Guest Article: Is Playing Chess Good for You?

Posted on July 25, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

Renzo Verwer

Chess has been the subject to a torrent of publications. Chess is supposed to be popular among young people. Chess helps students do better at school. In particular, the Dutch psychologist Karel van Delft is an enthusiastic proponent of these ideas. Chess, he says, is capable of bestowing not a single benefit but several different ones. It brings people closer together. It promotes concentration, self confidence, and creativity. It is a kind of mental gymnastics and teaches players how to cope with difficult situations. By providing immediate and clearly visible feedback to one’s moves, it can even bring young offenders back to the straight and the narrow.

Speaking for myself, I love the game. More so, perhaps, than some grandmasters do; that is why I went to watch the recent Dutch championship tournament. However, the kind of worship mentioned in the previous paragraph always makes me a little uncomfortable. Is chess really what tea used to be in seventeenth-century Holland (and what cannabis supposedly is today), a cure for any- and everything? Some people, including the Dutch international master Hans Ree, are not so sure. The idea that chess can strengthen the will and develop logical thought, he says, is pure nonsense. To the contrary: authoritarian countries consciously and deliberately use the game in order to prevent people from thinking; this is done by canalizing them into an isolated culture that, separated as it is from ordinary life, has no further consequences for the latter. Chess as the opium of the people, perhaps? He also mentions the cruel joy he experienced as he saw his opponent squirming. Not the best or healthiest of emotions, he says.

This is something I know from my own experience. “What an idiot. He did not dare pursue his advantageous position but tried to husband his miserable pawns instead, with the result that he lost. What I felt was pure contempt. And if that causes you to despise me, that is your good right.

I asked Karel van de Weide, one-time Dutch grand master, to give me his considered view of the game. Here is what he told me:

Advantages? Chess is mental gymnastics. It helps you with your arithmetic and also to postpone the onset of dementia. Whoever is good as chess is someone. That is something I sometimes miss, for by now I am a nobody and will probably never recover my former status. As one of my colleagues, upon being dropped from the FIDE list, exclaimed: ‘I simply ceased to exist!’ (he may have been joking). Others argue that chess plays a useful role by providing some people who cannot easily fit into society with something they are good at. Agreed. And a certain kind of recognition too, of course.

And what are the disadvantages of chess? Chess may promote autism. It keeps you away from women [MvC: men play chess much better than women do, which is why, in tournaments, the sexes are separated] and is sufficiently demanding to keep you away from other, perhaps more useful, forms of training. It may make those who take it up as a career more accident prone, decreases their chances of making good, economically, and can even help turn them into social outcasts. As has been said about former Dutch champion Maarten Solleveld, had it not been for this obsession with chess he could have got his position as a professor of mathematics at Leiden much earlier than he did.
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Another prominent Dutch player and author, Tim Krabbé, told me about the less sympathetic aspects of chess, as experienced and observed by him. Especially in the kind of coffee house where the game is played:

Chess bears a strong resemblance to addiction, the kind you get by taking drugs—though I myself have never been addicted to them. Doing something you cannot resist even though you know that you should stop is very, very bad for your life. None of the prefaces to the books that teach the young how wonderful the game is and how to play it have a word to say about this danger. No, chess is always great, good for the brain and I do not know what else. Truth is, chess can be very dangerous and people should be made aware of that fact.

The psychologist Paul Kirchner criticizes the kind of research that “proves” that chess is good for all kinds of things. Nor is chess the only activity that has been advertised in this way. “Similar claims” he says, “have been made on behalf of other fields of study. Such as learning Latin, geometry, and, today, writing code; it all seems so simple and logical. Truth is, you can learn all kinds of procedures. But a procedure that will enable you to master all procedures does not exist.”

In other words: by learning how to play chess, the most important thing you learn is… how to play chess.

* Renzo Verwer (Woerden, the Netherlands, 1972) is an author and a dealer in second hand books. He has published books about love, work, and the chess master Bobby Fischer. His most recent one (in Dutch) is titled Freedom of Thought for Beginners. His website is www.artikelzeven.nu. His books: http://www.amazon.com/Renzo-Verwer/e/B00ITG41ES/chess.

Should Sex Change Operations Also Be Banned?

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

To this day, following thousands upon thousands of years of human history, no one knows whether God (or the gods, but in the present context that does not matter) “really” exists. Witness Immanuel Kant, no less. Raised in a Pietist household, for years he tried to prove the existence of God. Only to conclude that the question could not be settled either way and was, therefore, a matter of pure belief. However, that has not prevented billions of people, probably the majority of those who have ever lived, from believing that He does; nor from using their belief, real or pretended, as a basis on which to expand their own political and military power by rewarding those who agreed with them and persecuting those who did not. As Mao Zedong might very well have said, often religion grew out of the barrel of a gun. As I myself like to say, a religion is a sect that has acquired cannon. In quite some places around the world that remains true to the present day.

Similarly, after thousands upon thousands of years of history no one knows whether homosexuality is or isn’t “natural” to humankind. In the Christian West at any rate, following the book of Leviticus, it was long considered a deadly sin. As a result, those who practiced it were often subject to some of the cruelest available punishments from being burnt at the stake down. If this is no longer the case today, then that is not because modern science, breaking with Kant, has finally discovered “the truth” about the matter. But simply because a greater number of people are prepared to support, or at any rate tolerate, homosexuality than are not. As Napoleon said, victory goes to the big battalions. Particularly in modern democratic countries where most issues are ultimately settled by counting noses either during elections or with the aid of public opinion surveys. And particularly if, like the early Christians, using means fair or foul they succeed in getting the media on their side.

And why am I writing about this? Because, reflecting the situation in many other countries as well, currently in Israel a great debate—if “debate” is the right term to describe a rather ugly process whereby both sides do what they can to shut up the other—is going on. The person who triggered it is Netanyahu’s new minister of education, Rafi Peretz. Peretz is a practicing Jew as well as a rabbi who takes his religion seriously. No sooner was he appointed to his post then he suggested that gays might want to undergo conversion treatment and benefit from it. How dare he! What chutzpa!

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As to conversion treatment, it was carried out by quacks as if there were no quacks in other fields where consults are involved, from housing agents to e(con)omics. It was useless (as if no other forms of psychological treatment were). It was unscientific (as if any kind of psychological treatment is or can be “scientific”). It might make those who tried it develop all kinds of psychological problems (as if it were not psychological problems that made people turn to the treatment in the first place). The practice should be prohibited (as, in quite a few countries and states, it is), and those who engage in it, if they did so on a professional basis, disqualified.

All this, in the name of choice, equality, openness, toleration, and similar concepts held sacred by the politically correct crowd both in Israel and a great many other countries. All this, at least partly in order to prevent people from developing doubts and ceasing to support the Gay Rights Movement. And all this makes me ask: If this kind of conversion, voluntarily undertaken of course, is banned, shouldn’t the same apply to the much more problematic, much more dangerous, sex change operations as well?

Guest Article: How to Avoid War with Iran

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

William S Lind*

When President Trump called off an airstrike on Iran with the planes already in the air, he justified the hopes many of us had placed in him in 2016. No other president would have had the guts to do that.

Unfortunately, while that action avoided war with Iran last week, the danger of war remains high. The confrontation between the U.S. and Iran is almost certain to continue. It is strategically disadvantageous for both parties. But powerful domestic political factions will continue to drive it nonetheless. In Iran, the Revolutionary Guard Corps needs the American threat to justify its own domestic power and the benefits of corruption that flow from it. In Washington, the Likud lobby, which includes people highly placed in the White House, desperately wants a war between the U.S. and Iran so Israel’s Likud-led government can seize the West Bank (see my column, “Bait and Switch”, in the latest issue of The American Conservative). So, the question becomes, how do we continue to confront Iran without war breaking out? That seems to be the best realistic objective.

Both sides may have offered up the beginnings of an answer. President Trump called off the airstrike when he was told it would kill around 150 Iranians. Iran had only shot down an American drone. No American lives were endangered, and the Pentagon has no shortage of drones. Similarly, the Iranians said they did not shoot down an American P-8 naval patrol aircraft they claimed had also invaded their airspace because doing so would have killed Americans. In other words, both sides called a halt at the point where their actions would have caused casualties.

The same has been true of Iranian attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf–if the attacks were in fact actions of the state of Iran, which is by no means clear. They could have been done by elements of the Revolutionary Guard Corps that do want a war, without authorization. Those Revolutionary Guards could have been in the pay of another power that wants a war, such as Saudi Arabia or Israel. The “Iranian sailors” could have been German soldiers dressed up in Polish uniforms. History has witnessed such things.

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This kind of ritualization of war is historically common. Ritualized war is in fact far more frequent than total war. The reason is obvious: the cost is lower. Each side gets to preen, pump, do its victory dances and so on while their respective societies carry on normal life. Think of it as the NFL without the big salaries.

After a campaign of mutual annoyance but not war has gone on long enough, both Iran and the U.S. may come to realize a negotiated solution would benefit both. President Trump has made it clear he is open to that outcome. So far, Iran’s leadership is not. But I suspect the Iranian people are, and the Ayatollah cannot ignore them forever.

What everyone needs now, except Likud and its American agents, is no war, i.e., no casualties. If President Trump continues to insist on that rule and the Iranians do the same, the war fever will eventually break.

* William S. (”Bill”) Lind is the author of the Maneuver War Handbook (1985) and the 4^thGeneration Warfare Handbook (2011) as several other volumes that deal with war. This article was originally published on traditionalRight on 22.7.2019.

Then You Are a Thought Criminal

Posted on July 4, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

If you do not believe that what “everybody” thinks is necessarily true –