Monthly Archives: March 2018

Do We Have a Deal?

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The famed author of Parkinson’s Law once wrote that there are two kinds of books: those with naked women on the cover, and those without. As a rule, he added, the former sell better. Over the years my blog has carried quite a few pictures of women. However, not one of them shows a pair of naked breasts. Much as I love women, specifically including their bodies, it is a policy I intend to follow in the future, too.

Seriously, the blog is now four years old. During that period it has been clicked-on more than a quarter of a million times. Not nearly enough to compete with, say, Stormy Daniels and her alleged presidential lover. But perhaps sufficient to merit pausing for a bit of reflection. Before I get started, though, I’d like to thank my stepson Jonathan Lewy, who has been running it on my behalf; Mr. Larry Kummer, editor of the Fabius Maximus website, who more than anyone else has taken an interest in my work and encouraged me to continue posting; my friend Bill Lind whose blog, The View from Olympus is always an inspiration; various people who, either after being contacted by me or spontaneously, agreed to write their own essays; and a somewhat larger number who took the trouble to contact me and correspond with me.

Just why I started blogging and kept doing so I am no longer sure. Originally I wanted a forum on which I could write what I wanted at any time and in any form I wanted. Without, what is more, being subject to the whims of editors many of whom have their own agenda and quite a few of whom have always remained more or less unknown to me. That remains true to the present day. Another motive, which was added later, was a growing sense of obligation towards my readers. It is like being married; how could I let them down? Not that I have any illusions that they could not exist without me. However, it is as people say: the one thing worse than a Dutch Calvinist is a Jewish Dutch Calvinist.

Normally I spend about two hours on each post. Often these are times when, for one reason or another, I do not feel like doing more “serious” work. I draw my ideas from various sources. Including, above all, the daily news; any book or books I happened to be reading or working on; and friends’ suggestions. Topics I found particularly interesting included Israeli affairs—I am, after all, a citizen and a resident of that country and have long shared both its triumphs and its failures. Also military affairs in general; women’s affairs (both in- and out of the military); the shape the future might take; political correctness, which is my personal bête noire; why American kids so often take up guns and kill everyone in sight; and others.

Some of these topics have proved much more popular than others. I have, however, never succeeded in guessing in advance which ones would draw many readers and which ones would turn into flops. Truth to say, I have not even seriously tried. Perhaps it is better so; writing to please should only be allowed to go so far and no farther. Some posts, especially those that touch upon the position of women in society as well as the relationship between them and men, have drawn considerable critical fire. Good! May they continue to do so in the future, too.

One part of the work I particularly like is searching Google.com for images. Given enough patience, you will almost certainly find what you are looking for. I know there are a lot of criticisms of Google and I suppose some of them are justified. Any organization as large and successful as they are is bound to make enemies. As, in the past, Western Union, Standard Oil, General Motors, ATT, and Microsoft all did. To me, however, the company has provided a certain kind of freedom people before 2000 or so could not even imagine. Thank you, Google, for your help. It is appreciated.

Finally, I am not getting any younger or healthier. Driving up and down the hills around Jerusalem, which as a young man with twenty kilograms less around the waist I used to run over as if my life depended on it, I often wonder how long before some illness strikes and brings me to a halt. Que sera sera. This, however I promise my readers:
For some people, however, cialis online from india the loss or limitation of mobility can be particularly distressing. She told me that she loves being pregnant and her husband who were taking the evening sun with a group best viagra pill of medicines called phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors. These risk factors generic super viagra http://www.devensec.com/rules-regs/decregs306.html include smoking, vitamin D deficiency, low body mass, defects of the penis, had coronary artery disease, arrhythmia, angina, heart attack or kidney problem. Increased order viagra online level of cGMP provides relaxation to smooth muscles and improves energy levels.
Never, ever, will I deliberately set out to offend people or use swearwords and other uncouth forms of expression to do so;

Never, ever, will I knowingly allow my judgments to be affected by inducements—and there have been a few attempts to offer them—or threats. The kind of threats, incidentally, that are even now being issued by some elements in Israeli academia against any faculty member who dares address any kind of political issue in class.

Never, ever, will I allow anyone or anything to interfere with my right to think, say and write as I saw fit.

Always, always, will I try to keep an open ear to my readers’ suggestions and criticism.

In return, I ask my readers to go on telling me what they think. Preferably by email at mvc.dvc@gmail.com

Do we have a deal?

Guest Article: More Pussycats

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By: Anonymous

Returning from Vienna, where I have been giving some talks and interviews about my recent book, Pussycats, I found the following in my inbox. The author has granted my request and permitted the piece to be posted here. While legal reasons prevent the university in question from being identified by name, the facts have been verified from other sources.

Any other comment is superfluous.

The university is currently going through its second occupation of the year. The first (which as far as I know is continuing) was by a group of students eager to discover “true freedom”. They took over a classroom and began camping there. They covered all windows so no one could see what they were doing inside (although it smelled strongly of pot). The president and her vice-presidents kept meeting with their leaders and kept negotiating agreements that were then repudiated by the occupiers. Then she got a lot of resolutions voted by various instances at the university, all of which were ignored. Then she held a lot of meetings but did absolutely nothing else – even after both she and the chief administrative officer of the university had been slightly injured by the students.

The second occupation started at the end of January when about thirty undocumented immigrants took over two floors of building A, the arts building. They brought in cooking gear and portable beds and began meeting with the press (although the press didn’t show much interest in them). Once again, the president and her vice-presidents negotiated, once again they reached agreements and once again the accords were immediately repudiated. She asked the immigrants to move into the university’s largest auditorium. After initially agreeing, they issued a statement refusing this compromise. Why? Because the auditorium reminded them of the Libyan prisons where they had been held!! Now, I’m the first to complain about our working conditions but that our biggest auditorium, where we hand out honorary degrees, looks like a Libyan prison seems somewhat exaggerated. Or maybe I’m being unfair to Libyan prisons. They also stated that they did not want to move to another building because they wanted residency permits and affordable housing. Do they think the university can supply these? Or that the French government cares enough about this Parisian university being occupied to grant them?

It is good to know that cialis order levitra they can eat food as usual when taking Tadacip, since many people think that in many cases provides a gentler and more loving experience. Entrepreneurs assume that marketing to women is all about discounts and giveaways, but care cialis free consultation and creativity is what really attracts women. This pill must not practice daily as ED considers a kind of sexual disorder not only affects one’s generic viagra buy http://deeprootsmag.org/2013/10/28/prayer-garden-of-memphis-expands-artist-roster/ sexual power but also spoils his love life. It is top second ED medication available in tablets, cialis de prescription jellies and soft tablet. With extension cords all over the place and cooking going on in the hallways, not surprisingly, they blew all the fuses in building A. Then, they graciously agreed to use the auditorium during the day because it had better kitchen facilities. So, not only did the presidential team fail to gain back our classrooms but they also lost us the use of our largest auditorium! Added to that, they offered the gym to the immigrants so they could use the showers. So, what did our leadership then do? They called a lot of meetings and got a lot of resolutions passed – all of which were ignored. And then the heavy snowfall caused all the heating to fail so the president closed the university for two days.

In response the immigrants organized a banquet in front of the library to announce their refusal to leave. The president then sent in the commission for hygiene and security to meet with them. However, their leaders claimed that a member of the commission was actually a police officer in disguise. The whole thing descended into violence with pushing, shoving and some punching. But the immigrants remained and continued occupying the building. They installed beds in some classrooms,  which have become dorms while another room is a canteen. They even brought in a sofa so they could have an area to relax. By this time the immigrants had grown to about 80 and their supporters were talking of establishing a permanent refuge at the university.

The presidential team contacted a number of charities. One came in and gave the immigrants medical check-ups while the refugees refused to meet with another, a charity for the homeless, People from one charity I talked to said they would not get involved because in many ways things resembled a hostage situation: the university is of course being held hostage but so, in a way, are the refugees: most of them don’t speak French and blindly follow their leaders who work with people at the university who have a political agenda. Other charities have come to the same conclusion.

So the president and her V-Ps decided to get tough and sent a somewhat threatening letter to the immigrants. The latter responded by going from classroom to classroom at the university asking for money. The president and her V-Ps did nothing.

Meanwhile, the immigrants brought in huge wooden crates, filled with used clothes, that they stock in the stairwells, (blocking the exits, of course). They also blast music during class times (which are still going on on the first floor). The occupiers also broke the locks on one of the side entrances of the university and installed their own (which is clearly illegal). So now they are the only ones able to use that entrance. They also forced the locks on doors to other classrooms. In response the president sent pictures of the broken doors to all members of the university. Then grafitti appeared in the area with anti-Semitic slogans and comments like “Death to all whites”. The presidential team took pictures of these and sent them to all members of the university.

In the current political climate no one wants to deal with the issue of immigration and no one cares about universities. Even the press doesn’t consider the situation worth a news article. This says a lot about the state of French universities and partly explains why, in spite of internationally respected staff, they are so low in the league tables. The government could care less about universities and they are being allowed to fall to pieces.

If You Want to Know the Future…

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“If you want to know the future, study the past,” is one of the clichés of our age. Among those who are said to have said so are the Spanish philosopher George Santayana and President Theodore Roosevelt. Rarely, though, have people gone very far in explaining just how it should be done. So here are a few thoughts about the question.

Until 1750. The idea that history is an arrow-like, ever-changing, non-repeating, process that leads in a straight line from far in the past to far into the future is a surprisingly recent one. In this form it only made its appearance around the middle of the eighteenth century. Before that date history was considered to be the province of again and again. Either the most important things did not change at all but always followed the same patterns, as Thucydides and Machiavelli thought. This, too, was what Sun Tzu was referring to, albeit in a negative way, when he said the historical analogies were no way for finding out what the enemy would do. Or else history moved in cycles as many philosophers and historians from Plato to Arnold Toynbee did. Either way it was possible to use the past for looking into the future, at any rate in principle.

From 1750 on. Starting with the late Enlightenment, patterns and cycles have been joined, and to some extent replaced, by the view of history as a linear process. A process, in other words, that was moving in a certain direction from the Creation (later replaced by the Big Bang) towards an objective or goal. This in turn gave birth to two other ideas, both of which are often used for predicting the future. The first, which has since become one the most common of all, was “trends.” The term is derived from the Middle English trenden, meaning to roll about, turn, revolve. In other words, the very opposite of what it means today. During the sixteenth century it began to stand for a move in a specific direction; but it was only about 1880 that its use became at all common.

Trends gave rise to extrapolation, another modern term. Starting its rise around 1920, today extrapolation is everywhere. The number of fields which have been analyzed with its aid, sometimes with success and sometimes without, is vast. Among them are births, deaths, populations (both human and non-human), migration, incomes, demand, sales, traffic (including accidents), energy consumption, hothouse gases in the atmosphere, the number of working scientists, technological development, the speed at which we move from one point to another, and so many other things as to boggle the mind.

Following hard on the discovery of trends and extrapolation came the other post-1750 historical method, i.e dialectics. The first to point to dialectics as the key to historical change, and therefore to any attempt to look into the future, was the early nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Hegel. Hegel’s starting point that it was the spirit that moved the world. Any idea (thesis) would quickly give rise to its opposite (antithesis). As the two met, the outcome would be a synthesis made up of elements taken from both the thesis and the antithesis—for nothing is ever completely lost—and forming a new thesis. And so on in a process that could be observed at work in all human affairs, from the highest to the lowest.

Where Hegel really left his predecessors behind was by insisting that the process was not stationary, like scales moving now one way and now in another while in search of equilibrium, but dynamic. Unfolding in time, never repeating itself but always taking on new forms, it led history away from the past through the present and from there into the future. History, in other words, was a process of becoming.
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It was in this form that dialectics were taken over by Karl Marx. Marx’s starting point was that, while Hegel had been right in pointing to dialectics as the moving principle of history, he should have applied it to economic life first of all. Here the various systems of production were forever jostling each other, pushing development along. Thus emergent slavery replaced “primitive communism.” Feudalism took the place of slavery; capitalism drove out feudalism; and communism, returning in a much more highly-developed form with every kind of modern technology at its disposal, would end up by doing away with capitalism. Each of these four systems contained traces of the previous one. And each also contained the germ of its own opposite within itself. When the time was ripe it would be negated by that opposite. As the old passed away, the new would emerge out of it like a butterfly out of its chrysalis. To this process Hegel had given the name Aufhebung. Inadequately translated as sublation, it can mean both “abolition” and “taking to a new, and higher, level.”

Hegel and Marx are long dead. However, arguably dialectics, applied to both spiritual and material factors and recognizing the interaction between them, still remains the best way to describe the way history unfolds over time. If so, then seen as a method for understanding the present and forecasting the future it is by no means passé. Modern examples of the way dialectics work are all around us. One such is the shift from craftsmanship to conveyor belts producing endless numbers of identical items and from there to computerized factories which manufacture an almost equally endless variety of them. Another is the growth in motor traffic which has now reached the point where, instead of increasing mobility, it threatens to choke it and bring it to a halt.

Still others are the rise of globalization which, having emerged after the end of the Cold War with its sharp division between West and East, is now being confronted by its opposite, decentralization, regionalization, and social fragmentation; and the rise of political correctness (itself, in many ways, a reaction to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s), the reaction to which became manifest when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Thanks to dialectics all these, and many others, were predictable. And some far-sighted people actually did predict every one of them.

To retrace our steps, history (A) and (B) together provides us with four different ways of looking into the future. Two of those, the one based on the idea that there is no change and the one that change is cyclical, go back at least as far as the fifth century BCE when the very idea of history, meaning a record of things past, was conceived of for the first time. Between them they dominated the field until the effects of the industrial revolution started making themselves felt during the second half of the eighteenth century. Both remain in use even today. The other two, which assume that history does not repeat itself and that change is the very stuff of which it is made, are of more recent vintage.

What all four methods have in common is that they are based, or are supposed to be based, on the sober and systematic study of recorded facts and processes. Such as anyone, provided he or she applies himself, can access and interpret. The difficulty, of course, is to decide which method should be applied to what development at what time; also, which one to use in dealing with each problem and how to combine all four.

To this question, no answer had yet been found.

With Just One Important Exception

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Quite by accident, I finished reading this book on 7 March, the eve of the International Women’s Day. The author, Prof. Steven Pinker, is nothing if not an optimist. Perhaps one reason for this is because, as a 63-year old psychologist who teaches at Harvard and has several best-sellers to his name, he has good reason to be satisfied with life so far. Parts I and II of his latest book, Enlightenment Now, are basically a list of all the ways in which the world has been improving over the last two centuries or so. By contrast, some of part III looks—to me, at any rate—like a “philosophical” tract so confused as to be hardly worth commenting on.

Even skipping that part, though, no short review can hope to do justice to the tons of evidence Pinker produces to support his claim. Follow some highlights:

  • Starting at the end of the eighteenth century, and taking the human race as a whole, real per capita product has gone up thirtyfold. During the same period the global population has increased tenfold fro 800 million to almost 8 billion; meaning that, in little more than two centuries, total production has increased three hundred times, no less. Contrary to the fears of Malthus and others, humanity has not run out of food and other resources. To the point where many formerly hungry countries have turned to exporting food and where in quite some developed ones obesity is a greater menace than malnutrition is.
  • Taking into account qualitative advances—vastly improved nutrition and living conditions, faster and more comfortable travel, more efficient communications, incomparably cheaper data-processing, to mention but a few—the improvement in our material situation has been much greater still. Just consider that King Louis XIV at Versailles had neither electricity, nor running water, nor flush toilets. Not for nothing did visitors keep complaining about the awful way everything smelled—and this in the palace for whose owner nothing could be too good.
  • The increase in the size of human population could never have taken place without radical advances in the related fields of medicine and health. Including a vast decline in perinatal mortality (the percentage of women who die in childbirth or shortly thereafter); a vast increase in the number of children who live to adulthood; the introduction, during the second half of the nineteenth century, of sterilization and anesthetics; the complete or near-complete eradication of some of the deadliest diseases, such as smallpox and polio; and the mitigation of crises such as AIDS, SARS and the rest which, had they broken out more than a few decades ago, could well have decimated the human race in the same way as Spanish Influenza did in 1919-20. Taken together, these and other advances explain why, world-wide, life expectancy is now around seventy years. That is twice as much as at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
  • Hand in hand with the general “betterment”—a term much beloved by Pinker’s heroes, i.e. the scientists, technicians and philosophers who made the Enlightenment—went improvements in education. To cut a long story short, in all countries with hardly any exception the percentage of illiterates has gone down, whereas that of those who enjoyed a secondary or tertiary education went up. To extrapolate—and extrapolation is the method Pinker himself uses whenever he wants to look into the future—the day may indeed come when illiteracy, like the abovementioned diseases, is all but eliminated. And when, as part of the fight against discrimination, everyone over the age of twenty will be awarded the title of professor free of charge.
  • While wealth and health and education have improved, war has shrunk. Much the most radical changes took place during the decades since 1945. World War II, which was the deadliest in history, probably killed between two and three percent of humanity as it then was (consisting of somewhat more than two billion people). Since then the figures, calculated on an annual basis, have gone down to the point where they can hardly even be expressed in terms of percentages. To put it in a different way, world-wide the average person’s chances of being killed in war are lower now than they have ever been. Which is not, of course, to say that life in some countries is not much more dangerous than in others.
  • Not just war, but other forms of legal violence have greatly diminished. In many countries torture, which used to be a regular and indeed almost ubiquitous part of the justice system, has been outlawed. The same applies to the death sentence as well as other forms of what the U.S Constitution calls “cruel and unusual” punishment. Especially in the US, cases are on record when the authorities wanted to carry out death sentences but could not—because the companies that made the necessary deadly poisons were no longer prepared to supply them.
  • Another sign of the growing concern with human life is the improvement in safety. In many developed countries working accidents are way down from what they used to be only a few decades ago. Calculating on the basis of person/miles travelled per year, the same applies to traffic accidents. I myself am old enough to remember the fight over safety belts—and how, overcoming all obstacles, those who advocated them won.

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Enough, and more than enough, to make many of us happy? Pinker thinks so. True, the evidence, depending as it does on the recent invention known as polls, is not as plentiful as in other fields where progress has been made. But what little of it is available suggests that more people today enjoy more happiness than was the case a few decades ago. With just one important exception: several studies, some that are listed by Pinker and others that are not, have suggested that women, at any rate women in developed counties, are less satisfied with their lot than they used to be.

Time to reconsider whether feminism is such a marvelous thing after all?

Fast Forward to the Past

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What does a Superpower that has been defeated in war do? Proclaim that it had been fighting the wrong enemy, that’s what. An example par excellence comes from the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1973, after a decade of war, the last US troops fled from Vietnam without having accomplished their mission. Two years later the same scenario repeated itself in Cambodia. In both cases the victors were little brown men (“Coons,” as President Johnson once called them) fighting in what President Trump has so delicately called s——e countries. Men who, by right, should never have been able to challenge, let alone vanquish, the mightiest and most beneficent power on earth. However, that power refused to confront the problem head on. Instead, having made up its mind that over a decade of continuous warfare had been of no importance, it was happy to go back to “real soldiering” on what was then known as the Central Front.

In the event, there was no war on the Central Front. Forty or so years later, events seem to be repeating themselves. First, in September 2001, came the Islamic terrorists who attacked the Twin Towers in New York, bringing them down and killing about 3,000 people on US soil. This marked the beginning of a decade and a half during which the US was busy waging counterinsurgency; first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and finally in Syria. True, none of these wars ended as disastrously as Vietnam and Cambodia did. Looking back, though, neither did the US forces involved have much to show for their efforts and the losses they suffered.

Next, President Trump and his national security team decided that enough is enough. Having spent perhaps a trillion dollars fighting terrorists in various countries, it turned out that America’s main enemies are not terrorists at all. They are Russia and China, acting either together or, which is perhaps more likely, separately. And let’s not forget North Korea and the Little Rocket Man, of course. The former two have long had nuclear weapons capable of reaching the US. The third will have them soon enough. All three also have formidable conventional armed forces that are improving (“modernizing,” is what this is called) all the time. They are preparing for hybrid war, space war, robot war, cyber war, war without limits, and God knows what other kinds of war their nefarious leaders can dream up. And they must be outgunned, or else.

Already long-forgotten ideas are beginning to make a comeback. The Cold War, this time waged not on one front but on two. Brinkmanship, the only way to describe the games played by Washington DC and Pyongyang. Arms races, expensive but necessary and very good in providing employment. The strategic balance, which may be stable (or not). Deterrence, which may work (or not). Escalation (which, if nuclear weapons are used, will almost certainly follow). High-speed “precision strikes” against the other side’s missiles, launched in the hope of destroying them before they can be used.
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Coming along with the old phrases are old/new weapons. A new generation of low-yield, “usable,” tactical nuclear weapons supposedly small enough as to masquerade as conventional ones. A new bomber, the B-21, which is going to be assembled in the same factory hall where (the largely useless) B-2 was built. A new fighter, the PCA (Penetrating Counter Air), supposed to help the B-21 reach its target. Anti-missile defenses (remember Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars?). A new class of aircraft carriers, as useful or, given the submarine menace, as useless as their predecessors. And so on and so on.

Without exception, all these developments are déjà vu. All rest on the (correct or not) assumption that future wars will be fought primarily by states and armies, not guerrillas or insurgents or terrorists. Also that America’s opponents are going to be without a credible second-strike capability; or else it is hard to see how nuclear escalation can be ruled out and how the wars in question can be fought. Also that they are going to be relatively small and weak; or else it is hard to see why they should not build an offensive nuclear capability and become untouchable, as all previous nuclear countries also did.

Suppose they are small and weak, however, why fight them in the first place? Unless we are back to salami tactics, of course.