Aesthetics Got There Before Cognitive Science

There is an interesting post up at a blog called The Frontal Cortex on how the brain, while listening to music, makes predictions about what’s coming next, and is pleasurably stimulated when those preductions are confounded. The blog’s author, Jonah Lehrer, writes:

There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty – we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns – that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance. (That’s why the unexpected pitches triggered the most brain activity, synchronizing the activity of brain regions involved in motor movement and emotion.) I wrote about this concept in Proust Was A Neuroscientist.

Lehrer then goes on, quoting from something else he’d written earlier, to cite the philosopher and musicologist Leonard B. Meyer in Emotion and Meaning in Music which Meyer published in 1956. I haven’t read that book (yet) but many years ago I read and never forgot an article Meyer had published in 1959, Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music. It’s far shorter than a book but gets across Meyer’s account of what makes great music great very effectively. Unfortunately it appears to still be under copyright so I can’t just post here the copy I have scanned from an old (1980) edition of Aesthetics Today, but I believe that under fair use rules I can send it to you if you e-mail me and request a copy. If you want to know why, for example, Mahler was great while another conductor-composer, Leonard Bernstein, was merely very talented, this’ll explain it.

So Meyer got this worked out half a century before the neuroscientists at Goldsmiths and UCL. I love and respect science, but this seems to suggest that sometimes you can figure something out just by thinking about it.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Shalom Lappin / King’s Philosophy — Update

In an earlier post I asked what people outside the academy could do to support Shalom Lappin. Here’s one thing you can do: join the Facebook group Stop Philosophy Cuts at King’s College London.

What Sir Oliver Miles is Really Saying

Sir Oliver Miles has been taking to the media this past week to defend himself against accusations of, shall we delicately say, inappropriateness after he pointed out that two members of the Chilcot panel are Jewish and insinuated that this would diminish the likelihood of the inquiry being conducted properly. (Apologies for not providing links; I read a letter from him to the Editor of the Times, and I actually read it in the Times itself – that is, in the physical paper. And I happened to see him on the telly in some sort of talk-show or debate or something — I almost never watch television and so I don’t know what the programme was.)

What I find baffling is that there seems to be a broad acceptance of the idea that Miles may have some scope or some reasonable grounds for defending his remarks. (I’m not speaking legally — legally of course they are well within what must be permitted under free speech principles.) It’s as if there might be an explanation of them that would somehow make them not racist.

There must be a reason for that. Here’s one hypothesis as to what the reason is: imputing to Jews an inability to think straight or function properly in regard to anything involving Israel at any level is a particular form of racism that has become so completely acceptable that it is no longer even seen as racist. Just one example: When David Miliband first became Foreign Minister, the BBC did a profile of him, and in that profile stressed the fact that he is Jewish and speculated that that might affect how he went about his duties where the Middle East was concerned.

Imagine someone saying publicly that the black judge in a particular high-profile court case ought to recluse herself because one of the parties to the case was also black and the judge would therefore not be able to be impartial. That would be a statement that black people had some sort of built-in “racial solidarity”, or something, that, whatever it was, was so strong as to render them incapable of carrying out their professional tasks with professional integrity. In other words, the judge’s sense of professionalism, and the priority and importance given by the judge to the maintaining of professional ethics and professional standards, would unavoidably be swept away by some supposed sense of race. Black judges, the message would be, cannot be counted on to maintain professional standards at all times.

That that message is incorrect — as in factually mistaken — is one thing, but it is key to note that it is also broadly — indeed universally, for all intents and purposes — considered unacceptable (as of course it should be).

Why then does it appear that many people in Britain, very much including the chattering classes, think that it at least might be acceptable to send what is essentially the same message, when it’s about Jews?

It matters not a jot whether Sir Martin Gilbert is an “ardent supporter of Zionism”. His job on the Chilcot panel isn’t to rule on Zionism or Israel. He has a brief, and the only question is: is Gilbert a man of professionalism and integrity who will complete his task to the highest possible standard, which includes respecting and meeting his brief as best he possibly can?

The answer of Sir Oliver Miles and others is “No, he isn’t and he can’t, because he’s Jewish, and there’s something strange and invisible that gets inside the brains of Jews and controls them and makes them unreliable, shifty, likely to act and speak not in the interests of their country but rather of Israel, to pretend to be doing their jobs while secretly pursuing a different agenda.”

“You just can’t trust them because they’re Jews.” And the media let Miles argue that he is being perfectly reasonable.

UPDATE: I highly recommend this article (yep, in The Guardian — go figure). In it, David Cesarani writes:

In 1876, an uprising of Bulgarian Christians against Ottoman rule provoked a murderous response from the Muslim Turkish authorities. William Gladstone, former prime minister and grand old man of the Liberal Party, was so enraged by the massacres of Christians that he published a pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. In it, he lambasted the then prime minister Benjamin Disraeli for abandoning the victims in preference for a pro-Turkish policy. Even though it had long been British policy to support the Ottoman Empire, Gladstone ascribed Disraeli’s stance to the fact that he was born a Jew and therefore sympathised with the Ottomans who had treated their Jews fairly – unlike the new Christian states in the Balkans.

Writing to a Jewish correspondent who questioned this response, Gladstone explained: “I have always had occasion to admire the conduct of the English Jews in the discharge of their civil duties; but I deeply deplore the manner in which, what I may call Judaic sympathies, beyond as well as within the circle of professed Judaism, are now acting on the question of the East; while I am aware that as regards the Jews themselves, there may be much to account for it.”

Gladstone’s peculiar reference to those “beyond” the community of observant Jews was a swipe at Disraeli who had been baptised into the Anglican communion aged 12. He believed that Disraeli was perversely motivated by some residual racial loyalty. Gladstone had more respect for Jews affiliated to their community, but they fared little better. Their dual loyalty was simply more obvious and explicable.

Within a short time, Gladstone’s tirade was being echoed by eminent intellectuals, including Professor AE Freeman, also a stalwart of the Liberal party, and Goldwin Smith, professor of history at Oxford. In addition to claiming that money-grubbing Jews exploited Christian guilt over past oppression (such as the Inquisition) and controlled the press, Smith declaimed that Jews could not be loyal citizens because “their only country is their race; which is one with their religion”.

While he would no doubt dismiss the comparison, 134 years later this is exactly what Sir Miles is banging on about. Either he thinks it is a problem that Jews are serving on the Iraq inquiry because they have a dual loyalty or he thinks that less enlightened folk than him in the Arab world might draw this conclusion. The first possibility is dismaying but the alternative is no cause for relief. His response to the existence of bigotry is not to pour scorn on prejudice and defend the integrity of public servants who happen to be Jewish, but to appease it.

What Can We Do to Support Shalom Lappin?

I’m back, valued readers; sorry for the pause. Was travelling.

Just a very brief post still this evening, to link to a very important one here regarding an academic at King’s College who has been treated very shabbily. In a nutshell, Shalom Lappin was offered a chair with tenure at Hebrew University. After conferring with his institutional superiors at King’s and receiving assurance that his position there was secure, and preferring to remain in London, he turned down the offer from Jerusalem. Little more than half a year later, he was informed that his academic position was being eliminated and he himself being made redundant. He writes:

I now find myself threatened with redundancy six years before scheduled retirement, with totally inadequate pension provisions, while at the height of my research career. This is grossly unfair, and violates statements often made by the Principal and other members of the administration to the effect that excellence in research is King’s priority. This threat is also a serious miscarriage of justice, given my level of productivity, and the fact that I was allowed to give up a very attractive offer on the basis of assurances that have turned out to be without foundation.

Normblog announces that a campaign is under way within the philosophy profession and among King’s students to obtain redress for Shalom Lappin and others. I hope that that campaign can be broadened (or a parallel one launched) to include others who may wish to support, in particular, Shalom, whose writing at Normblog and Engage will be known to many who may not be familiar with his scholarly output.

The Ballgame Wasn’t in Cairo or Oslo

In this post, Andrew Sullivan quotes Junot Diaz as saying:

All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and reëlect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all.

I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.

About this, Sullivan says:

Jeez, this is unfair. From Cairo to Oslo, he has hit it out of the park.

That metaphor is more apt than its author realises. Egypt and Norway weren’t where the game was being played, for goodness sake (they never have been). Obama may have given great speeches in those places, but they had nothing to do with health care. (I think sometimes Sullivan just blogs too quickly.) While Obama was abroad wowing the world about war and peace, Americans, his voters, back home in America where the game gets played, were wondering when he was going to go to bat for health care — or just plain start pitching it, for that matter. He never really did. He appeared briefly on the mound in September, threw one solid fastball, and disappeared again. He didn’t even pitch an inning, and he never did show up at the plate.

So Frank Rich is right:

The master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain.

It’s true, I’m afraid. I love Obama, I voted for the guy against Hilary in the primary, and of course against the truly frightening McCain-Palin ticket in the general election, and in my own mind I’ve been giving him the benefit of the doubt for a year. But throughout that year I have wondered where he was and what he was doing and why he wasn’t leading the country, and Washington, on health care. I’m still wondering. Virtuoso oratories in foreign capitals don’t move domestic policy agendas forward.

Slate: No, Money Isn’t Speech, but Advertisement Is

I am among the many who are horrified at, and extremely worried about the results of, the recent Supreme Court ruling that lifted century-old financial limits on political campaigning by corporations for politicians. I’m about as radical a believer in the importance of freedom of speech as anyone I know, but I find this ruling mistaken and anti-democratic.

I nevertheless think that this article, which does make some important points about freedom of speech and does rightly argue that a corporation needn’t be considered a person for the purposes of absolutely everything, makes a mistake in belaboring the point that money isn’t speech. Because that isn’t the point. It’s not about money, it’s about advertising. The idea behind the free-speech argument and corporate campaigning in elections is that to limit corporate spending on political advertisements is effectively to muzzle the corporations’ ability to communicate their positions — i.e., to limit their ability to speak. That argument, as a self-contained point, is pretty hard to refute (however insistently one may rebut it). Efforts to show why the Supreme Court ruling is anti-democratic should not focus on that point, but should rather find effective ways to argue that the principle of freedom of speech neither need nor should be extended to corporations.

The Slate article goes some way in developing such arguments, as in this paragraph:

But some perspective: We limit speech—when it has nothing to do with wealthy people spending money—in many ways. (It wasn’t protected at all until the mid-1930s.) You famously can’t shout fire in a theater. You not-so-famously can’t break the theater’s rules, including rules about speaking, because you don’t really have any First Amendment rights in a privately owned theater or at work. The First Amendment limits only government. And even where it is fully protected, free speech has not been absolute; it’s subject to regulation when it undermines basic societal interests and functions, like voting and democracy. In the last few decades, the conservative justices dominating the court have also limited speech rights for demonstrators, students, and whistle blowers. They have restricted speech at shopping malls and transit terminals. Taken as a whole, the conservative court’s First Amendment jurisprudence has enlarged the speech rights available to wealthy people and corporations and restricted the speech rights available to people of ordinary means and to dissenters.

Now that is a strong paragraph. The current Supreme Court is indeed activist, utterly inconsistent, and ideologically driven. Its decision even to hear Bush v Gore was a historic low. The ruling itself sunk still deeper. But this last landmark ruling really takes the cake. What is happening to the American system of state under the current Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority is nothing short of disastrous.

Andrew Sullivan also makes, I think, at least the beginnings of an effective case — which complements the above passage from Slate, when he says:

But the notion that there is no difference between an individual’s inviolable right to speak or publish his or her own views and a corporation’s right to flood the marketplace with advertizing to advance its own economic interests and to effectively buy off politicians’ votes seems willfully perverse to me in the real world. I see the principle. But I’m pragmatic enough to believe this can be balanced by some good faith attempts to avoid the wholesale purchase of democratic speech by moneyed interests.

What is the point, after all, of free speech? The point is liberty. And liberty is protected by democracy. Using freedom of speech, therefore, as an argument for removing laws that are themselves designed to protect democracy — and for instating a set of circumstances that are a threat to democracy — is not coherent and cannot be principled or right.

But the attempt by the Slate article to set up an argument on the premise that the ruling was based on a theory that money equals speech is bound to fail.

Comments Roundup

Primavera has had a traffic boost of late, and for that would like to thank Norm, who has linked to a couple of my posts and, best of all, this past Friday also honoured Primavera with a Normblog Profile.

As a result, some comments have been coming in, and I’d like to highlight a few:

On Andrew Sullivan (too many posts to link to), Snoopy The Goon says…

If it quacks like a duck…

I am not sure one needs to meet a person to come to a conclusion about the person’s “real” thoughts. Sullivan for most of us is that disembodied spirit of his blog. You may conclude that this spirit is (or isn’t, I am not to be the judge) anti-Semitic, but there is no necessity to meet the body behind it. I think so, at least.

…and Inna says:

I too appreciate Andrew Sullivan’s blogging and frankly agree with him on many issues. And it pains me when he says stuff that frankly may well end in people being hurt. His is one of the most widely read blogs out there and so when he starts spouting anti-Semitic stuff, it’s going to get into the mainstream conversation. And that will, in turn, validate the feelings of some jerk who was just thinking about maybe hitting some Jew (or Zionist) or spray-painting a synagogue with a swastika or three.

I personally doubt Andrew is himself anti-Semitic. But I do think that if he doesn’t start taking responsibility for his words, he will continue to make this world a much worse place.

Regarding the Freedom of Anti-Semitic Speech post, Terry Glavin says:

I’m afraid you don’t understand me, Primavera. My point is that I’m normally an abolitionist on the matter of free-speech codes, but sometimes, I despair. I’ll admit to having despaired before, and to having come around. But a case like this is such a grotesque incitement, built upon an earlier incitement (the Aftonbladet libel), ad naseum, and it is producing real-world, horrific consequences, that I honestly don’t know which is worse – state intervention or something, em, else.

Part of the problem may be that a well-regulated “marketplace of ideas” (i.e. wiht free speech laws) doesn’t really exist in much of the Arab world, and barely exists in the Ukraine.

On the taking and granting of offence post, Lorenzo says:

Part of what is going on is an implicit or explicit denial of agency. When you write “It’s not that the cartoon gave offence so the offended man got angry and attacked (even if that’s what the attacker himself honestly believes). It’s that the cartoon offered the opportunity to construct a pretext for violence and intimidation, and the taking of offence is part of that construct”, you are treating those involved as full moral agents. Quite correctly.

Those who finds ways of blaming the West are, in effect, denying the agency of those offended while postulating a sort of uber-agency to those “did the offending”. This seems to be one of the “discoveries” of post-colonialism: that Western imperialism somehow permanently redistributed causal (and thus moral) agency in the world. (I have a related post on blaming the West first here.)

The latter post also got a much-appreciated incoming link from Martin in the Margins.

Last but not least, a strongly dissenting comment from Eric Blair (no url available) on Why Education is Not a Priority for Republicans:

Don’t be [expletive deleted] ignorant.

You obviously don’t know the first thing about US public schools.

Where do you think the Democrats went to school? Especially all the urban blacks who voted for Obama?

I guess they’re all ignorant too?

A fair enough point (if inelegantly made) and not one that I have an immediate answer to. Just two remarks. The first is that, as a broad generalisation, urban blacks seem to have a better feel for where their interests lie, in terms of voting, than do the rural white poor. (I will concede right away, however, that, in this context, that is a question-begging argument.) The second is that if you grow up poor and go to low-quality schools in a big city, you are still likely to be exposed to more worldliness and savvy than if you grow up poor and go to low-quality schools in the middle of nowhere. That’s an advantage the urban poor have over the rural poor, and might at least partly explain why the urban poor seem more able to vote in their own true interests than the rural poor.

When Sullivan Gets it Right

…which is more often than not, he sounds like this.

Prickly and Petulant

Roughly a year ago I sent an e-mail to a friend in which I wrote:

It was America who had had to come in, twice in a space of less than thirty years, to save Europe from itself, and then America who shielded Western Europe from the Soviet threat for almost half a century and, ultimately, America, and not Western Europe, into whose arms Eastern Europe rushed as soon as the Soviet prison fell apart. It will take more generations than have passed so far for the proud Western Europeans to forgive America for all of that – for having been so desperately needed, and for having been so great a benefactor and protector.

In today’s FT, Philip Stephens writes:

The US is throwing its weight around. Such was the accusation hurled by a French minister as Washington assumed control of the humanitarian effort in Haiti. It was a silly thing to say, but inadvertently it provided a glimpse of a helplessly conflicted view of the US. Of course, America must do the heavy lifting in global affairs; but woe betide if it does not afford due respect to the Europeans trailing in its wake.

In his remarks upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama mentioned a “reflexive suspicion of America”. He was being politic. It’s not really suspicion; it’s resentment.

Back to Stephens:

You could say there is nothing new in this. The strains were visible during the cold war. Europe sheltered from the Soviet threat under the US nuclear umbrella, but insisted all the while that it be free to treat with Moscow on its own terms. Britain was less inclined than most to challenge Washington. Many others thought it supine.

Did they really think Britain supine? I bet they had a hunch as to the real reason for Britain’s less complicated cooperation with the US: Britain didn’t have the Continent’s complexes. Britain had been, with the US, one of the two victorious powers in the war on the Western front (Canada was valiant and noble, but not a power). Britain had not been occupied; Britain had not needed to be saved; Britain had helped do the saving. Britain had more in common with the US at the end of the war than it had with the Continent. Still self-confident, then, in the second half of the Twentieth Century, Britain calmly saw to its own interests, and its own interests happened to be pretty much exactly aligned with those of the US. Britain just simply didn’t have the prickly needs that, for example, France had — and has.

Still, Philip Stephens’ column is very much worth a read.

Drop the Pilot

The plane didn’t take off from Ulaanbaatar, people. We’re talking a flight out of New York City — and there’s no one on board who’s seen tefillin before?

That’s surprising, but this is worrying: The pilot didn’t even know what they are! The flight attendant, okay, but the pilot? Aren’t the officers at the controls of these mammoth machines hurtling through the sky filled with hundreds of people at practically the speed of sound supposed to be, you know, with-it types?

I mean, as Toby Ziegler might have said,

You’ve got all kinds of atmospheric pressure up there. You’ve got wind sheer, down draft, massive turbulence, not to mention four giant engines burning jet fuel at galactic temperatures. It’s a flying death tube!

And the hero flying it, out of New York, had never before seen so much as a photo of tefillin. Comforting.

A Simple Plan

… advocated by a man who survived both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for preventing further nuclear war:

Mr. Yamaguchi, the double survivor, was among the advocates of a simple plan to end nuclear war, Mr. Pellegrino writes. That plan went like this: The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers, those who are still breast-feeding their babies.

From The New York Times.

Am I Ahead of the Political Curve?

A headline seen on Google News just now, half a day or so after my last post:

The Next Liberal Cause: Could it be Education?

Why Education is Not a Priority for the Republicans

I would like to clarify something I wrote in my preceding post, namely my description of Sarah Palin’s voters (those who voted for her in the US general election in 2008) as “illiterate”.

First, most obviously, and most trivially, this was not meant literally. Few, if any, of these people are unable to read and write. What I meant, of course, was poorly educated.

My main concern here, however, is to make it clear that I do not mean what I wrote to contain any element of scorn. In large parts of the US, the public-sector school system isn’t nearly as good as it should be. It falls well short of the standards that can and should be expected of state education in any wealthy and democratic country, not to mention the world’s wealthiest and most advanced. I have no reason not to believe that, for the most part, poorly educated Americans are good people and merely people who, relative to other sections of the country’s population, have received a bum deal. It is true that they are poorly educated, but it is not their fault.

Moreover, the people who emerge from these inferior state school systems are probably not, on average, any less natively intelligent than the more fortunate ones who get better schooling. But, though it sounds brutal, and though it is not their fault at all, they are ignorant.

The Republicans count on this. This relatively ignorant population is the Republican base. It’s this underprivileged population’s lack of education that allows the Republicans to dupe them, every single time, into voting into power a party that serves the interests of the privileged and powerful.

Ingorant but not Illiterate

Sarah Palin is much in the news again, and this provides an opportunity to say something about her that I’ve always wanted to say.

Her shortcomings, certainly for a former Governor of one of the United States and a former candidate for the Vice Presidency of that country, are significant and well documented. So well documented that I almost feel sorry for her. The only thing, indeed, that keeps me from feeling sorry for her is the fact that it was her own unbridled ambition and moxie (or what self-appointed philosemite and taxonomer of Jews Andrew Sullivan would leap at the chance to call “chutzpah”) that got her into such a harsh public light in the first place.

Where the ridicule of her has been for the vapidity and ignorance displayed by her words, it has been justified. But she has also been ridiculed for being borderline illiterate, utterly at sea with the English language, and that is most decidedly not the case.

On the contrary, she has a command of English — of syntax and grammatical logic — that is unusual in general and even unusual in politicians. And that command of English allows her to string together as well as any other politician highly verbose sentences that say almost nothing but involve so many words that her desperate ignorance of issues and facts is covered from the sight of those who truly are illiterate and are hence impressed by verbiage: her voters.

Crystal-Clear Dishwater

The purpose of this post is to recommend a blog that was just recently called to my attention. That blog is The Daily Dishwater. I’ve had a chance to have a quick scan of it — by no means a thorough read, but a look at the About page, the blogroll, and some of the posts. My impression is that the Dishwater and Primavera have much in common, including both a broad appreciation of Andrew Sullivan’s blogging, and a strong feeling that Sullivan is developing an attitude towards Jews that is, at best, unhealthy.

Here is a recent summary of Primavera’s take on Sullivan:

Several things make Andrew Sullivan a great blogger. One is his immediate, visceral approach: he says what he thinks about something in any given moment. Another is his intellectual honesty: he will say “I was wrong” when new information prompts him to correct or adjust something he’d said. A third (and by no means the last) is his human touch: he lets his emotions show, he comes across as a real person and not a calculated media persona.

Add to this the fact that I also agree with him on just about every substantive issue and it’s no wonder he’s one of my favourite bloggers. What are those issues? The Media. Iraq. Sarah Palin. President Obama. Health Care. Torture. Gay Rights. Israel. And many others.

Whoah, wait a minute — Israel? Absolutely. And why not? As far as I can make out, Sullivan thinks that all of the West Bank and Gaza should become a proper, independent Palestinian state, and so do I. As far as I can make out, Sullivan doesn’t think that Israel has any business building anything at all on territory it conquered in 1967, and neither do I.

No, I don’t have any problems with Sullivan’s positions on Israel/Palestine.

…

But sometimes I’m bothered by some of his symbolism and language.

I would like to note that now I appear to have moved, without having announced it, from giving Sullivan the benefit of the doubt regarding whether or not he has become anti-Semitic to basically now feeling that, yes, he has. But that’s not in fact really the point. Primavera doesn’t need to try to peer into the heart of Andrew Sullivan. All I need to do is read what he writes, and he is now writing anti-Semitic material. The question isn’t in fact whether he himself is anti-Semitic, but whether what he writes is, and, yes, he now writes things that, quite objectively, are.

Sullivan has already been preparing his defence against accusations of anti-Semitism, having evidently known they would be forthcoming. His tactic is not to deal with the accusations at all, but to employ the Livingstone manoeuvre.

He must be called out on that, and it must not be permitted, but at the same time I would like to underline that most of what Sullivan has written that could be seen as anti-Semitic has been about Jews qua Jews, not about Israel per se. See: His patronising self-declared philosemitism, his good-Jews-vs-bad-Jews taxonomy, his invoking of the “darkness” trope, his some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jews moments, his wrapping Anne Frank in a kefiyeh, his use of “neocon” as code for “Jew” and with it his insinuation of divided loyalty and untrustworthiness, and probably more.

So the Livingstone trick doesn’t even apply to much of what is at issue here.

Nevertheless it must be headed off, for some of what Sullivan does is demonisation — not criticism, but demonisation — of Israel. Comparing Israel to the Nazis, for example, as he did when he called Gaza a ghetto. Or: his repeated claims that Israel wants to go to war with Iran, as if Iran weren’t, quite openly and declaredly, threatening Israel’s very existence, and the potential of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities were from sheer lust for violence and blood on the part of Israel. Or, similarly, his frequent references to Israel “crushing” or “pulverising” Gaza, as if there were no reason in the world for Israel’s strikes against Hamas. The latter two examples constitute not only demonisation; they are also an extension of the age-old blood libel against Jews, portraying them as an incorrigibly bloodthirsty. None of this is negated in the slightest by Sullivan’s hedging moves in which he patronisingly mentions those acceptable Jews who manifest the officially-approved Jewish qualities of gentleness or whatever have you (go read Sullivan’s blog to figure out exactly what Jewish qualities he approves of). On the contrary, that simply has the effect of layering anti-Semitism over more anti-Semitism.

But I’ve already digressed. Read the Dishwater — it does an important job well. Sullivan is a great blogger — one of the greatest. All the more important to call attention to, and protest, that part of his writing that is objectively anti-Semitic.

Andrew Sullivan Finds Some Jews Acceptable

Well, speak of the devil. Not quite literally, of course. I mean Andrew Sullivan. I only just mentioned him, very much by the way, and bingo, now I have to do a post on him. Again.

There’s a lot of stuff in my mind that I would like to cover and this was originally intended to be a more ambitious post but no time right now so I’ll just give an extremely brief summary.

A recent post of Sullivan contains not one but two anti-Semitic tropes. Here they are:

1. Good Jews vs Bad Jews:

Most American Jews, of course, retain a respect for learning, compassion for the other, and support for minorities (Jews, for example, are the ethnic group most sympathetic to gay rights.) But the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing – that celebrates and believes in government torture, endorses the pulverization of Gazans with glee, and wants to attack Iran – is something else.

Gotta love that little “of course”, eh? Who the hell is Andrew Sullivan to start classifying and evaluating Jews? A patronizing little prick, that’s who. With self-declared philosemites like these, who needs anti-Semites? Go fuck yourself, Sullivan. Do us a favour and start hating us properly like the Ron-Paul-loving pratt you really are.

2. Shadows and darkness: not enough that the “neocons” Andrew disagrees with are, according to his learned opinion as expert taxonomer of Jews, betraying what Jews really ’should’ be like. No, there must also be “something much darker” about them. This is classic anti-Semitism.

UPDATE: there is an excellent post at The Daily Dishwater about yet a further anti-Semitic post by Sullivan, and as it does the job of dissecting his particular form of patronising racism very well, I’ll just leave you with the link, as I have to run.

Nor is the Body Count

I’ve had quite a few posts about Andrew Sullivan so far (relative to the still young age of this blog) and, if Sullivan’s recent form holds, will almost certainly have more, and have wondered whether, as a result, this blog would wind up being a sort of “Andrew Sullivan Watch”.

Similarly but differently, I’m also finding myself often linking to Normblog, albeit in a very different style, not with criticism but rather commentary (Primavera’s Talmud to Normblog’s Torah?).

Here’s one of the latter class of links. Norm explains that a state’s duty to take external threats extremely seriously does not arise from the fear, in and of itself, that its citizens may have of such threats, and is not dependent upon the degree of that fear. That is of course both correct and very important.

It triggered the following further thought.

What is it that is most to be feared about terrorism? Camos and Drum discuss, on the one hand, the fear of, in effect, getting blown up, crushed or incinerated, and, on the other, the difference between fear of harm from unpredictable events of nature and fear of harm from malicious groups of people who are intentionally and very persistently seeking to cause that harm. Me, when it comes to terrorism, it’s not the physical harm I’m worried about in the first place. I’m worried about what’s happening to our once wonderfully liberal and free systems of society, law and state.

Tony Blair was a leader whose personal instincts were liberal and enlightened. But as a head of government, responsible for seeing to it that the British state performed its duties toward its citizens responsibly, he came to say this: “Traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong as just made for another age.”

Free speech, the right to privacy, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, and other cornerstones of democracy are all being curtailed by Western, democratic, liberal states as they respond to the threat of terrorism.

It seems to me that the terrorists may not need to actually succeed in blowing up all that many people in order to achieve an important part of their aims: the destruction of democracy and liberal society.

Dislike at a Distance

Is it possible to dislike a person you have never met?

For me, that’s not a difficult question to answer. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people I dislike quite intensely without ever having come within spitting distance of them.

One of them is the prominent PAIJ Tony Judt. It would matter little to me how charming and engaging and warm he might be in person, his political views aside. I cannot leave his political views aside.

Judt advocates the destruction of Israel. Under the thoroughly disingenuous formulation of the “one-state solution”, Judt argues for a scenario in which the Jews become once again a vulnerable and persecuted minority, a nation without land or country.

Advocates of the so-called “one-state solution” always claim to have the good of everyone in mind and that a properly democratic, human-rights-and-civil-liberties-respecting multi-ethnic and multi-cultural state could be formed on the territory that is today Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and that everyone would live happily ever after. It’s a lie and they know it.

Olivier Kamm calls Judt’s stance terribly mistaken. Well, Kamm’s a bigger man than I am. I can’t find it in myself, I’m afraid, to call this campaign of Judt’s anything other than terribly nasty and terribly mendacious, and probably self-serving (as a highly “respected” PAIJ, he’s got a nice little niche going in places like the New York Review of Books).

Offence Taken? Not Granted.

There is a substantial post up on Normblog by the philosopher Eve Garrard. As with everything she writes, it is well worth a read.

I must say I find it worrying that such a post is even necessary. It really ought to be clear to every democratically-minded person these days why free speech needs to be protected, and that it’s got nothing to do with the accuracy or inaccuracy of religious beliefs or any others. (It further ought to be clear, although I am painfully aware that it isn’t, that, as Eve with customary eloquence demonstrates, the factual mistakenness of religious belief doesn’t render religion in and of itself, in sum, a force for evil in the world.)

But the observation I want to make here is a different one. Eve mentions the importance of getting across to people that no-one, including deeply committed religious believers, has the right not to be offended. That is indeed an extremely important point, and the degree to which the opposite seems to be believed by the political and other chattering classes is horrifying and does not bode well. But I would add something else, too, which is that we shouldn’t, either, be too quick to accept one of the main premises of that particular debate (the debate about whether people should be protected from being offended). I’m talking about the premise that someone like Westergaard’s would-be-axe-murderer was really doing what he did because he was offended (which he may nevertheless have considered himself to be). Or, for that matter, that the whole world-wide eruption of violence over the original Mohammed cartoons was really all just because people felt offended.

I’m of the point of view advocated by Paul Berman and others: these attacks, this violence – all this is not happening because a Danish paper published some depictions of Mohammed (which it did, and which there was nothing wrong with) or because Israel is building settlements on Palestinian land (which it is and which there is a great deal wrong with) or because the United States props up the ruling family of Saudi Arabia (which I gather it does and which it probably shouldn’t). Rather the terrorism and the constant protests and the intimidation and the violence are driven by a simultaneously nihilistic and totalitarian agenda to attack the Occident (or what my father used to call, with great affection, the Abendland) and, ultimately, take over parts of it, as much indeed as possible. This does not need to mean that, say, Westergaard’s attacker had that particular ideology and big-picture agenda in mind when he attacked. The foot soldiers of a movement needn’t have a true understanding of the big picture in order to do their job and are often merely brainwashed fools. Westergaard’s attacker (his name, it seems, is not being published – why not?) may well have felt offended, or thought he felt offended. But why is it that, at this particular juncture in history, some Muslims, or at least some Islamists, respond to feeling offended by becoming violent, while, by and large, people of other persuasions don’t? Is it in the nature of Islamic belief itself? I don’t think that it is, and I say that not by way of hastening to insert the politically correct disclaimer (I don’t care whom I offend and if I thought  it was inherent in Islam I would be happy to say so). Rather, it’s because the totalitarian, anti-Occident movement that Berman identified is indoctrinating its foot soldiers to behave this way. It’s not that the cartoon gave offence so the offended man got angry and attacked (even if that’s what the attacker himself honestly believes). It’s that the cartoon offered the opportunity to construct a pretext for violence and intimidation, and the taking of offence is part of that construct. There is a deeply dishonest and sinister, and extremely broad and radical, agenda behind the attack on Westergaard. And that is true even if the attacker, in his foot-soldier childishness, really thinks that he was acting alone and purely out of his own personal anger. If he thinks that, then he is simply unaware of the degree to which he had already been taught and conditioned to do violence.

One big problem I have in this whole area, this whole debate about the giving and taking of offence and how much of it should be allowed or tolerated or whatever, is the apparently unlimited credence given, in the first place, to those claiming to be offended. I think we all ought to move quite decidedly away from the automatic assumption that, in any case, the feeling of being offended, whatever else we might come to say about it, is at least real in and of itself and worthy of discussion as being the thing it claims to be.

In Support of Freedom of Anti-Semitic Speech

Terry Glavin, if I understand him correctly, thinks that this sort of thing should be outlawed. I do not. Glavin ends his post with this: “No to racism. Zero tolerance. No excuses. No exceptions.” Well, who can disagree with that — as far as it goes. But it only goes so far. Me, I’d rather have some anti-Semitism in my environment than see freedom of speech restricted even more than it already is.

UPDATE: Terry has clarified. Happily it turns out I didn’t understand him correctly. His remark in the comments. Thanks Terry.

Not Good Enough, But Still Good

The American Law Institute has now said, not that capital punishment should not be administered because it’s wrong, but that capital punishment should not be administered because, in practice, it cannot be done properly. It would have been better for them to declare that the death penalty is categorically wrong, but that was never going to happen. So we’ll have to be glad for this bit of progress in the fight against this particular, and particularly horrible, barbarism.

Back to the Middle Ages in Ireland

Fifteen years ago, this sort of thing would have been unimaginable. But a decade or so of terrorism against a free and secular West by religious extremists from the East, and a once-proudly-free society now cowed by both simple fear and an insidious and pathetically self-regarding political correctness, have already gotten things to the point where it not only happens but I am, to my own horror, not even shocked. (Hat tip: Norm)

The Safe Racism

Further regarding last Sunday’s hate rally led by British racist Jenny Tonge, commenter Inna at Engage makes a telling point. Several years ago Martin Amis spoke of an “urge” to hold all Muslims responsible for acts of terrorism committed by Islamist extremists. This, quite rightly, was met with outrage and caused quite a scandal, particularly in Britain, and Amis was, quite rightly, forced onto the defensive.

What a contrast. Here we have someone who doesn’t limit herself to merely describing an “urge” to hold all Jews responsible for what she sees as Israel’s transgressions, but actually goes ahead and does it, and… nothing. Inna asks:

Has Tonge been kicked out of her party for making these remarks? Had she made these remarks about any other people (e.g., Muslims) do you think she would have been?

Well, she certainly would have been scolded, and probably disciplined in one form or another. As it is, though, she’s likely to get off scott free.

What Israel Really Wants

The Jerusalem Post is not a publication I link to without some hesitation. It’s pretty right-wing, and I am not. A new column by its editor, David Horovitz, is worth a read, however. Especially the following:

The fact is that, broadly speaking, some two-thirds of our parliament, presumably representing some two-thirds of our public, wants to realize that vain hope Blair expressed a decade ago. Israel wants an accord with Syria and the rest of the Arab world if, but only if, that means lasting peace and does not expose Israel to heightened security risk. We want the regime in Iran that relentlessly seeks Israel’s destruction to be prevented from achieving a nuclear weapons capability and, preferably, to be removed from power altogether by its oppressed and betrayed populace. Internally, we want to maintain the near-miraculous status quo which somehow reconciles the modern State of Israel with the religious code that has sustained our people’s very existence through the generations.

And with far more clarity than a decade ago, we recognize that we want to be a Jewish, democratic state, which necessitates a separation from the Palestinians. We don’t want to be forced back to the pre-1967 lines – from where we were attacked relentlessly in the preceding 19 years and which rendered us untenably vulnerable. But we also know, most of us, that we cannot expand Jewish sovereign rule deep into Judea and Samaria, however legitimate our historical claim.

Our goal has become clearer, and our leadership more united around it. But that does not make its attainment more straightforward.

Arafat’s departure did not pave the way for dramatic progress. Neither did Assad’s replacement by his unexpectedly tenacious son. And Iran has spent the past decade radicalizing the entire region and beyond.

Protecting the relative security we enjoy today, furthermore, has become ever more complicated, as our enemies impose confrontations in civilian theaters of conflict where the nature of the consequent battle challenges our morality. And even as we strive to disarm our attackers in wars that quite plainly erupt because of their aggression, we are misrepresented and unfairly judged – with that promised international support slipping ever further away.

Yet while the delegitimization of Israel intensifies, the rapacious, bloodthirsty ambition of the Islamists calls into ever more unavoidable question the spurious assertion that Israel lies at the root of Middle East friction and Islamic grievance.

In 2001, America saw 9/11 for the fundamentalist declaration of war and challenge to Western freedoms that it so clearly was. By contrast, Britain, in 2005, refused to believe that the July 7 bombings of the London public transport system represented the smaller scale equivalent. And many nations around the world are still similarly intent on ignoring their Islamist threats within, ducking the obvious, seeking to place blame elsewhere, anywhere, including on Israel.

But sooner or later, even the likes of Britain – many of whose academics and union activists and clergymen and politicians and teachers and reporters apparently consider Islamic extremism an understandable response to the very fact of Israel’s existence – will no longer be able to maintain the myopia. They will no longer be able to talk away the obvious fact that murderous young zealots such as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, former president of the Islamic Society at University College London, did not become the would-be Christmas Day bomber of Northwest Airlines Flight 523 from Amsterdam to Detroit because the Middle East peace process stands unfinished.

Read the rest here.

The Odd Lies of Andrew Sullivan

Sanctions are a tool frequently used by the international community to pressure a regime to bring an end to abuses that are intolerable by today’s standards. Regardless of whether or not one supports sanctions against, say, North Korea, no serious voices are heard complaining that those sanctions are aimed at “the North Korean people”, for it is obvious that they are not.

Likewise, even in the widespread and frequent public discussions, in the media and at high political level, between opponents and proponents of sections against the dictatorial regime in Iran, no one has objected on the basis that such sanctions would somehow be a vicious attack on the population of Iran. Why not? Because that is just not the intent and everyone, on both sides of the debate, knows it. The potential effects of sanctions on a population are important to consider and are always a factor in the debate, but nobody (except, mendaciously, the target government, of course) claims that the point of sanctions is to attack the people of a country.

So why is Andrew Sullivan stating on his blog that Michael Oren has called for sanctions “against the Iranian people”? Has Oren suddenly broken new ground in the area of sanctions, and called for a whole new approach, namely to target the population of a country instead of its government?

He has done no such thing. Here’s what Oren suggested: “targeting the financial activities of the government, curbing the import of refined petroleum and limiting the ability of Iranian leaders to travel around the world”. 

Andrew Sullivan has posted a blatant lie.

A Slip of the Tonge and the Truth is Out

“Baroness” Jenny Tonge, a hideous old bag of a commoner who gained her title by virtue of a political seat in the House of Lords, said last Sunday: “Jews should be totally ashamed of themselves.” Jews. Not these Jews or those Jews. All Jews. So now her anti-Semitism (which we knew about all along) is out in the open.