Obama’s choice on Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

As with so many things about Obama, we just don’t know what his policy on Israel will be. But his dilemma is clear: will he appease the left wing of his party and go the Jimmy Carter route? Or will he face the facts and realize that such a course would be not only a waste of time and effort, but a means of empowering the terrorist powers-that-be in Palestine who have brainwashed and impoverished its people and helped them to embrace murder and mayhem?

I was going to write a longer piece on the subject, but Irwin Seltzer seems to have more or less done it for me. My additional question is whether Obama’s more fundamental sympathies are with those who think Hamas is a force to be moderated and reasoned with, or whether he understands the group’s implacable and non-negotiable agenda.

I don’t know the answer; I’m not sure anyone except Obama’s closest advisors—and perhaps not even them—knows. Does Obama himself know? If he doesn’t, that’s okay for now—he’s got about a week to decide.

Meanwhile, here’s the face of Hamas. See whether you think this describes a mindset amenable to diplomatic niceties, or even conventional pressure:

Like Hezbollah, Hamas believes that God is opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine… I [author Jeffrey Goldberg] asked [a Hamas leader] the question I always ask of Hamas leaders: Could you agree to anything more than a tactical cease-fire with Israel? I felt slightly ridiculous asking: A man who believes that God every now and again transforms Jews into pigs and apes might not be the most obvious candidate for peace talks at Camp David. Mr. Rayyan answered the question as I thought he would, saying that a long-term cease-fire would be unnecessary, because it will not take long for the forces of Islam to eradicate Israel.

Goldberg goes on to say that the only hope for any successful action against Hamas is to activate the help of the “moderate” Arab states to strengthen Fatah:

The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of [Hamas].

Good luck on that. Talk about nation-building for democracy and tolerance in a climate and culture hostile to it! Iraq was indeed a “cakewalk” compared to the task of changing a people that has been macerated in the deepest and most irrational of religiously-driven hatreds for many decades.

Making predictions about the economy—or much of anything else

The New Neo Posted on by

Are these guys correct, and is the worst of the recession behind us?

I certainly don’t know—but neither does anyone else. It would, however, be a wonderful thing to have the answer, because we are being asked to act in drastic ways to forestall a cataclysmic event that may or may not occur without such intervention. And, unfortunately, since the proposed cures could be worse than the disease, it would be awfully good to know that the diagnosis is correct before we start the treatment.

But isn’t this always the way? For example, it’s the situation with global warming (or climate change, or whatever is the proper term de jour). The state of our analytic and predictive powers is poor, but the voices of doom cry out for immediate and sometimes drastic remedies.

It also was what faced the Bush administration in the buildup to the Iraq war—that is, unless you think the evil CheneyBushHitler manufactured everything for their/his own nefarious purposes. There was evidence that pointed in the direction of a situation that could easily go on to become a conflagration if not nipped in the bud. And yet the nipping process was painful, uncertain, and potentially dangerous in and of itself, as we have seen.

But we must always make decisions based on incomplete information, both in our lives and in politics —and even in areas of science that seem far more straightforward than climate change or economics. For example, at the end of WWII, when it came time to test the atomic weaponry developed by the Manhattan Project, there was still some uncertainty about the outcome. Despite the fact that physics is one of the more rigorous and predictable sciences, and although the men who designed the bomb were exceptionally brilliant, there remained some question about what would actually happen when an attempt was made to detonate one:

The observers [of the first atomic test] set up betting pools on the results of the test. Predictions ranged from zero (a complete dud) to 18 kilotons of TNT (predicted by physicist I. I. Rabi, who won the bet, to destruction of the state of New Mexico, to ignition of the atmosphere and incineration of the entire planet. This last result had been calculated to be almost impossible, although for a while it caused some of the scientists some anxiety.

I bet it did.

We all must live with the anxiety of not knowing the consequences of our actions, or what the alternatives would have wrought. Those of you who read this blog regularly know that one of my favorite authors, expatriate Czech author Milan Kundera, has written quite a bit about this topic—and I’ve quoted him quite a bit, too. But his words seem so apropos that I’m going to quote him again (the following is from his masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being):

Several days later, [Tomas] was struck by another thought, which I record here as an addendum to the preceding chapter: Somewhere out in space there was a planet where all people would be born again. They would be fully aware of the the life they had spent on earth and of all the experience they had amassed here.

And perhaps there was still another planet, where we would all be born a third time with the experience of our first two lives,

And perhaps there were yet more and more planets, where mankind would be born one degree (one life) more mature.

That was Tomas’s version of eternal return.

Of course we are here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience) can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man’s power? Can he attain it through repitition?

Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.

….There is only one history of the Czechs. One day it will come to an end, as surely as Tomas’s life, never to be repeated.

In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle. Their defiance led to the Thirty Years War, which in turn led to the almost complete destruction of the Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than courage? The answer may seem simple; it is not.

Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire world decided to sacrifice the Czech’s country to Hitler. Should the Czechs have tried to stand up to a power eight times their size? In countrast to 1618, they opted for caution. Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the forfeit of their nation’s freedom for many decades or even centuries. What should they have done?

If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to check the other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of this kind remain a game of hypotheses”¦

The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of all of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe are a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience.

Does humanity grow in experience, and therefore wisdom? Perhaps. I’m not at all sure, however—or, to extend Kundera’s thought, I’m not at all certain that the history of planet number five would go any better than that of planet number one (or to use another example, does “Groundhog Day” trump “Peggy Sue Got Married?”)

No matter how much history and knowledge we amass, we are still going forward into an unknown future, in which situations that appear to resemble each other (such as, for example, the present economic crisis and the Great Depression of the 30s) have so many differences that to try to apply the lessons learned from the errors of the first to the facts of the second is not necessarily going to lead to a better result. We also labor under the difficulty that, even if those lessons might be applicable and we would like to apply them, public opinion and/or politics may at times make it impossible to do so.

The only solution is to attempt to study history and/or science, find the course of action that seems most suitable to address the new situation, and do our best, remaining philosophical about the prospects of success. Another caveat might be to use the least drastic measures possible. But unfortunately, sometimes drastic situations require drastic interventions.

Good marks for Freud?

The New Neo Posted on by

Long-term psychotherapy, especially of the Freudian type, has gone out of style. Perhaps that’s because we’ve become more impatient these days. Or perhaps it’s due to the fact that psychotherapy seems more an art than a science, and an expensive one at that.

But here’s an article claiming that in many cases Freudian therapy achieves longer-lasting positive results than shorter therapies do. The patients in the two studies cited had been diagnosed with “complex mental disorders” and/or borderline personality disorder (the latter is a problem that is notoriously difficult to treat). Such findings are encouraging for the talking cure, pointing to the fact that shorter and simpler is not always better in the therapy biz.

Of course, this may not matter to the insurers who reimburse for therapy; they’ve been cutting back on coverage for quite some time, for obvious cost-saving reasons. The type of treatment tested in these particular studies—in the second one, eighteen months of individual therapy followed by eighteen months of group—would rack up quite a hefty bill indeed.

However, although the article claims to be about Freudian therapy, it really seems to concern long-term psychotherapy, which is a somewhat different animal. Although Freud’s work is the historic foundation for long-term psychotherapy, it is hardly identical to it, but is instead a small and very specific subset of the genre, practiced by very few therapists today. In fact, I doubt very much that the research cited here investigated classic Freudian therapy at all, although I’d have to go to the studies themselves itself to determine whether that is true.

Freudian therapy had/has a number of very specific techniques with which it is associated, among them the familiar lying-on-the-couch routine. Others are word association and dream analysis. Freud used these tools as the primary ways he tried to get at the underpinnings of patients’ psyches, believing them to be the royal roads to unlocking the ways in which patients were held in thrall to the workings of their unconscious minds and drives.

Let’s take the Freudian couch. It’s been celebrated in popular culture, especially cartoons. Here’s one classic from Gary Larson:

psychiatry-couch2.jpg

Cute. Except that Freud suggested the couch be positioned so that the patient could not see the psychiatrist’s face, the better to foster transference, and to relax the patient and make free-association more free.

Here’s a cartoon than shows the proper placement of both parties:

therapistcouch.jpg

The couches in both cartoons are rather spare. But the couch the historical Freud used for patients in his office was surprisingly and charmingly ornate:

freud-couch.jpg

Note the position of the chair, placed where the patient cannot see the doctor’s face. And here’s one of Freud himself demonstrating, complete with cigar (or is it cigarette?):

freudcouch2.jpg

Less news is good news—for now

The New Neo Posted on by

Have you noticed a certain flatness in the news lately?

The election is over. Bush-bashing is no longer so much fun—nor so necessary—because he’s on the way out. Very very soon, they won’t have him to kick around anymore— although I’m pretty sure they’ll keep on trying.

Iraq is relatively stable, and thus off the media radar screen. Israel and Palestine are—Israel and Palestine. The economy is bad, but that’s not news, and now the initial shock is over. Obama is waiting in the wings, but hasn’t really done much except make appointments and speeches, and bare his torso in Hawaii.

Will the lull last a while? Or is this the calm before the storm?:

And all the news just repeats itself
Like some forgotten dream that we’ve both seen.
Someday I’ll go and call up Rudy,
We worked together at the factory.
But what could I say if he asks “What’s new?”
“Nothing, what’s with you? Nothing much to do.”

Well, even though the news seems to be repeating itself lately, that most assuredly won’t last long. Remember the pre-9/11 summer of 2001, when the biggest stories were about shark attacks?

Real news of import is always a surprise, always unexpected. That’s why it’s called news.

The recession: don’t worry, be happy

The New Neo Posted on by

Depressed about the recession? If you are, research indicates that, unless you are directly affected by losing your job or some other dramatic loss, the downturn in your mood won’t last long. And even if you have been directly affected in a fairly dramatic way, you probably won’t remain depressed for long unless that’s your natural tendency anyway.

It turns out that, just as money can’t buy you love, it can’t buy you happiness—at least, not much, and not permanently. But even if there are a few depressed people around, they’re not as likely to have a depressive effect on others:

The reason: sorrow does not spread nearly as readily as joy. Nicholas Christakis, one of the study’s authors, says happy people form groups and socialize. Unhappy people spend more time alone, not always by choice. “Do you want to hang out with an unhappy person?” says Christakis, who teaches sociology at Harvard. “My feeling is that happiness declines during recessions, but I am not sure how much.”

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a piece on what makes for happiness—at least, according to psychology research. Turns out that some of it is genetic—about 50%, as with so many things. And other important factors are the somewhat corny and cliched, but nevertheless important, acts of counting one’s blessings, finding meaning in one’s life, and altruistic endeavors. ]

Obama’s choice: FDR or Reagan?

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it may be Pat Buchanan saying it, but I still agree with him: Obama has a choice between the FDR approach to the Great Depression, policies that made it “greater”—that is, longer and more damaging—than it otherwise would have been; and the more successful Reagan approach to the recession of 1980.

But Buchanan ignores the one thing both FDR and Reagan had in common: an abiding optimism and the ability to convey it. They exuded confidence.

There is something very different and disturbing about Obama’s message, and that is his deep pessimism about America. Despite the lip service paid to the hope/change campaign message of uplift, his negativity comes through loud and clear.

Of course, Obama’s latest economic speech is being given in the context of trying to motivate legislation he will be proposing, especially his huge and controversial stimulus package, which jumps (rather than wades) into deep and uncharted waters. But if you read excerpts from his speech, you will see how extraordinarily gloomy it is, couched in the language of the dire consequences of what could happen if Obama’s plan isn’t realized.

The remedy? Why, big government, that’s what:

Mr. Obama insisted that only government could “break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy,” prevent “the catastrophic failure of financial institutions,” restart the flow of credit and restore the regulations needed to prevent such a crisis in the future.

Not only is big government the one and only answer, according to Obama, but the changes he proposes have to occur as soon as possible:

For every day we wait or point fingers or drag our feet, more Americans will lose their jobs,” Mr. Obama warned. “More families will lose their savings. More dreams will be deferred and denied. And our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”

For some contrast, let’s have the words of FDR in his First Inaugural, facing a situation far worse than that Obama faces today:

This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself””nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory…Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply…

We can argue over the proper policy to institute in order to deal with the financial crisis, and the Left and Right certainly will do so. But I don’t think there’s any argument about the fact that Obama is striking exactly the wrong tone, if economic recovery is what he is really after.

Palin agrees that it’s the class war, stupid

The New Neo Posted on by

Back in September I wrote that much of the vicious bias against Sarah Palin was a result of her being from the wrong side of the tracks—the Walmart side. Now Palin is on the record as acknowledging the class issue in an interview with conservative filmmaker John Ziegler.

Palin feels that Caroline Kennedy’s upscale bona fides have caused her to be been handled by the press with more delicacy:

I think that as we watch that we will perhaps be able to prove that there is a class issue here also that was such a factor in the scrutiny of my candidacy versus, say, the scrutiny of what her candidacy may be.

I personally have been somewhat surprised that Caroline has been criticized at all by the press; I expected more of an anointment, which she certainly has not gotten. Nevertheless it’s true that she has been treated nowhere near as poorly as Palin was—but then again, few people on earth have been treated by the press as poorly as Palin was.

Palin adds that she was certainly aware of how badly things were going with the MSM almost from the start. Re the disastrous Couric interviews:

[M]y question to the campaign was, after it didn’t go well the first day, why were we going to go back for more?

This is another example of the fact that Palin had good political instincts. That was clear from the moment she gave her first speech, and it was one of the things that frightened the opposition and made them determined to destroy her. Her handlers should have trusted her more.

She’s not given up, but I wonder whether she’s through politically on the national level.

If the only thing we have to fear is…

The New Neo Posted on by

…fear itself, why does Obama keep playing on it?

In the financial crisis, he’s been sounding a relentlessly gloomy note from the very start. I agree that things are far from rosy, but I believe that Obama is doing no one any favors by being so consistently pessimistic. Perceptions and emotions affect the economic climate, and pronouncements of the President (or President-Elect) help to shape them.