I managed to make it through college, graduate school, and a Harvard instructorship without owning a car, but in 1961, As I set out from Cambridge, Massachusetts to find out whether there was a world beyond Harvard Square, I decided I needed transportation, so I bought Sam Todes' ancient Plymouth for a $100. The next year, when I got married, I decided wanted to get rid of the car but I could not find anybody to buy it or even take it away. I will never forget calling the police department and having a Sgt. lean in conspiratorially to the telephone as he said "dump it in the river." Eventually i did find a garage that would take it away for $25 (that is to say, I paid them $25 to take it away.)
Now, 63 years later, I have decided my car owning days are over, so I shall do something or other with my 20-year-old Toyota Camry and rely from now on on the transportation of others.As losses go, it is small one.
91 comments:
Already some decades ago the philosopher Woodrow Guthrie opined that cars are strictly for young people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmcrlvNPTJw
You may be able to donate the car to a local public radio station, if you're so inclined, and they'll pick it up (and then sell it and keep the proceeds and give you a receipt). That can be done where I live at any rate. There may also be other possibilities re donating.
You can probably find some sort of charitable organization that would be happy to receive your car in Google or Instagram or Twitter.
When I moved several months ago, we found a church organization that worked with Haitian immigrants that came and took all my old electric appliances in a cart pulled by a motorcycle.
I am always glad to hear from you. Freedom in loss perhaps. As others said, you can donate if you don't need the cash.
I donated one car to Defenders of Wildlife and another to our local NPR station. They just dropped by and towed it away -- no hassle whatsoever.
-- Jim
This is really a comment in relation to the previous thread. But I imagine many don't return to the past but would appreciate an update on Noam Chomsky.
https://mronline.org/2024/06/17/a-message-about-noam-chomsky-an-update/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-message-about-noam-chomsky-an-update
more on chomsky:
https://jacobin.com/2024/06/noam-chomsky-obituary-media-theory-elites
I just saw on Twitter that Chomsky passed away.
All my condolences!!!!
A great human being.
Oh, no. :(
(That was fast, by the way, s.w. - his Wikipedia page hasn't been officially changed yet! Perhaps we're only in the rumor stage?)
Re Jacobin piece: Unless I have misread it, it is a tribute, not an obituary.
It's all over Twitter, but I have Twitter in Spanish.
If you google it in Spanish, you'll find articles on his passing away.
It seems that Chomsky was more important in the Spanish-speaking world than in the anglophone world.
It's even top news in La Tercera, rightwing Chilean newspaper.
https://www.latercera.com/mundo/noticia/muere-el-escritor-y-filosofo-noam-chomsky-a-los-95-anos/466YJAQ6BJEAZPW7EB6NRUJOM4/#
Google can translate for you.
The New Statesman had a piece out just now stating that Chomsky had died today, June the 18th, but it has been taken down now. Not sure this is confirmed, let's wait a bit.
Not confirmed, as far as I know. New Statesman took their announcement down.
It seems to be just a rumor.
Sorry to mislead people, although not sorry that Chomsky is still with us.
Yes, Pinker has just stated on Twitter that he's spoken with Chomsky's wife and he is well.
re DZ's observation that the jacobin piece was a tribute rather than an obituary, I, who posted the reference, was actually rather confused as to which it was. I started reading it as a tribute but by the end I felt like it was something other than that. Still, I thought it was a significant set of reflections on Chomsky's significance.
In the previous thread, at 3:01 p.m. on June 17, a commenter writing as Anonymous suggested that U.S. foreign policy (among other matters) was or had been "so broadly and deeply accepted as common sense that [it] seem[ed] to brook no discussion" -- until Chomsky came along.
In my opinion, this suggestion of Anonymous is wrong. U.S. foreign policy has been a contested matter since at least the late 19th century, indeed since before that, going back to the early republic. (The end of the 19th cent. is usually viewed as the point at which the U.S. entered into formal imperialism w/ the conquest of the Philippines among other things; there was an anti-imperialist current that opposed this.)
It doesn't take anything away from Chomsky to say this, or to note the long line of critics of U.S. foreign policy (from various directions).
LFC,
No doubt that some people have always been skeptical of U.S. foreign policy, but Chomsky is a leader of a movement that became massive in the 60's which questions U.S. foreign policy.
A personal story: when the Bay of Tonkin incident occurred in 1964, I was just beginning to read alternative news sources which at that time explained that LBJ's justification for the escalating the Viet Nam War was based on fake news. I was a high school senior and I recalled pointing that out to my father, who replied that the president would not lie to the American people that way.
My father was not an intellectual, but did read the news and was not especially innocent., I believe his thinking was typical of middle class Americans at the time.
Fast forward 40 years and the U.S. is invading Iraq. I'm communicating with my father by email and I ask him where are the weapons of mass destruction. He replies that if they don't find them, they'll plant them.
That process of growing skepticism about whether U.S. presidents lie or not is the product of 40 years of agitation, activism and denunciation of U.S. foreign policy by folks like Chomsky. There were others, to be sure, but Chomsky is perhaps the best known, the most eloquent and the most efficacious educator in such matters.
I don't know if my father ever read Chomsky, but the Bernard (my father) of 1964 would have indignantly refused to read a critic of U.S. imperialism like Chomsky while the Bernard of 2003 would have read him with interest. That also says something about how effective Chomsky was and is.
s.w.,
If the comment by Anonymous to which I responded had said what you just said, I would have had little or no problem with it. (Regrettably I have to leave it at that for now. Have to run out somewhere.)
I believe a certain Representative from Illinois (among others) opposed Polk's adventure in Mexico. This happened later:
"If Judge Douglas’s policy upon this question succeeds and gets fairly settled down, until all opposition is crushed out, the next thing will be a grab for the territory poor Mexico, an invasion of the rich lands of South America, then the adjoining islands will follow, each one of which promises additional slave fields."
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-lincoln-douglas-debates-5th-debate/
Chomsky was a right time. right place thing.
Well, LFC, you’re surely right that like most other things US foreign policy has been much discussed. I am perfectly aware, for example, of the so-called great debate between realists and idealists, etc. etc.. What I intended to intimate, however, was that there were certain assumptions about America’s place in the world and a broad rejection of the notion that the term imperialism might be applied to what the US did, and it was all of that that I think Chomsky tried to expose and criticise. s.w. thanks
Dylan's song "With God on our Side" came out in 1963.
That God was on our side, that "we" were always the good guys who acted out of noble principles, was believed by almost everyone in the U.S. in 1963 except a few comsymps, as they were generally called.
Just watch the Nixon-Kennedy debates in the 1960 elections or worse JFK's inaugural address, which was a classic of the anti-communist "crusade" rhetoric.
What people like Chomsky did was show how illusionary and dishonest the "with God on our side" rhetoric is and by now few people believe it. Maybe Biden does and probably Hillary Clinton does, but outside of a few mainstream liberals no one does.
Trump is an imperialist of course, but his message is "we're the biggest and strongest guys in the neighborhood and we'll kick ass and break heads if we feel like it", outright fascism without any "with God on our side" hypocrisy.
So thanks to Chomsky, a lot more people have their eyes open about U.S.imperialism than was the case before he began, along with others, to educate us.
Thank you, Noam.
I am glad to say I fell prey to the rumor and was wrong, that Noam Chomsky died. and I am happy to say he is recovering at home according to this AP story.
https://apnews.com/article/noam-chomsky-alive-not-dead-5b7a1b23b8731ca311e1ec38cdc3c119 Like all other friends, colleges and associates we wish him and his family nothing but the best for his recover and rehabilitation.
In addition to the "crusade" ("long twilight struggle") element of JFK's inaugural address, there was this:
"To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required--not because the [C]ommunists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."
https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/inaugural-address-19610120
Media now saying that Chomsky has been discharged from the hospital.
I saw a video of Chomsky walking out of the hospital in twitter.
https://x.com/eleconomista/status/1803490485685854365
That's obviously an old video from a few years back.
S. Wallerstein I suspect you know the latest about Noam Chomsky. You are right he has been discharged from the hospital.
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/6/20/headlines/noam_chomsky_leaves_hospital_after_suffering_stroke
But, DJL is correct that the clip you sited is not correct. I doubt there is an up-to-date clip on his leaving the hospital. I also doubt that he would be walking. Typically patients are wheeled out of the hospital to a waiting vehicle, either family or otherwise.
From today's Guardian:
Smotrich group takes over administration of the West Bank
Part One
Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem
Thu 20 Jun 2024 15.32 BST
The Israeli military has quietly handed over significant legal powers in the occupied West Bank to pro-settler civil servants working for the far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich.
An order posted by the Israel Defense Forces on its website on 29 May transfers responsibility for dozens of bylaws at the Civil Administration – the Israeli body governing in the West Bank – from the military to officials led by Smotrich at the defence ministry.
Smotrich and his allies have long seen control of the Civil Administration, or significant parts of it, as a means of extending Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank. Their ultimate goal is direct control by central government and its ministries. The transfer reduces the likelihood of legal checks on settlement expansion and development.
Israeli politicians have long sought to find ways to permanently seize, or annex, the occupied West Bank, which it captured in 1967 and where millions of Palestinians live.
Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer, said: “The bottom line is that [for] anyone who thought the question of annexation was foggy, this order should end any doubts. What this order does is transfers vast areas of administrative power from the military commander to Israeli civilians working for the government.”
It is the latest coup for Smotrich, who became finance minister and a minister in the defence ministry after a coalition agreement between his far-right political party and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.
The Civil Administration is principally responsible for planning and construction in Area C of the West Bank – the 60% of the Occupied Palestinian Territories under full Israeli administrative and security control – as well as enforcement against unauthorised construction, whether by Israeli settlers or by Palestinians.
Smotrich clasps Netanyahu’s hand as he walks behind the prime minister
View image in fullscreen
Bezalel Smotrich became finance minister and a minister in the defence ministry after a coalition agreement between his far-right party and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/AFP/Getty Images
Part Two:
The transfer of laws, which was largely unremarked upon in Israel, follows a years-long campaign by pro-settlement politicians to accrue many of the legal powers previously wielded by the military chain of command.
The laws cover everything from building regulations to the administration of agriculture, forestry, parks and bathing locations. Lawyers have long warned that transferring them from military to political control would risk bringing Israel into conflict with its responsibilities under international law. After entering government, Smotrich moved quickly to approve thousands of new settlement homes, legalise previously unauthorised wildcat outposts, and make it more difficult for Palestinians to build homes and move around.
Reports in the Israeli media say US officials have privately discussed the possibility of imposing sanctions on Smotrich over his destabilising impact on the West Bank, where he lives in a settlement that is illegal under international law.
Netanyahu has become more reliant on the support of Smotrich and other far-right elements of his coalition government since the moderate former defence minister Benny Gantz quit Israel’s emergency war cabinet in a row over strategy in the Gaza war and how to bring home Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
Smotrich has made no secret of his desire to carve out his own stronghold in the ministry of defence to pursue his policies, downplaying the significance as merely technical.
In April, Smotrich appointed a long-term ideological ally, Hillel Roth, as the deputy in the Civil Administration with responsibility for enforcing building regulations in settlements and outposts.
Roth is a former resident of Yitzhar, a West Bank settlement with a reputation for violence and extremism. He served as an official with Bnei Akiva, an NGO linked to Smotrich’s Religious Zionist party.
Sfard said the transfer meant legal power in the West Bank was now in the hands of “an apparatus headed by an Israeli minister … whose only interest is to advance Israeli interests”.
Equally important, Sfard said, was that although the head of the Civil Administration is an officer subordinate to the military command, Roth is a civilian who answers to Smotrich.
Sfard’s view echoes a legal opinion published by three Israeli jurists last year who warned that transferring powers from the military would amount to annexation in law, as Smotirch “considers himself committed first and foremost to advancing the interests of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, rather than the welfare of Palestinian residents”.
Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst for Israel-Palestine at Crisis Group, said: “The big story is that this is no longer ‘creeping annexation’ or ‘de facto annexation’, it is actual annexation.
“This is the legalisation [and] normalisation of a long-term policy. Smotrich is basically re-establishing the way in which the occupation works by taking a large part out of the hands of the military.
“Half the people he has brought in to the defence ministry are from [the pro-settler Israeli NGO] Regavim. The same people who worked at Regavim to disposess Palestinians in Area C are now in government positions.”
D.Z.,
Thanks for that. Important (and v. bad) development.
This may be a precedent for the future governing of places like Gaza. Meaning, the military rules Gaza then annexes Gaza openly to the Israeli government. However, the problem with turning any Palestinian territory into any kind of Israeli protectorate is, that if you want a peaceful existence in that protectorate, you're going to have to crack down hard on criminals & terrorists. Meaning, more Israelies will be killed, and that unless Netanyahu is planning to become supreme dictator of Israel for the next 50 years, new governments will eventually be elected that oppose Netanyahu's old draconian policies and that won't crack down hard on criminals & terrorists. This lax in law & order will give Palestinians even more opportunities to join organizations like Hamas & Hezbollah and make terrorist activities & wars even worse.
To solve this problem Gaza must be handed over to the U.N. temporarily or until a democratic Palestinian government is elected. And if you can't stop terrorist organizations from infiltrating Gaza it will just be the same old stuff.
You eventually sort of come down on the right side, Michael. But your first paragraph is objectionably phrased. Unless by your definition everyone who opposes being subjected to an authority imposed upon them against their will is a criminal & a terrorist, it’s not just “criminals & terrorists” who would resist. But you leave no room for such resisters in what you say. I think you shd. take a look at, say, John Locke, on that sort of issue.
"...if you want a peaceful existence..."
ML, I believe you mean "co-existence" and the Israeli Right doesn't want that, they want something else. As long as Russia is (illegitimately) one of the veto holders on the SC, I wouldn't expect your scenario. Also, as for a "democratic Palestinian government" - and a pony.
I think the Palestinians would welcome the U.N. into Gaza. If the U.N. brings food, clothing, medicine, nurses, & doctors into Gaza (with no Israeli military left in Gaza) it would be the "carrot" everyone needs. To stop mass protests would be something they would not have to worry about initially, but only after many months, since everyone welcomes promising new things. Two things would have to be done to stop mass protests later on. (1) A written plan shown to the Palestinians with the steps laid out from beginning to end, or from the first shipments of humanitarian aid to a freely elected government & complete U.N. withdrawal from Gaza. And (2) The following of that plan without straying from it to garner trust.
aaall
“As long as Russia is (illegitimately) one of the veto holders on the SC”? Why the “illegitimately,” apart from your by now well recognized hostility for Russia? As the recognized successor state to the USSR, surely its place as a permanent, veto-possessing member of the UN Security Council is as legitimate as that of any other successor state, as, e.g., China (which replaced the Nationalist rump state on Taiwan). And should the UK break up, in all likelihood its place would be assumed by England.
If you’re terming it illegitimate here because it behaves contrary to the supposed aspirational goals of the UN, there is surely no permanent member of the SC which would escape a similar judgement. So maybe all the permanent members are illegitimate? (I might go along with that.)
And then there’s the possibility that the possession of the veto itself is in some sense illegitimate? It certainly doesn’t any longer match the powers the permanent members possessed when the SC was formed. It’s very doubtful whether France or Britain belong there since their rankings in the system of power are way below the powers of, e.g., India, Germany?, Brazil? But maybe its the very notion of a veto at the SC that no longer matches global circumstances, constituting blockages rather than judgements (as can be seen by the way certain countries regularly use vetos to defend their friends/satellites and discomfit their enemies)?
Michael, there you go again, presenting yourself as somehow an advocate of goodwill but you throw in stopping mass protests as if that was a universally acknowledged good thing, a necessity. Despite your emphasising the “carrot” you still present yourself as more than willing to see the stick being used on people who may well have no other way to make it known that they are discontented and maybe even suffering. De haute en bas, I suppose?
JW
You gotta try something. If you don't help the People of Gaza it might turn into a Sudan, or Haiti, or Northern Ireland: or, any of those three combinations.
My mistake. That was me.
I'm certainly not disputing that something ought to be done. Thankfully, something was done in Northern Ireland, but that's an interesting case, for it's pretty obvious that years of wielding heavy sticks there didn't work. Besides, I don't believe the agreements which brought an end to "the troubles" required that mass protests be illegal, something Michael is intimating. (The modern criminalisation of protest in the UK is quite a recent, most unfortunate re-invention.) That said, it strikes me as rather odd that you don't consider the state of Gaza to be just as horrific in its own way as Sudan or Haiti, as if somehow it could be worse.
JW
The gangs & crime in Haiti & Sudan are extremely bad. And the famine in Sudan is worse. (Or at least has existed a great deal longer.) Although any sort of famine is nefarious and culpably unendurable.
But the scenario I'm proposing is a post IDF presence in Gaza. The IDF can be worse in many ways than gangs & crime by via their bombing actions. I do acknowledge the horrific famine as well. That's why the Israelies should not take any part in any U.N. mission to Gaza.
By "culpably unendurable" I meant that any nation that brings famine to a group of people is culpable of such an unendurable act.
There's an outstandingly interesting in the new NYRB by Mark Lilla of recent books giving the latest more or less crypto-Right and/or crypto-Catholic ideology of postliberal return to order by Patrick Deneed, Sohrab Ahmari, and Adrian Vermeule (a Harvard man--you can't have the bold advocacy of political regression without the Crimson!). An interesting point is Lilla's acknowledgement of "the hollowness of contemporary culture, which is now heightened by the ephemeral yet fraught online they [that is, young people attracted to this style of regression] have with others", and he recalls the (vaguely?) analogous attraction in the 60s to the writings of Thomas Merton and Paul Tillich. Here's a quote from Harvard's finest Vermeule suggesting sensitive folks enter into political coalitions with any and all right-alt right-radical right types: "The hunger for the real might then make people so desperate, so sick of the essential falsity of liberalism, that they become willing to gamble that the Truth . . . will prevail--or at least willing to gamble on entering into coalition with other sorts of anti-liberals." And further wisdom out of Harvard: "It is a matter of finding a strategic position from which to sear the liberal faith with hot irons, to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents, to take over the institutions of the old order."--Lilla also quotes Montaigne's "it is much easier to talk like Aristotle and live like Caesar than to talk and live like Socrates", which reminds me to note that Raymond Geuss has a new book that opens with a lengthy essay on Montaigne. Here's Lilla: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/06/20/the-tower-and-the-sewer-why-liberalism-failed-deneen/
Here's another take "out of Harvard" (a phrase implicitly defined by John Rapko to mean anything written by anyone who's on any Harvard faculty):
https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Minority-American-Democracy-Breaking/dp/0593443071
Long Marches seem to tilt towards unfreedom: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bozell-religious-right-gop/
I remember Thomas Merton from the 60's and he wasn't rightwing at all.
Unless I'm mistaken (I'm refraining from googling his name), he was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and far from being a rightwing Catholic, he was into Zen Buddhism, which was very cool and alternative in the 60's, as well as being a Catholic monk.
I would associate him with the school of liberation theology which was "in" with progressive Catholics during the 60's.
Now he wasn't a new atheist but if I have to opt between Merton and Sam Harris, I prefer to hang out with Merton.,
Mark Lilla himself, as far as I'm aware, is not exactly on the left.
Merton was a Trappist monk and quite outside of the hierarchy. Then there was Father Coughlin.
Dear s.w,
" ...Now he wasn't a new atheist but if I have to opt between Merton and Sam Harris, I prefer to hang out with Merton... "
There is hardly any topic where my perceived distance across the Atlantic, i.e. between Europe and America, is as great as when observing the discussions between Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens and Dennett and people with religious convictions. I am not sure why this is. I am particularly struck by the insistent question: does God exist or not? Perhaps on this side of the Atlantic, Kant's refutation of the ontological proofs of God has penetrated the general subconscious to such an extent that no one who values his intellectual integrity dares to ask this question seriously. In any case, it seems as if the whole Transcendental Philosophy has not survived the crossing into the New World. (Exceptions prove the rule Prof. Wolff)
On the other hand, of course, it is also possible that, in view of the very deeply rooted naivety of some evangelical communities in the U.S., one is faced with completely different challenges. Then there are people like Gordon Peterson who are able to eloquently disguise this discussion behind a wall of seemingly rational arguments.
It's Jordan Peterson... not Gordon.
AK: I don’t think that Kant proved that God does not exist—or that he destroyed the case for the existence of God (or what he and a lot of people mean/meant by the term). If anything, Kant offered proofs for believing (though maybe not knowing) that God exists. The First Critique isn’t the only thing he wrote on this subject. His “proofs” for God’s existence are delivered in his moral philosophy. He makes a case for the need to believe in a deity. For what it’s worth, I think that his arguments for this are sophistical, and I don’t believe them or believe in the deity that he says is a matter of rationality. As for the divide between America and Europe on belief in God, I’d mention that the popes who immediately preceded the present South American one were German and Polish. And then, of course, there’s the middle east. My sense in general about religious belief is that Nietzsche’s madman is still waiting (for non-Godot).
Kant undermined one argument for the existence of a god... the ontological argument, on the grounds (as we all learn in Phil 100) that "existence is not a predicate."
He did insist in the Groundwork and other places that the objectivity of morality presupposes the existence of "God, freedom and immortality." Whether this counts as a vindication of the existence of God is a matter of controversy.
Achim, Unless you regard the English Channel as Atlantic--and admittedly, Britain may not be the Europe you're thinking of--your geographical allocations are a bit off. Dawkins is decidedly British, and while Hitchens eventually did become a US citizen he retained his British passport, so maybe we can call him a mid-Atlantic person?
I'd add, however, in relation to the distinctions you draw, that I, an atheist since the age of about 10, was most taken aback to encounter the sort of virulence with which American atheists advocated their disbelief. Prior to coming to the US, I was more accustomed to a sort of 'well, we're atheists, but so what?' attitude. And while our atheism may have disturbed our theist families and friends, again it was hardly worth talking about.
PS. After last night's "debate" I sense that a lot of Americans are now echoing Heidegger: 'only a god can save us.'
thx @ David ... Jordan of course
@ Fritz,
yes, I realize that in Kant's critiques "God" becomes a very convoluted problem. That's why, careful as I am, I spoke of the "ontological proof of God", and not of God as a regulative concept etc.. If you follow the discussions between Peterson and Harris, for example, this problem is examined again and again from all sides and both seem to wonder why they cannot solve the problem of "existence".
As far as the popes are concerned, a distinction should be made between what is at the heart of their religious conviction and the unquestionable basic idea of their dogma and the way in which the church institutions and their members participate in public discourse. In the manner that for example Ratzinger before he became Pope, debated with Habermas, it was evident how much 'Enlightenment' Catholicism has already incorporated, for instance.
"He did insist in the Groundwork and other places that the objectivity of morality presupposes the existence of 'God, freedom and immortality.'"
Kant died 5 years before Darwin was born.
To Eric:
Your post carries an intriguing possibility, viz. that -- had he know about it -- Kant's views about the existence of God might have been affected by "Darwin's dangerous idea."
Hmmm.
Prof Zimmerman,
Maybe it wouldn't have altered his views about the existence of God. (Wasn't Darwin himself, at least at the time he began writing Origin of Species, a theist, or at least agnostic?)
But it might have given Kant pause when it came to arguing that God is required for the objectivity of morality. Evolution provides an mechanism for some degree of commonality of values (what could be called morality) among closely related organisms.
Context of that exchange in my last post.
Aaron Bastani [49:09] Something you hear on the left in the UK is that obviously what's happening in Gaza and the West Bank is bad, obviously there's a right-wing Israeli government [and] they're bad; but the British Left should work with the Israeli Left in order to underpin a two-state solution, or whatever you think is the preferred political outcome....
What you're saying, though, [is] actually, since the 1950s, these are the precise interests which have underpinned apartheid--the impossibility of Palestinian liberation.
Ilan Pappé: Absolutely.... [W]hat is interesting about Labour Zionism in Israel, and later on we would call it 'Liberal Zionism,' is there is no connection between the language that they use and the actions that they perform on the ground. So there is a deception here that is very sophisticated and for many years worked very well.
That you talk about, unlike the right wing in Israel, you talk about the wish for peace, for reconciliation, and yet you build more Jewish settlements in the West Bank than the right wing governments. But you talk much nicer about the future. And it takes time...to cut through this deception. And this kind of provided a shield of immunity for Israel, as long as it seemed like liberal or left Zionist parties are at the [helm]. But it was really a kind of thing that mesmerized people and blinded them to what was going on on the ground....
I think that's why this whole idea that there was a genuine peace camp in Israel that unfortunately was waiting in vain for the emergence of a similar, equivalent peace camp on the Palestinian side--this was never true. What people call the peace camp in Israel was a willingness, a tactical willingness, to rule the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in a more indirect way [somewhat like how the white South African apartheid regime indirectly ruled the black Bantustans, without directly occupying them].
Bastani [52:25}: So there is no real peace camp in Israel.
Pappé: There is not. There never was.
There are small anti-Zionist individuals and groups like Matzpen at the time [or] CAMPUS. There are members of the Israeli Communist Party [who] I think would genuinely believe in peace which is reconciliation, which is admitting what Israel did in the past and now looking for rectification of injustices and building a future on the basis of equality.... But what is called--usually the peace camp in Israel is not thinking in equal terms....
The best way of describing it is to talk to people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and they will tell you that life after the Oslo Process in 1993 was far worse than life before.... In every aspect, life became much worse for Palestinians after the Oslo Peace Process. And this is a reflection of what the peace camp in Israel is, because the peace camp in Israel determined the conditions and terms of the Oslo accord.
On a lighter note: I've only looked at the headlines, but I gather that the so-called presidential debate went as expected, except that the Dismal Dem's Dotard was even worse than feared. I did come across a good line from Freddie deBoer: "The bar for "best president" is now like the bar for "smartest of the 3 Stooges"".
JR: I see that Berkeley literature professor Frederick Crews just died. He was a long-term debunker of Freud (etc. et al.) I wondered whether you knew him and if so what you thought of him. How much Freud is built into contemporary aesthetics theory?
I just happen to know quite a number of people who studied under Crews. Some of them even were close to him during his transition away from Freudianism, of which he was a passionate and influential teacher. What I gather from all of them is that despite not following him along the path he chose to follow, they nevertheless continued to think of him with affection for his personal qualities.
As for me, I found his "Pooh Perplex" one of the great introductions to literary criticism.
Fritz Poebel:
I'm very sorry to say that I never knew or studied Crews. When I was an undergraduate at Berkeley in philosophy (it took me 16 years to get an undergraduate degree; Berkeley was 1983-1991) Crews had a reputation (via distant gossip) of being a lightweight; I was in graduate school there 1991-1998, and I don't recall him ever being mentioned. Because I didn't know anybody who thought highly of him, I never checked him out, and so had and have absolutely no opinion whatsoever on his work.--It's because of countless things like this that I always stress Alasdair MacIntyre's saying that a major part of academic professionalization is absorbing a sense of who you must admire, who you must take seriously, who you may respectfully disagree with, who you may ignore, and to whom you may condescend. Professionalization is inter alia self-impoverishment.--My chief guides in aesthetics are Aristotle and Richard Wollheim, with Adorno a distant third. Wollheim was of course massively, yet also curiously indirectly, oriented towards psychoanalytic thinking, not just through Freud, but also Melanie Klein, Hannah Segal, and above all Adrian Stokes, with Wollheim's most overtly psychoanalytic work being the accounts of Titian, Poussin, and Ingres in Painting as an Art, all of which I consider absolutely brilliant and profound, though highly partial. I'm not aware of anyone substantively developing the psychoanalytic dimension of Wollheim's thought. These days I almost never come across any interesting work in aesthetics and/or the philosophy of art that owes much to psychoanalysis. In the philosophy of art there's the fascinating, occasionally profound, and wildly uneven work of Alva Nöe (I've written lengthy reviews of his last two books, for which see my blog or my academia.edu page); Mohan Matthen has written some exceptionally interesting essays in aesthetics; and to my mind most interesting there's the work of the anthropologists Carlo Severi and Philippe Descola on world visual art. None of this draws substantively on psychoanalytic thinking.
Anonymous, do you mean that they did not agree with his assessment of Freud?
Whatever one may have thought of Crews personally (I did not know him myself)--his analysis of Freud in, say, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" was devastating and persuasive.
Fritz Poeble,
btw, did you know Peter Dale Scott. What did you think of him. At 95, he's been emeritus for decades now.
Poebel
In his just-published book Cosmic Connections (p. 544), the 92-year-old philosopher Charles Taylor cites "the remarkable book [published in January this year] of [the 95-year-old] Peter Dale Scott, Reading the Dream: A Post-secular History of Enmindment" in which "Scott sets out his notion and detailed unfolding of "ethology" as the multimillennial history of human ethical growth". Taylor also praises Scott's nearly 400-page book on Czesław Miłosz that was published last year. 90+ is the new 60+.--But I digress. I came to pass on Frankie Boyle's latest: "Even the name Biden sounds like someone's last words".
Wrt to the US presidential election.
At this point, I am often reminded of Grover Norquist's bit about how the only requirement conservatives have for their presidential nominee is that he have enough working digits to sign bills sent to him by a Republican-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate--no need for a president with a working brain.
Dyed-in-the-wool Democrats (and Trump haters) seem to share that sort of approach to the presidency now.
If Joe Biden were a candidate for any other job that required critical thinking skills, would you support his candidacy? Would you trust him to pilot your plane? Would you trust him to perform your heart surgery? (Assuming, of course, that in each case he had had the requisite training and had the experience to otherwise qualify for the job)
Heck, would you trust Biden to drive your kid's bus home from school?
I could understand people supporting Biden if the only other choice were Trump. But there are still several other people running who are not named Biden or Trump.
(John Rapko, thanks for replying. I obviously meant to address you, not Fritz.)
Eric,
I don't know Scott's work very well. I heard him read poetry a couple of times back in the day, and once heard him talk about the C.I.A. Those were the days when people I knew whispered about Alfred McCoy's book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and did a great deal of asserting about the C.I.A's role in drug smuggling and connections with Fort Benning's School of the America's (alleged) training of paramilitary torturers and assassins. I never pursued any of that, maybe because I had read Chomsky's and Herman's The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, and the documented and/or overt stuff was sufficiently appalling that I didn't care to read speculations about the covert operations. Because of Taylor's recommendation, I'm keen on taking a look at Scott's new book.
Some comments on the last day-or-so's conversation -
Re. Darwin's religious beliefs: All I can remember him saying is, (1) Some zealots had tried to spread the false rumor that, with the end of his life approaching, Darwin (re-?) converted to Christianity and disowned his scientific findings; (2) As the famous quote goes, he couldn't persuade himself that a beneficent God designed a certain species of wasp to implant its eggs in the living bodies of other insects, so that the latter would be slowly devoured from within; nor cats to play with mice.
Re. Kant and Darwinism: FWIW, I can't picture Kant (as a moral philosopher) being moved by the discovery of human morality's evolutionary origin; I think he's too much of a rationalist, too concerned to spell out the character of morality and the moral law in a-priori fashion, in a way that purports to be compatible with any empirical discovery whatsoever. Suppose some scientist came along and informed Kant that our spatial awareness had an evolutionary origin as well - I don't think Kant would want to revise his understanding of geometry or his teachings in the Transcendental Aesthetic.
Re. Kant's moral argument for belief in God: Was this influential? (And does it remain controversial today?) I'm not sure. Nietzsche ridiculed it (likening Kant to a fox who used his cunning to escape his cage, only to freely return to it), but I think it left a mark on some followers in e.g. Reinhold and some of the 19th-century British moralists and/or idealists...? I'm shaky on this.
Re. voting for Biden, or not: In a way, Trump of course is the only other choice - the only other candidate who has a shot of winning. Obviously not an Earth-shaking revelation, but still deserving of acknowledgement whenever the topic comes up... But do what you've got to do (which IMO is fine if you're not in a swing state). Also, the way it seems to me (and I ordinarily refrain from political commentary, b/c I'm pretty ignorant about the stuff), the Presidency isn't a one-person job, so the bus-driving etc. analogies aren't totally persuasive. If the Presidency really were a one-person job, then Trump's "first" (God willing, only) term would have turned out worse in ways I can hardly imagine.
Michael,
Right. I was thinking the same thing, that the presidency isn't a one person job.
Biden, if re-elected (and I hope he is), could become a Queen Elizabeth sort of figure, appearing in ceremonies and mouthing cliché phrases, while smart and ambitious young people run the show.
So Biden's obvious cognitive deterioration does not matter all that much.
"So Biden's obvious cognitive deterioration does not matter all that much."
It matters on the campaign trail!!
David,
I realize that it matters on the campaign trail.
I meant that it shouldn't matterr to us on the left.
In any case, Biden never was particularly brilliant. Obama strikes me as being very smart and having a high IQ, Clinton too, but Biden not at all.
George Bush 2 was especially dense, Trump is at least cunning and manipulative, which is a kind of intelligence.
'Trump is "the only other choice"' is only so if you make it so. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Discussing this with Biden supporters, I feel like the therapist who is trying to convince a terminally suicidally depressed person that they don't have to feel so bad, that there are other possible ways of being, it just takes being able to accept that and change one's perspective.
Eric,
Biden sucks, but Trump sucks a thousand times more.
I can see the point of building a third party option, but not when Trump is the Republican candidate.
There have been Republican candidates who were not as corrupt and dishonest as Trump, without his authoritarian tendencies.
The next time the Republican candidate is someone like Romney or McCain, fine, go for the third party option, try to build an alternative, but not now.
There are responsibilities of the presidency for which as a practical matter it is a one-man job. One is being the face of the government and the American people when dealing with other countries. (Just as the impression a candidate makes to potential voters matters, so does the impression a sitting president projects to other world leaders matters.) The days when it was possible for a president's wife and inner circle to hide the fact that he'd been completely incapacitated by a massive stroke are long gone.
Another is deciding what to do in a middle-of-the-night Fail-Safe/Doomsday scenario. There is no constitutional mechanism to block a presidential order to launch a nuclear strike.
Eric @ 1:12
Yes, I did mean that those of his students whom I know did not give up on Freudian analysis of literary works.
As to how impressive his post-Freudian debunking career was, I'd suggest you look more closely at two things: first, the philosophical foundations of the approach he adhered to (to my mind, it was extremely positivistic), and second, the bitter animus he directed at someone whose work he had previously taken quite uncritically (reminiscent of all that god that failed stuff familiar elsewhere).
I'm with you on your later comment, that being the US President is a sort of one-person job, esp. wrt nuclear war. (I wonder how Edith Wilson would have handled that.)
Right, not everything in the position is done collaboratively. But my general impression is that Biden (or any of the candidates not named Trump) has the sense and capacity to defer to, or welcome the input of, people with more advanced specialized knowledge, in at least some cases. And besides, for any of the one-person tasks you mention, I think it'd be a tough thing to argue that Trump would be a less dangerous fit than Biden. (In some individual cases I could easily be wrong - but in most or all of them? I strongly doubt it, FWIW.)
Any way I look at it (I think the strictly factual, non-ethical considerations are pretty much agreed-on here), I think where individual voters basically part company here is on the decision between two ethical stances (if "ethical" is the right word). One stance has it that choosing a candidate is ultimately a matter of damage-control, harm-minimization (or less pessimistically, "half-a-loaf versus none at all"); the other stance, to put it in terms of a slogan I've sometimes seen here, is "You don't fight fascism because you can win" - or, "The lesser of two evils is still evil" - maybe it's not a stretch to also reference "Let justice be done though the heavens fall."
I have no idea how someone occupying the first stance might begin to persuade someone occupying the second stance, or vice-versa. It just seems like a sort of basic (i.e. fundamental), ground-level decision, if that makes sense.
Michael,
Right. I see electoral politics at this moment when the extreme right is growing everywhere as damage control.
Biden's debate performance has been rightly criticized (it was awful), but what Trump's debate performance showed yet again is that he has no conception of anything resembling the truth, that he lies repeatedly and without compunction, and that he makes stuff up out of whole cloth (e.g., his statement that "everyone" [sic] wanted Roe v. Wade to be overturned and the abortion issue sent back to the states). Also his deranged raving about undocumented immigrants being housed in penthouse suites and being all terrorists and murderers, when the data show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than non-immigrants.
Trump is increasingly appearing to be a deranged narcissist, a tendency that he was able to some extent hold in check when he was Pres. but is now, exacerbated by his fury over his criminal conviction and other legal travails, coming to the fore with a vengeance. Anyone who has even a nodding acquaintance with the gist of the Heritage Foundation-sponsored wet dream Project 2025 should realize that a second Trump term would be a catastrophe. Under these circumstances, a vote for a third-party candidate, especially in a swing state or tightly contested state, is an act of profound irresponsibility.
Being Pres. is not analogous to flying a plane (there are legal age limits for commercial pilots, btw, an exception to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act) or performing surgery. So this line I find unpersuasive. As to whether I would trust Biden or Trump more with the nuclear codes, the answer is Biden, unequivocally.
Biden has been the most pro-labor Pres. in decades. He also has a record of legislative accomplishment esp given the closely divided Congress. He can no longer speak well extemporaneously (not that he was ever that great at it), but when you look at the overall picture, and despite his disappointing debate performance, voting for him, esp. in a swing state, is the obvious thing to do if you care about combating right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, and neo-fascism.
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@LFC
Those who have not already decided to vote for Biden, despite knowing his opponent, either don't care (to know) or agree with what you are saying. Most people here, I think, understand the depth of Trump's immorality, ignorance, etc. Biden's job was to make some undecided (clueless) voters understand some of this. He blew it. What I am interested in is this: if Trump becomes president what damage will he cause and whether the US will ever be the same again.
Couple small corrections of my comment from yesterday, 3:03 pm -
"Some zealots" refers in particular to Lady Hope:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth,_Lady_Hope
And the claim Lady Hope put forward as to Darwin's religiously inspired renunciation of evolutionary theory: This allegedly took place on Darwin's deathbed (so, he wasn't around to rebut the allegation). It was his children, among numerous others, who rebutted it.
@ MAD
Those are good questions. I need some time to think about them. Partly it will turn on what the balance of power in Congress is, since while Trump can do some damage on his own, other measures will require congressional action. Perhaps others will weigh in on this. P.s. If you search on "Project 2025" some of the Trumpist agenda will likely be spelled out.
I dropped by because I was wondering about a Biden-Trump debate thread. I have liked Biden all along, and am seriously wondering if the idea of him pulling out of the race can possibly gain traction. I would be amused if AOC became the candidate, if only for entertainment value. I don't think she's *that* famous. It's hard to get excited about Kamala Harris and her chances, I say this as a Californian, I don't think she's an especially talented politician.
But, I find myself distracted by the comment thread here -- it is very clear in my own mind that Kant was never remotely 'arguing that God is required for the objectivity of morality', so I wonder where one gathers that impression, like as if Kant said, in so many words, that 'God is required for the objectivity of morality'.
David Zimmerman said...
'Kant undermined one argument for the existence of a god... the ontological argument, on the grounds (as we all learn in Phil 100) that "existence is not a predicate."'
I'm not sure I'd sum up the issue as being about any 'argument for the existence of a god', so much as it is about attempting a logical proof of the existence of god. I guess that can construed as an argument for the existence of god, but this rather elides Kant's point of emphasis, that we don't know what we don't know.
'He did insist in the Groundwork and other places that the objectivity of morality presupposes the existence of "God, freedom and immortality."'
Not true. What, indeed, is 'the obejctivity of morality'? Does it actually even mean anything? You don't read about 'the objectivity of morality' in Kant.
I talk about what you don't read about *in Kant*, but I get that it's going to be familiar enough, from *somewhere*, that there may be the fac tthat grounding morality in God's commands preserves 'the objectivity of morality'. So to speak. And I think we are all familiar with a notion along the lines of the belief in God's supreme authority. This, amid whatever are, shall we say, the fundamental theological beliefs about the nature of God.
All more or less familiar, and there are those who take all of it to be cogent, but how much of it is actually Kantian? The notion that something is wrong because God forbids it, this notion is utterly familiar, so familiar that it may not seem like a thesis at all, in the sense of being controversial at all, but it is not Kant.
"Partly it will turn on what the balance of power in Congress is.."
Loper Bright is another judicial coup that, short of New deal/Great Society majorities, will render Congress yet more ineffective. Of course, majorities like that would mean a Democratic president.
I see even folks on the Left seem to have a problem with an African American/S, Asian president of the female persuasion.
Also, how about that Vichy France?
How would one determine if one was headed into a Dark Age?
LFC,
I will vote for Biden, if for no other reason, because he isn't Trump. Trump and, increasingly the Republican Party, are not constitutionalists, not small "d" democrats or small "r" republicans. They do not see the other party as the loyal opposition that is wrong on the issues, but as the enemy that must be destroyed. They do not respect the basic premises of a constitutional system, and do not respect is borders or its norms.
I can't think of another President who did not respect the constitution and the norms. For instance, there were at least four Presidents that that were defeated in their attempts to win a second term: Herbert Hoover lost to FDR; Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter; Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan; George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. Every one of them congratulated his opponent, and every one of them rode in an open car from the White House to the Capitol with his opponent to witness his taking the oath, and listened to his inaugural address. Carter began is address by thanking Ford, on behalf of the nation, for healing the country after Watergate. Can you imagine Trump ever doing anything like that? These norms are not laws, but they reflect values that are essential to a free society. They are totally alien to Trump.
I pay no attention to all the comparisons of the two candidates. This election is not about policy--or at least it shouldn't be. It's about the Constitution, the peaceful transition of power, of rule by law. Trump is a danger to all of these. Biden's age, inflation, US policy on Israel and the Middle East--are not important. Preservation of free government as we've know it is important. It is the only thing that is important in this election. And there's only one option for those that want to preserve it.
D. Palmeter,
I think both preservation of democracy and policy issues (e.g. environment, climate, taxation, reproductive rights, foreign policy, immigration, etc.) are important. But there's little point in debating this since we end up in the same place re voting.
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