Friday, July 26th, 2024
It is important to constrain relationshipsas much as possible.
-Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design
ASK
Israel is the pivot,the axis, the litmus, the trial.
-George Gilder
ASK
Tuesday, July 9th, 2024
Thank you Rusto Reno, editor of Feisty Things, for this articulation towards the end of this podcast episode:
The liberation project is a utopian project that doesn’t have any limits. And moreover, if you can redefine husband and wife, why can’t you redefine men and women? I mean, if we can redefine marriage, the primordial institution of society that is more fundamental than any particular form of government, it’s universal across all cultures, then if you can redefine that, then I don’t see how you can object to people redefining what it means to be a man and a woman, or for that matter, to redefine anything.
Thursday, July 4th, 2024
There is not one UK political party that expresses the main stances I value:
- Get back into Europe: Brexit is a silly nonsense; Britain’s historic role is offshore balancer to Europe, and how better than deep within its regulatory institutions.
- Be economically sensible: Look back at and reapply what worked in the 20th century: top-notch educational opportunities for less privileged people paired with business-friendliness.
- Support Israel properly: I mean not “staunchly” like the Conservatives say but barely do; I mean get ahead of the USA and Germany and be Israel’s most reliable ally as a fellow smaller world-historic democracy always working for true liberalism. And I also mean: find an independent way to be relevant and helpful in the Middle East. Both Jordan and the Gulf states look to Britain I believe as a senior partner; these are hugely important players who would do more if Britain had their backs; and France might see that and in turn play its part, maybe even in new Anglo-French joint initiatives with yes some boots on the ground.
- Jettison the bollocks: Rigorously and vigorously dispatch with the medievalist self-mutilation that is political post-modernism, including both the extreme rights-based Orwellianism eroding actual liberalism, and the climate apoplexy eroding actual science (there are less oppressive and destructive ways to foster energy innovation).
Theoretically the party closest to all this are the Conservatives, but in practice not so much; moreover they are the cause of the top mess with their Brexit business — Britain is a European nation, not a semi-continent unto itself like a USA or an India, and now that the Britain-led industrial revolution and resulting empire is long gone, it’s folly to presume and proceed otherwise.
Saturday, June 29th, 2024
Archly-written summary of the Trump-Biden debate by Jenny Holland in Spiked:
Call me naïve, but I don’t think sister-on-sister rape – and the resulting offspring – is the national problem that Biden seems to think it is.
But she concludes more darkly:
The media’s complicity in the disaster that America now finds itself in must never be forgotten. Or forgiven.
Sunday, June 23rd, 2024
1948
Benny Morris
♦♦♦♦♦
First bought and read a dozen years ago, and mostly forgotten, I returned to Benny Morris’s 1948 now during the post-October 7th Israel-Gaza conflict, for which 1948’s War of Independence serves in a number of ways as a distant mirror. Although 1967’s Six Day War seems to loom larger in consciousness, 1948 was the big one, the epoch-definer.
Even back then, Israel labored under a diplomatic situation where it was held back from victory. This time around the Palestinians have different weapons: no Arab armies, but lopsided savagery, projectile warfare, a dedicated sponsor and participant in Tehran, Western cultural cognitive decline, and lawfare from a corrupted globalist establishment. The book, with its encyclopedic ambitions, suffers from one sin of history: it does not elicit mental images of many of the events it describes, such as the battles around Gaza between Israel and Egypt. That said, it’s a vital primer.
Saturday, June 22nd, 2024
I used to be an intellectual but now I’m a conservative.
Mike Doran
Tuesday, June 18th, 2024
Monday, June 17th, 2024
Sunday, June 16th, 2024
At a meeting between US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and a group of senior Arab officials about a month ago, a shouting match reportedly ensued between the UAE and Palestinian delegates. I find it so encouraging that there is a body in the Arab world that seems insistent on calling a spade a spade and treating people equally and with respect no matter who they are, and not instrumentalizing the Palestinians to some nonsensical end, nor fatally coddling them no matter their viciousness. The UAE’s path-beating instills me with hope.
Tuesday, June 11th, 2024
MacRumors summarizes Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2024 in 9 minutes. Onboard AI and ChatGPT integration. More configuration and multiple screens in Control Center. Sending even regular messages via satellite. And so much more, for real. A huge raft of announcements!
Maybe the single killer feature of the Apple Vision Pro: entire home not desk as office:
Walking around my entire apartment with Vision Pro on my head, strolling between large windows that cover different walls in each space, with specific rooms dedicated to certain kinds of work activities, felt like a radical extension of the standing desk.
Especially useful for those who work at home and have it to themselves for the workday.
I’ve heard people such as Dan Senor not understand the electoral logic behind President Biden’s pandering to Hamas supporters in Michigan. Like others, Senor cannot even imagine the only logical conclusion: it comes not from cynicism and expedience but rather ideology and belief (as much as this ethics-challenged pol can muster at any rate). In a devastating list-like article akin to a mordant Victor Davis Hanson column, Morton Klein reminds that Biden is not an Israel-friendly president. If he is not the architect of our current woes he is at least the midwife.
Biden has been hostile to Israel since day one of his administration before Michigan was a twinkle in his eye. Moreover, Biden stands to lose more Jewish and pro-Israel votes than he gains from anti-Israel communities, as 80% of Americans support Israel over Hamas. I thus believe that the real reason for Biden’s anti-Israel policies is Biden’s longstanding and sinister hostility to Israel.
In the last few days John Podhoretz has been coming to this conclusion, but sees it as the ranting of a senile old man, rather than long-held tendencies.
Thursday, June 6th, 2024
Salem Alketbi in The Jerusalem Post on Arab do-nothing-ism vis-a-vis Gaza. It’s great to hear this pragmatic, humanist voice coming from the UAE.
What remains unspoken about the Arab role in Gaza is the lack of a collective political vision for a solution to the crisis, despite the fact that it has been ongoing for over seven months. Instead, they have settled for official face-saving statements, while refraining from calling a spade a spade and without playing any real role in saving the Palestinian people from the ruthlessness of the Iran-backed Hamas faction.
Gaymen and ladies in San Francisco, your true colors shining through…
Gadi Taub hosts Gabi Siboni [Hebrew]. Total common sense that seems in short supply. With the North empty and on fire, an invasion of South Lebanon is very overdue. I think the country understands that. I am long along the road of losing faith in Netanyahu, who pays way too much mind to the Biden Administration’s inanity.
Monday, June 3rd, 2024
Only now, after calling an election, do the Conservatives say a woman is a woman. And that is why they will lose: because they have not been governing as conservatives. The only caveat to this prediction is that they are the worst except for all the rest. Or, as Allistair Heath writes in “Nigel Farage has driven the Tories to a state of near-total psychological collapse”, also in The Telegraph:
Aending out strong Right-wing vibes at one minute to midnight in a desperate bid to deflect the oncoming Nigel Farage tsunami isn’t enough: after 14 years of talking as conservatives but governing as social-democrats, the Tories have run out of excuses. They broke their promises on migration, legal and illegal, and never had the guts to pull out of the ECHR. They increased taxes, and are planning to do so again as a share of GDP.
This is why I blame the Tory wets, in charge for almost all of the past 14 years, for the Starmer-ite calamity that is about to befall Britain.
It is the wets who jettisoned free-market economics, deregulation, tax cuts and supply-side reforms, who crippled the City, who increased immigration, who ignored the collapse of community and family and the baby-bust, who failed to fix the Civil Service, who refused to scrap the BBC licence fee, who had no interest in properly reforming the public sector, including the NHS (and who promoted even more cultish reverence for a failing system), who vetoed prison building and a real crackdown on crime, who embraced net zero and the neo-Blairite quangocracy, and who wanted to surrender to the woke stormtroopers.
Tuesday, May 28th, 2024
Sunday, May 26th, 2024
Friday, May 24th, 2024
Yossi Klein-Halevi: We have to own the strangeness of our story. I’ve been having similar thoughts; there is no comparable nation to Israel. Right from the get go we endemically punch way above our weight — this small nation sandwiched between bigger empires declared its god to be the only one, negating everyone else’s! It’s a world religion that — unlike any other world religion — doesn’t proselytize because it’s the religion of a nation, so grows through the womb not the meme. Always being small in one’s arena means always being a target.
Thursday, May 23rd, 2024
The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board cuts through the miasma:
Though Israeli liberals won’t like to hear it, Israel probably will need to fill the vacuum in Gaza for a time. Though Israeli right-wingers won’t like to hear it, the purpose would be to make way for local governance. The politics, there and here, explain why it has been easier to pretend there’s no plan at all.
Monday, May 20th, 2024
Saturday, May 18th, 2024
Sense from John Spencer as reported by CNN of all outlets.
By going slowly, I can argue through history and through metrics, it gives your enemy more time to defend, more time to prevent your plans, more time to prevent you from achieving surprise. We, as in the world, are also responsible for some of the destruction that’s happened in Gaza.
Friday, May 17th, 2024
We are at a moment where what’s morally indefensible is becoming socially acceptable.
Tal Becker, “Call Me Back”, May 16th
Tuesday, May 14th, 2024
David Wurmser at the Center for Security Policy, the first I’ve come across to synthesize Israel’s Eurovision popular vote win:
Israel seems to be casting some light that is shining onto populations and peoples far away, triggering in them a rediscovery of themselves and what made those distant lands and cultures great.
He notes the dichotomy between the popular vote and the judges:
Many of the nations in which Israel won the popular vote by wide margins had their judges award Israel zero points. Western European elites led the trend: the UK, Switzerland, Luxembourg, San Marino, Spain, Finland, Australia, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Andorra, Belgium, and Sweden all had been won by Israel with 12 points on the popular vote, but all had the judged award Israel zero points. Four of the five UK judges had ranked Israel as the worst song of the 35.
Eric Cohen’s Exodus project: American Jews need to contribute to renewal.
Monday, May 13th, 2024
Brendan O’Neill in The Telegraph:
[Green agitation and radical Islam], at root, represent a disgust with modernity. Both the privileged Western weepers over industrial society and the Islamist haters of Israel share an aversion to the modern world, to progress, to Enlightenment itself.
Climate Justice for Palestine! Mental. Though there’s precious little more in this piece linking the two deranged movements, both of which start from a place of ostensible decency yet veer almost immediately into the weeds of venality and beyond, I’ve been waiting for someone to at least touch on the shared ideational foundations. Here they fuse in one charismatic which might alone shed some light on their commonality. One thing they share is hate, demonstrating wilful disregard for actual causes and workable solutions in favor of vilification of the chosen villain and a desire to dismantle existing structures (modernity; Israel) which if ever actually successful would be imagined catastrophe.
John Bolton in The Telegraph:
Piling on publicly in the middle of a war is imprudent, even juvenile, damaging the respect and trust allies must sustain during times of crisis and tension. The propaganda opportunities handed to hostile powers are immeasurable. And if Biden is prepared to cut loose one of America’s most valued partners, what does that foretell for those more-distant, less-favoured than Israel? How does Ukraine feel? Or Taiwan?
A few days in to the announcement of withholding weapons and the Biden Administration is in contortions trying to walk it back a bit, at least rhetorically. Oh dear they are in a mess. And why? Venality. A belief in something, anything, could fortify them with the intestinal fortitude required to stay the course.
Sunday, May 12th, 2024
Tuesday, May 7th, 2024
Potholes are a great heuristic for evaluating national decline, and Britain’s here has been especially egregious. In this excellent bit of reporting in The Telegraph, the main culprit seems to be, like at least with one other major problem, legislation from the 90s:
Part of the issue is a little-known change in the law in 1991. Prior to this, companies had to pay highway authorities to repair roads after they’d been dug up. Westminster council charged £120 per square metre for this work. But under the New Roads and Street Work Act of 1991, utilities could reinstate their own openings. Costs dropped to an estimated £40 per square metre. In theory the savings should have resulted in lower bills (or fatter margins for the utility companies). But the change in the law clearly had a number of unintended consequences.
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour writes on Middle Eastern history, Arab intellectual life, philosophy, Jewish history, and Middle Eastern politics. He calls his Substack “The Abrahamic Critique”.
Monday, May 6th, 2024
The Wall Street Journal’s Letters Editor Elliot Kaufman lays out Biden’s series of errors regarding Gaza, in particular his lack of pressure on Egypt to step up.
How did the president get here? Mr. Biden isn’t “Genocide Joe” any more than he is “pro-Hamas.” He has been boxed in and brought low by his own mistakes.
To my mind it all stems from cowardice; leaning on reasonable friends is less scary than on iffy partners, let alone adversaries.
Sunday, May 5th, 2024
Benny Morris, prescient in 2008:
Many Israelis feel that the walls — and history — are closing in on their 60-year-old state, much as they felt in early June 1967, just before Israel launched the Six-Day War.
Saturday, May 4th, 2024
Friday, May 3rd, 2024
Wednesday, May 1st, 2024
How heartwarming is this exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Yossi Klein-Halevi. Who better to thank HH for his steadfastness and engagement since Oct 7.
[Update 2024 May 7]: Hewitt is even reading out the names of the young Israeli fallen after the rocket attack on Keren Shalom. I hope when Hewitt gets over to Israel he is appropriately feted; how many people his erudite common sense must be reaching as they commute to and from mid-sized cities throughout the American heartland.
Tuesday, April 30th, 2024
This is how the Associated Press presents the US intifada encampments:
The outcry is forcing colleges to reckon with their financial ties to Israel, as well as their support for free speech. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus.
What a topsy-turvy whitewash.
There is also:
The protests have even spread to Europe…
What’s interesting is why they haven’t mainly been in Europe.
Thursday, April 25th, 2024
In contrast with the Jonathan Freedland piece I linked to earlier, Armin Rosen’s survey “The Israel-Gaza war has changed everything: The norms of war are being rewritten in real-time” in Unherd is simultaneously more detailed yet more humble.
Much of what’s happened since October 7 is without any real precedent … we are deep into the unknown, and were there long before this past week. The sides have notched accomplishments that are both novel and gruesome enough to demand real analytic humility…
I just used the term “midwit” in a post, I’m pretty sure for the first time, but some tendril of editorial integrity made me look it up and it is discomfiting. One nice definition:
An internet term that ironically, is something only an actual midwit would try to use on in the internet to look vErY sMaRt.
Yes — there should be a term for a derogatory term the very use of which classifies you as an instance of it. At any rate, since I had to hold back from using it myself, I am inclined to think I am indeed a midwit, or if not one, only slightly not one.
Someone who is around average intelligence but is so opinionated and full of themselves that they think they’re some kind of genius.
And:
Generally found in the 105-120 IQ range. These are the people who are considered “gifted” in primary school and perhaps “honors” in high school.
I notice myself trying to think but cannot; I can merely react.
Jonathan Freedman, a Jewish columnist for The Guardian, which in itself tells a tale, pens a column “In this shadow war between Iran and Israel, the outline of a different future is visible”. I can understand Palestinians’ disgusting murderous thuggery better than I can understand such sickly magpies within the nest. And he may not even be wrong in his conclusions! It’s the myriad of little things that bug me, the Olympian chin-rubbing despite being Jewish himself. First, the subtitle, which perhaps he didn’t write, but nonetheless reflects his conclusion:
Both seem keen to limit hostilities, and key Arab states are ready to resist Tehran. But real change will require new Israeli leadership
Israel is required to change its government! (No need for any change in Iran.)
It doesn’t help that the leaderships in both Iran and Israel are under constant pressure from elements that are even more bellicose.
Some insane and insulting parallels are being drawn here.
The hitherto crypto-alliance of Israel and those Sunni states that fear Tehran more than they fear Tel Aviv has stepped into the light.
Fear Tel Aviv? Firstly, that’s Jerusalem to you bub, though given that The Guardian is a British publication, which still shamefully does not recognize Israel as Jerusalem’s capital — I mean Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — no doubt “Tel Aviv” is editorial policy, but you are complicit in this policy, your name is in the byline. Secondly: fear? Hate I would say is more accurate; the Arabs never feared that Israel was going to invade or overthrow them.
Israel would have to do what the US and others are asking: offer the Palestinians a political horizon, one that holds out the prospect of an eventual Palestinian state.
Which others are these? Westerners project their desire for a Palestinian state onto Middle Easterners, who only pay lip service to this notion, because they are close enough to know that Palestinians are part of the problem not the solution. Resolving to being just like the Ayatollahs where it matters, Palestinians’ modus operandi is mass murder and the destabilization and overthrow of any polity they can, so that responsible Middle Easterners prefer to see them contained not empowered.
Normally I would just skip over such pap as this, especially if in The Guardian, which I only look at occasionally for movie reviews and design inspiration. But Israel’s Channel 12 hosts the Unholy podcast with Freedland to which people I know listen to devotedly, and who know him personally slightly as he sends his kids to the same Jewish school in northwest London. Why oh why does he not know better.
Wednesday, April 24th, 2024
Every paragraph with its little bombshell: Edward Luttwak is in full elegant force in “Iran is weaker than we think” in Unherd. The opening paragraph:
It is only now, almost 16 years since Obama first entered the White House with the private determination to end Iran’s “death to America” hostility at all costs, that his Iran policy has achieved the exact opposite of what he had wanted: direct warfare, with US fighters intercepting Iran’s bombardment drones. All along, it was a policy that had two different faces: one perfectly reasonable, and the other perfectly delusional.
Such casual rhythm before the zing at paragraph’s end! Later we get a Luttwakian paradox of strategy:
The [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards finally failed strategically because their Arab recruitment policy was so successful that it overshot the culminating point of success: seeing the historic Sunni capital of Damascus under Shia domination, and Baghdad the very seat of the Sunni Arab Caliphate ruled by Iran’s agents, Sunni Arab states from Morocco to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which had repeatedly fought Israel from 1948, moved to abandon their hostility, openly or discreetly.
And we end with striking, real-world evidence that demonstrates the strategic theories posited within. I won’t quote this evidence so as not to spoil the end of this masterful op-ed.
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024
Monday, April 22nd, 2024
In The Wall Street Journal, this geopolitical news article on Finland is the first one I can recall reading anywhere. Swimming into focus are renewed tensions with the new Russia. Th
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Finland has ramped up its military spending, boosting its defense budget to above 2% and snapping up U.S. rocket systems, as well as Israeli antitank and air-defense systems. The country is preparing to base F-35 jet fighters it will receive from the U.S. just over 100 miles from its border with Russia.
I wish for Finland and Israel to explore each other much more.
Sunday, April 21st, 2024
Friday, April 19th, 2024
Great lengthy interview with Giora Eiland, always with cogent orthogonal ideas on important Israeli geopolitical realities.
The Israeli story was, Hamas is like ISIS, and ISIS is like Hamas. No! That’s not the case. ISIS was a bunch of crazies from Baghdad who, unopposed, gained control of western Iraq and those who lived there. But it didn’t represent the people, not in Mosul or elsewhere. Gaza more resembles 1930s Germany, where an extremist party won elections, with the support of most of the people, and quickly unified the military and civil government into one entity. What happened on October 7 is that the State of Gaza went to war against the State of Israel. State against state. Now, the state of Gaza does have vulnerabilities. It doesn’t have sufficient fuel, food and water of its own. You can impose a legitimate boycott on that state until the state returns all of your hostages. Humanitarian for humanitarian.
I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that Eiland is granted the levers of power.
