's WaPo.  He begins, "But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology."

What?  The first time Trump got anybody's attention was with a policy statement, "I will build the wall."  From which anyone can reasonably infer that Trump means to stop illegal immigration.

Now, you can argue the point.  You might say he is lying.  You might say he cannot do it because it is impossible, or he should not do it because it is undesirable.  But it is, undeniably, a policy statement.

Furthermore, Trump's politically incorrect speech doubles down on policy.  Political correctness has nothing to do with sparing people's feelings and everything to do with steering the political discourse away from policy.  If you do not know this, you are probably a very nice person, but you should go shampoo your rug and avoid anything to do with politics.  By the simple fact of his political incorrectness, Donald Trump is forcing the public discourse into policy and away from the insufferable bullshit that has passed for political discourse for the past generation.

After this, Kagan goes into something about incoherent ideology and contradictory policies and a jumble of other irrelevant gibberish.  Bob!  What part of "close the borders" do you not understand?!

With the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump is the only political candidate on the public stage who is all policy all the time.  If this is what has come of his progeny, Kagan père, the great Yale historian, must be turning over in his grave, and he isn't even dead, yet.

"This is how fascism comes to America"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-how-fascism-comes-to-america/2016/05/17/c4e32c58-1c47-11e6-8c7b-6931e66333e7_story.html