David Schneider-Joseph

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Tue Sep 30, 2003

The Presidency Wars

David Brooks has a good article in the New York Times which relates to my earlier post, Why I Probably Won't Be a Politician.

I genuinely would like to talk about ideas. Let's talk about ideas, OK?

9/30/2003 11:21 pm | Comments (3) | #

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Sun Sep 28, 2003

John Kerry for President!

Is it just me or do these t-shirt photographs seem somewhat.....fishy (as in Photoshopped)?

9/28/2003 11:57 pm | Comments (3) | #

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

In a recent post, I said that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism tend to go hand and hand.

I want to elaborate on that. I'm not saying that all anti-Zionists are anti-Semitic. However, the claims that bolster anti-Zionism, such as the one that Israel expelled Arabs when it was founded, were fabrications that were created by anti-Semites, and have now become accepted by mainstream anti-Zionists who don't bother to research the facts.

So, in that sense, the vast majority of anti-Zionists are basing their opinions on anti-Semitic ideas (without realizing it), even if they themselves are not racist.

Anti-Semitic politicians like Yasser Arafat have mastered the art of manipulating the opinions of well-meaning Westerners with carefully-constructed half-truths.

9/28/2003 2:06 am | Comments (0) | #

Tolerance vs. Complicity

As someone who has pretty radical ideas in some areas (e.g. that young people are human beings), it can sometimes be difficult to figure out the right balance between not being complicit in evil, and not forcing my ideas onto people who are uninterested in them.

Here's an example. A conversation will arise somehow where the topic of, say, drugging "ADD" kids, or forcing medical procedures on kids, will come up. People will laugh their knowing laughs, and it's all rather amusing to them. And everyone is oblivious to the fact that there's someone sitting at the table who thinks that it's all pretty disgusting.

But the people themselves are good people, who are just infected with a bad meme that most of our society is affected with. I don't want to come across as if I'm disgusted with them as people, but just that I'm disgusted with that particular idea.

And I don't want to force my ideas upon them if they're not receptive to the ideas. I don't believe it's useful to do so. I think people aren't going to learn something that they don't have an interest in or aren't in a position to understand, and trying to force the issue serves no end.

But on the other hand, not saying anything is an implicit agreement that the ideas being expressed are true, since usually the thought doesn't even cross their mind that reasonable people think something different about the topic.

So, how does one avoid the effective lie of silence, while at the same time not ramming your ideas down other people's throats?

I think I'm pretty good at balancing the two, but I'm not nearly as good as I'd like to be, and it can pose a problem when I feel a need to say something, out of sheer moral imperil, and then I get looked at as if I have two heads for actually saying it.

9/28/2003 1:17 am | Comments (2) | #

Sat Sep 27, 2003

ROFLMAO!!!!!

This is TOO funny. They just can't stop with stealing the duck.

A friend and I were comparing the maximum-priced Mac laptop vs. the maximum-priced PC-laptop money could buy. They both had 17" widescreen displays, so we decided to compare the descriptions of the displays. Well, read Apple's:

Featuring the largest, most spectacular display ever to grace a portable, miraculously engineered into a 1-inch-thin notebook that’s ultralight (just 6.9 pounds), ultradesirable — and starts at $2999.

Now read Voodoo's!

Featuring the largest, most spectacular widescreen WXGA 1440-by-900 resolution display with a 16:9 aspect ratio ever to grace a portable, engineered into the most luxurious, powerful and ultra desirable fully featured super-notebook ever built.

9/27/2003 1:31 am | Comments (11) | #

Palestinian nationalism

In response to my previous post, a friend told me that we should not only take Palestinian national identity seriously, but that the fabrication of that identity was a huge miscalculation on the part of those who wished to destroy Israel, and is one of the few redeeming qualities of the current situation.

Even though the Palestinian culture is mostly anti-Israel at the present time, "once they invented Palestinian nationalism, they set in motion the process by which they would eventually lose control of the Palestinians as pawns."

I thought that was pretty brilliant.

9/27/2003 12:04 am | Comments (0) | #

Fri Sep 26, 2003

Anti-Semites? Who, Us?

Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are logically separable, but in reality they tend to go hand in hand.

My one gripe with the article is calling the Palestinians a "make-pretend" people. While Palestinian national identity was manufactured as a means to destroy Israel, it exists, and we should accept that fact and take it seriously now. (Thanks to Woty for pointing this out to me.)

But aside from that, the article does a tremendously good job at showing that "anti-Zionists" apply their principles to Israel in a way which is blatantly inconsistent with the principles they claim to espouse.

9/26/2003 11:29 pm | Comments (4) | #

Wed Sep 24, 2003

The KGB's Man

Ion Mihai Pacepa, chief of Soviet-era Romanian intelligence and defector to the U.S., offers a must-read on how he and the KGB masterminded the grooming of Yasser Arafat and the "Palestinian cause" as a front for anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.

If true, it's quite important.

9/24/2003 1:03 am | Comments (0) | #

Sat Sep 20, 2003

What is terrorism?

Raven asks:

Can you direct me to where exactly on your site you explain your definition of a terrorist or a terrorist act?

I'll do my best. Most likely someone will come up with an example of some action that is hard to classify. But the first thing to keep in mind is that even though some actions are hard to classify, the vast majority of actions are clearly either terrorist actions, or not terrorist actions, and I think the definition I'm about to put forth is relatively good at distinguishing between the two. So, with that disclaimer out of the way...

A terrorist is someone who deliberately targets non-combatants. This is distinct from someone who simply does things that end up killing non-combatants.

For example, a military action that results in innocent death is not terrorism if it was designed for a specific military end. So, bombing a power plant, if it's providing power to your enemy's military, is not terrorism, even if there are innocent people working at the power plant who you know will die. It serves a specific military, tactical objective which makes the job of winning your war easier and less costly.

On the other hand, bombing a bus full of children is a terrorist act. There is no military or tactical value in doing so. The only value is in its "theatrical" value, i.e. the psychological effect it brings to your enemy. Therefore, it is wrong.

If that bus happens to contain an enemy soldier, that does not make the act less of a terrorist act, because your intent was to kill the innocent people. Intent is the fundamental defining characteristic of terrorism. Ask yourself this question: if there were more innocent children on the bus, would you have been happier? If the answer is yes, then it was terrorism. However, if your answer is that you really just wanted to kill the soldier, and it's unfortunate that other people had to die, then it might not be terrorism.

Note that while a terrorist act is always wrong, this does not mean that acts which aren't terrorism are always right. To determine whether a non-terrorist act is moral, you need to ask three questions.

1. What war are you fighting? You need to ask what your ultimate end is. Who is your enemy? Why are you fighting them? What do you hope to accomplish by winning the war? It is not enough to just pick an enemy to fight. You have to have a good reason for fighting that enemy.

2. How will this action further that war's objectives? If your war is a just one, that doesn't mean that all actions performed in its name are just. There must be a good reason to believe that your action will be likely to contribute to the likelihood of winning the war.

3. Are the benefits worth the costs to innocent people? Even if your war is just, and you've picked a target which will serve toward the end of winning that war, that doesn't mean it's okay to indiscriminately attack legitimate targets. The effect of collateral damage is important to weigh.

If you attack a target without satisfying those three questions, even though it's not terrorism, it's still wrong (though not nearly as wrong as terrorism itself is).

Now, that said, the U.S. and Israel don't commit terrorist acts, and, on top of that, the vast majority of military actions by the U.S. and Israel satisfy all three of those moral questions, too.

By contrast, organizations like Hamas and Al Qaeda deliberately target non-combatants, and in addition they fail to have adequate answers to the three moral questions. Plus, they deliberately put innocent people on their own side in harm's way, to make the moral dilemmas for the other side more complicated.

9/20/2003 2:27 pm | Comments (24) | #

Thu Sep 18, 2003

What do you call a cloned llama?

The Dolly Llama.

And speaking of the Dalai Lama, check out this somewhat surprising article: Dalai Lama Says Terror May Need a Violent Reply.

9/18/2003 10:08 pm | Comments (0) | #

Why I Probably Won't Be a Politician

Comments like this one are one reason I'm not cut out for being a politician. I'm actually interested in having a real exchange of ideas, not a rhetorical slugfest.

9/18/2003 9:48 pm | Comments (17) | #

Tue Sep 16, 2003

Ha

I just caught my aunt and uncle (whom I'm living with) watching a rerun of the Joe Schmo Show, even though they said it was stupid when I was watching it last week.

I just registered pMpost, by the way. Definitely worth $10.

9/16/2003 11:44 pm | Comments (0) | #

Sat Sep 13, 2003

September 12

We need to remember September 12th, 2001, maybe more than the 11th:

The moral clarity after 9/11 terrified them. They wanted it to go away so badly so they could switch the conversation back to the faults and evils of America.

And they have, of course, partly succeeded ... They succeeded in the end not by argument but by the effect of sheer fatigue. No democracy wants to believe it is under dire threat; no one wants the abnormality to endure; no one wants to absorb the truth that the war is still in its infancy and that greater atrocities lie ahead

You should read Andrew Sullivan's entire post at The Daily Dish.

9/13/2003 12:40 am | Comments (0) | #

Thu Sep 11, 2003

September 11

I was thinking of posting four images today, one for each crash, at the corresponding times.

Maybe if this were September 11, 2002, I would have done that. But it's September 11, 2003.

So I'll simply leave those who want to remember with this link.

9/11/2003 8:46 am | Comments (0) | #

Wed Sep 10, 2003

The Myth of Appeasement

Steven Den Beste over at USS Clueless has a good article today explaining the way Palestinian terrorist organizations like Hamas put out propaganda intended to scare Israelis and the rest of the world into believing that fighting back against terror will cause innocent people to suffer more.

The reality is that the terrorist organizations have no moral restraints, and never did. We can't appease them by refusing to fight them. The best we can do to save innocent lives is to fight them with all our capacity.

In the post-9/11 world, these things should be obvious to everyone, but they're not, so I am going to periodically remind my readers of simple facts like this one.

9/10/2003 9:25 pm | Comments (0) | #

Thu Sep 4, 2003

Planning

Before the war, Bush was accused of arranging the details of the Iraqi reconstruction as if war were inevitable and he had no intention of giving inspections a chance.

Now that the war has happened, some of the very same people criticize Bush on the grounds that the reconstruction was poorly planned before the war.

9/4/2003 7:33 pm | Comments (8) | #

Wed Sep 3, 2003

Lizard Attack

I guess they're still playing SimCity Classic in Beirut.

9/3/2003 5:38 am | Comments (2) | #

More On Israel

Berard wrote a comment disagreeing with my post, No One To Blame But Themselves. I have responded to some of his points below:

The thing is, to the Palestinian point of view, every Israeli is a legitimate target because they're all occupying land that's not theirs by any right other than the Israelis decided to come in and take it.

I agree with Berard that this is the point of view of many Palestinians, and that is exactly the problem.

Palestinian tactics don't help, but neither does the heavy-handedness of the Israelis- and their supporters stateside. The problem is, they're both jackasses, all of them.

Any debate of Israel's policies should start with an acknowledgment that "heavy-handedness" in targeting terrorists, whether the right approach or the wrong one, is radically different, morally, from the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians.

The Israelis no more or less than the Palestinians- say what you will about the latter but they were there first.

The premise that a group of people has no right to live somewhere on the Earth because some other group of people which happens to be a different race was there first, is not valid. I have no right to prevent black people from living in my town, and Arabs have no right to prevent Jews from living in theirs. Selling land to Jews is punished by death in Palestine.

Let's review how Israel came into being:

1. Jews had recently been mass-murdered nearly to extinction, and, having nowhere else to go, established a state in the area specified by a United Nations mandate. Upon Israel's founding, the Arabs already living within Israel's borders were not forced to leave by Israel.

2. The same United Nations mandate also called for the establishment of a Palestinian state. No Palestinian state was founded, and the Arab states rejected Israel's right to exist, declaring war on Israel and urging all the Arabs in Israel to leave to make way for the invading Arab forces.

3. Israel fought for its life, and survived.

There are now roughly one million Israeli Arabs, with the same rights as Israeli Jews.

For more information about Israel's history, visit The World's excellent A Short History of Israel series.

9/3/2003 4:34 am | Comments (6) | #

The Joe Schmo Show

Beats the shit out of Survivor.

9/3/2003 12:38 am | Comments (29) | #

Mon Sep 1, 2003

No One To Blame But Themselves

Like it or not, Israel and Palestine are effectively at war.

The difference (well, one of many) is, the Israeli side obeys the rules of war. It targets only military targets, uses only military personnel to do so, and does not use civilians as cover.

The Palestinian side targets innocent children with their "military". And they use innocent children to attack Israel's military.

They have no one to blame but themselves.

9/1/2003 2:55 pm | Comments (2) | #

Reuters is Biased

Look at these blatantly one-sided articles by Reuters here and here.

If they delete them, I've got backups here and here.

9/1/2003 1:38 pm | Comments (1) | #