Very nicely done, Sam. There is something very strange about confronting such distant issues, with a bit of diplomacy (disingenuous), a bit of journalism (often lies), a bit of data (often wrong) and inscrutable questions about what individuals (Putin, Harris, Netanayu) are _really_ thinking. On that shaky foundation, we end up working really hard to interpret the situation. But maybe we Russia or Iran or . . . just wrong? FWIW, I happen to agree with your judgments, and especially your assessment of the Biden policy, a difficult hand, played badly. Keep up the good work.
Epistemology is always a real problem. The more I learn of journalism and the world, the more I become convinced that no one knows anything. The people who know are the people in the room, but even they only know their own side and are flying blind as often as not. The best sourcing for them are these kinds of shadow journalism accounts, like Foer's or Woodward's, but those come out significantly later and have to leave material off the record. The memoirs come out so much later that they're useless for journalism coverage. I feel pretty good about my method tbh. I'm not talking to anybody, so that's a real limit, but access journalism has its challenges too - you have to work so hard cultivating a source that you really have to almost work for them as opposed to saying what you really think in the press. I really like this technique of just reading widely. It's possible to piece together a lot doing that.
Sam, I like your method, too! Yeah, it is really, really hard to know. Much of what I've done in the last dozen years is thinking about what bureaucrats know, and how we can make them more approachable. You might like Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Thtrough Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern. A lot of epistemology, around just these questions of violence. You might also like Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters (Chicago 2008) has no footnotes, on Levi-Strauss's list. Really proud of that. Some talk of the relationship beween long form journalism and anthropology. Anyway, I think you'd find some of it interesting. I'm currently finishing a darker, bigger book, Quixote's Dinner Party. As soon as I get off Substack!
Interesting analysis but on the question of Israel I just say this. Why is it always about what the Israeli PM will or will not do or the US President will or will not do. The Palestinians have agency don't they? They're adults aren't they? Can THEY not create a political party for peace? Radical I know...
Fair enough. I’m trying to stay outside of the realm of moral culpability in these pieces and to focus on geopolitics and strategy. Sinwar is a fanatical terrorist. A lot of things would be different if he, or Hamas, weren’t in power. But at this point I assume fanaticism in Gaza to be something like a fact of life. The question is how the Israelis deal with it.
Thank-you for your reply Sam and I appreciate your point. As you say this may be a repeat of 1967. But equally more moderate moves could be a repeat of the Second Intifada. Whether Israel choose peace or war, dove or hawk, Netanyahu or the anti-Netanyahu, nothing will change unless the Palestinians change. That is the key variable here. Not this or that American/Israeli policy.
There is a clear situation here of objectifying the Palestinians as we used to objectify women. They are treated as essentially bad actors, a racism which ironically leads to antisemitism because Israel is blamed for doing anything to harm with these "eternal victims" that are anything but.
Palestinians are humans like you and me and they need to choose life. Specifically, in policy terms, they need to be educated to choose life. Which means the UN curriculum needs to change. That is the key policy that will make the difference. It's Mary Wollstonecraft all over again. When she educated women like people, surprise surprise they started engaging their brains for the good of us all. The Palestinians are no different.
Education for; absolutely. The eternal problem fueling these conflicts is the shared cultural memories of actual and inherited human suffering and the ongoing cycles of injustice and atrocities.
How we choose to engage with and frame our differing personal stories of pain within a wider shared social narrative is key. There are no winners or losers here. Just willful ignorance or active engagement.
Thank you for disseminating such complex issues in an article everyone can clearly understand. Occupation is always a "lose-lose." Netanyahu reminds me of a teacher who lost control of his class and now reigns in terror trying to regain personal respect while punishing everyone for his initial laxness. Of course some men feel left out of Harris' campaign. Along with the #MeToo movement, there was a #WhoMe? movement. Men don't get reproductive rights and the significance of a female president. Many have probably worked with someone like Harris who broke the glass ceiling with nothing other than hormones to support the rise in responsibility. If Harris had been a man, would she have been a candidate? Trump and Harris are a product of our sound-bite 30 second news segment culture. As always, I look forward to your comprehensive articles. Thank you.
Thank you Cathy. I like "#WhoMe?" as a phrase! I haven't heard that before. Yeah, the sanctification of Kamala Harris is rubbing a lot of people the wrong way. You're supposed to really work to be president! But Harris is like a Gerald Ford-type figure, somebody who found an inside track into power without having to ever really define herself.
The post was cut off before you got to all the glad tidings.!
The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a terrible unforced error. Biden, so stubborn and unable to realize that his judgments about anything complex tend to be poor, failed to listen to the military.
Too bad! My Middle East proposal was just after the cutoff. Guess that means we're stuck with tragic, insuperable conflict forever then.
I think the secret of the Biden administration is that Biden isn't unbelievably bright. Obama was looking at the same set of circumstances as Biden and decided to leave troops there. He knew that a relatively small force kept an equilibrium. But Biden is a bit more principled and was intent on the withdrawal, which then had catastrophic consequences.
Ir ia only boring to people not really interested in politics or history. Biden was elected to make America boring again, but Trump prevented that from happening. Trump single-handedly continues to expose the weaknesses of our system and to exploit those weakness to an extreme degree.
The misguidedness of our politics could be small potatoes compared to an apocalyptic scenario with global warming, where our best hope would be all hands on deck in a cooperative world. The biggest hope is that our political situation is bad enough to get us to make the system change we need to go from the self-interest that runs our economic world to the mutuality that would prevail in a humanitarian one.
Such thinking, however well meaning, is utterly utopian. The vast majority can only think in terms of their own interest in will only start to want to deal with global warming when it starts to effect them adversely in a major way. It is the way human nature has always been.
This history of human civilization says otherwise. Humans have the capacity for foresight and action and can use those abilities effectively as individuals or smaller groups, but much less so when it comes to entire large societies.
For a very interesting perspective on the situation in Israel Palestine & the Middle East check out a posting by Michael Hudson http://michael-hudson.com titled Sovereignty in Crisis Israel Palestine & America's Global Agenda
Very nicely done, Sam. There is something very strange about confronting such distant issues, with a bit of diplomacy (disingenuous), a bit of journalism (often lies), a bit of data (often wrong) and inscrutable questions about what individuals (Putin, Harris, Netanayu) are _really_ thinking. On that shaky foundation, we end up working really hard to interpret the situation. But maybe we Russia or Iran or . . . just wrong? FWIW, I happen to agree with your judgments, and especially your assessment of the Biden policy, a difficult hand, played badly. Keep up the good work.
Good point David.
Epistemology is always a real problem. The more I learn of journalism and the world, the more I become convinced that no one knows anything. The people who know are the people in the room, but even they only know their own side and are flying blind as often as not. The best sourcing for them are these kinds of shadow journalism accounts, like Foer's or Woodward's, but those come out significantly later and have to leave material off the record. The memoirs come out so much later that they're useless for journalism coverage. I feel pretty good about my method tbh. I'm not talking to anybody, so that's a real limit, but access journalism has its challenges too - you have to work so hard cultivating a source that you really have to almost work for them as opposed to saying what you really think in the press. I really like this technique of just reading widely. It's possible to piece together a lot doing that.
Sam, I like your method, too! Yeah, it is really, really hard to know. Much of what I've done in the last dozen years is thinking about what bureaucrats know, and how we can make them more approachable. You might like Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Thtrough Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern. A lot of epistemology, around just these questions of violence. You might also like Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters (Chicago 2008) has no footnotes, on Levi-Strauss's list. Really proud of that. Some talk of the relationship beween long form journalism and anthropology. Anyway, I think you'd find some of it interesting. I'm currently finishing a darker, bigger book, Quixote's Dinner Party. As soon as I get off Substack!
https://www.davidawestbrook.com/getting-through-security.html
https://www.davidawestbrook.com/navigators-of-the-contemporary.html
Keep up the good work!
Interesting analysis but on the question of Israel I just say this. Why is it always about what the Israeli PM will or will not do or the US President will or will not do. The Palestinians have agency don't they? They're adults aren't they? Can THEY not create a political party for peace? Radical I know...
Fair enough. I’m trying to stay outside of the realm of moral culpability in these pieces and to focus on geopolitics and strategy. Sinwar is a fanatical terrorist. A lot of things would be different if he, or Hamas, weren’t in power. But at this point I assume fanaticism in Gaza to be something like a fact of life. The question is how the Israelis deal with it.
Thank-you for your reply Sam and I appreciate your point. As you say this may be a repeat of 1967. But equally more moderate moves could be a repeat of the Second Intifada. Whether Israel choose peace or war, dove or hawk, Netanyahu or the anti-Netanyahu, nothing will change unless the Palestinians change. That is the key variable here. Not this or that American/Israeli policy.
There is a clear situation here of objectifying the Palestinians as we used to objectify women. They are treated as essentially bad actors, a racism which ironically leads to antisemitism because Israel is blamed for doing anything to harm with these "eternal victims" that are anything but.
Palestinians are humans like you and me and they need to choose life. Specifically, in policy terms, they need to be educated to choose life. Which means the UN curriculum needs to change. That is the key policy that will make the difference. It's Mary Wollstonecraft all over again. When she educated women like people, surprise surprise they started engaging their brains for the good of us all. The Palestinians are no different.
Education for; absolutely. The eternal problem fueling these conflicts is the shared cultural memories of actual and inherited human suffering and the ongoing cycles of injustice and atrocities.
How we choose to engage with and frame our differing personal stories of pain within a wider shared social narrative is key. There are no winners or losers here. Just willful ignorance or active engagement.
Thank you for disseminating such complex issues in an article everyone can clearly understand. Occupation is always a "lose-lose." Netanyahu reminds me of a teacher who lost control of his class and now reigns in terror trying to regain personal respect while punishing everyone for his initial laxness. Of course some men feel left out of Harris' campaign. Along with the #MeToo movement, there was a #WhoMe? movement. Men don't get reproductive rights and the significance of a female president. Many have probably worked with someone like Harris who broke the glass ceiling with nothing other than hormones to support the rise in responsibility. If Harris had been a man, would she have been a candidate? Trump and Harris are a product of our sound-bite 30 second news segment culture. As always, I look forward to your comprehensive articles. Thank you.
Thank you Cathy. I like "#WhoMe?" as a phrase! I haven't heard that before. Yeah, the sanctification of Kamala Harris is rubbing a lot of people the wrong way. You're supposed to really work to be president! But Harris is like a Gerald Ford-type figure, somebody who found an inside track into power without having to ever really define herself.
This is an excellent piece
Thanks Ross!
The post was cut off before you got to all the glad tidings.!
The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a terrible unforced error. Biden, so stubborn and unable to realize that his judgments about anything complex tend to be poor, failed to listen to the military.
I always enjoy these Commentator pieces!
Too bad! My Middle East proposal was just after the cutoff. Guess that means we're stuck with tragic, insuperable conflict forever then.
I think the secret of the Biden administration is that Biden isn't unbelievably bright. Obama was looking at the same set of circumstances as Biden and decided to leave troops there. He knew that a relatively small force kept an equilibrium. But Biden is a bit more principled and was intent on the withdrawal, which then had catastrophic consequences.
Appreciate the note!
Sometimes you just want to dance lol. Always a pleasure to read you, Sam.
Thanks so much Louis!
Ir ia only boring to people not really interested in politics or history. Biden was elected to make America boring again, but Trump prevented that from happening. Trump single-handedly continues to expose the weaknesses of our system and to exploit those weakness to an extreme degree.
The misguidedness of our politics could be small potatoes compared to an apocalyptic scenario with global warming, where our best hope would be all hands on deck in a cooperative world. The biggest hope is that our political situation is bad enough to get us to make the system change we need to go from the self-interest that runs our economic world to the mutuality that would prevail in a humanitarian one.
Such thinking, however well meaning, is utterly utopian. The vast majority can only think in terms of their own interest in will only start to want to deal with global warming when it starts to effect them adversely in a major way. It is the way human nature has always been.
We are not animals who operate on instinct. Read my Substack for ideas about what we can do.
This history of human civilization says otherwise. Humans have the capacity for foresight and action and can use those abilities effectively as individuals or smaller groups, but much less so when it comes to entire large societies.
I like "Make America Boring Again" as a rallying cry! Let's get those extremely dull stickers out, and the unremarkable, room-tone hats.
For a very interesting perspective on the situation in Israel Palestine & the Middle East check out a posting by Michael Hudson http://michael-hudson.com titled Sovereignty in Crisis Israel Palestine & America's Global Agenda
Thanks Jonathan!