Thanks to the link to Moldbug article, started reading him a month or so ago after he was recommended by another LWrongian. He seems to be one of those thinkers that is either horribly wrong or horribly right, but isn’t a bore and carries quite a bit of insight.
Some of his ideas are indeed unsound and with some serious blind spots, but on the whole, I’d say his analysis of the modern-day institutions and social order is spot-on, and more accurate than practically any other source. Generally, the closer the topic is to the present day, the more correct and insightful he is.
Also, his earlier writings from 2007-2008 are much better than his more recent work. You can find them all nicely indexed here.
Huh, I found the opposite, in the abstract he’s insightful but his descriptions of modern day reality seem to be coming from some bizarre counter-earth, for instance:
“The pretend enemies (such as the Communist countries in the Cold War, other Third World nationalist thugs, revolutionary Islamists, etc, etc) are actually best defined as partial clients. Unlike full clients such as the OECD democracies, their friendship is only with one side of the American political system (the left side, duh). If their “anti-Americanism” actually reaches the level of military combat, the war is a limited war and essentially a civil one.
Right enemies include: Nazis and other fascists, of course; apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia; the Portuguese Estado Novo and Franquista Spain; the Greek colonels; and, of course, Israel. You might notice a property shared by all but one of the regimes on this list, which is that they don’t exist anymore. Sometimes there will be patron-client relationships on the right side of the equation, but they are always tenuous. Even in the last case, the “Israel lobby” is a piece of dental floss compared to the arm-thick steel cable that is the Palestine lobby. (You’ll notice that USG’s policy is that the war should end by Israel giving money and land to the Palestinians, not the other way around.)”
He’s perceptive and erudite enough that when he says something so gratuitously and obviously wrong I sit there for ages thinking hang on, is this just something I don’t want to believe- a politically correct myth I don’t want to let go of. It disturbs me how often the answer is no, but I genuinely cannot see a way to make passages like the above make sense.
It would be helpful if you narrowed down to a specific claim which you consider to be gratuitously and obviously wrong.
For instance, your quote contains the claim that, of the regimes described, only Israel has survived to this day. Is it your contention that Franquista Spain has survived to this day, or that Israel has not survived? If that is not your contention, then you do not, after all, object to the whole quote, but object to only part of it. And yet you dropped the whole thing into your comment, apparently expecting your reader to know what section of the quote you object to.
I quoted the whole thing because the structure is central to the thesis. He’s comparing the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and so on with the revolutions that took down Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. That South Africa and Rhodesia were taken down and the Vietcong were not is perfectly true. That this is evidence the American government spent more effort opposing Apartheid than the Vietcong is something else entirely—conspiracy theory. Not merely in that it proposes a conspiracy but in that it does not bother to argue for one, the state of the world is evidence for the existence of a body that wanted it that way- except where it isn’t, in the case of Israel.
That said, I quoted the whole thing to provide context, the claim I find impossible to grasp is that the US was not really opposed to the USSR and is not really allied with Israel. This requires either a definition of the US government that is separate from the people that actually run it, an assertion that the people who appear to be in charge don’t really run it, or that they secretly hate Israel and love communism.
Not merely in that it proposes a conspiracy but in that it does not bother to argue for one
Moldbug does argue for his controversial analyses of world events at enormous length. Here he is mentioning some of his conclusions without restating his arguments. It doesn’t mean he didn’t bother to argue. What it does mean is that he’s a demanding writer, who expects his readers to spend a lot of time familiarizing themselves with his arguments. If that sounds like he’s expecting too much—that is, if you think he should prove that he’s not a nutcase before you devote months to reading his blog chronologically from 2007 through the present, which is more or less what you need to do to gather together the threads of his argument, then there you have your explanation as to why he’s not very widely read.
Moldbug did recognize this problem and at one point he attempted to recap his argument in condensed form, but even that condensed introduction to his argument is spread over many very long blog posts.
He furthermore places barriers in the way of his reader by writing in a colorful and circuitous style which I presume is his attempt to imitate writers that he admires, such as Carlyle. It doesn’t make for easy reading.
the claim I find impossible to grasp is that the US was not really opposed to the USSR and is not really allied with Israel.
I don’t recall Moldbug ever claiming this, and taken strictly it would contradict one of his main recurring themes, which is that the US government is not a monolithic entity, though maybe he does speak of the US government as a monolithic entity (if he does, he is speaking loosely). What I recall Moldbug claiming is that the US government is not a monolithic entity, and that one can usefully roughly divide it into two warring factions, one of which dominates the State Department among other things, the other of which tends more to dominate the Pentagon. If we look at the quote here he writes, “their friendship is only with one side of the American political system”, referring to this divide I’ve mentioned.
the claim I find impossible to grasp is that the US was not really opposed to the USSR and is not really allied with Israel.
The US demands that Israel make territorial and monetary concessions on land long ago acquired and settled by Jews. It made no similar demand against the USSR, except for those Soviet acquisitions that were so recent as to still be in play.
For the situation to be comparable, for the US to have treated the USSR and Israel equally as enemies, the US should have derecognized and actively resisted the Soviet acquisition of East Germany, in the fashion that it has derecognized and actively resisted the Jewish acquisition of Jerusalem.
Or as an alternate explanation, the US was afraid of the USSR and thus was more careful about what demands it made of it, but it’s not particularly afraid of Israel.
Have you sought for alternate explanations and checked to see how evidence update the probablity of each upwards or downwards?
That this is evidence the American government spent more effort opposing Apartheid than the Vietcong is something else entirely—conspiracy theory.
The US sought to overthrow its right wing enemies, such as Rhodesia and so forth, replacing their regimes with utterly different regimes, but generally sought to maintain its left wing enemies in power, while placing pressure on them to moderate their ways, go along with the consensus, and stop trying to disturb the status quo, like a squabble within a marriage, rather than a divorce.
Even on those rare, infrequent, and dramatic occasions when the US did want to overthrow its left wing enemies, as for example the Taliban, the State Department clearly did not want to overthrow them, eventually got its way and installed regimes almost indistinguishable from the originals. The current Afghan regime is just the Taliban light, far closer to the Taliban in its ethnicity and its state imposed theology than to the Northern Alliance.
So… enemies that enjoyed the support of the USSR or China largely survived, at least until the USSR’s dissolution itself. While enemies of America that were also enemies of the USSR and China, were largely defeated.
Basically all you’re saying is that few countries could stand without support from some superpower.
This isn’t saying much that’s suprising. But by talking as if the difference is between right-wing enemies and left-wing enemies, instead of enemies that didn’t have superpower backing, and enemies that did have superpower backing, you make it look like a bigger conspiracy than it actually is.
I quoted the whole thing because the structure is central to the thesis. He’s comparing the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and so on with the revolutions that took down Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa.
But obviously Rhodesia and South Africa were not taken down by revolutions. Rhodesia was taken down by foreign invasion and terrorism from outside Rhodesia, terror conducted by black people but sponsored and funded by white people from outside Africa. South Africa yielded not to violence, but to moral pressure and political correctness.
So you are contradicting Mencius’ version of history, with a politically correct version of history that is transparently false, that no one genuinely believes, even if lots of people pretend to believe it for fear of the consequences of doubting it.
While Mencius’ version could be false, the fact that it differs from a transparently false version of politically correct history is not reason to doubt it.
That this is evidence the American government spent more effort opposing Apartheid than the Vietcong is something else entirely—conspiracy theory
The US spent precisely zero effort taking down the Hanoi regime, making its vast expenditure of effort against the Vietcong completely pointless and ineffectual.
The US sponsored terror against the Rhodesian regime in its efforts to overthrow it, something it has not done against communist or Islamic enemies, unless you count the Contras and the sons of Iraq as terrorists, which is stretching things.
Rather than comparing resources expended on war, which is an unfair comparison since fascist regimes have been insignificant after the fall of Nazi Germany, let us compare qualms of conscience. When fighting communist enemies, dreadfully concerned to make friends and not offend anyone, when fighting fascist enemies, kill them all, let God sort them out. When fighting communist or Islamic enemies, all the experts agree the thing to do is to win hearts and minds, when fighting fascist enemies, all the experts agree that the thing to do is to grab them by the balls and rip those balls off.
Hence Mencius description of those wars as civil wars, fought in a manner that shows that they were friends before, and hoped to be friends after, while the point of conflict with those dreadful fascists was to destroy them. Often, as in the Vietnam war, and arguably the Afghan war, the concern for not offending people paralyzed the war effort.
Wars with left enemies were like squabbles within a marriage. You would not want the squabble to escalate to divorce. If the US had really wanted to win in South Vietnam, would have had to win in North Vietnam, or credibly threaten to do so if the North Vietnamese did not back off. Hence, civil war, family squabble. The objective with fascist enemies was to destroy them. The objective with communist and Islamist enemies was to get them to converge. When communism fell, the CIA was not only shocked and incredulous, but also dismayed. Obama wants Islam to come resemble the WCC. That might arguably be a reasonable plan, but it is not the plan that was applied to Rhodesia or the Greek colonels—nor even the plan applied to our supposed allies, the Northern Alliance.
That was the point. That some of assertions are obviously unproblematic.
While many of the assertions are arguably problematic, none of them seem unreasonable, or even weakly supported.
Could you nominate one of the assertions as unreasonable, or weakly supported. Choose one as an obvious deal breaker, something that a reasonable person should obviously reject.
I’m not interested in joining the debate about the assertions. I only object to Constant’s use of an unfair rhetorical trick; namely, interpreting the interlocutor in a way such that (s)he sounds silly. That some assertions in a paragraph of text are obviously unproblematic is hardly worth pointing out. It would be very difficult to write a longer stretch of text consisting purely of dubious statements.
For illustration, consider this fictitious dialogue (edited to give a better example):
A: The proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is incorrect. That’s as obvious as that two plus two is four.
B: That sounds overconfident and is probably false.
C: It would help to pinpoint one particular false claim. Do you for example disagree that two plus two is equal to four?
C’s reaction is an unfair distraction although it’s not obvious that A’s assertion is wrong. If C isn’t an idiot he must see that B’s objection is directed towards the claim that the proof is faulty, not against the fact that 2+2=4.
I only object to Constant’s use of an unfair rhetorical trick; namely, interpreting the interlocutor in a way such that (s)he sounds silly.
Actually, you took my words out of context and in effect are spreading falsehoods about what I was saying. The immediately preceding and following sentences are absolutely critical for understanding my argument. By extracting just the one sentence, you falsely make it seem as though I am uncharitably interpreting the interlocutor, and not only do you falsely make it seem this way, you explicitly state this interpretation.
OK. I believe it was not your intention to uncharitably interpret your opponent. Still, I think a reasonable interpretation of Mercy’s comment is that he’s objecting to all other assertions except the one about non-existence of Franco’s dictatorship and existence of Israel and the reason why he didn’t remove this clearly correct claim was simply because it was located in the middle of the quote. Therefore I still consider your choice of example distracting, but since it wasn’t intentional, I retract my downvote.
not only do you falsely make it seem this way, you explicitly state this interpretation
I prefer stating my opinions explicitly to making something seem that way.
Still, I think a reasonable interpretation of Mercy’s comment is that he’s objecting to all other assertions except the one about non-existence of Franco’s dictatorship and existence of Israel
I think that your interpretation of Mercy would be both wrong and uncharitable to Mercy because there are other plainly true and easily verifiable assertions in that comment.
I was not satisfied with making a reasonable interpretation which might nevertheless be false, because I wanted to know what Mercy actually was objecting to. I didn’t want to have to guess.
My comment was in fact no interpretation at all but a request for clarification. It was obviously that. Mercy understood it as that sam0345 understood it as that and explained this to you.
The real question is whether I should have made a reasonable but possibly false interpretation, or whether I should have requested clarification.
Now in my opinion Mencius Moldbug’s passage is itself reasonable from beginning to end. In my view, the real difference between the different parts of it is not that some are true and others false, but that some are easy to check and others are hard to check for a variety of reasons, one of which is that most people have such a superficial understanding of alliances and conflict that they would not know how to even begin to check to see whether there was an alliance or a conflict. Take for example North Korea. Everyone in North Korea loudly sings the praises of the great leader. Superficially, it looks like they all love him. Ie, it looks like an alliance. But I think many Americans by now are savvy enough to realize that the reason they praise the great leader so loudly is that they are all terrified of the state. So, not an alliance at all, but enslavement.
Well, North Korea is a pretty obvious example, which is why I picked it just now. However, there are, I think, other less obvious examples.
Now, since I think that Moldbug’s quote is reasonable from beginning to end, I would like to know what part of it Mercy objects to, and it’s not obvious to me which part that is because I am not a psychic. In order to illustrate that not all of the quote is false I picked one part of it that is not false. But from my point if view, none of the quote is obviously false. What part, then, to pick? I picked the part that was easiest to check as my illustration. Not, mind you, the truest part, since I think it all could be true.
Whatever your opinion about Moldbug is, and even if you are not a psychic, you had to suppose that Mercy is not disputing that Israel exists. The question
Is it your contention that Franquista Spain has survived to this day, or that Israel has not survived?
was rhetorical, and rhetorical questions are problematic tools in a rational debate. It could be understood as a mere example of a true (albeit trivial) statement in the quoted text, it could also be understood as an indirect claim that your opponent doesn’t know that Israel still exists. In political debates question of form “do you say that [something obviously false]” are much more often used as indirect accusations than for other purposes, which was why I have interpreted it as such. Since you say that was not your intention I believe you. But still your reply, if it was meant as a request for clarification, would be much better without the whole second paragraph.
you had to suppose that Mercy is not disputing that Israel exists.
That would have been careless. I was asking for clarification. It would have been needless and careless to make and incorporate assumptions about what Mercy was saying, into my very request for clarification.
But still your reply, if it was meant as a request for clarification, would be much better without the whole second paragraph.
The whole second paragraph was fine. It was only the single sentence taken out of context that became ambiguous. You’re the one who did that.
Assuming that your debate partner knows such an elementary fact as that Israel exists isn’t careless, it’s what charitable interpretation is supposed to be based on.
These are not mutually exclusive. It is indeed charitable, but one should make assumptions, even charitable ones, only when they are necessary to proceed. And it was hardly necessary to assume what the person was saying in my very request for clarification, since the point of the clarification was to obviate the need to make any such assumptions.
It’s hardly ever necessary to make assumptions; one can always proceed with literal interpretation of what has been said. But one shouldn’t. We have probably different preferences as for debating style.
So which of these six assertions do you suggest is obviously unreasonable.
Note that 6 is not a position taken by Mencius, but rather an uncharitable inference, you are arguing that if what Mencius says is true, then the Palestine lobby is much stronger than the Israeli lobby, which obviously it is not.
What Mencius says is that there is no Palestinian lobby, because the Palestinian lobby is Harvard and the State department, which is indeed much stronger than Israeli lobby.
Now proposition six is not a position of Mencius, but your refutation of Mencius.
Consider: The PLO lives off aid to Palestinians. Aid to Palestinians is provided by “The international community”, which is in practice pretty much the State Department, Havard, and their NGO proxies. If we assume that he who pays the piper calls the tune, then the various US peace initiatives are best understood as various US presidents trying unsuccessfully to get the State Department to accept the existence of Israel as permanent and unchanging reality, that cannot and should not be changed, however sad, regrettable and unfortunate that reality might be, that the various US presidents were not so much unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a peace between Israel and the Arabs, nor even between Judaism and Islam, but between the Pentagon and the State Department.
So which of these six assertions do you suggest is obviously unreasonable.
That’s a question for Mercy, but it can be that (s)he finds unreasonable all except the fifth. No.5 is the only obviously reasonable one.
Note that 6 is not a position taken by Mencius, but rather an uncharitable inference, you are arguing that if what Mencius says is true, then the Palestine lobby is much stronger than the Israeli lobby, which obviously it is not.
I have paraphrased that for brevity. Still can’t think about meaning of “A is a piece of dental floss compared to the arm-thick steel cable that is B” significantly different from “A is much weaker than B”.
The quote above? Not obviously wrong, just not even wrong and as unfalsifiable as any proper conspiracy theory should be.
Of the “enemy” regimes listed, US went to war only with Nazis and three of them were valued NATO members. One can call Vietnam and Korean wars in a sense limited, because US refused to use nukes and escalate into full WW3.
I wouldn’t comment about Israel, because there is nothing more mind-killing that discussion about Israeli/Palestinian politics :-(
I wouldn’t comment about Israel, because there is nothing more mind-killing that discussion about Israeli/Palestinian politics :-(
That is true, but we don’t have to get into all of it. His assertion that the USG does not actually support Israel is frankly bizarre. USG gives them billions of dollars a year in cash, in weapons systems and other material support.
Mencius holds that the US is not a monolithic entity. Therefore it is possible within his framework for one part of the US government to do one thing while another does something else that directly contradicts what the first part is doing. His model of the US government is, to put it crudely, that politicians are essentially figureheads, and that the real government is the unelected bureaucracy. Since the politicians are not really running things, then the bureaucracy of government is effectively a sovereign entity. However, there is not one single bureaucracy. The Pentagon, for example, is pretty separate from the State department, since their hierarchies come together only at the Presidency, which is, as mentioned, a figurehead position with severely limited real influence. Therefore it is conceivable, and I believe Mencius holds it to be the case, that the Pentagon and State are mutually fairly autonomous.
All of this is to point out that it is possible, within his framework, for the US simultaneously to aid Israel militarily with weapons, and also to undermine it politically through State Department activities. Whether this is the case depends on what the state department is doing, and Mencius throughout his many long blog entries presents his evidence. I don’t want to go into further detail because the topic is both difficult and dangerous.
I don’t think the Pentagon makes appropriations of foreign aid, even in weapons systems. I could be wrong, but I think these are specific line items approved in the federal budget. Doubtless, the state department and pentagon do provide analysis and persuasion with regard to their pet programs, projects and a number of critical implementation details but they do not, as a bureaucracy, determine WHETHER support will be provided at all.
Nor can one say that any bureaucratic organization has a single opinion about a question as general as “support for Israel”. I don’t consider any of this to be very revealing observations. Corporate bodies are made up of multiple people who have different ideas, values and opinions. Yes. Still the OUTPUT is lots of material aid to Israel. Therefore, USG supports Israel and Mencius is probably off his meds.
And what does the US give Israel’s enemies? The US gives two billion a year, mostly military aid, to Egypt. Foreign aid to Palestinians, much of it US aid or thinly laundered US aid, supports a comfortable Palestinian standard of living, substantially better than that of most their Muslim neighbors, which encourages them to continue doing what they have been doing.
Israel and Egypt are at peace, and have been for 30 years. For much of that period, Egypt and Israel had fairly effective joint security undertakings. They’re not a convincing example of an enemy.
Egypt and Israel were at peace the way the US and the Soviet Union were at peace, if that, and now they are at peace rather less than that.
And if you find Egypt unconvincing as a US funded and sponsored enemy of Israel, consider Israel’s long and bitter complaint about the Arab states maintaining the Palestinians and the PLO as permanent multi generational refugees.
But arguably it was the “international community” rather than the Arab states that maintained the Palestinians and the PLO as permanent multi generational refugees.Certainly it was the “international community” that funded this, and one does not have to be unreasonably conspiracy minded to consider that the “International community” is the State Department in drag. The NGOs look mighty like Harvard on a generous expense account mingling with the CIA on a slightly less generous expense account.
Egypt and Israel were at peace the way the US and the Soviet Union were at peace
From what you’ve said earlier you apparently believe that the USSR was a client state of the USA.
So I can only conclude that you believe either (1) that Israel is a client state of Egypt or (2) that Egypt is a client state of Israel. I regard either of these two interpretations as bizarre, but no more bizarre than thnings you’ve said on this thread.
Egypt and Israel were at peace the way the US and the Soviet Union were at peace
From what you’ve said earlier you apparently believe that the USSR was a client state of the USA.
A client state of the state department. There is more than one America, and the state department does not like the America that I like.
I hope to see the day that the Pentagon bombs the state department. During the invasion of Afghanistan, it became apparent that the Pentagon’s allies were not the State Department’s allies.
I find these questions fascinatingly interesting, but I’m afraid this isn’t the right place to proceed with this discussion. Feel free to PM me if you want some of my further thoughts, though.
The passage above seems quite obviously true, indeed pretty much common sense. Do you have any specific points in it that trouble you, or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other. You quote the article as if it was obviously unreasonable on sight. I am puzzled, and would like to understand what is unreasonable about it.
Recall, for example, when the pentagon was allied with the Northern Alliance, the State Department was allied with the Taliban. The state department ordered the Northern Alliance not to enter Kabul, much as it demands that Israel give Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The Pentagon furtively indicated it was fine with the Northern Alliance entering Kabul, which resulted in something close to shooting war between the Pentagon and the State Department. The Northern alliance, contrary to orders, entered Kabul and threw the Taliban out of Kabul. In the end, the state department, and thus the Taliban, won, in that the Northern Alliance was suppressed, and replaced by a government that is is composed, like the Taliban, of Pashtun, unlike the Northern Alliance, composed, like the Taliban, of Radical Islamists, unlike much of the Northern Alliance, but nonetheless is supposedly at war with the Taliban and supposedly on our side, not withstanding its habit of burning bibles, executing Muslims who convert to Christianity, and executing Muslims who try to rationalize away the more disturbing parts of the Koran, odd behavior for a supposed ally of us and supposed enemy of the Taliban.
You may think this account of the current war is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that the State Department ordered the Northern Alliance to not enter Kabul? Is it not odder that the current government of Kabul has policies that are a lot closer to the Taliban than to the policies of the Northern alliance?
And if the US is on Israel’s side, is it not odd that its policy is that peace should be made by the stronger side yielding land and money to the weaker side?
If Mencius’s account is obviously odd, are there not a lot of even odder aspects about the conventional account?
This is not the place to argue whether his view is correct, but I would like to understand why some people find his view hard to swallow. Of course it comprehensively contradicts official history, but no one seems troubled by versions of history that contradict yesterday’s official history in a leftward direction.
The passage above seems quite obviously true, indeed pretty much common sense.
Yet you don’t offer any direct evidence. Moreover, the style of your comment is precisely the reason why political debates aren’t encouraged on LW. The problems are:
offering only one possible explanation of a selected historical event, ignoring other possible explanations and several important concerns (e.g. you have tacitly assumed that it was feasible to impose any government in Afghanistan without regard to the opinion of the Pashtuns—a dubious assumption in the least)
rhetorical questions instead of well formulated arguments (“you may think this account [...] is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that …”)
implicitly suggesting that the opponent may be biased against new ideas (“or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other”)
conspirationist-style vocabulary (“conventional wisdom ”, “comprehensively contradicts official history”) and unnecessary use of political labels (“leftward direction”); this seems to imply that there is some leftist conspiracy to cover the important facts
The points 3 and 4 are mainly a matter of style, but 1 and 2 are more important. Inference (X is odd, therefore Y must be true), where X and Y are neither exhaustive nor enough precisely specified, is a fairly typical ingredient of nowhere-leading frustrating debates. This is what we try to avoid here.
offering only one possible explanation of a selected historical event, ignoring other possible explanations and several important concerns (e.g. you have tacitly assumed that it was feasible to impose any government in Afghanistan without regard to the opinion of the Pashtuns—a dubious assumption in the least)
In any one particular case one can rationalize all sorts of excellent reasons why the US wanted to preserve the left enemy while utterly destroying the right enemy. But the point is not to argue particular cases, but that in almost every case the US sought to utterly destroy the right enemy, while preserving the left enemy.
And when the US did seek to destroy the left enemy, the State Department resisted that policy the whole way kicking and screaming.
In any one particular case one can rationalize all sorts of excellent reasons...
It was you who started arguing about one particular case. Therefore my reaction logically addressed that case.
More generally, if you offer a particular event (siege of Kabul) as evidence for a general hypothesis (the US State Department always tries to utterly destroy the right enemies and never the left enemies), you have to show that the particular example really supports the general hypothesis (here you had to show that the reason of the SD’s opposition is best explained by sympathies to Taliban). But at this moment you can’t use the general hypothesis to show that it is indeed the best explanation; that would be circular.
Well the stuff you’ve detailed about Afghanistan being a rogue puppet state brought to heel is an untroubling version of history that contradicts the official variety in a leftward direction. I see Constant was quite right to ask what I objected to in the quote, but I thought it obvious which bits were novel—that Israel is an enemy of the US and the Vietcong were not. It’s not that these are troubling, I like being troubled by heterodoxy, but I like it for the opportunity to model their thought processes.
And I understand how someone can believe in the idea that the US is against Israel and for Communism, but I MM actually seems to think it’s true- he thinks the US funding of Israel is explicable in terms of wanting to see Israel destroyed, and the invasion of Vietnam in terms of curbing the anti-american tendencies of communism. And I can’t see what those explanations are.
Likewise, I can see someone interpreting America’s attitude towards Israel as being overly pro-Palestinian, but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true—there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn’t notice the world he’s describing isn’t our own.
but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true—there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn’t notice the world he’s describing isn’t our own.
That is simply false. MM explains, or perhaps rationalizes, why the Palestinian lobby does not exist: He says that the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians are a proxy of the state department. According to MM the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians do not really exist as a group capable of rationally and selfishly following their own interests.
Which might be just rationalizing away an inconvenient fact, but does explain the curious anomaly that the Palestinians don’t rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interests.
Nations are less rational and self interested than individuals, but rationality and self interest is for the most part a rough approximation, as good as a spherical cow. It is a quite good approximation for monarchies such as Qatar and the former Lichtenstein. It is a very bad approximation to Palestinian behavior.
the Palestinians do not really exist as a group capable of rationally and selfishly following their own interests.
Very few large groups are ever capable of rationally following their own interests. One of the things we learn from decision theory and voting theory is that groups, in general, might not have well-defined preferences, even if the members do. When a large group acts incoherently, no special explanation is needed.
Very few large groups are ever capable of rationally following their own interests
The evidence you produce supports the considerably weaker claim, that no group is capable of reliably and consistently rationally following their own interests, and will not always have a well defined interest.
A well run corporation, and most corporations are reasonably well run, perhaps because those that are not are apt to wind up broke, does fairly successfully follow its own interest.
The whole point of organizing a group, having a leadership, is to achieve the capability of pursuing its own interests, (unless of course, it is an astroturf organization)
If one asserts that the Israeli lobby exists and is effective, this implies that Jews organized as the state of Israel are capable of following their collective interests, or at least the interests of the state of Israel.
A corporation is usually quite capable of following the interests of shareholders.
The way a corporation accomplishes this is that there is a board, which supposedly represents the shareholders. The board is theoretically elected by shareholders, though usually it was self appointed when the company was formed, and has subsequently been self perpetuating. But despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that the elections are usually worthless, the board usually does represent the interests of shareholders.
The board appoints a CEO, and delegates all power to him, subject to the limit that they may fire him at any moment. The board is supposed to monitor what he does, but not interfere or second guess him. It is supposed to allow him enough rope to hang himself, and usually it does.
This system does enable large groups to rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interest.
The systems commonly used by governments are generally less effective, but they are not totally and completely ineffective.
And he doesn’t notice the world he’s describing isn’t our own.
The world that we think we are familiar with may be quite different from the way we think it is. We know less than we think. As you write the words above, you are (typically) in a room somewhere, looking at a monitor, surrounded by walls. You see very little of the world, just a few cubic meters of your immediate surroundings. So how do you know about the world that exists outside those four walls?
Could it be that you remember that world, that you remember having been outside these walls before entering the room and writing your forum comment? So you have an eyewitness’s memory of the world outside. Eyewitnesses, however, are notoriously unreliable (just google eyewitness reliable, you’ll find discussion about this phenomenon).
So your own personal memory of the world is unreliable. We know furthermore that your consciousness of what is in front of your eyes right now has enormous gaps. There has been a lot of interesting activity in this area. Google change blindness for example. Google invisible gorilla.
So, we know very little about what is happening right now immediately around us. We have unreliable memory of what happened to us in the past.
And now we move from our most direct sources of knowledge to indirect sources of knowledge, mostly what other people say. The unreliability of our senses, of our mind, and of our memory, must now be combined with the added unreliability of what other people tell us. This forum called “lesswrong” and its parent blog called “overcoming bias” are built in large part on the assumption that people are unreliable, often wildly unreliable.
A little humility is in order. This is not to say that Mencius Moldbug is uniquely clear-sighted. That’s not my point. My purpose is to dent, at least a little, the confidence that he must be wrong because he contradicts what we know quite well the world is like. You write:
And I can’t see what those explanations are.
That can be taken two ways. If you have great self-confidence in your knowledge of the world and in the absence of any important gaps in your reasoning, then that can be taken to mean that since you can’t see his reasons, therefore there must not be excellent reasons.
But it can also be taken another way. If you are not that self-confident, then it can be an admission that you don’t know, with no implication that he is probably wrong. I, for example, can’t see what the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem could possibly be—but when I say this, I am not implying that Wiles’s proof is probably flawed. I am here admitting my own limitations, nothing more.
but I thought it obvious which bits were novel—that Israel is an enemy of the US and the Vietcong were not.
The Vietcong never existed. They were an arm of Hanoi. And Hanoi was never an enemy in the sense that the US wanted it to be overthrown or lose territory—nor in the sense that US derecognized Hanoi’s authority over large parts of North Vietnam. The US seriously undermines the very existence of Israel. It never undermined the communist regime in the North. The squabble between the US and North Vietnam was like a quarrel within a marriage, like the frequent disputes between the Pentagon and the State Department. Indeed, Mencius argues that it was a dispute between the Pentagon and the State Department. In contrast, the dispute between the US and Rhodesia was existential.
And if the US is on Israel’s side, is it not odd that its policy is that peace should be made by the stronger side yielding land and money to the weaker side?
It’s only odd if you abstract away a lot of uncontroversial and widely known facts.
The US gives quite a lot of aid to Israel, in diplomatic and financial terms. Support for Israel is a standard part of both parties’ political platforms. That US support for Israel is limited or qualified doesn’t make it nonexistent. There isn’t a Palestinian government has reliable control over any money or land to speak of. If there’s going to be any yielding of either, it’s going to have to be to the Palestinians, not from them. And most of the Israeli leadership is perfectly aware of this.
That there is such an entity as “the Palestinians” reflects the fact that Palestinians get paid for being Palestinian, paid rather a lot. There was no such entity, no such people, until the money started flowing.
And who pays them? It is remarkably difficult to find out, almost as if paying them was some sort of criminal plot.
But if you dig deep enough, it is primarily the United States and the European Union. And the supposedly European Union aid somehow winds up passing through NGOs full of graduates from the American Ivy League.
The Paris conference (who?) provided 7.7 billion in Palestinian aid over three years 2008-2010. Note that no one seems to want to have their names on these payments.
High estimates for US aid to Israel are based on such highly creative accounting as including Jewish migrants from the US to Israel as foreign aid, and international investment as foreign aid. Actual direct aid for Israel from the US in 2008 was 2.38 billion, which seems remarkably similar to western aid to Palestinians—except that aid to Israel is done with trumpets blowing, and aid to “Palestinians” is done furtively.
Some of his ideas are indeed unsound and with some serious blind spots, but on the whole, I’d say his analysis of the modern-day institutions and social order is spot-on, and more accurate than practically any other source. Generally, the closer the topic is to the present day, the more correct and insightful he is.
Also, his earlier writings from 2007-2008 are much better than his more recent work. You can find them all nicely indexed here.
Huh, I found the opposite, in the abstract he’s insightful but his descriptions of modern day reality seem to be coming from some bizarre counter-earth, for instance:
“The pretend enemies (such as the Communist countries in the Cold War, other Third World nationalist thugs, revolutionary Islamists, etc, etc) are actually best defined as partial clients. Unlike full clients such as the OECD democracies, their friendship is only with one side of the American political system (the left side, duh). If their “anti-Americanism” actually reaches the level of military combat, the war is a limited war and essentially a civil one. Right enemies include: Nazis and other fascists, of course; apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia; the Portuguese Estado Novo and Franquista Spain; the Greek colonels; and, of course, Israel. You might notice a property shared by all but one of the regimes on this list, which is that they don’t exist anymore. Sometimes there will be patron-client relationships on the right side of the equation, but they are always tenuous. Even in the last case, the “Israel lobby” is a piece of dental floss compared to the arm-thick steel cable that is the Palestine lobby. (You’ll notice that USG’s policy is that the war should end by Israel giving money and land to the Palestinians, not the other way around.)”
He’s perceptive and erudite enough that when he says something so gratuitously and obviously wrong I sit there for ages thinking hang on, is this just something I don’t want to believe- a politically correct myth I don’t want to let go of. It disturbs me how often the answer is no, but I genuinely cannot see a way to make passages like the above make sense.
It would be helpful if you narrowed down to a specific claim which you consider to be gratuitously and obviously wrong.
For instance, your quote contains the claim that, of the regimes described, only Israel has survived to this day. Is it your contention that Franquista Spain has survived to this day, or that Israel has not survived? If that is not your contention, then you do not, after all, object to the whole quote, but object to only part of it. And yet you dropped the whole thing into your comment, apparently expecting your reader to know what section of the quote you object to.
I quoted the whole thing because the structure is central to the thesis. He’s comparing the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and so on with the revolutions that took down Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. That South Africa and Rhodesia were taken down and the Vietcong were not is perfectly true. That this is evidence the American government spent more effort opposing Apartheid than the Vietcong is something else entirely—conspiracy theory. Not merely in that it proposes a conspiracy but in that it does not bother to argue for one, the state of the world is evidence for the existence of a body that wanted it that way- except where it isn’t, in the case of Israel.
That said, I quoted the whole thing to provide context, the claim I find impossible to grasp is that the US was not really opposed to the USSR and is not really allied with Israel. This requires either a definition of the US government that is separate from the people that actually run it, an assertion that the people who appear to be in charge don’t really run it, or that they secretly hate Israel and love communism.
Moldbug does argue for his controversial analyses of world events at enormous length. Here he is mentioning some of his conclusions without restating his arguments. It doesn’t mean he didn’t bother to argue. What it does mean is that he’s a demanding writer, who expects his readers to spend a lot of time familiarizing themselves with his arguments. If that sounds like he’s expecting too much—that is, if you think he should prove that he’s not a nutcase before you devote months to reading his blog chronologically from 2007 through the present, which is more or less what you need to do to gather together the threads of his argument, then there you have your explanation as to why he’s not very widely read.
Moldbug did recognize this problem and at one point he attempted to recap his argument in condensed form, but even that condensed introduction to his argument is spread over many very long blog posts.
He furthermore places barriers in the way of his reader by writing in a colorful and circuitous style which I presume is his attempt to imitate writers that he admires, such as Carlyle. It doesn’t make for easy reading.
I don’t recall Moldbug ever claiming this, and taken strictly it would contradict one of his main recurring themes, which is that the US government is not a monolithic entity, though maybe he does speak of the US government as a monolithic entity (if he does, he is speaking loosely). What I recall Moldbug claiming is that the US government is not a monolithic entity, and that one can usefully roughly divide it into two warring factions, one of which dominates the State Department among other things, the other of which tends more to dominate the Pentagon. If we look at the quote here he writes, “their friendship is only with one side of the American political system”, referring to this divide I’ve mentioned.
The US demands that Israel make territorial and monetary concessions on land long ago acquired and settled by Jews. It made no similar demand against the USSR, except for those Soviet acquisitions that were so recent as to still be in play.
For the situation to be comparable, for the US to have treated the USSR and Israel equally as enemies, the US should have derecognized and actively resisted the Soviet acquisition of East Germany, in the fashion that it has derecognized and actively resisted the Jewish acquisition of Jerusalem.
Or as an alternate explanation, the US was afraid of the USSR and thus was more careful about what demands it made of it, but it’s not particularly afraid of Israel.
Have you sought for alternate explanations and checked to see how evidence update the probablity of each upwards or downwards?
The US sought to overthrow its right wing enemies, such as Rhodesia and so forth, replacing their regimes with utterly different regimes, but generally sought to maintain its left wing enemies in power, while placing pressure on them to moderate their ways, go along with the consensus, and stop trying to disturb the status quo, like a squabble within a marriage, rather than a divorce.
Even on those rare, infrequent, and dramatic occasions when the US did want to overthrow its left wing enemies, as for example the Taliban, the State Department clearly did not want to overthrow them, eventually got its way and installed regimes almost indistinguishable from the originals. The current Afghan regime is just the Taliban light, far closer to the Taliban in its ethnicity and its state imposed theology than to the Northern Alliance.
In contrast, Rhodesia is utterly destroyed.
So… enemies that enjoyed the support of the USSR or China largely survived, at least until the USSR’s dissolution itself. While enemies of America that were also enemies of the USSR and China, were largely defeated.
Basically all you’re saying is that few countries could stand without support from some superpower.
This isn’t saying much that’s suprising. But by talking as if the difference is between right-wing enemies and left-wing enemies, instead of enemies that didn’t have superpower backing, and enemies that did have superpower backing, you make it look like a bigger conspiracy than it actually is.
But obviously Rhodesia and South Africa were not taken down by revolutions. Rhodesia was taken down by foreign invasion and terrorism from outside Rhodesia, terror conducted by black people but sponsored and funded by white people from outside Africa. South Africa yielded not to violence, but to moral pressure and political correctness.
So you are contradicting Mencius’ version of history, with a politically correct version of history that is transparently false, that no one genuinely believes, even if lots of people pretend to believe it for fear of the consequences of doubting it.
While Mencius’ version could be false, the fact that it differs from a transparently false version of politically correct history is not reason to doubt it.
The US spent precisely zero effort taking down the Hanoi regime, making its vast expenditure of effort against the Vietcong completely pointless and ineffectual.
The US sponsored terror against the Rhodesian regime in its efforts to overthrow it, something it has not done against communist or Islamic enemies, unless you count the Contras and the sons of Iraq as terrorists, which is stretching things.
Rather than comparing resources expended on war, which is an unfair comparison since fascist regimes have been insignificant after the fall of Nazi Germany, let us compare qualms of conscience. When fighting communist enemies, dreadfully concerned to make friends and not offend anyone, when fighting fascist enemies, kill them all, let God sort them out. When fighting communist or Islamic enemies, all the experts agree the thing to do is to win hearts and minds, when fighting fascist enemies, all the experts agree that the thing to do is to grab them by the balls and rip those balls off.
Hence Mencius description of those wars as civil wars, fought in a manner that shows that they were friends before, and hoped to be friends after, while the point of conflict with those dreadful fascists was to destroy them. Often, as in the Vietnam war, and arguably the Afghan war, the concern for not offending people paralyzed the war effort.
Wars with left enemies were like squabbles within a marriage. You would not want the squabble to escalate to divorce. If the US had really wanted to win in South Vietnam, would have had to win in North Vietnam, or credibly threaten to do so if the North Vietnamese did not back off. Hence, civil war, family squabble. The objective with fascist enemies was to destroy them. The objective with communist and Islamist enemies was to get them to converge. When communism fell, the CIA was not only shocked and incredulous, but also dismayed. Obama wants Islam to come resemble the WCC. That might arguably be a reasonable plan, but it is not the plan that was applied to Rhodesia or the Greek colonels—nor even the plan applied to our supposed allies, the Northern Alliance.
Downvoted for uncharitable interpretation. The citation includes at least six assertions
The pretend enemies are actually best defined as partial clients.
[The enemies’] friendship is only with one side of the American political system.
If their “anti-Americanism” actually reaches the level of military combat, the war is a limited war and essentially a civil one.
Right enemies include: [list of countries].
[These countries except one] don’t exist anymore.
[T]he “Israel lobby” is [much weaker than] the Palestine lobby.
and you selected the only unproblematic one for illustration.
That was the point. That some of assertions are obviously unproblematic.
While many of the assertions are arguably problematic, none of them seem unreasonable, or even weakly supported.
Could you nominate one of the assertions as unreasonable, or weakly supported. Choose one as an obvious deal breaker, something that a reasonable person should obviously reject.
I’m not interested in joining the debate about the assertions. I only object to Constant’s use of an unfair rhetorical trick; namely, interpreting the interlocutor in a way such that (s)he sounds silly. That some assertions in a paragraph of text are obviously unproblematic is hardly worth pointing out. It would be very difficult to write a longer stretch of text consisting purely of dubious statements.
For illustration, consider this fictitious dialogue (edited to give a better example):
C’s reaction is an unfair distraction although it’s not obvious that A’s assertion is wrong. If C isn’t an idiot he must see that B’s objection is directed towards the claim that the proof is faulty, not against the fact that 2+2=4.
In your fictitious example, it is obvious what A is objecting to
In the actual discussion in question, it is not at all obvious what you and Mercy are objecting to.
Actually, you took my words out of context and in effect are spreading falsehoods about what I was saying. The immediately preceding and following sentences are absolutely critical for understanding my argument. By extracting just the one sentence, you falsely make it seem as though I am uncharitably interpreting the interlocutor, and not only do you falsely make it seem this way, you explicitly state this interpretation.
OK. I believe it was not your intention to uncharitably interpret your opponent. Still, I think a reasonable interpretation of Mercy’s comment is that he’s objecting to all other assertions except the one about non-existence of Franco’s dictatorship and existence of Israel and the reason why he didn’t remove this clearly correct claim was simply because it was located in the middle of the quote. Therefore I still consider your choice of example distracting, but since it wasn’t intentional, I retract my downvote.
I prefer stating my opinions explicitly to making something seem that way.
I think that your interpretation of Mercy would be both wrong and uncharitable to Mercy because there are other plainly true and easily verifiable assertions in that comment.
I was not satisfied with making a reasonable interpretation which might nevertheless be false, because I wanted to know what Mercy actually was objecting to. I didn’t want to have to guess.
My comment was in fact no interpretation at all but a request for clarification. It was obviously that. Mercy understood it as that sam0345 understood it as that and explained this to you.
The real question is whether I should have made a reasonable but possibly false interpretation, or whether I should have requested clarification.
Now in my opinion Mencius Moldbug’s passage is itself reasonable from beginning to end. In my view, the real difference between the different parts of it is not that some are true and others false, but that some are easy to check and others are hard to check for a variety of reasons, one of which is that most people have such a superficial understanding of alliances and conflict that they would not know how to even begin to check to see whether there was an alliance or a conflict. Take for example North Korea. Everyone in North Korea loudly sings the praises of the great leader. Superficially, it looks like they all love him. Ie, it looks like an alliance. But I think many Americans by now are savvy enough to realize that the reason they praise the great leader so loudly is that they are all terrified of the state. So, not an alliance at all, but enslavement.
Well, North Korea is a pretty obvious example, which is why I picked it just now. However, there are, I think, other less obvious examples.
Now, since I think that Moldbug’s quote is reasonable from beginning to end, I would like to know what part of it Mercy objects to, and it’s not obvious to me which part that is because I am not a psychic. In order to illustrate that not all of the quote is false I picked one part of it that is not false. But from my point if view, none of the quote is obviously false. What part, then, to pick? I picked the part that was easiest to check as my illustration. Not, mind you, the truest part, since I think it all could be true.
Whatever your opinion about Moldbug is, and even if you are not a psychic, you had to suppose that Mercy is not disputing that Israel exists. The question
was rhetorical, and rhetorical questions are problematic tools in a rational debate. It could be understood as a mere example of a true (albeit trivial) statement in the quoted text, it could also be understood as an indirect claim that your opponent doesn’t know that Israel still exists. In political debates question of form “do you say that [something obviously false]” are much more often used as indirect accusations than for other purposes, which was why I have interpreted it as such. Since you say that was not your intention I believe you. But still your reply, if it was meant as a request for clarification, would be much better without the whole second paragraph.
That would have been careless. I was asking for clarification. It would have been needless and careless to make and incorporate assumptions about what Mercy was saying, into my very request for clarification.
The whole second paragraph was fine. It was only the single sentence taken out of context that became ambiguous. You’re the one who did that.
Assuming that your debate partner knows such an elementary fact as that Israel exists isn’t careless, it’s what charitable interpretation is supposed to be based on.
These are not mutually exclusive. It is indeed charitable, but one should make assumptions, even charitable ones, only when they are necessary to proceed. And it was hardly necessary to assume what the person was saying in my very request for clarification, since the point of the clarification was to obviate the need to make any such assumptions.
It’s hardly ever necessary to make assumptions; one can always proceed with literal interpretation of what has been said. But one shouldn’t. We have probably different preferences as for debating style.
So now you agree with my careful avoidance of assumptions?
So which of these six assertions do you suggest is obviously unreasonable.
Note that 6 is not a position taken by Mencius, but rather an uncharitable inference, you are arguing that if what Mencius says is true, then the Palestine lobby is much stronger than the Israeli lobby, which obviously it is not.
What Mencius says is that there is no Palestinian lobby, because the Palestinian lobby is Harvard and the State department, which is indeed much stronger than Israeli lobby.
Now proposition six is not a position of Mencius, but your refutation of Mencius.
Consider: The PLO lives off aid to Palestinians. Aid to Palestinians is provided by “The international community”, which is in practice pretty much the State Department, Havard, and their NGO proxies. If we assume that he who pays the piper calls the tune, then the various US peace initiatives are best understood as various US presidents trying unsuccessfully to get the State Department to accept the existence of Israel as permanent and unchanging reality, that cannot and should not be changed, however sad, regrettable and unfortunate that reality might be, that the various US presidents were not so much unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a peace between Israel and the Arabs, nor even between Judaism and Islam, but between the Pentagon and the State Department.
That’s a question for Mercy, but it can be that (s)he finds unreasonable all except the fifth. No.5 is the only obviously reasonable one.
I have paraphrased that for brevity. Still can’t think about meaning of “A is a piece of dental floss compared to the arm-thick steel cable that is B” significantly different from “A is much weaker than B”.
“A” is not the (entirely nonexistent and wholly unnecessary) Palestinian lobby. It is Harvard and the state department.
B, not A. Anyway, have you read the original quotation by Moldbug? Here is the relevant sentence, for your convenience:
Palestine lobby is written explicitly there, and it’s even not in quotation marks as “Israel lobby” is.
I’m sorry, but this is not a reasonable debate. I retreat.
Moldbug also says the Palestine lobby does not exist. You are taking a fragment out of context.
The quote above? Not obviously wrong, just not even wrong and as unfalsifiable as any proper conspiracy theory should be.
Of the “enemy” regimes listed, US went to war only with Nazis and three of them were valued NATO members. One can call Vietnam and Korean wars in a sense limited, because US refused to use nukes and escalate into full WW3.
I wouldn’t comment about Israel, because there is nothing more mind-killing that discussion about Israeli/Palestinian politics :-(
That is true, but we don’t have to get into all of it. His assertion that the USG does not actually support Israel is frankly bizarre. USG gives them billions of dollars a year in cash, in weapons systems and other material support.
Mencius holds that the US is not a monolithic entity. Therefore it is possible within his framework for one part of the US government to do one thing while another does something else that directly contradicts what the first part is doing. His model of the US government is, to put it crudely, that politicians are essentially figureheads, and that the real government is the unelected bureaucracy. Since the politicians are not really running things, then the bureaucracy of government is effectively a sovereign entity. However, there is not one single bureaucracy. The Pentagon, for example, is pretty separate from the State department, since their hierarchies come together only at the Presidency, which is, as mentioned, a figurehead position with severely limited real influence. Therefore it is conceivable, and I believe Mencius holds it to be the case, that the Pentagon and State are mutually fairly autonomous.
All of this is to point out that it is possible, within his framework, for the US simultaneously to aid Israel militarily with weapons, and also to undermine it politically through State Department activities. Whether this is the case depends on what the state department is doing, and Mencius throughout his many long blog entries presents his evidence. I don’t want to go into further detail because the topic is both difficult and dangerous.
I don’t think the Pentagon makes appropriations of foreign aid, even in weapons systems. I could be wrong, but I think these are specific line items approved in the federal budget. Doubtless, the state department and pentagon do provide analysis and persuasion with regard to their pet programs, projects and a number of critical implementation details but they do not, as a bureaucracy, determine WHETHER support will be provided at all.
Nor can one say that any bureaucratic organization has a single opinion about a question as general as “support for Israel”. I don’t consider any of this to be very revealing observations. Corporate bodies are made up of multiple people who have different ideas, values and opinions. Yes. Still the OUTPUT is lots of material aid to Israel. Therefore, USG supports Israel and Mencius is probably off his meds.
Their proxies and nominally independent contractors often wind up shooting at each other. It is like the cold war.
Indeed, Mencius argues that the cold war was between the State department and the Pentagon
And what does the US give Israel’s enemies? The US gives two billion a year, mostly military aid, to Egypt. Foreign aid to Palestinians, much of it US aid or thinly laundered US aid, supports a comfortable Palestinian standard of living, substantially better than that of most their Muslim neighbors, which encourages them to continue doing what they have been doing.
Israel and Egypt are at peace, and have been for 30 years. For much of that period, Egypt and Israel had fairly effective joint security undertakings. They’re not a convincing example of an enemy.
Egypt and Israel were at peace the way the US and the Soviet Union were at peace, if that, and now they are at peace rather less than that.
And if you find Egypt unconvincing as a US funded and sponsored enemy of Israel, consider Israel’s long and bitter complaint about the Arab states maintaining the Palestinians and the PLO as permanent multi generational refugees.
But arguably it was the “international community” rather than the Arab states that maintained the Palestinians and the PLO as permanent multi generational refugees.Certainly it was the “international community” that funded this, and one does not have to be unreasonably conspiracy minded to consider that the “International community” is the State Department in drag. The NGOs look mighty like Harvard on a generous expense account mingling with the CIA on a slightly less generous expense account.
From what you’ve said earlier you apparently believe that the USSR was a client state of the USA.
So I can only conclude that you believe either (1) that Israel is a client state of Egypt or (2) that Egypt is a client state of Israel. I regard either of these two interpretations as bizarre, but no more bizarre than thnings you’ve said on this thread.
Frankly I at a loss to understand you.
Is that the link you intended? It doesn’t mention that.
A client state of the state department. There is more than one America, and the state department does not like the America that I like.
I hope to see the day that the Pentagon bombs the state department. During the invasion of Afghanistan, it became apparent that the Pentagon’s allies were not the State Department’s allies.
I find these questions fascinatingly interesting, but I’m afraid this isn’t the right place to proceed with this discussion. Feel free to PM me if you want some of my further thoughts, though.
The passage above seems quite obviously true, indeed pretty much common sense. Do you have any specific points in it that trouble you, or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other. You quote the article as if it was obviously unreasonable on sight. I am puzzled, and would like to understand what is unreasonable about it.
Recall, for example, when the pentagon was allied with the Northern Alliance, the State Department was allied with the Taliban. The state department ordered the Northern Alliance not to enter Kabul, much as it demands that Israel give Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The Pentagon furtively indicated it was fine with the Northern Alliance entering Kabul, which resulted in something close to shooting war between the Pentagon and the State Department. The Northern alliance, contrary to orders, entered Kabul and threw the Taliban out of Kabul. In the end, the state department, and thus the Taliban, won, in that the Northern Alliance was suppressed, and replaced by a government that is is composed, like the Taliban, of Pashtun, unlike the Northern Alliance, composed, like the Taliban, of Radical Islamists, unlike much of the Northern Alliance, but nonetheless is supposedly at war with the Taliban and supposedly on our side, not withstanding its habit of burning bibles, executing Muslims who convert to Christianity, and executing Muslims who try to rationalize away the more disturbing parts of the Koran, odd behavior for a supposed ally of us and supposed enemy of the Taliban.
You may think this account of the current war is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that the State Department ordered the Northern Alliance to not enter Kabul? Is it not odder that the current government of Kabul has policies that are a lot closer to the Taliban than to the policies of the Northern alliance?
And if the US is on Israel’s side, is it not odd that its policy is that peace should be made by the stronger side yielding land and money to the weaker side?
If Mencius’s account is obviously odd, are there not a lot of even odder aspects about the conventional account?
This is not the place to argue whether his view is correct, but I would like to understand why some people find his view hard to swallow. Of course it comprehensively contradicts official history, but no one seems troubled by versions of history that contradict yesterday’s official history in a leftward direction.
Yet you don’t offer any direct evidence. Moreover, the style of your comment is precisely the reason why political debates aren’t encouraged on LW. The problems are:
offering only one possible explanation of a selected historical event, ignoring other possible explanations and several important concerns (e.g. you have tacitly assumed that it was feasible to impose any government in Afghanistan without regard to the opinion of the Pashtuns—a dubious assumption in the least)
rhetorical questions instead of well formulated arguments (“you may think this account [...] is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that …”)
implicitly suggesting that the opponent may be biased against new ideas (“or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other”)
conspirationist-style vocabulary (“conventional wisdom ”, “comprehensively contradicts official history”) and unnecessary use of political labels (“leftward direction”); this seems to imply that there is some leftist conspiracy to cover the important facts
The points 3 and 4 are mainly a matter of style, but 1 and 2 are more important. Inference (X is odd, therefore Y must be true), where X and Y are neither exhaustive nor enough precisely specified, is a fairly typical ingredient of nowhere-leading frustrating debates. This is what we try to avoid here.
In any one particular case one can rationalize all sorts of excellent reasons why the US wanted to preserve the left enemy while utterly destroying the right enemy. But the point is not to argue particular cases, but that in almost every case the US sought to utterly destroy the right enemy, while preserving the left enemy.
And when the US did seek to destroy the left enemy, the State Department resisted that policy the whole way kicking and screaming.
It was you who started arguing about one particular case. Therefore my reaction logically addressed that case.
More generally, if you offer a particular event (siege of Kabul) as evidence for a general hypothesis (the US State Department always tries to utterly destroy the right enemies and never the left enemies), you have to show that the particular example really supports the general hypothesis (here you had to show that the reason of the SD’s opposition is best explained by sympathies to Taliban). But at this moment you can’t use the general hypothesis to show that it is indeed the best explanation; that would be circular.
Well the stuff you’ve detailed about Afghanistan being a rogue puppet state brought to heel is an untroubling version of history that contradicts the official variety in a leftward direction. I see Constant was quite right to ask what I objected to in the quote, but I thought it obvious which bits were novel—that Israel is an enemy of the US and the Vietcong were not. It’s not that these are troubling, I like being troubled by heterodoxy, but I like it for the opportunity to model their thought processes.
And I understand how someone can believe in the idea that the US is against Israel and for Communism, but I MM actually seems to think it’s true- he thinks the US funding of Israel is explicable in terms of wanting to see Israel destroyed, and the invasion of Vietnam in terms of curbing the anti-american tendencies of communism. And I can’t see what those explanations are.
Likewise, I can see someone interpreting America’s attitude towards Israel as being overly pro-Palestinian, but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true—there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn’t notice the world he’s describing isn’t our own.
That is simply false. MM explains, or perhaps rationalizes, why the Palestinian lobby does not exist: He says that the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians are a proxy of the state department. According to MM the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians do not really exist as a group capable of rationally and selfishly following their own interests.
Which might be just rationalizing away an inconvenient fact, but does explain the curious anomaly that the Palestinians don’t rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interests.
Is there any nation that “rationally and selfishly follows its collective interest”?
It is safe to say that there isn’t. The rest of us would have been left or overwhelmed within months.
Huh? Do you think that selfishness unambiguously means: dominate Earth (or what left of it) as fast as possible?
No.
Nations are less rational and self interested than individuals, but rationality and self interest is for the most part a rough approximation, as good as a spherical cow. It is a quite good approximation for monarchies such as Qatar and the former Lichtenstein. It is a very bad approximation to Palestinian behavior.
WARNING: MIND-KILLER FIELD AHEAD
Very few large groups are ever capable of rationally following their own interests. One of the things we learn from decision theory and voting theory is that groups, in general, might not have well-defined preferences, even if the members do. When a large group acts incoherently, no special explanation is needed.
The evidence you produce supports the considerably weaker claim, that no group is capable of reliably and consistently rationally following their own interests, and will not always have a well defined interest.
A well run corporation, and most corporations are reasonably well run, perhaps because those that are not are apt to wind up broke, does fairly successfully follow its own interest.
The whole point of organizing a group, having a leadership, is to achieve the capability of pursuing its own interests, (unless of course, it is an astroturf organization)
If one asserts that the Israeli lobby exists and is effective, this implies that Jews organized as the state of Israel are capable of following their collective interests, or at least the interests of the state of Israel.
A corporation is usually quite capable of following the interests of shareholders.
The way a corporation accomplishes this is that there is a board, which supposedly represents the shareholders. The board is theoretically elected by shareholders, though usually it was self appointed when the company was formed, and has subsequently been self perpetuating. But despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that the elections are usually worthless, the board usually does represent the interests of shareholders.
The board appoints a CEO, and delegates all power to him, subject to the limit that they may fire him at any moment. The board is supposed to monitor what he does, but not interfere or second guess him. It is supposed to allow him enough rope to hang himself, and usually it does.
This system does enable large groups to rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interest.
The systems commonly used by governments are generally less effective, but they are not totally and completely ineffective.
The world that we think we are familiar with may be quite different from the way we think it is. We know less than we think. As you write the words above, you are (typically) in a room somewhere, looking at a monitor, surrounded by walls. You see very little of the world, just a few cubic meters of your immediate surroundings. So how do you know about the world that exists outside those four walls?
Could it be that you remember that world, that you remember having been outside these walls before entering the room and writing your forum comment? So you have an eyewitness’s memory of the world outside. Eyewitnesses, however, are notoriously unreliable (just google eyewitness reliable, you’ll find discussion about this phenomenon).
So your own personal memory of the world is unreliable. We know furthermore that your consciousness of what is in front of your eyes right now has enormous gaps. There has been a lot of interesting activity in this area. Google change blindness for example. Google invisible gorilla.
So, we know very little about what is happening right now immediately around us. We have unreliable memory of what happened to us in the past.
And now we move from our most direct sources of knowledge to indirect sources of knowledge, mostly what other people say. The unreliability of our senses, of our mind, and of our memory, must now be combined with the added unreliability of what other people tell us. This forum called “lesswrong” and its parent blog called “overcoming bias” are built in large part on the assumption that people are unreliable, often wildly unreliable.
A little humility is in order. This is not to say that Mencius Moldbug is uniquely clear-sighted. That’s not my point. My purpose is to dent, at least a little, the confidence that he must be wrong because he contradicts what we know quite well the world is like. You write:
That can be taken two ways. If you have great self-confidence in your knowledge of the world and in the absence of any important gaps in your reasoning, then that can be taken to mean that since you can’t see his reasons, therefore there must not be excellent reasons.
But it can also be taken another way. If you are not that self-confident, then it can be an admission that you don’t know, with no implication that he is probably wrong. I, for example, can’t see what the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem could possibly be—but when I say this, I am not implying that Wiles’s proof is probably flawed. I am here admitting my own limitations, nothing more.
The Vietcong never existed. They were an arm of Hanoi. And Hanoi was never an enemy in the sense that the US wanted it to be overthrown or lose territory—nor in the sense that US derecognized Hanoi’s authority over large parts of North Vietnam. The US seriously undermines the very existence of Israel. It never undermined the communist regime in the North. The squabble between the US and North Vietnam was like a quarrel within a marriage, like the frequent disputes between the Pentagon and the State Department. Indeed, Mencius argues that it was a dispute between the Pentagon and the State Department. In contrast, the dispute between the US and Rhodesia was existential.
WARNING: MIND-KILLER FIELD AHEAD
It’s only odd if you abstract away a lot of uncontroversial and widely known facts.
The US gives quite a lot of aid to Israel, in diplomatic and financial terms. Support for Israel is a standard part of both parties’ political platforms. That US support for Israel is limited or qualified doesn’t make it nonexistent. There isn’t a Palestinian government has reliable control over any money or land to speak of. If there’s going to be any yielding of either, it’s going to have to be to the Palestinians, not from them. And most of the Israeli leadership is perfectly aware of this.
That there is such an entity as “the Palestinians” reflects the fact that Palestinians get paid for being Palestinian, paid rather a lot. There was no such entity, no such people, until the money started flowing.
And who pays them? It is remarkably difficult to find out, almost as if paying them was some sort of criminal plot.
But if you dig deep enough, it is primarily the United States and the European Union. And the supposedly European Union aid somehow winds up passing through NGOs full of graduates from the American Ivy League.
The Paris conference (who?) provided 7.7 billion in Palestinian aid over three years 2008-2010. Note that no one seems to want to have their names on these payments.
High estimates for US aid to Israel are based on such highly creative accounting as including Jewish migrants from the US to Israel as foreign aid, and international investment as foreign aid. Actual direct aid for Israel from the US in 2008 was 2.38 billion, which seems remarkably similar to western aid to Palestinians—except that aid to Israel is done with trumpets blowing, and aid to “Palestinians” is done furtively.