Future Discount: Israel and Palestine

We have almost all had some experience with the concept of future discount: the snooze button now versus the good things studying harder for the test might make possible in the future. The exhilaration and social cachet of your own car now against the future advantages of having saved up and taken the bus. For too many people, future discounting means weighing the escape the pill, the pipe, or the needle offers now, versus the chances for the uncertain possibilities of a better future.

Few forms of future discounting have the seductive nature, or pose the dangers, of apocalyptic religious belief. A coming apocalypse justifies gratifying the present at the expense of the future because God will call an end to the world. The righteous, whether they provide for the future or not, will receive their eternal reward. In that system, imprudence does not look like self indulgence, or as a pursuit of pleasure with consequences others may have to pay for. Rather, it appears as as an affirmation of faith.

The wrong man

Doug Ford is a people pleaser. His government works on that principle. He doesn't conceal the fact; indeed, he proclaims it. He is "for the people". If the people want to drink, he'll have alcohol, including  pre-mixed cocktails, available in corner stores. If people want to drive, he'll build a highway. If people want a spa and water park, he'll arrange it. If the people want entertainment, he'll lease out the waterfront venue to a promoter (never mind the promoter in question is a predatory monopoly).

That has made Doug Ford popular with an enthusiastic base. It also makes him extremely unsuited to lead during what look like the very hard times ahead of us. There is very little that is pleasing about our situation. Doug Ford will have very little to offer in the way of gratification if Donald Trump follows through on his threats. We don't need a premier who promises us everything we want; we need a premier who can rally us to stand together, even if the government can offer us nothing but toil, tears, and sweat. 

January 20, part 2

Just a few hours from now, Donald Trump will take the oath of office, and we will learn which of his threats, or promises, he intends to carry out.

In my last post, I wrote about the hazards of taking Mr. Trump's implicit promise to make Canada a state with caution; I believe that if we surrender before Donald Trump's economic aggression, we would find ourselves residents of a territory, not a state, and Canadians, or former Canadians, as we would be if we surrendered, might well find ourselves classified as US nationals, rather than citizens with voting rights. 

But if too many Canadian commentators have been mistakenly optimistic about our prospects should we surrender, we have been unreasonably pessimistic about our ability to face the kind of economic pressure Trump's government could or would bring to bear. 

January 20

On Monday, Donald Trump will take the presidential oath of office and the reigns of a president's very considerable power under the American system.

He's also set to be the first American president to seriously question Canada's sovereignty. Some Americans have always regarded Canada with an kind of uneasiness and suspicion, because we contradict their favourite narratives. If, as some American conservatives actually believe, Americans represent the pinnacle of humanity, if everyone aspires to American citizenship, then why do forty million Canadians fail, indeed refuse, to petition for admission to the union? Plenty of American pundits have expressed hostility to the idea of Canada. Most American presidents and lawmakers, on the other hand, have had a real degree of affection and respect for Canada. Even where US presidents have disliked our politics or politicians, the decencies of international relations have kept these sentiments out of official United States policy. Until now: Donald Trump has made it quite clear that, at least when it comes to rhetoric, he has no intention of abiding by the old restraints. 

Fanfare for the Common Man

 It's now the sixth of November: Guy Fawkes Day is over, and so is the civic ritual (not far) to the south of where I live. Though we do not know the full outcome yet, this election may well bring to office an administration that will bring with it policies that challenge the whole world, and not least Canada. 

At this moment, suspended between bad news (the New York Times has just called the United States Senate majority for the party of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and J. D. Vance) and the remaining hope that the Democrats will take the White House of at least the House of Representatives, it seems a good time to reflect on what it will take to respond to the challenge of a man and an administration in the White House who wants to exercise dictatorial powers "on the first day"; who plans to replace professional civil servants with ideologically vetted functionaries; who has referred to dissenters in his country as "vermin"; who has promised his supporters "I am your retribution".

For my friends in the United States, this is a bleak outlook. The Trump Administration elected in 2016 came into office by surprise, with relatively few set plans, relying on professional civil servants and members of the military, most of whom had a basis in their professional and personal ethics that enabled them to resist Donald Trump's worst impulses. If he is elected this time, he will have a retinue of individuals who share his most undemocratic impulses and a plan to transform the American government, all ready.

Thirty-nine years ago, in 1985, Jonathan Kozol published "Illiterate America". It contained a chilling prophesy describing the end result of Ronald Reagan's educational policies. It ends with these words: 

Masking skills in time will yield to a determined passion to remove those masks and to compel us to look hard into the face of every Caliban we have created and ignored. Violent disorders will become endemic. They will be met with measures that no longer seek to pacify but only to contain. American will cease to be a flawed democracy. What we will become instead cannot be named.

If the American people have given Donald Trump another term, and particularly if they have given him a compliant legislature, he will have no shortage of supporters and enablers eager to make the worst of Kozol's prophesy come true. 

Project 2025 and "schedule 'F'"

Republicans complain the Democrats have set out to terrify the public with references to Project 2025. They point out the project did not come from the Republican Party, but from the Heritage Foundation, a right wing policy development and influence organization. The Heritage Foundation operates at arm's length from the Republican Party and the Trump campaign, but all three entities belong to the larger American Conservative movement, and the personnel in the Heritage foundation, including the staff responsible for Project 2025, overlaps with the personnel of the Trump Administration of 2017-2021 to a significant degree.

The project itself consists of a public policy framework, containing both broad ideological outlines and specific implementation details. Its authors have divided it into several phases: the initial policy document, titled Mandate for Leadership, which they have released publicly, then a series of training videos, which have been leaked to ProPublica, and a number of other as yet unpublished documents.

All or nothing: a convenient paralysis

Therapists characterize all or nothing thinking, the ability to see only polar opposites, as a cognitive distortion.  Politicians, governments, and advertisers all rely, to greater or lesser degrees, on convincing people to make decisions that work against their own interests, so they find cognitive distortions very useful. Far too often, those of us who work for peace and justice accept these distortions without analyzing them, and when we do, we limit our effectiveness.

Governments have worked hard to promote all or nothing thinking in relation to peace work.. The idea of peace as an all or nothing proposition, with no possibility of any position between absolute passivity and unlimited, lawless violence has proved useful as a political strategy and as an administrative technique for authorities in charge of military conscription. To the extent advocates of peace and justice work have accepted this proposition, it has proved disastrous for us, and more important, it has done real harm to the people we work and advocate for.

Poetry and government

 

"The silent wheels roll through the quiet green," happens to be the first line of a sonnet, a poem written in a highly specific form. The word form here matters: a form, by definition, has a formal definition, one which a poem, or anything else with a formal definition, must fit. A Shakespearean sonnet must consist of exactly fourteen lines, divided into three stanzas and a final rhyming couplet. In the stanzas, each alternate line must rhyme: first with third and second with fourth. A line in a sonnet must consist of exactly ten syllables, or beats, with alternate strong and weak stresses, and each pair of beats must begin with the weaker beat. Like the drumming of Indigenous North Americas, this poetry mimics the beat of a human heart.

Many other formal definitions exist: computer languages have extremely specific formal definitions, many of which make the definition of a sonnet look very loose and informal. In each case, a formal definition acts as a scaffold. It does not define what people who employ the form may express, but it does define, and thus restrict, the means of expression. Above all, the scaffold, by itself, has nothing to say about the quality of the expression. The literary record contains a long list of very bad sonnets: trite, sentimental, poorly expressed, but none the less fitting the formal definition of the sonnet. Conversely, the world contains many magnificent poems that do not fit the definition of a sonnet.

Oppression and atrocity

This post deals with the accounts of sexual violence in the Hamas-led assault on Southern Israel on October 7, 2023. It thus necessarily includes references to rape, homicide, and crimes of extreme violence.

A United Nations investigative team has now submitted a report, finding credible evidence the Hamas fighters committed acts of sexual violence, both during the initial assault on southern Israel on October 7, and also against those they held hostage.

In all the things people can say, and have an obligation to say about this report, a number of things stand out. Start with the obvious: "credible evidence" does not mean certainty. If subsequent investigation should disprove these allegations unfounded, we should all celebrate: any woman  not suffering rape, not violated in life or death, is good news. But that is also to say there is no excuse, whatever, for this kind of violence. Nor, now, do we have any excuse for ignoring or dismissing the possibility Hamas fighters, or people associated with them, did commit these atrocities. 

We can't justify the violation of Israeli women by Hamas by pointing to claims, also under investigation, that Israeli soldiers have assaulted and violated Palestinians. Nor do we have to justify, or ignore, claims about brutality by Hamas to uphold Palestinian rights. The children of Gaza are innocent, and their suffering is unjust. No actions of Hamas cancel or reduce the rights of Palestinians who had no hand and no say in them.

We've been here before: A personal view of the Israel-Hamas conflict

 

Flag of Kach/Kahane Chai

Over the last five months, the dialogue between Israel and the international community, including some of the strongest supporters of Israel in the international community, has begun more and more to resemble the conversation at an intervention. The participants all express support, sympathy, solidarity with Israel, emphasize their friendship, and slowly work around to the lengthening list of symptoms suggesting their friend has gone off the rails. The sense of dismay at the behaviour of the Israeli government grows steadily more apparent. Increasingly, we see calls for moderation, expressed willingness to broker and support a settlement leading to peace and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and behind those words of encouragement the seldom bluntly stated but increasingly solid consensus that the behaviour of  the current government of Israel will lead to catastrophe.

Perhaps a memory of my own can help explain why this is happening. 

Talk is cheap

Germany has come out strongly in support of Israel's position at the International Court of Justice and against the allegations of genocide brought by South Africa. The statement from Germany mentioned a sense of obligation felt by the current German government as a result of the mass murders of Jewish people committed by Nazi Germany. 

Tomoyuki Yamashita would like a word...

General Tomoyuki Yamashita

 Recently, Jonathan Cook published a substack essay, in which he questioned the evidence for widespread sexual violence associated with the Hamas breakout from Gaza on October 7. In his essay, he makes the following extraordinary statement:

The reason why Israel’s apologists for genocide need to inflate their claim is because, sadly, opportunistic rape would be entirely unremarkable in any violent, militarised situation – and indeed unremarkable in behaviours towards women in western societies in general.

First, it should go without saying: nothing justifies genocide. Those who believe the Israeli government, or apologists for Israel, have alleged sexual violence against Hamas to justify genocide or even ethnic cleansing in Gaza need to respond on principle: nothing justifies crimes against humanity. Nothing Hamas fighters did on October 7 justifies intentionally harming or killing the children of Gaza. 

Second: allegations of war crimes matter. They matter because of what Sr. Helen Prejean called the basic human solidarity against suffering and death. They matter because without investigation and accountability they will happen more often.They matter especially when people we might otherwise sympathize with stand accused, because if our solidarity depends on a political test it means nothing.

Finally: if you let loose armed fighters on a civilian population, you own what they do. The American government hanged the Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita on exactly that basis, and his fate has haunted more than one military commander since, with good reason. Our rules and standards for warfare exist to make resort to violence harder and less appealing, and to offer the maximum protection to uninvolved and unarmed persons caught up in a conflict.

We do not need to accept allegations of rape and sexual violence by Hamas fighters on October 7 without scrutiny, but neither should we dismiss them. Standards of human rights and human decency must apply to all of us, or they will come to apply to none of us.

A welcome departure...

Jeff Sessions testifying
by Office of Robert Aderholt

 I begin to write this in the last few minutes of January 20, 2021. I will probably publish it in the first hours of January 21, which, among some other distinctions, marks the first full day of the Biden-Harris administration. TV news has shown President Biden swearing in new officials of his administration, with an admonition similar to Churchill's famous "blood toil tears and sweat", and a single, uncompromising requirement: he required all his appointees to always show respect for their colleagues and the American people. 

At the same time, the officials, strategists, functionaries and hangers on of the previous administration have departed Washington, one or two clutching freshly printed presidential pardons, others just leaving. As Americans celebrate a hard-won transfer of power, in the last minutes of this day I want to celebrate the departure of a man who left Washington over two years ago, and now lives in well earned obscurity, his attempt at a political comeback denied by Donald Trump for precisely the wrong reasons. That man, Jefferson Sessions, implemented the most egregiously cruel of all the policies of the Trump administration, the policy of family separation at the American border with Mexico. 

January 20

As I write this, Joe Biden prepares to take the oath of office as president of the United States. He now has an opportunity: to move American politics in a new and humane direction. He also has a series of challenges: a republic fractured, with at least some bitter end fans of the previous chief executive who will not accept him as their president, and who have made no secret of their propensity for violence. He has to lead his country through the worst months of a pandemic, made far worse by the blundering, posturing, and dishonesty of his predecessor. He has to deal with a historic deficit and a government burdened by over seven trillion dollars more debt than it carried when he left at the end of his terms as vice president. He, his government, and the American people also face the task of weaning the American economy off the twin narcotics of easy money and fossil fuels.

I wish him well. 

What the People Who Sent Murderers to Barcelona Want

Sagrada Família

A terror cell affiliated with the deash has murdered fifteen people and injured one hundred and thirty more.

Pray for the dead and for the recovery of the injured. And don't give the hard men of the daesh, who sent the killers, what they want.

Size the office to fit the man

photo by Gage Skidmore

 Donald Trump’s recent behaviour has provoked dark thoughts among American opinion writers. Ross Douthait, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, has raised the possibility of declaring Mr. Trump medically unfit for his job and invoking the 25 amendment to the US constitution to remove him.

That is a spectacularly bad idea. It is, to paraphrase Orwell, a bad idea even though National Review says it’s a bad idea. For one thing, the authors of the 25th amendment intended it to deal with a medical crisis, not a policy disagreement or even justified reservations about the character of a president. For another, it doesn’t deal with the structural or even the psychological problems the Trump presidency raises.

What, me worry?

by Gage Skidmore

If American news reports accurately describe the events of last week's meeting between President Trump and Russian representatives, somewhere in the Western Asia at least one person probably has a lot less confidence in their future than they did a few days ago. We may never know the name or names of the people who apparently took huge risks to obtain important details of the latest efforts by the Daesh to loose chaos on international air travel. We can only hope the president of the United States did not sentence them to an unpleasant death by recklessly boasting about his intelligence sources.

We have less room for doubt about what happened next. After both his national security advisor and his secretary of state denied the story in carefully worded statements, Mr. Trump took to late night Twitter and cast doubt on their claims by stating he had, in any case, the right to tell the Russians anything he wanted them to know.

What's wrong with David Frum's excellent article

by HiMY SYeD via Wikimedia Commons

David Frum recently wrote an excellent article in the Atlantic Monthly on the possible development of an authoritarian populist state under Donald Trump. Read it if you haven't already.

David Frum comes from Toronto, but he left many years ago for the United States. He did not live through Toronto's experience with insurgent populist conservatism. That may or may not have led to what I regard as the most interesting omission in a very good article.

The corruption of freebies in politics

By Kiwiev via Wikimedia Commons

By freebies, I don't mean swag ; I don't mean rides in jets and helicopters provided to politicians by prominent business leaders. In fact, I don't mean corruption of politicians at all, although crooks in office do cause major problems. I mean a much more serious problem: the corruption of the voters and, by extension, the political process.


Commentators have long derided political promises as bribing voters with heir own money, but the purposes of legitimate political debate include the best use of resources. The process gets corrupted when politicians promise someone else will pay. One example of this we all know: the slogan "make the rich pay", an aspiration often stated but seldom realized. Calls to tax the rich frequently give rise not to better services but rather to increasingly convoluted tax avoidance schemes. Governments have had much greater luck extracting money from people accused of crimes. Conservative governments in the eighties, motivated to reward their friends with deep tax cuts and to punish those they disdained, invented a series of creative and mischievous government financing tools, from the outright forfeiture of assets to fine surcharges.

Donald Trump's promise to force the Mexican government to pay for a massive public works project on the southern border of the US has a precedent: Ronald Reagan's government sent Oliver North on an unconstitutional fund-raising tour through the palaces of depots to obtain funding for the "contra" mercenary terrorists the US Congress had explicitly refused to support. Mr. Trump has extended this idea in two ways: proposing a major infrastructure program employing hundreds of thousands of Americans, and planning to take the money by some form of coercion rather than beg for it.

The value of a tell

I have seen a number of comments about the movement calling themselves the "alt-right"; these comments argue we should not accept these peoples' name for their movement, but rather call them fascists, racists, national socialists, misogynists, and plain haters. An Internet activist has written a Google Chrome plug-in that renames "alt-right" to White Supremacy or neo-Nazi. The Associated Press has also updated their style guide to require quotes and a full definition whenever writers use the term "alt-right".

I sympathize with the impulse, but if we reject the name "alt right" we stand to lose potentially useful information. The name a person or a group gives themselves is always a "tell"; it gives away more about the people who take the name than they intend.