It looks like the parable of David and Goliath is about to re-emerged on the world stage. Ironically, the previous battle cast the Israeli State as the heavy. The “David” of the piece was decentralized “4GW” (4th Generation Warfare) as deployed by an estimated 3,000 Hezbollah fighters.
The outcome of that battle was a serious blow to central governments everywhere. If one of the most effective government militaries in the world couldn’t deal with 3,000 militiamen, what good is it? The inevitable outcome of the ill conceived U.S. Government actions in Iraq and Afghanistan delivered two much more lethal blows to Goliath.
The uncivilized, barbaric ferocity of the actions against Fallujah — and against ISIS in Mosul and Syria — demonstrate the consternation and fear hierarchical organizations experience when confronting non-hierarchical opposition they’re unable to understand – – –
“The central secret to Hezbollah’s success is that it trained its (global) guerrillas to make decisions autonomously (classic 4GW), at the small group level. In every area — from firing rockets to defending prepared positions to media routing around jamming/disruption — we have examples of Hezbollah teams deciding, adapting, innovating, and collaborating without reference to any central authority. The result of this decentralization is that Hezbollah’s aggregate decision cycles are faster and qualitatively better than those of their Israeli counterparts.” Global Guerrillas, Sunday, July 30, 2006 THE SECRETS OF HEZBOLLAH’S SUCCESS, Organizational Improvements
Hamas is just what you get when you create an intolerably abusive apartheid state which keeps millions of people in a concentration camp whose inhabitants are cut off from basic human needs and make peaceful revolution impossible. Hamas isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is an apartheid settler-colonialist project which cannot exist without endless violence, warfare and abuse.
The response to the Gaza crisis from western leaders and media outlets and celebrities shows very clearly that we really are led by the least among us. The least wise. The least intelligent. The least compassionate. The least insightful. We are ruled by sociopaths and morons.
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You are being offered two narratives to choose from:
Palestinians in Gaza are evil orc-like savages who just want to murder Jews and must therefore be caged and killed.
Palestinians in Gaza are thinking human beings who are reacting to intolerable abuses inflicted upon them.
Which is more believable?
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We’re being told that Israel needs to wage a relentless bombing campaign which is killing civilians by the thousands in order to eliminate Hamas, because Hamas must be destroyed to achieve a lasting peace. Every part of this is transparently false.
Firstly the premise that Hamas must be eliminated to achieve peace is fallacious; peace can be achieved by eliminating the abuses and righting the wrongs which gave rise to Hamas in the first place. There’s no rational reason to believe Hamas would continue to exist in its current iteration or keep waging violent resistance if the theft and injustice from 1948 onward were rolled back, refugees had the right to return, apartheid abuses were ended, and people were no longer kept in a giant concentration camp where they are deprived of basic human needs.
Secondly the premise that you can bomb people into accepting an abusive status quo is self-evidently absurd. Even if Israel kills every single member of Hamas, there will be hundreds of thousands of survivors of this onslaught who see the depravity of Israel and refuse to accept it. You think all these orphaned boys and all these men who saw their loved ones ripped apart by military explosives are just going to be cool with the status quo from here on out? Of course not.
The problem with this thinking, Bastiat and Hazlitt explain, is that it cites only the economic activity that can be seen to result from the broken window. What goes unseen is the cost—all the economic activity the shopkeeper would have instead spurred had he not been forced to buy a new window.
And because the shopkeeper would have preferred to spend the $50 elsewhere, the breaking of the window can only be considered a net loss. The glazier benefits from the shopkeeper’s loss, but the shopkeeper and therefore the overall economy are made poorer.
As the long-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia stalls and a new war in Gaza draws the world’s attention, American support for funding Kyiv’s war has waned. In an effort to reverse this, the Biden administration is changing its messaging. A Politico report from last week details how White House aides are now telling members of Congress to sell Americans the lie that continuing to send money and weapons to Ukraine is good for the economy.
President Joe Biden made this point himself when he introduced a $105 billion proposal to send military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan:
We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores, our own stockpiles, with new equipment. Equipment that defends America and is made in America. Patriot missiles for air defense batteries, made in Arizona. Artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas. And so much more.
With this new talking point, the Biden administration is echoing Senator Mitch McConnell, who has for months been saying that the war in Ukraine is an excellent deal because American companies get paid, the Russian regime is weakened, and only Ukrainians have to die.
Setting aside the morality or practicality of Biden and McConnell’s foreign policy ambitions, the argument that all this military spending is good for the American economy relies on one of the oldest, most pervasive economic fallacies in our political discourse—the broken window fallacy.
First outlined by French economist Frédéric Bastiat in his essay “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen” and later expounded upon by economic journalist Henry Hazlitt in his bookEconomics in One Lesson, the broken window fallacy is the false belief that spending money on restoring things that have been destroyed can make an economy richer.
To make this point, Bastiat used the example of a broken shop window. After his careless son breaks a pane of glass, a shopkeeper is forced to hire a glazier to repair the damage. A group of bystanders reflect on the situation and question their impulse to condemn the boy. After all, they ask, “what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”
If there is one thing artificial intelligence should be great at, it’s treating everyone equally. As far as the algorithm is concerned, everyone in the human race can be represented by 0s and 1s. AI doesn’t necessarily see black and white, male or female; it just sees a human: that person’s experiences, criminal record, resume, and social media account — pretty much anything available about them online.
Or, at least, that’s the theory.
But some scientists and philosophers — and President Joe Biden’s administration — think differently. The trouble is that while AI might treat everyone equally, it won’t necessarily treat everyone equitably.
Making AI Equitable
On Monday, Biden signed an executive order that not only established some vague ground rules for regulating artificial intelligence but also included an entire section on “Advancing Equity and Civil Rights,” which aims to ensure AI doesn’t discriminate against individuals applying to rent a house, receive government assistance, or be awarded a federal contract.
The order states that Biden will provide “clear guidance” to services using AI to screen applicants; tasks the Department of Justice and federal civil rights offices with providing training and technical assistance in “investigating and prosecuting civil rights violations related to AI”; and commits resources to developing better ways to use AI in detecting, investigating, and punishing crime. (READ MORE: Physiognomy Is Real, and AI Is Here to Prove It)
At first glance, this might make sense. There’s always the possibility that AI could err in its automated screening processes. For instance, in 2018, a man named Chris Robinson was denied a rental application to a California senior living community because the artificial intelligence system that ran his background check mistook him for another man with the same name who had been convicted of littering in a state in which Robinson had never lived. But while Robinson’s case qualifies as an instance of unfair (and accidental) discrimination, it certainly isn’t one of “inequity.”
And the Biden administration isn’t trying to fix the kind of mistake that resulted in the denial of Robinson’s rental application. Instead, it wants to ensure that AI adjusts to a woke worldview that filters decisions through past wrongs — real or imagined.
The ‘Principle of Autonomy’ Is ‘Inequitable’
The Left has decided that the problem with AI is that it views humans autonomously. In one study published by Topoi, an international review of philosophy, authors Sábëlo Mhlambi and Simona Tiribelli argue that the very “principle of autonomy” is flawed. It’s a construct rooted in “Western traditional philosophy,” they argue, and “[a]dherence to such principle, as currently formalized, … fail[s] to grasp a broader range of AI-empowered harms profoundly tied to the legacy of colonization.”
In practical terms, AI systems tend to predict crime statistics that woke leftists don’t like. For instance, as AI research group Prolific reports, the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) used AI to predict “the likelihood that US criminals would re-offend.” The system noticed that individuals who were black were more likely to fall in that category, and, because AI isn’t politically correct, it reported exactly that. (READ MORE: People Are Working on Using AI to Steal From You)
New fountain in Vienna expresses contempt for the city and its inhabitants.
Note the revolting distortion of what appears to be a vaguely female figure wearing a mask. This is an expression of pure hatred and contempt for humanity. The poor people of Favoriten who walk past it every day will eventually grow accustomed to the dread and unease they will feel when they see it.
I’ve often wondered what someone who grew up in Vienna would think if he were suddenly transported to once beautiful San Francisco and confronted with the spectacle of thousands of homeless people living on sidewalks and using them as latrines.
I believe he would be so shocked by the squalor, ruin, and indignity of it that he would scarcely believe it possible in a country that considers itself civilized. He would literally say to himself, “This can’t be real.”
For a while in the 1990s, the City of Vienna tolerated drug addicts loitering around the Karlsplatz subway station, but eventually changed the policy because the city’s inhabitants objected to it. By longstanding tradition going back to the Vienna’s rapid growth in the 19th century—guided by very talented and civic-minded urban planners—the inhabitants of Vienna have come to regard their city a beautiful, clean, and orderly place, celebrated in the popular folksong “Wien, Wien, nur du allein” (Vienna, Vienna, only you alone).
Those who now run the City of Vienna seem to understand that the spectacle of dehumanization, expressed by actual humans living in abject squalor on the streets, would not be tolerated. Another approach to normalizing ugliness and the subversion of dignity is to express it in a public monument.
This morning I saw the news that the City of Vienna recently unveiled a new fountain in the Favoriten district near the West Train Station on which it spent 1.8 million Euros of taxpayer money.
What it has done is made enemies that the U.S. would not otherwise have had.
The Truman State Department warned in the late 1940s that the U.S. would squander this good will via President Truman’s bias toward Israel (which Truman told Clark Clifford was dictated largely by domestic political considerations). The U.S., they said, would share the blame for whatever Israel did (and indeed Truman was evidently appalled at how Israel handled the refugee situation).
You will not run across anyone in official conservatism telling you this. Their salaries depend on not telling you.
I lost some subscribers yesterday, which I expected. But I’m still here and all is well.
One person accused me of a “double standard” because all lobbying groups pursue their interests. So why was I singling out AIPAC?
How about because AIPAC smeared the most principled and courageous U.S. congressman we have? Is that answer sufficient for the police?
I wouldn’t say there’s exactly been a shortage of criticisms of other lobbying groups — the military-industrial complex gets its share of attention, I’d say — in my writing.
Again, imagine creating an organization aimed entirely at enriching a foreign country at the expense of the one in which you live, and then throwing career-destroying smears around at people who decline to comply. You cannot imagine that, thank goodness, because you’re not motivated by narcissistic self-preoccupation.
I have heard and I understand the reasons people have for supporting the Israeli regime.
My points are these:
(1) It is not reasonable to describe the Israeli government as our “greatest ally.” If you thought silly platitudes that are supposed to become true through repetition were confined to the left, think again. This particular one is a favorite of Conservatism, Inc. The “special relationship” with Israel confers no benefit on the U.S. How could it? What can a country of 9 million, half a world a way, do for us?
What it has done is made enemies that the U.S. would not otherwise have had.
Yes, I have heard the arguments: the Muslim world would have hated us no matter what we did, etc. I don’t buy it. At the time of the King-Crane Commission, the United States had an excellent reputation in the Middle East. When asked what country they’d like to govern them as League of Nations mandates, Middle Easterners overwhelmingly said the United States. That’s so inconceivable today that I wouldn’t blame you for not believing me.
The Truman State Department warned in the late 1940s that the U.S. would squander this good will via President Truman’s bias toward Israel (which Truman told Clark Clifford was dictated largely by domestic political considerations). The U.S., they said, would share the blame for whatever Israel did (and indeed Truman was evidently appalled at how Israel handled the refugee situation).
You will not run across anyone in official conservatism telling you this. Their salaries depend on not telling you.
(2) Christians may have their own secular reasons for wishing to lend support to the Israeli government, but they are under no theological obligation to do so.
Let’s not forget these great figures who were vital to the development of today’s high living standards and of the universally applicable philosophy of individual liberty, private property, free markets, and peace. This proper foundation for domestic and foreign policy was and today remains explicitly pro-freedom in all spheres and anti-aggression.
Those of us whose pro-peace/antiwar principles are of the bourgeois classical-liberal variety need reminding now and again that we have a glorious tradition going back hundreds of years. We need not get lost in the dominant rhetoric that opposes war, empire, and its deadly accouterments from a flawed anti-individualist, anti-Western, and socialist position.
No, we can draw on a proud history of writers and activists who opposed war and intervention not just for the obvious reason — harm to others — but also because peace and nonintervention are required for reaping the full benefits of private property, specialization and the division of labor, free global trade, and the unobstructed movement of people in search of better lives. It would be mistaken to regard this as a union of humanitarian and so-called “economic” justifications for peace-mongering. For those classical liberals, freedom to produce, trade, and consume was simply another humanitarian reason to oppose the disruption of war.
Two of the best exemplars of bourgeois pro-market peace activism were the Englishmen Richard Cobden and John Bright, both members of Parliament, manufacturers, orators, and activists. In the mid-19th century, they built a movement that has been in the history books ever since. They are best known for opposing England’s tariff on imported grain (“corn”), which raised the price of bread to enrich the land-owing aristocracy. Cobden and Bright successfully fought their battle through the Anti-Corn Law League.
Cobdden and Bright did not compartmentalize but rather explicitly linked free trade to peace and opposition to military spending and intervention. They had a friend and ally on the continent in the French laissez-faire liberal Frédéric Bastiat.
These classical liberals understood that if a social conflict is to be avoided and society is to develop for all, then the industrious members of the population — entrepreneurs and employees, both of whom produce valuable goods through their labor — must be free from those who use government-granted privileges to legally steal from the industrious. (Ironically, Marx credited the classical liberals with devising this class analysis, but then screwed it up by putting business creators in the exploiter class.)
Cobden and Bright were not only clear and analytical; they were also passionate. They were great orators inside of Parliament and outside. The liberals’ association of peace and free trade can be seen in this example of Cobden’s eloquence:
How shall a profession which withdraws from productive industry the ablest of the human race, and teaches them systematically the best modes of destroying mankind, which awards honours only in proportion to the number of victims offered at its sanguinary altar, which overturns cities, ravages farms and vineyards, uproots forests, burns the ripened harvest, which, in a word, exists but in the absence of law, order, and security — how can such a profession be favourable to commerce, which increases only with the increase of human life, whose parent is agriculture, and which perishes or flies at the approach of lawless rapine?
He finishes this passage with a rebuke to those who wanted the English government to compel foreign populations to do business with privileged government-granted monopoly interests:
They who propose to influence by force the traffic of the world, forget that affairs of trade, like matters of conscience, change their very nature if touched by the hand of violence; for as faith, if forced, would no longer be religion, but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery if coerced by warlike armaments.
Take a quick look at the brave new world that is renewable energy and with it the end of coal.
Of course, this has been followed up with a steady stream of hysteria. Stern-faced weather-men, weather-women, and weather-people insist we’re facing apocalyptic heat, or cold, or rain or cats coming down, even dogs. Either way, New York is soon to be underwater… or is it dry as a bone? Depends on the day and weather-people, I guess.
One does have to wonder at what point folks wake up. Perhaps literally it takes place when one wakes in the morning, pulls back the curtains, and sees the sun shining and a beautiful day ahead… right after having heard the night before from some spineless diversity hire on the idiot box that Armageddon is surely coming… because, climate change. I often wonder about these things.
It’s worth remembering that the witch burning in the so-called Dark Ages lasted for nearly a decade and by some accounts only stopped when they began running out of women, so it’s entirely possible that this hysteria continues unchecked for a long time.
What warms the cockles of my heart (I’m not sure what cockles are but mine are warm) is that clearly many countries either see this for the obvious nonsense it is or they simply look at the option of baking or freezing (depending on where they live and perhaps the seasons), and conclude that they are unprepared to give up on the central heating or air conditioner. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the “elites” who are telling them to stop showering do so from the comforts of one of their multiple mansions after landing their private jets. Either which way, electricity consumption seems to be continuing unabated — as we promised it would.
Here’s a neat infographic of what powered the world last year.
It’s almost as if coal isn’t going away anytime soon. Wow! “You mean to say the pointy shoes with their “modeling” of outcomes are about as far off as Neil Ferguson was on the COVID hysteria.
And now as ZeroHedge reports, Fortescue Metals just halted playing the carbon offset game.
In what sense do wars support democracy? They merely ensure that many of the persons who made up the populace at the outset of the conflict no longer exist. Despite having never, in most cases, supported the war in which they were destroyed, they will never vote again.
In its cursory treatment of the planned shipment of depleted uranium-tipped missiles to Ukraine, which was opposed by many organizations and countries, NPR host Leila Fadel interviewed one “expert,” Toghzan Kassenova, who cheerfully explained that “it’s important to remember that depleted uranium is considerably less radioactive than natural uranium.”
The Joe Biden administration recently managed to persuade politicians and a number of outspoken pundits to applaud the provision of cluster bombs to the Ukrainian government for use on Ukrainian soil. One war crime leads to another, so perhaps no one should be surprised that the U.S. government has now opted to ship depleted uranium-tipped missiles to Ukraine as well. The notion that the use of such weapons will help to defend democracy should jar the cognitive faculties of any person with a functioning cortex.
Democracy is “rule by the people,” while unexploded ordnance, such as the bomblets left behind by cluster munitions, kills future persons in no way supportive of a war which took place before they were born. Similarly, the babies of women exposed to the dust generated by depleted uranium-tipped missiles, found to be carcinogenic and teratogenic in both Kosovo and Iraq, have their prospects radically diminished as a result of the decisions of military and government officials to deploy such weapons. The flawed arguments used to rationalize the shipment of cluster bombs to Ukraine have evidently quelled any analogous concerns among those who support the provision of depleted uranium-tipped missiles to that land.
The primary reason for the near silence in the mainstream media on the issue of DU-tipped missiles is that the Pentagon itself steadfastly denies that the munitions pose any real danger to the inhabitants of the lands where they are used. This is accomplished by setting the epistemological bar unachievably high: demanding something akin to mathematical certainty before admitting that weapons waste harms human beings. The usual “Correlation is not causation!” slogan is recycled every time the government undertakes to defend itself from allegations that it is poisoning people. It happened in Vietnam, after the use of Agent Orange; in Iraq, after the bombing of chemical factories in 1991; in Iraq, again, after the use of open-air burn pits from 2003 on…
In cases where U.S. troops themselves have suffered through exposure to toxic weapons waste, an acknowledgement of causation may finally emerge, decades after a conflict, as in the case of Agent Orange in Vietnam, long after the policymakers have receded from public life. (In an interview with Errol Morris in the 2003 film The Fog of War, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara infamously claimed, to his eternal shame, that he did not recall having authorized the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.) Contemporaneously, the public relations apparatus of the Pentagon reflexively denies any and every allegation of malfeasance, effectively enabling evil by protecting those who perpetrate pernicious policies. When eventually, as in the case of Agent Orange, it becomes undeniable that correlation was in fact causation, the denial of moral responsibility for the harms done is systematically defended through appeal to the good intentions of the government administrators who implemented what proved to be disastrous policies. They meant to do well!
Unfortunately, the press, including once-reputable outlets such as NPR (National Public Radio), now serve primarily to parrot the official proclamations of what has transmogrified into a military state. In its cursory treatment of the planned shipment of depleted uranium-tipped missiles to Ukraine, which was opposed by many organizations and countries, NPR host Leila Fadel interviewed one “expert,” Toghzan Kassenova, who cheerfully explained that “it’s important to remember that depleted uranium is considerably less radioactive than natural uranium.” Kassenova concluded his segment with a rousing endorsement of the plan to send the controversial weapons to Ukraine.
Despite the existence of studies demonstrating anomalous “correlations” between proximity to spent DU-missiles and the incidence of cancer and birth defects, which are most plausibly explained as instances of causation, the U.S. government and its propagandists remain steadfast in their insistence that no proof exists that the use of such weapons in Kosovo and Iraq, among other places, ever harmed anyone. No cancer, no birth defects. The cranks just pulled together all the birth defects and cancer cases they could find and blamed them on the entirely innocent military!
MCViewPoint 