JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES 

 

You are only partly right, Daniel, calling Jefferson author of the Declaration of Independence.

That is of course what Jefferson liked to think himself – he had an ego the size of a cruise ship – and he had that half-truth carved on his tombstone at Monticello.

But in that as in so many things Jefferson was a rather dark and devious man.

Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration was long and slightly ridiculous. The opening memorable phrases were amended to what we know today by that original genius, Benjamin Franklin.

Perhaps more importantly, the Continental Congress whittled his draft seriously down. Jefferson was in fact angry and embarrassed by the editing.

Jefferson’s draft was ridiculous for his lengthy focus on the King’s guilt for the slave trade – this from the lifetime owner of more than two hundred slaves.

Jefferson undoubtedly had a double purpose in this condemnation of the King.

First, at the time, there was actually a surplus of human flesh on the market, and slave prices were falling, and Jefferson was looking after his large investment in flesh.

Second, as always, Jefferson liked to be seen as a great advocate of human freedom, a kind of minor Enlightenment figure if you will with a legacy of words if not acts, so condemning the King would be part of his manufactured legacy.

Jefferson was such a spendthrift all his life, never able to earn his way as a lawyer, he never thought of setting his slaves free. Indeed, he died a bankrupt still.

So far as freedom goes, Jefferson also assisted Napoleon in trying to suppress the slave revolt in Haiti. A number of other ugly behaviors and policies are on his freedom-balance sheet.

The Declaration, if you actually read it (few do), after the wonderful opening words, descends into an almost petulant long list of charges and grievances, taking on a tone of something still true of America, always blaming others for their own poor choices.

All early – before the revolution – visitors to the colonies remarked how healthy and free the American colonies were. The colonies were widely regarded as one of the freest places on earth.

But being asked to help pay with taxes for something which largely benefited them – the French and Indian War – and being made part of a dreaded Catholic place, Quebec, under the Quebec Act caused an almost insane reaction.

The colonists had the benefit of the war and saw no reason to help pay for what they already had, and anti-papacy became a raging storm resembling in its intensity something from Northern Ireland in 1969.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

“Now it should never – never – be the case that arguing against the policy of the Israeli Government is regarded as proof of anti-Semitism.”

Thank you, Daniel.

Unfortunately, your open mind does not characterize a good many defenders of Israel’s excesses, including some well-known people.

It has become common to hurl the epithet “anti-Semite” at anyone criticizing Israel.

This foolish use of an epithet has two effects, at least.

First, it immediately sends the debate over Israel’s foreign policies into the gutter, when there is indeed a large and important set of issues to debate.

Two, in the long term, the term “anti-Semite” will lose all genuine meaning.

This is already becoming the case with some other hideously over-used words, including “genocide” and “terrorist.”

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

This is an old set of arguments.

In the United States over the last half century, versions of both views have been given time and time again.

What seems intuitively clear is that poverty and poor parenting do not automatically go together.

Indeed, some of the best parents are those who struggle against difficulties to do their best for their kids.

These are people often who are, for one reason or another, trapped in a temporary poverty: they and/or their children will almost certainly rise out of it. There are many cases of this, especially among immigrants without the language or who have lost all their resources in some tumult back home or who have difficulty getting their professional qualifications recognized in their new home.

But what is also clear is that some portion of poverty is owing to the lack of any marketable skills, relatively low intelligence, and perhaps mental disorders of one kind or another. Then, too, there is addiction to drugs, but we might put that down to mental disorder.

There are parents who see their children only as unpleasant burdens, accidents they did not want to happen, types which occur both in the well-off and the poor.

In the case of some wealth, the wealth of the family gets the child through, as do perhaps native gifts. Winston Churchill was a perfect example: his mother was almost completely indifferent to his existence while his father actually disliked him.

But in cases where there is both poverty of resources and an indifferent parent or parents, the die is pretty well cast.

Nothing guarantees having even one good parent, having even one must be regarded as a blessing, the luck of the draw, much the same as having good looks or special talents or being born into wealth.

Nature is utterly indifferent to the inequalities doled out at birth, a reality quite the opposite to the cozy, warm notion of a benevolent God.

And while society needs to do what it can to intervene, the task of completely making up for having terrible parents and no resources is beyond its capacities. In terms of sheer time, let alone resources, it is impossible to make up for all the bad parents in society.

Of course, therein resides the heart of the matter with the David Cameron view: if you just say parents need to love children, you often are blowing hot air and passing the blame for not even trying to help.

We have a whole generation of school teachers, for example, I’m sure in Britain as in North America, who insist parents must be involved, some knowing full well that there are parents who are hopeless, ignorant, and even vile. So their mantra about parents becomes effectively an excuse for not rolling up their sleeves and helping the child.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

The government of the United States has only itself to blame for the beliefs of Charlie Sheen and, indeed, millions of other Americans if sites on the Internet are any indication.

For whatever reasons, the American government has withheld important information, and many understand that much. When a government chooses withholding information in such a dramatic event, it literally is inviting speculation and superstition to flare up.

The official version of 9/11 is certainly incomplete, and I say this without believing that government was involved in plots.

There are the clearest bits of evidence.

The towers‘ collapse is a completely unexplained matter: it resembled precisely the kind of controlled explosion and collapse used in tall-building demolition.

A number of engineers have also pointed out the melting point of the kind of steel used in construction: it is twice the temperature (3000 degrees versus 1500) at which aviation diesel fuel (aviation fuel is a refined diesel) burns.

There is a well known picture of a woman standing in the wreckage of the building façade a short time after a plane crashed. She shows no signs of heat discomfort, and stands right next to the building’s crumpled metal.

It is likely then that the scheme was larger than just the 19 or 20 on the four planes. After all, there had been a previous attempt to bring down the Trade Center with controlled demolition.

The authorities do not want to acknowledge the size and success of the scheme. It is a confession of the utter incompetence of intelligence and police services.

Little noted by the mainstream press is the fact that the skyjackers had valid American visas. One senior American diplomat, after 9/11, complained in the press about an inordinate number of visas issued abroad under pressure from the CIA for rapid issue.

It is virtually certain that there was some kind of CIA operation under way, training people from the Middle East for God knows what purposes. Mossad was aware of this, thus the involvement of a group of its agents (below) in following some of the skyjackers in the U.S. Also, former American intelligence agents use the term “blowback” to describe the entire set of events.

The fourth plane over Pennsylvania was certainly shot down – just the extensive nature of the wreckage field (spread about three miles) says this to a certainty.

Cheney undoubtedly ordered it shot down – he is a totally ruthless man – and naturally they do not want to tell the world this ugly fact and be deluged with law suits. So we get mythical nonsense about “Let’s roll.”

There is also the documented matter of a group of Mossad agents, under cover of a moving (removal) firm, who were aware of these plotters and were following them around inside the U.S. They were arrested, questioned, and deported a short time later.

Just the fact that there was a sizeable group of an ally’s agents operating inside the U.S. and that this group was on to the plotters further emphasizes the complete incompetence of an American intelligence establishment chewing its way through tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money every year.

Of course, the entire thing could not have happened had the simplest precautions been taken in aviation security, such as cockpit doors that lock securely from inside and the upgrading of boarding procedures, too.

There had been years of skyjackings – many like that of D. B. Cooper still unsolved – and the U.S. Congress continued to refuse to spend this small amount of money on real security. It is only generous when it comes to bombing people in the colonies.

So now we suffer from a ridiculous degree of over-kill in American security. We all are paying a price for the incompetence of American government, and no government wants to be thought incompetent.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

McNamara may be the greatest modern example of the banality of evil. He was, in his heyday, a dry, boring man with the appearance of a corporate executive who taught Baptist Sunday School classes.

He was very bright and energetic, but dry and boring, driven by an insane need for success and with no evident ethical standards beyond those associated with the ferociously ambitious.

The United States, under his advice and that of others like McGeorge Bundy, created the greatest holocaust since that of World War II.

An estimated three million Vietnamese were killed, many of them suffering horrible deaths from napalm and early versions of cluster bombs.

Carpet bombing by B-52s made parts of that poor country resemble the surface of the moon.

Left behind were millions of pounds of the hideous Agent Orange oozing through the ground to cause birth defects for perhaps centuries.

Left behind too were hundreds of thousands of land mines to cripple and kill farmers for decades after.

The reason for this horror? The Vietnamese were fighting a civil war and the side with the wrong economic beliefs was winning.

Of course, it also relates to America’s penchant for obsessions, its Captain Ahab drive to chase and kill the great whale.

In the 1960s, it was communism.

Today it’s Islamic fundamentalism.

In his later years, McNamara was a sad figure. He very much did come to regret his role. He was almost driven by the ghosts of all those dead souls.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Bush did say God told him to do several things.

John O’Farrell should do his own research on his question, rather than expecting others to do it for him. I’m sure Google would get you a hatful of such quotes in a few minutes.

In general, you cannot get at the truth of a matter like this by just adding up citations.

American presidents must bring God into their speech, going back to Washington, who was a deist, or Jefferson, who was altogether a skeptic. There is just too big a pool of Puritan descendents to ignore.

After all, only about fifty years ago, Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, itself already representing a rather obnoxious, fascist-tinged practice.

It is very clear that Obama is a sophisticated man, a genuine intellectual and one who questions things.

It was equally clear that Bush is a dull man no one would call an intellectual, one moreover whose idea of sophistication was to dance naked on a bar room table after drinking lots of beer(something he actually did).

I don’t believe that Bush was any more religious than Obama, but he cheaply, very consciously exploited religious feelings of fundamentalists at every turn, having been advised that it was the thing to do.

When Obama mentions God, he clearly does it in the Washington tradition.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Could be, but I believe there is another explanation.

Alaska is a place heavily peopled with militia-types, backwoods throwbacks, and Aryan-nation types, much like Idaho.

Sarah Palin fits the profile of an ideal candidate there, utterly uninformed about the world at large yet ready to offer an opinion on any of it, being blithely unaware of how parochial her every sentence is. Such places very much want parochialism, male or female.

Her having Russia as “a neighbor,” with its assumption of knowing something about world affairs, pretty much sums up the situation.

Her equivalent as a male is more far common, places like Texas, Mississippi, or Oklahoma growing them almost like a toxic crop.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

“Mad. But so too was Hitler”

Authoritative psychiatric studies of Hitler tell us clearly that he was not mad.

His not being mad is precisely what makes him so frightening.

Madness is tragic, not frightening.

Humans are simply capable of anything, given the right set of beliefs or obsessions.

It’s the damned human race, a gang of nasty chimpanzees with the brains to be even more destructive than their ancestors.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

“In my last two paragraphs I mentioned a poll in the US indicating that a quarter of all Americans blame the Jews for the financial crisis either moderately or a great deal. I concluded by saying that I don’t like it when people mob up.”

Daniel, you cannot take such a poll seriously.

A true random sample of American opinion on almost any subject is always disturbing.

After a few years of the bloody pointless invasion of Iraq, a poll showed sixty-odd percent of Americans believed that Saddam was involved with 9/11.

I don’t recall the number, but a surprisingly large percent of Americans believe in the devil and believe that the Mark of the Beast is 666.

Polls showed a good slice of Americans believing that the Apollo Mission to the moon was faked.

I very much don’t like it when people mob up either, but a quarter of Americans believing anything you care to name is not mobbing up, not surprising, and virtually predictable.

As for David Irving, I admire your publishing his e-mail, but I wish you had shown the restraint not to characterize it. People can interpret for themselves.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

I don’t know how you can rank people much of whose work remains secret to this day. You really do not know how effective or damaging each was.

So far as we know, few spies were more damaging than Maclean and Philby in their top form.

Many of your names of course are the Cambridge Circle.

I actually think – although full revelation of their work could change my assessment – these men served a high cause.

The US was in the turmoil of McCarthyism and the Pentagon contained a number of generals ready and willing to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Russia.

There were actually plans for doing this at one point. After all, the early 1950s were less than a decade after the US used two atomic weapons, on civilians no less.

And MacArthur was ready to use nuclear bombs on the Chinese just at the dawn of the 1950s to clean up the mess he himself created at the Yalu River.

Those were ugly days, fanatical and dark. People today cannot appreciate them fully without reading some good books.

Russia’s progress in getting nuclear weapons and in having the details of many US secrets likely saved the world from a catastrophe.

The cold War was nasty, but MAD actually contributed to tolerably peaceful situation.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Prizes generally are foolish business.

Even the most prestigious – the Nobel – often gets it wrong. Just look at the winners in literature. The authors loved and read often are not on the list. Those on the list include those few read. In science even we find things like Einstein having won for one of his lesser contributions, not relativity.

The Peace Prize is compromised beyond meaning with several leaders whose hands are very bloody receiving it, all in the hope one presumes of influencing the course of events.

The Academy Award is just silliness, although people like it for exactly that reason. Goofy gowns, goofier speeches, and Fred Astaire glitter.

Some terrible films have won. Just recall Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8, an unwatchable, bad movie, even in its day. And then there are the fad films – Dances with Wolves – which are heaped with prizes despite being good but not original work.

The Pulitzer is the most hopeless prize of all. It has not only got it wrong many times, it has been hopelessly compromised by crooked journalists and crooked newspapers. A New York Times correspondent in Russia in the early part of the century we now know won for totally created material. And there have been more scandalous examples in recent decades. The prize has a flag-waving agenda that has nothing to do with quality or ideas or even journalism.

Just consider the oleaginous laureate Thomas Friedman, a man whose job is to rewrite Pentagon material and other imperial propaganda into chirpy copy.

With history books, it has often missed great books while giving awards to second-rate or boring work.

Just consider the odd idea that there must be a best each year in anything. It just isn’t so. Creativity and genius don’t follow clocks or calendars.

Science for example progresses steadily but often with spectacular work only coming after years or decades.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Daniel, these are not well-considered comments.

First, you are totally inconsistent.

You quote Mubarak as though he were a fair and impartial authority in these matters.

President Mubarak is a dictator, one of decades standing, and he has some very large interests in supporting American policies, about $2 billion a year in keeping-the-peace payoffs for a start.

At the same time, you always have been a defender of Israel’s de rigueur
position that Hamas – a truly democratic organization – is a terrible bunch of beasts.

And, as we know from other times, you promote the also de rigueur position about the great blessings of democracy in Israel.

Mubarak is little more than a thug, but he is a peaceful thug towards Israel so I guess that makes his opinion worthy?

As to Haaretz, quoting Israelis on anything having to do with Gaza, or Iran for that matter, is rather like quoting a South African paper in the heyday of apartheid on events in a Bantustan. The view is utterly predictable.

I object strenuously to your calling George Galloway a “blustering fool” if only because it so clearly untrue.

Galloway has a piercing intelligence, and he is, without a doubt, the most remarkable orator in Britain today.

His mission on this delivery of assistance to a people left shattered by three weeks of bombardment is not something to make light of.

How do you know, Daniel, that the stone-throwers were not Israeli agents? My God, we have boundless precedents for such activity and worse.

If the stone throwers were indeed Egyptians, then it is certain they were not acting, as we used to put it during the Cold War, spontaneously.

Spontaneous displays do not happen in Mubarak’s Egypt, as I’m sure you well know.

So, I’m sorry to say, I don’t find even a shred of honest analysis in your words here, but then you are riding your favorite hobby horse again, aren’t you?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Rush Limbaugh is one of the ugliest phenomena in American politics, perhaps only exceeded by Ann Coulter.

But the group from which David Frum has made his living for years is the group that has used and rewarded Limbaugh for his years of service as America’s Lord Haw Haw.

David has some very dark marks against his own name, some of which you will find discussed in this article I wrote some years ago.

He is anything but a hero.

http://chuckmanotherchoiceofwords.blogspot.com/search/label/CHUCKMAN%20ARTICLE%3A%20SICK%20PUPPIES%20-%20OR%20THE%20DANGEROUS%20DELUSIONS%20OF%20NEO-CONS

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

There is a lot of confused thinking around this subject. In the U.S., I.Q. tests in the public schools were done away with years ago. The reason: the tests consistently showed below average performance for black children.

I do think the word “race” is so contaminated from history that it must to be avoided, but we can accurately speak of groups in so far as the members of a group share a bundle of characteristics from thousands of years of common history and adaptation to various places and conditions.

The I.Q. test is an imperfect concept, of course, but we know to a certainty that the test has a certain degree of predictive ability for certain types of success. The very term “intelligence” itself is imperfect, leading to many vaguely defined concepts including the hazy idea of multiple intelligences coming from an educator at Harvard

Of course, all statements about various groups’ performance in these tests are statistical in nature. They do not necessarily apply to any given individual.

No one of good sense prejudges anyone’s abilities from color or ethnicity, but we know the groupings inaccurately called race include many general characteristics other than skin color. For example, Caucasians, Blacks, and Asians are all known to suffer in different statistical patterns from various diseases and conditions. Patterns in the incidence of everything from heart disease to diabetes are quite different. Why would we expect it be any different with characteristics of the body’s most complex organ, the brain? Is such knowledge to be cast aside in the name of political correctness?

Millions of IQ tests in the U.S. – from public schools and armed forces enlistment – do show fairly dramatically that there are differences between groups. When you have millions of observations for any phenomenon, you know you are dealing with something real.

These millions of tests show ‘Caucasians’ with a mean IQ of about 100, ‘Blacks’ with a mean IQ of 85, and ‘Asians’ (and Ashkenazi Jews) with a mean score in the range of 107-115.

IQ tests only certain skills, skills around problem-solving and mathematical reasoning. There are many other human skills not captured by the scores.

But life experience in many countries does tend to confirm that the specific skills measured by IQ are important in a number of careers. Business, finance, and science are notable for high numbers of Jews and Asians and low numbers of Blacks. We find this pattern in country after country. It is not prejudice to observe it.

The abilities measured by IQ – the abilities to solve certain kinds of problems and math skills – surely contribute directly to these easily observable results.

We see a much smaller presence of black people in these fields, and it cannot be sensibly argued that this is owing to prejudice. Opportunities to go to any school are today wonderfully open in all qualified in advanced countries.

Now, look at the sports field. American football, baseball, basketball are virtually dominated by blacks (who constitute 13% of the population) owing to their innate athletic skills and strength. The same for professional boxing.

Why should these observations cause vituperation?

These are not arguments for prejudice or racism. They are arguments for better dealing with many social problems.

There is an unfortunate syndrome of black behaviors we see consistently demonstrated in country after country – Britain, United States, Canada, South Africa, Jamaica, and many others.

These include having children early, absentee fathers, dropping out of school in large numbers, attraction to gangs and violence, and lack of economic success on average.

At the other extreme of human experience, what do we see in the behavior of Asians and Jews? Putting off having children, almost always finishing school, strong bonds from fathers for children, much less violent activity, and remarkable economic success in free countries.

You can’t deal properly with any problem when you pretend it doesn’t exist.

We test for a multitude of things against which people do not argue.

We test everything from pulse and blood pressure to agility and speed. We test the efficient working of various internal organs. We test artistic ability. We test acquired knowledge. We test driving skills. We test sight.

Why does this one test, whose meaning really is limited to certain kinds of problem solving, raise so much heat?

We know that there are vast differences in results just within any one group. Are these differences imaginary or culturally induced? There is no basis for saying that.

So why, when a comparison between groups is made, does the test become worthless, biased, culturally contaminated, and a host of other pejorative adjectives?

We all see regularly, with our own eyes, people who are clever at what they do and people who are barely able to function. These are the extremes, but everyone falls somewhere on the spectrum.

What is the least odd or prejudiced in saying there are differences between groups if the empirical results warrant the statement?

Prisoners are routinely tested for IQ as one component of understanding their actions and for their rehabilitation. Criminals do tend to have lower intelligence, as well as many mental illnesses. Labs regularly test for IQ in studies to determine the effects of chemicals or new drugs. Scientists typically put study results of, say, the impact of certain chemicals on children in terms of how many I.Q. points are lost.

This is a topic society is going to have to deal with eventually.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

I can’t agree, Daniel.

Tony Blair is the perfect example of a politician lacking real ethics, not ready to stand up for anything in the face of a challenge.

He knew Bush was lying. He knew Bush was forging evidence. He knew Bush was a man incapable of reliable and logical thinking.

But he went along anyway because that was the easy thing to do.

America can bring – and does in such cases – immense behind-the-scenes pressure on a government to go its way, through finances, trade, diplomacy, and favored status.

And the opposite is true too: there are personal rewards for going along. Blair’s entire set of sinecures in retirement are examples of this.

Many, like Canada’s Chretien, were able to resist joining in this vast war crime – for that is what the Iraq invasion is, a war crime.

But Blair was not, and I’m afraid you are weaving a fantasy explanation of his shameful behavior.

America and Britain have killed more Iraqis and destroyed the lives of more who lived than Hussein ever dreamed of doing.

Iraq, an advanced Arab state, would have naturally moved towards a more democratic future with the passing of Hussein. That’s the experience of the entire Western, advanced world.

________________________

John Swaine,

You do appear to know too little history to engage in a debate like this.

The cases are countless of offspring who do not manage to do what their dictator fathers did.

We see this phenomenon, too, in wealthy families. Often the second or third generation loses the family fortune or sinks into a humdrum existence.

But most important is you also do not understand the way in which democracy evolved in Europe.

Once a large middle class is established in a country through sustained economic growth – something that took a few centuries in Europe – there are many people with influence who no longer see their interests being represented by an autocrat.

And Iraq was prosperous and growing. A flourishing middle class was in the making. Now many have been killed, others deprived of employment, and many, many have left the country. It is an economic disaster.

And please try to avoid unwarranted characterizations like “studiously ignores.” They only make you seem small.

_________________________

Craig,

You really should know the words to the song before you get up to sing.

There have been several reliable studies done of excess Iraqi mortality. Two of these were done by highly qualified people, and they were published in peer-reviewed journals. One found 650,000 deaths owing to the war; the other found 400,000.

Then there were the thousands maimed, the hundreds of thousands who lost their employment, and the two million who emigrated.

And don’t forget the ghastly destruction of some of the world’s most precious ancient artifacts.

The United States has always kept its own estimates quiet so as not to disturb complacent people who don’t seek information, just as it did in the first Gulf War when it slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts by carpet-bombing their pitiful sand redoubts in the desert. It then bull-dozed over the mass graves.

Then there were the tens of thousands of Iraqi children who perished in a long, brutal embargo.

Today the poisonous dust from depleted uranium shells is all over Iraq, and it will kill for generations to come.

America’s treatment of Iraq is a total and unqualified disaster.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

It would be nice to think this idea had some validity, but I fear it is just one more illusory notion from American social science.

We get, at least, an average of one of these notions a month from the United States’ vast body of second-rate academics in soft subjects.

Many of these notions become widely accepted, especially in American primary education, before there is any real authority in their testing.

Another example of this sort of thing is the notion of multiple intelligences, seven different ones. There are printed posters in many American grade schools and an entire literature promoting this concept as though it were a proven fact.

This notion discussed by Daniel is comparable to the American experiments of the efficacy of prayer in healing. Then again there’s the boosterism, widely practiced in American ghetto schools, with banners and literature and songs about how you can be anything.

Well, America is given to these enthusiasms. The history of the Great Awakenings – great national waves of wildly enthusiastic Christian revivalism which occurred several times – and the popularity of tent revival meetings are really other aspects of the same phenomenon.

Americans, many of them, are always ready to believe in some form of redemption or in some desperate quest to find it. Moby Dick, America’s first great novel, remains a true story of the national character.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Yes, indeed, peer influence on young people has been demonstrated again and again as far more weighty than the influence of parents.

And unfortunately, the Chief Medical Officer quoted commits the fundamental fallacy in logic and in statistics of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

It is well known to good doctors that genes play a crucial role in alcoholism. It really is a form of depression and self-medication.

Of course, then, the parents who drink heavily will often have children who do the same, example having nothing to do with it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE ON A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

I have this one, hands down, Daniel.

That Oliver Kamm regards himself as cleverer than one of the 20th century’s leading intellects, Noam Chomsky, while also regarding himself a better debater than the sharpest tongue in contemporary Britain, George Galloway.

I’m waiting for Mr. Kamm to claim he is also faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

This is like scholastics counting the angels on the head of a pin.

Only here, misery and death on a massive scale are involved, actually making it a rather dreadful discussion.

These relatively ineffective, home-made rockets – it is altogether wrong to call them “missiles” for they have no real guidance systems as do the deadly American-supplied, Israeli Hellfire missiles – are police matters, no war matters.

They could be treated as a police matter if Israel would simply establish normal relations with its neighbors, something it has never genuinely pursued in my view.

Here is a parallel situation, a very close one actually, that makes the point of how irrational and savage Israel’s responses are. In America’s ghettos, horrible crimes are common. In the Chicago where I grew up, for example, it became common for sewer covers – or large pieces of pavement – to be rolled to highway overpasses and dropped on the cars below.

A number of times, there were ghastly deaths and accidents. That is why today all overpasses are covered with chain-link fencing, something going back to the 1960s.

But imagine, instead, the authorities having responded by calling in the National Guard to bomb a section of the ghetto, killing many innocent people? That is precisely what Israel does, time and time again. That’s why Rabbi Lerner rightly called the policy stupid.

Israel alienates most of the world with this barbarism, especially the liberal-minded intellectuals of the world who should be its friends. It also creates new enemies by the score: it’s the principle of revenge at work.

And time is not on Israel’s side. The Palestinians, like most third-world people have a high birth rate. Israelis have the birth rates typical of all advanced countries – that is, not high enough to replace its own population in the long term.

The reason for the disparity is an economic concept called Demographic Transition. It has many long-term implications. Just one of these, we see today, is the youthful nature of the Palestinian population. When Israel bombs, it kills and maims kids, unavoidably, and it disgusts the world, as it should.

And it sows a new crop of enemies, young people being very headstrong and emotional.

All of Israel’s ugly policies have failed, from tearing down people’s homes to refusing permits for business and construction in occupied areas to blockades. This way of behaving is a one-way trip to nowhere.

I’ll turn the argument in your column of the other day around, Daniel. All Israel has to say is let Palestine exist and let them choose their government.

Then negotiate and deal legally as any neighboring governments do in the world. No savagery, just words and legal agreements. It doesn’t matter what Hamas thinks of Israel so long as it abides by the rules, which there is every reason on earth to believe they will. They have tried in the past to have an understanding with Israel, and they are rejected as not being worthy of talking to.

I have to say, Daniel, I was disappointed in published responses to your commentary the other day.

It was clear that you selected favorable ones and ignored others, at least at the point I looked. Hardly a dialogue, and what’s the point of having a comment facility if it is treated that way, as it is regularly by The Times regular columnists?

You are fair and generous in allowing responses to your blog, but that mode of thinking never extends to reportage or columnists in The Times.

Maybe it should. Toronto’s Globe and Mail, a fine and distinguished paper, allows virtually free comment on stories and columns – only filth and libel and prejudice are excluded.