Propaganda, For and Against

A study in simple contrasts. I didn't realize Hitler was so well-known in Iran.

Wonders

In which Rep. Occasio-Cortez invokes the law of supply and demand perfectly correctly.

A Protest in Iran

The Iranian government painted the US and Israeli flags on one of the streets where the citizenry are protesting that government (this time openly demanding the Ayatollah resign).

The protestors are actively avoiding walking on those flags (I don't speak enough Farsi--which is to say not a single syllable--to understand what they're chanting).

Eric Hines

The Rök Stone

Jackson Crawford explains the news that you may have seen this week about an alleged Viking climate prophecy.

Good on him

What is food?

I have to wonder sometimes what most people think "nutrients" are. This peculiar Guardian article tries to discuss the thorny question whether eating meat is a good nutritional strategy, but can't resist the impulse to quote bizarre statements about what kind of nutrition we might expect to find in fruits and vegetables. Supposedly they've somehow been "drained of 50% of their nutrients" in recent decades. It has something to do with selecting for uniform shape and color, and the resulting loss of vitamins and "electrolytes" (which, as we know, are what plants crave).

If you spend any time reading popular literature about diet strategies (I recommend against this), you'll find people trying to argue that a healthy diet requires eliminating carbs, fats, and proteins.  They honestly seem to believe there's some other source of calories, or that calories have become optional in the post-modern world.  This is what happens when we forget what famine is and start telling each other, "It doesn't matter what I eat, I still put on weight!"--as if the process were magical.

Soon we will be reduced to blood-letting and cupping to counteract the Man's destruction of our precious bodily nutrients.

Hans Jonas, Call Your Office

Scientists could use some advice from a philosopher this time. Jonas (see first comment) has written great work on what it means for something to ‘be alive’ or not; to be an animal, or not; and how the development of these capacities drives what he thinks of as a rising consciousness. We have also discussed older traditions here.

How would you distinguish “lifelike materials” with these characteristics from “life”? Purely because they were artificially created? What are the downstream consequences of that standard? Why would you assume them to be non-conscious, once they can seek light and food, and self-organize what they eat into themselves?

Credit

Life in Iran must be unimaginably hard right now. I give the Iranian government and people credit for reversing course on their denial of responsibility for the airliner their security forces shot down. Speaking the truth can be deadly at any time, but in that tinderbox it takes tremendous courage.

The other Middle East revolution

As Legal Insurrection says, "while you were focused on Soleimani, Israel became an energy superpower." And Turkey is torqued.

An Ironic Tale From Home

Of the great Georgia prison escape of 1980.

“Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom”

Nancy Pelosi channels Mao.

‘Absolutely total cooperation,’ Pelosi told reporters Friday when asked about the support she’s received from Democrats for withholding the articles. ‘We have 1,000 flowers blossoming beautifully in our caucus.’

Given what Mao did to the flowers after they blossomed, if I were one of her caucus I’d be reaching for my Buck knife.

A New Whistleblower

Most interesting, if true.

Starting to Get Right in Russia

Russian journals retract hundreds of scientific papers. Sure, it's easy to mock them and talk about all the ways in which they got so wrong; but the point is that they're trying to get right. Are American academics in our mock disciplines -- sociology, say, or political science, or that most popular of all majors psychology -- trying anything similar?

Smiles, tears

Are you wondering why we should care about the New York Times endorsement for president?  Jim Geraghty explains the appeal:

Elizabeth Warren was more or less engineered in a laboratory to appeal to the Times editorial board. If she doesn’t get the endorsement, it’s a bad day for her.

And no matter what the editorial actually says, people will read certain meanings into the choice. If the Times endorses Joe Biden, it will be seen as a sign that the Times editorial board doesn’t have faith that the rest of the field can beat Trump. If the Times endorses Buttigieg, it will be seen as a sign that the Times editorial board wants the formula that worked for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — the young, smart, well-spoken rising star. If the Times endorses Bernie Sanders, it will be seen as a sign that the Times editorial board wants to lead the Socialist Revolution from the offices of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan.

As for me, I hope that the process begins with each candidate first individually pouring his or her heart out, directly to a camera, talking about their hopes and dreams and what they feel they can offer the editors of the Times that the other candidates can’t. I hope they say what the endorsement means to them, and how it could be the start of something life-changing and unforgettable. I want to see an edited montage of each candidate talking with the editors, hopefully showcasing a wide range of moments showcasing their entire personality — impassioned, laughing, solemn. Then I want all of the candidates to come out in a group, dressed in their finest, and then deputy editor Kathleen Kingsbury comes out with a single rose, and they sort this out like on ABC’s The Bachelor — lots of heated competition, crying, and broken hearts.

When gentrification isn't the worst threat

A Guardian article moans that San Francisco residents don't have gentrification to kick around any more.  Instead they have something more like Detroit.

In 2017, about one in every eight storefronts here was empty, and more businesses seem to have vacated since then. The diner was first to go: in 2015 rent suddenly went up, the diner’s owner refused to pay, and Sparky’s was no more. Our usual ideas about gentrification suggest neighborhood standbys get replaced by fancy boutiques and brunch-centric eateries. Instead, after Sparky’s came … nothing. Elsewhere, too, long-term leases timed out, rents increased, and the old neighborhood hangouts disappeared. Aardvark Books, which stood on Church Street for nearly 40 years, until 2018, is now a hollow storefront.

The culprit? If you guessed the insane public policy common to deep-blue bastions like San Francisco and Detroit, the Guardian assures you you are mistaken. It's actually capitalism's fault.

Enter the Stone Age

What I find interesting about this claim is that, if it’s right, survival plays no apparent role in the change. In this way it is more like Chesterton’s view of cultural evolution — that the sacred comes first, and alters our physical culture — than like the standard account of natural selection as driven by survival. It’s compatible with a random change that may or may not prove to survive if it doesn’t add to survivability, though; except that it isn’t ‘random’ in the sense of mutations. It is a thing they somehow decided to do together, in a socially-specific way.

UPDATE: This is the passage I was thinking of, from Orthodoxy; Chesterton was talking about social contract theory rather than evolution, but the idea that the sacred came first holds in spite of the move from critiquing the one theory to the other.

The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been
exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant
that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of
content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right. But they really
were wrong, in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at
order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests.
Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you
if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction.
There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other
in the holy place." They gained their morality by guarding their religion.
They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine, and found
they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness.
They purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean.

Now we do not know how this will turn out, and it may take longer than any of us are around to find out. We can readily imagine, though -- with Robert E. Howard as much as with Chesterton, as Howard describes this occurring over and over in his Conan stories -- these apes on the road to a rise to civilization, having found the necessary first step.

Harsh but fair

Speaking of the Tim Cook of terror--the best shorthand I've heard in a long time for second-rate pseudolegacies--here is Kurt Schlichter's assessment of the Democrat presidential field.  He thinks the nod definitely goes to Biden, but is less sure of the VP slot.

[M]aybe Biden will pick him for VP – if so, I’ve got $10 that says Smart Joe will get caught on tape at a rally explaining to disappointed feminists that, “Well, a gay guy counts as a woman, right?” You know that will totally happen.

Understudies

John Podhoretz ponders whether killing Soleimani is a fundamental change, or only the usual opportunity for a leadership rotation in terrorist circles.  He comes down on the side of change:

It may be true that if you kill one terrorist mastermind, another will rise in his place. But the fact is that masterminds like Soleimani do not grow on trees. If you think of him as the Steve Jobs of state-sponsored terror, then it seems plausible to likely that he will be followed by a less creative type — the Tim Cook of terror, say.

I hope he's right. There's no doubt Soleimani had stiff competition in the eel-brain department, but as an effective leader maybe not.

As Podhoretz argues, deterrence isn't peace, and deterred enemies aren't friends.  By the same token, enemies don't become friends when you cozy up to them and offer appeasement.  Trump seems adept at using the carrot and the stick, which makes his foreign policy more coherent than the usual run of American deep-thinkers.

Thinking Too Much of Ourselves

A criticism of criticism. The fellow is from Brookings, which is institutionally suspect on Middle Eastern issues because it receives vast funding from Qatar; however, I see little wrong with the major point he's making on this occasion.

Those who said there will be war may not have realized there already was war.... Iran... may find new ways to escalate, but Iran had already been escalating. The regime of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, with its Iranian patrons, led by Soleimani, has been waging a brutal assault on Syrians for more than eight years. War, in short, has been happening—costing hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians their lives—since long before Donald Trump ordered the drone strike against Soleimani.

In the aftermath of the strike, critics of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, particularly on the left, have described the move as one more rash American intervention that’s sure to further destabilize the region. Yet this formulation gives U.S. policy, for all its flaws, too much credit. Not everything is America’s fault; others are sometimes to blame; and no one, not even the weaker parties, are devoid of agency or freed of responsibility. The burden of de-escalation does not fall entirely on the United States; Iran, too, can choose to de-escalate.

Actually, his minor point is pretty good too.

There is also the problem of Trump himself. Because killing Soleimani was very much his decision—reflecting the impulsiveness and disarray a decision by him implies—it seems fair to assume that one’s view of the president will affect how one interprets the fallout from Soleimani’s killing. Correcting for subconscious bias isn’t easy, but at the very least, observers should be aware of the Trump effect.

Well, indeed. One might begin trying to correct for this particular one by examining how one responded to President Obama's very regular targeted killings -- or whether you felt like the War Powers Act was being openly flaunted by Team Obama in its decision to overthrow Libya for no apparent reason.

Maybe Major General Solemani was higher profile than most of Obama's victims -- though he was a Major General out of uniform, operating in a foreign country while under UN travel sanctions and US State and Treasury designation as the terrorist head of a terrorist organization that is itself a subset of a terrorist organization. He wasn't a higher profile victim than Qaddafi, though; and President Trump didn't overthrow a whole country just to get at him.

Speaking of which, Turkey is apparently moving forces into Libya to try to quell the remaining fires of the civil war Obama kicked off nine years ago. They have, of course, chosen to back the wrong side; but it's also the side Obama had picked, quite a few of whom were al Qaeda affiliates in the grand days of that movement. The Trump administration doesn't seem to care about Libya one way or the other, and will likely let the Turks decide the issue if they are able. Trump, at least, doesn't share the opinion that America is indispensable to these conflicts.

Stuck in the last war

Jim Geraghty chronicles the state of the MSM reportage on who exactly it was that bombed the Saudi oil facilities several months ago.  The early reporting included hostile suspicion of all Trump administration attempts to pin the responsibility on Iran.  That went on for several months, until a magically quiet revolution reversed the story without any acknowledgement that the early reports were flat wrong.

Yesterday, Reuters: “Yemen’s Houthi group did not launch an attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities in September, according to a confidential report by U.N. sanctions monitors seen by Reuters on Wednesday, bolstering a U.S. accusation that Iran was responsible.”

Also yesterday, a New York Times article declared: “with tensions between the United States and Iran at the highest level in four decades, the unexpected success of the September strike on the Saudi oil facilities is a stark reminder that Tehran has an array of stealthier weapons in its arsenal that could pose far greater threats if the hostilities escalate.”

Somewhere along the line, the American national news media either decided or realized that Secretary Pompeo and the U.S. government were not lying, were not making this up, and were not using shoddy intelligence to hype a threat from an authoritarian Middle Eastern regime. The declaration that Iran was responsible stopped being controversial, disputed, or unproven. It just became a fact, one that can be cited in an article about how dangerous the current moment is and the high risks of the president’s actions.

This is all leftover guilt about the Iraq War, isn’t it? So many of the people in foreign affairs journalism imbibed the “Bush lied us into war” rhetoric so deeply that they’ve concluded that American officials must be treated with way more skepticism than officials in secretive and serially dishonest authoritarian regimes. They say generals are always fighting the last war; apparently journalists are always covering the last one, too.