ShrinkWrapped

Fool Me Once ...

In my morning peregrinations across the radio dial I spent some time at NPR and at John Gambling's show listening to learned commentary about the situation in Egypt.  On both shows, commentators referred to as "experts" on the Middle East made the almost identical comment to the effect that we should not be too worried about the Muslim Brotherhood because they do not support terror; further there were multiple comments extolling the moderation of "Nobel Prize" winner Mohamed el Baredi.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; (try to) fool me a thousand times, something is seriously amiss.

The New York Times, the go-to site for conventional wisdom, describes the situation in similar terms: [All Emphases added and my comments in italics]

Cairo Protesters Urge Mass Rally on Tuesday

(Benjamin Netanyahu commented), “I remind you that the peace between Israel and Egypt has endured for over three decades and our goal is to ensure that these relations continue,” he said on Sunday as Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood and the secular opposition banded together around a prominent government critic to negotiate for forces seeking the fall of Mr. Mubarak.

The announcement that the critic, Mohamed ElBaradei, would represent a loosely unified opposition reconfigured the struggle between Mr. Mubarak’s government and a six-day-old uprising bent on driving him and his party from power.

Though lacking deep support on his own, Dr. ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and diplomat, could serve as a consensus figure [ie, a figure head] for a movement that has struggled to articulate a program for a potential transition. It suggested, too, that the opposition was aware of the uprising’s image abroad, [the opposition is un-organized, except for the Muslim Brotherhood, so who decided they needed a moderate for a front man?  Hint: it wasn't the democratic secular opposition, most of whom are Arabic nationalists and not Jeffersonian democrats, in any event.] putting forth a candidate who might be more acceptable to the West than beloved in Egypt.

In scenes as tumultuous as any since the uprising began, Dr. ElBaradei defied a government curfew on Sunday night and joined thousands of protesters in Liberation Square, which has become the epicenter of the uprising and a platform, writ small, for the frustrations, ambitions and resurgent pride of a generation claiming the country’s mantle.

“Today we are proud of Egyptians,” Dr. ElBaradei told throngs who surged toward him in a square festooned with banners calling for Mr. Mubarak’s fall. “We have restored our rights, restored our freedom, and what we have begun cannot be reversed.”

The reports of the Muslim Brotherhood and secular opposition banding together should be a cause for great concern; we have seen this before:

SNAP ANALYSIS: Elbaradei, The Muslim Brotherhood, and a Cautionary Note

I would like to remind people that after the 1979 revolution in Iran, the secularists and the various religious groups united to form a coalition government. Within a year, the Islamic Republic party (two of the members of which were Rafsanjani and Khamenei) completely took control and turned Iran into a totalitarian state in the guise of a so-called “Islamic” republic that took away many of the hard-earned rights that Iranians had gained in the last century. This regime is still in power in Iran today, executing opposition members and Iranian citizens who dare oppose them.

I would like to remind people that when Khomeini came to Iran he promised freedom, democracy and human rights. As we are seeing today — with people telling us not to worry about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt — in Iran in the early days of the revolution people said the same about Khomeini and his minions. Western media and even western leaders, including former U.S. President, Jimmy Carter, tried to deal with the government of Khomeini, only to see radical so-called “students” who called themselves “Followers of the Imam’s Line” occupy the U.S. embassy in Tehran and take its employees hostage for 444 days, only to release them on the day that Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President, humiliating Carter and releasing a new meme–the idea that Islamic revolution could spread throughout the world. Radical Islam has been with us since.

In fact, one of the members of the Muslim Brotherhood, involved in the assassination of former liberal Egyptian President Anwar Saddat, is Ayman Al-Zawahiri, one of the leaders of Al Qaeda. Remember them?

Barry Rubin supplies some useful quotes that you will not see in the MSM delimiting the "moderation" of the Muslim Brotherhood:

Flash: Egyptian "Moderate Democratic" Leader Negotiating Coalition Government With Islamists

And for those of you who think that the Muslim Brotherhood is really a moderate group, here is one example of its rhetoric from Rajab Hilal Hamida, a member of the Brotherhood in Egypt’s parliament, who proves that you don’t have to be moderate to run in elections:

“From my point of view, Bin Ladin, al-Zawahiri and al-Zarqawi [the leaders of al-Qaida who staged the September 11 attacks and massive killings in Iraq] are not terrorists in the sense accepted by some. I support all their activities, since they are a thorn in the side of the Americans and the Zionists.…[On the other hand,] he who kills Muslim citizens is neither a jihad fighter nor a terrorist, but a criminal murderer. We must call things by their proper names!”

And here's Muhammad Badi, the Brotherhood's leader:

"Resistance is the only solution….[Today the United States] is withdrawing from Iraq, defeated and wounded, and it is also on the verge of withdrawing from Afghanistan. [All] its warplanes, missiles and modern military technology were defeated by the will of the peoples, as long as [these peoples] insisted on resistance–and the wars of Lebanon and Gaza, which were not so long ago, [are proof of this].”

The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist, Sharia supporting organization.  It demurred on terror as a tactical ply and has never abandoned the philosophy which supports terror, in the form of strict Sharia, as a political philosophy.  If they have not used terror within Egypt in the last 20 years it is only because of their fear of the Egyptian internal security (which we have used to extract information from Islamists and which does not worry about he tender sensibilities of those who quake at making their enemies uncomfortable) and their recognition that terror would lead to their destruction.

Worse, for the future of the Middle East, the Egyptian people are not democrats waiting for a chance to build a consensual democracy; Barry Rubin has the numbers:

My Interview on the Egyptian Revolt: I'm Worried That Others Aren't Worried

In Egypt, 30 percent like Hizballah (66 percent don’t). 49 percent are favorable toward Hamas (48 percent are negative); and 20 percent smile (72 percent frown) at al-Qaida. Roughly speaking, one-fifth of Egyptians applaud the most extreme Islamist terrorist group, while around one-third back revolutionary Islamists abroad. This doesn’t tell us what proportion of Egyptians want an Islamist government at home, but it is an indicator.

In Egypt, 82 percent want stoning for those who commit adultery; 77 percent would like to see whippings and hands cut off for robbery; and 84 percent favor the death penalty for any Muslim who changes his religion.

Asked if they supported “modernizers” or “Islamists” only 27 percent of Egyptians said they favored the modernizers while 59 percent said they backed the Islamists.

In general, if you are a pessimist about the ability of rational behavior to trump the irrational in the Middle East, you will be right much more often than those who minimize the import of the irrational.  The best case scenario in Egypt is another dictator who is willing to begin the process of constructing a more free, more democratic society; the worst case scenario is the triumph of Thanatos, in the person of the Sunni Islamists.

Someday historians will look back at our time and wonder how our most prestigious news organizations could have been so gullible and complicit in our failures to understand the world we live in.

Psychiatry and Organized Medicine in the Special Interest State

Dr. Joy Bliss [HT: Bird Dog] has collected a couple more links in the chain from the enhanced diagnostic nosology of DSM-5 to the ongoing efforts to pathologize all the foibles of human behavior.  Ace is worried about organized Psychiatry's tendency to pathologize normal variants of behavior and about the purity of their motives:

The Battle Over the DSM-V (Or "DSM-5," Since Roman Numerals are Getting the Axe Too

From the Washington Examiner, the changes "reflect new political realities about how psychiatric medicine gets paid for and by whom." Under the new revisions, almost everyone could be labeled with some kind of disorder. Behavior that has always been regarded as normal is now considered suspect. Some of the diagnoses that are being considered include:

• mild anxiety depression
• psychosis risk syndrome
• temper dysregulation disorder
• attenuated psychotic symptoms syndrome
• binge eating disorder

Maybe I just have a case of too skeptical for my own good syndrome, with a touch of sick of the bullshit fugue. And maybe a little everybody seems to have a way to scam money from the government but me anxiety. Yeah, there's that. 

Looking on the bright side, under DSM-5, Ace will have a reimbursable disorder; of course, so will everyone else and the only treatment that will be reimbursed will be pharmaceutical.   

A long article in the Washington Examiner is well worth your time to understand how the convergence between government and organized Psychiatry is corrupting the practice of Psychiatry.

Corrupting Psychiatry

Even if you could justify rent-seeking on grounds that taking preventive measures with, say, “alcohol use disorder,” it ought to be difficult to use the primary care rationale for any number of other kooky disorders dreamt up by the APA inner-circle, its lawyers or its supplicants. Oh but they will: If we treat temper tantrums early, there will be less crime, etc. People get creative when it comes to rigging the game..

It’s not just the psychiatrists and Pharma who stand to gain. This is also a subsidy largely for the wealthy. A new bonanza for the so-called “worried well” is likely to pull psych doctors away from helping those who need it most -- the chronically mentally ill poor -- and into practices built to treat wealthy people with newly-minted Cadillac mental health plans.

[Dr. Bliss wrote more about this in The personality disorder kerfuffle, and the silly DSM and I wrote about the misuse of Psychiatric nosology in The Altruistic Will to Power.]

The crucial element from the Psychiatric point of view is that Psychiatry has abandoned any concern with using etiology, ie causation, in its diagnostic manual.  All diagnoses are collections of symptoms and all treatments, especially under the pressure of the health department bureaucrats who know nothing about patient care but assume all providers are alternately morons, incompetents, charlatans, or sociopaths and demand  numbered lists of problems that can be addressed in notes (which may have nothing to do with the actual person, or client or consumer, the note refers to) devolves to the lowest common denominator, which in most cases means drugs.  Psychotherapy is not amenable to problem lists (though some schools of Psychotherapy do focus on specific problems) while symptoms are easy to list and can be assigned numerical values.  Drugs are designed to address symptoms, Pt gain symptom relief (perhaps primarily form the placebo effect) while keeping their pathology and diagnosis, and everyone goes home unhappy but afraid to change.

Here is a case in point, a young man entering the system, who was referred for evaluation and treatment of (mild) Depression, Not Otherwise Specified (DSM-IV: 311):

Hector is a 20 year old man born in New York who was referred by his primary care provider (née Doctor) because of depressed mood, low frustration tolerance, and anger management issues.

He described his problems as being caused by his family's financial problems and conflicts with his 15 year old Girlfriend.  She lives two hours away (they met on line) and they only see each other two days a month.  She is much less invested in the relationship and he feels insecure; when she does not show sufficient interest in their chats, he gets angry.  His history includes difficulty learning, he dropped  out in 9th grade, and poor work habits.  He worked at a hotel on track to join th Union but spent much of each day with his co-workers drinking beer.  He was fired.  He worked for several months over the summer but his job, moving pallets in a warehouse, was too strenuous and didn't pay well enough.  He quit.  He is currently working part time and it is insufficient for his needs.  He worries about money and his girlfriend and when he discussed his worries with his PCP he was referred to mental health with a provisional diagnosis of Depression. 

Hector does not yet realize it but he is on track to enter the realm of Mental health/Social Services where, if he hits the jackpot, he will be discovered, under DSM-5, to have chronic " mild anxiety/depression" (or perhaps, he might better fit "temper dysregulation disorder" or “alcohol use disorder") and given disability.  His disability will "earn" him several hundred dollars a month ( not enough to live on but enough to keep him pacified and eligible for subsidized housing in New York), and support a network of Social Service workers (Social Workers, Case Managers, Psychiatrists, et al) who will keep him "treated" with a varying stream of "supportive services" and medications from Pharma.

[For the record, Hector could not leave without a diagnosis and I therefore diagnosed "Adjustment Disorder", did not prescribe medication, and sent him to the Social Worker for Supportive Therapy so that he could negotiate his break up with his girlfriend; it is possible Hector will find the inner strength to resist the pull of the system whose siren song he is just now beginning to hear, but he did not strike me as a modern day Odysseus.]

Hector was naive in the ways of the System; with time and more lost jobs he will discover that if he describes himself as "depressed" rather than unhappy and that he is "self medicating" with beer rather than merely drinking beer and that he has anger management issues rather than poor frustration tolerance and a bad temper, he will be ushered into the system and its financial inducements with alacrity.

The system is becoming so complex and kludgey that it cannot last indefinitely.  Able bodied men and women who are limited it their abilities cannot be supported forever by a smaller and smaller number of productive workers.  This is the way toward Collapse.

Comment of the Year

I am only now, thanks to the snow day, catching up on reading everyone's comments.  As usual, I learn a great deal from the people who stop by and leave comments, but Siha Sapa's comment on Compare and Contrast , a response to Dr. Aswaz Truv, was in a class of its own.  Do yourself a favor and read the Dr.'s comment and the responses; you will not be disappointed.

An Experiment

I have begun to blog at Psychology Today's web site.  As part of the process of setting up the blog, I have posted a picture and my real identity.  My posts there will be, of necessity, less political than my posts here but it offers another venue to develop and disseminate my ideas.  My current plan (at the suggestion of the person in charge of the Psychology Today blogs) is to cross post there a couple of times a week more concise and less political versions of posts that I put up here.

If you are interested, take a look, leave a comment or two, and see what else the magazine and its bloggers have to offer: ShrinkWrapped at Psychology Today.

On the Limitations of Parenting

Until now I have studiously avoided commenting on Amy Chua's recent article which has the world of upper middle class parenting in an uproar.  There are several reasons I have chosen not to comment.

To start, from the brief excerpt printed in the WSJ, Chua's behavior borders on abusive and is clearly presented as being primarily in service to her own narcissistic needs for a "perfect" child.  Beyond that, the description of her parenting style is incomplete, exaggerated, and probably bears only a passing resemblance to her actual parenting or to the most significant aspects of her parenting.  The take-away from her article is that if you want to raise a child who can get into an Ivy League school it is best to have extremely bright, academically successful parents, go to the "right" schools, have the "right" hobbies, and accumulate the "right" extracurricular activities.  She does not mention that without any legacy effect, even a child who scores in the 1500's, with all the "right" accoutrements, has only a random chance, on the order of <5%, of getting into Harvard.  I could also add that despite her self-identification as a Chinese Tiger Mom, from every indication she is merely an exaggerated version of the Upper West Side American Mom whose self concept and value system depends on the attainment of the status that can only be confirmed by credentials.  This is fine as far as it goes but has only a passing association to "success" in life if we default to Freud's rubric of success as a three part axis consisting of Love, Work, and Play.

[For example, to a great many Americans, were their child to enter the military, they would see this as a wonderful achievement, worthy of great pride for their parents; on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, having a child join the military earns pity and/or contempt.  The values that imbue Amy Chua's piece are not universal.]

I have decided to offer some comments at this time because a very thoughtful blogger has written a couple of pieces discussing the question of American versus Chinese parenting: What we sow, and what we raise:

Chua does have a point. In America we have allowed genuine excellence to be sacrificed upon the altar of our children’s self-esteem, and our barely earned praise has become a kind of cheap grace. In our schools, every test gets a star, every assembly gets a “participation certificate” and every sporting try gets a trophy. Often children do begin to realize that when everything they do is overpraised, their specialness has been undervalued through condescension. That, in turn, reveals the flimsy foundation upon which their self-esteem has been so carefully built. Such a realization can be shattering.

[The idiocy of our pedagogical devotion to "self esteem" is based on a complete misinterpretation of the concept and has led to, as so many foolish pedagogic techniques tend to, an epidemic of people with damaged self concepts; they have unearned, elevated self regard without commensurate accomplishments.  Such damaged narcissism interferes with learning since to recognize that they do not know what they think they know damages their self regard.  The result is anger rather than the kind of humility that facilitates learning and exploration.] 

Elizabeth Scalia continues:

Have Americans become such hypersensitive violets that they cannot bear a bracing wind? 

Six years ago, then Harvard president Lawrence Summers suggested that the underrepresentation of female scientists at elite universities could partly be attributed to “innate” differences between men and women. His remark caused a female biologist from MIT to dramatically depart the meeting in a near swoon. 

Perhaps some of this is a reflection of cultural differences that seem sharp-edged in the first throes of immigration, but eventually dull.

...

But there must be some happy medium between making extreme demands of our children and being too afraid to demand anything at all. The recently released book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” has made the case that our students are not developing critical-thinking skills, and that their learning seems more centered on how to “get by and get through” than a genuine pursuit of excellence. The book may serve to bolster Chua’s assertion that by not allowing our children to struggle, and not demanding persistent hard work from them, we have dulled their curiosity or the sense of competitiveness in a way that, Chua suggests, will deprive our children from reaching their full potentials. 

There is much more in her article so read the whole thing; then take a look at her follow up, US vs Tiger Mothers, Lion Fathers – UPDATED (which includes some interesting quotes from Todd Zywicki and Timothy Dalrymple) about the vapidity of the education we foist upon our children:

Clearly, there needs to be a balance between achievement for sake of excellence and excellence born purely of passion, and unimpressed with what anyone else thinks. Educationally (and perhaps otherwise) we’re schizophrenic. We want our kids to have the best opportunities but we hobble them with insipid curricula that are too heavy on social engineering and too light on personal accounting. We watch the government pay lip service about the importance of a good education and the crippling effect of poor schools upon our young, then we watch the same gasbags do everything they can to prevent poor kids from getting into good schools, because they’re real concern lies with their union-filled coffers, and not the kids.

What Chua misses (most likely by editorial decision; after all, a balanced approach would sell few books) and Elizabeth understands implicitly, is that there is no single best way to raise a child.  There is also no single ideal metric by which to measure the success of that child.  Each parent must decide for themselves, recognizing that ultimately they have only the most limited control and that the unconscious determinants are far more important than the conscious elements, what they desire for their child.  Most parents have a tremendous narcissistic investment in their child(ren) and unconsciously love those aspects of the child that resemble what they value in themselves and hate those aspects of their child that they detest in themselves.  Finding way to minimize the effects of one's unconscious Narcissistic investment and tolerating, even enabling, the child to find and become the person he wants (needs?) to be, is a rare skill in parenting.  Some Chinese Tiger Mom's will, in between the demands of piano practice, find ways to encourage or at least tolerate their child's interests and developmental diversions, even while being disappointed that he prefers the flute (possibly an acceptable instrument) or the guitar (unacceptable) or, God [they-don't believe-in] forbid, baseball.  An argument can be made that a parent who wants a child to study piano 3 hours a day and is able to compromise on 1 and 1/2 hours a day exchange for allowing their son to go to baseball practice or their daughter to learn to cook (or go to baseball practice for those very few girls who prefer) is a mother who is able to set her own narcissism in second place to the needs of their child.

Along with the discussion (argument?) over which style of parenting is superior, a non-starter as far as I can tell, the point is often made that American children are more creative than Chinese children.  (Whether or not that is still true when American children are being offered pabulum in school rather than being challenged academically is another story; there is some evidence, for another post, that American creativity is waning.)  There is no adequate theory for creativity and how to foster it in children.  Certainly we want to allow our children the freedom to let their imaginations run free.  One of the terrible effects of child abuse is the inhibition of imagination seen in its victims; free thought can always be dangerously drawn to intolerable experiences and therefore is dangerous to such children and the adults they become; yet even with that proviso, there are adults who have emerged from horrendous childhoods who have been creative and have enriched the human race.  There are many children of privilege who have been so constricted in their marathon race for the brass ring of an Ivy Education that there imaginations have never soared; yet others find a professor who opens the door to realms they never knew were there and in their explorations they advance our knowledge in unique and ultimately beneficial ways.

I suppose this is an argument for raising children as valued as-yet-uncivilized creatures, with love and limits, with the full awareness that there is no single idealized rule book for engendering adults who are able to Love, Play, and Work effectively, and are fully capable of pursuing happiness in what ever way matches their potential.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-Change

I did not watch the SOTU address last night but from reading commentary provided by people on the left and on the right (more from people on the Right, as you would expect) my impression is that Obama said he was all for cutting spending right before he proposed a mammoth amount of new spending, excuse me, investment.  Apparently he managed to dispense with foreign affairs in a few sentences as a nuisance distracting from his domestic agenda.  Finally he lauded American exceptionalism (apparently we are able to take people from failed cultures and make them into average Americans within one generation, except that we are failing to do that because our schools don't have enough science teachers, or something along those lines.)  If I have short changed his speech, let me know.  However, any speech that mentions the need to cut spending without mentioning the need to reform entitlements is a joke.  And any speech which discusses foreign policy without mentioning the ascendancy of Iran in Lebanon or the unrest in Egypt is trivial.

The demonstrations in Egypt may mean nothing, but the ruling family apparently is concerned; this may or may not be big news:

Mubarak’s Wife and Son Flee to London amid Protests

The wife of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and their son Gamal, considered the successor to his father as president, have fled to London with 97 suitcases after unprecedented massive protests in Egypt, an Arab website reported.

The plane also carried Gamal's daughter, the Akhbar Arab website reported. It also said a Twitter account was blocked to prevent a social network campaign to urge the ousting of Mubarak, who is over 80 and is reportedly is suffering from cancer.

Dozens of Twitter messages have been sent sayng that Mubarak’s wife Suzanne was identified at Heathrow Airport in London, where she and her son and granddaughter arrived in a private jet.

In Egypt, calm has returned to the streets. Three people – two of them protesters—were killed in Tuesday’s demonstrations that spread throughout the country. 

Despots are a lot like rats when they are in charge and a lot like rats when their power slips; if the family is fleeing it may just be precautionary before the violent suppression or it may be a sign of impending upheaval; time will tell.  If Mubarak falls, the primary beneficiary will probably be the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological father of Salafi Jihad terror.  KSM was a member before forming al Qaeda with his friend Osama bin Laden.  Their disagreement with the Muslim Brotherhood had to do with tactics, not with goals.

Inertia is an under-appreciated aspect of biological systems.  People resist change and will prefer to kludge the system rather than risk a collapse, yet eventually any system that resists change must collapse.  The beauty of a Democracy is that we encourage collapse and insure partial collapses every few years (as in the 2008 ans 2010 elections.)  Despots fear collapse and resist with all their might, becoming more and more ruthless and vicious while less and less efficient in bettering the lives of their subjects.  Egypt will change, probably not for the better and possibly not just yet.  Once the change occurs, our government will be completely surprised and unprepared.  The current administration, run by a President who speaks of change while behaving as if he is a conventional machine politician of the early days of the last century, will be more surprised and unprepared than most.

Compare and Contrast

There are two contrasting points of view in the West on the nature of Islam and the problems it presents.  The more prevalent view, adopted by the Bush administration and emphasized by the Obama administration, is that Islam is basically a Religion of Peace and Islamic terror is merely a deviant iteration of Islam.  The contrasting view is that Islam itself fosters violent conflict with non-believers and confrontation is inevitable; in this view only by projecting strength and resolution can the West minimize the deleterious results of the clash since Islam accepts as part of its core doctrine the need for coexistence where Islam cannot achieve supremacy.

The two contrasting approaches are on display in an article from Tom Barnett and a recent book review linked by Zenpundit.

Tom Barnett has advanced the idea that Iran can be managed and eventually co-opted if only we use our soft (economic) power to its utmost:

The New Rules: The Battle for Islam's Soul

Beginning with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the West has viewed the Middle East and North Africa primarily through the lens of radical fundamentalist political movements. That perspective has narrowed our strategic vision ever since, conflating Shiite with Sunni, evangelicals with fundamentalists, Persians with Arabs, Islamists with autocrats, and so on. But recent events in Tunisia and Algeria remind us that the vast bulk of history's revolutions are fueled by economics, not politics. In this, the struggle for Islam's soul is no different than that of any other civilization in this age of globalization's rapid expansion.

All of the world's major religions grew up under the same Malthusian conditions, in which population growth and wealth creation duked it out in a zero-sum contest. That contest ended with the Industrial Revolution, which allowed the West to free economic growth from the limits of organically achieved accumulation.

My apologies; unfortunately the rest is now behind a pay wall and I cannot find the link to the open source copy of the article.  However, if you are familiar with his work, the rest follows; essentially, he proposes that were we to open up to Iran (increase connectivity) it would inevitably lead to its people growing wealthier, effectively becoming more middle class, and that eventually, though sometimes only after 2, 3, or more generations, that leads to moderation. 

Charles Cameron, who reviews Jean-Pierre Filiu's Apocalypse in Islam, might disagree: [HT: Zenpundit]

Jean-Pierre Filiu’s book, Apocalypse in Islam (University of California Press, 2011) makes a crucially important contribution to our understanding of current events – it illuminates not just one but a cluster of closely-related blind-spots in our current thinking, and it does so with scholarship and verve.

Al-Qaida’s interest in acquiring nuclear weapons — and Iran’s – and the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear materiel – and the situation in Jerusalem – depending how you count ‘em, there are a half dozen or so glaring world problems where one spark in the Mahdist underbrush might transform a critical situation. And yet as Ali Allawi put it in his talk to the Jamestown Foundation on Mahdism in Iraq a few years back, Mahdists ferments still tend to be “below our radar”.

Background:

People are always talking about unintended consequences: might I suggest that blind-spots are where unintended consequences come from – and offer some background on apocalyptic, before proceeding to discuss Filiu’s contribution?

We already have a tendency to dismiss religious drivers in considering current events, having concluded in many cases that religion is passé for the serious-minded types who populate diplomatic, military and governmental bureaucracies world-wide – and we are even more reluctant to focus on anyone who talks about the Last Days and Final Judgment, despite the presence of both in the faith statements and scriptures of both Islam and Christianity. We think vaguely of cartoons of bearded and bedraggled men with sandwich boards declaring The End is Nigh, and move along to something more easily understood, something conveniently quantitative like the number of centrifuges unaffected by Stuxnet in Iran, or purely hypothetical, like the association of Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan.

And yet, as I’ve argued before, apocalyptic belief can be a potent force-multiplier – because as Timothy Furnish puts it bluntly in the opening paragraph of his book, Holiest Wars (Praeger, 2005):

Islamic messianic insurrections are qualitatively different from mere fundamentalist ones such as bedevil the world today, despite their surface similarities. In fact, Muslim messianic movements are to fundamentalist uprisings what nuclear weapons are to conventional ones: triggered by the same detonating agents, but far more powerful in scope and effect.

Even if that’s somewhat overstated, it should give us pause.

The review is long and interesting; this quote caught my attention:

Indeed, Jessica Stern, was taken aback at first by the apocalyptic intensity of the terrorists she studied, writing in Terrorism in the Name of God (Harper/Collins, 2003):

I have come to see that apocalyptic violence intended to “cleanse” the world of “impurities” can create a transcendent state. All the terrorist groups examined in this book believe — or at least started out believing — that they are creating a more perfect world. From their perspective, they are purifying the world of injustice, cruelty, and all that is antihuman. When I began this project, I could not understand why the killers I met seemed spiritually intoxicated. Now, I think I understand. They seem that way because they are. [Emphasis mine-SW]

Read the whole thing; you will learn something about Islam and the place of Millennialism in the religion. 

The place of Millennialism, the Islamic concept of the Mahdi, and the "love affair" with death that is a part of Apocalyptic Islam are typically discounted and ignored by commentators in the West.  Any "talking head" who would have the temerity to discuss religious fervor (except, of course, for the religious fervor among the troglodyte Christians who present a much greater threat than any Muslim terrorists, in the world according to our elites) among Muslims would be unlikely to be invited back; in some places he or she would be brought up on charges of propagating Islamophobia and/or hate speech.  It has become the most conventional of conventional wisdom to believe, with a fervor approaching that of those they mock, that G-d is not only unnecessary but an outmoded concept with neither explanatory power nor the ability to move men.  Rather than believe that Ahmadinejad, among others, might actually believe in the nonsense he professes, Iran's behavior can only be explained in economic terms.  It would be irrational for Iran's ruling elite to risk their comfort and wealth for a war with the West so therefore, since they are rational men, such a war will never occur unless we miscalculate because of our irrationality.

Dennis Prager, in an article about tonight's SOTU address, makes a point which reinforces this idea in unexpected ways:

The One Thing You Won't See on TV at the State of the Union

Here is the one thing you will not see and probably have never seen. You won't see what is behind the president and above the vice president and the speaker of the House. And because you won't see it, you won't know that you are missing something of surpassing importance.

Think about it for a moment. Why do television cameras never pull back and give a wide-angle view of the president delivering his speech? That is certainly routine for TV: It is considered uninteresting to TV viewers to have a fixed view of a subject.

Why, then, have almost no Americans ever seen what is located above the president, the vice president and the speaker of the House?

I discovered the answer when I attended President Obama's speech on health care to a joint session of Congress.

I saw chiseled in the marble wall behind the speaker and vice president, in giant letters, the words "In God We Trust."

My immediate reaction was to wonder: Why had I never seen that before? I have, after all, been watching presidential State of the Union addresses for about 40 years.

Here is my theory -- and I say "theory" because I cannot prove it.

A generation of Americans has been raised to regard any mention of God outside the home or church as a violation of the deepest principles of our country. To the men and women of the left-leaning news media, in particular, "In God We Trust" is an anachronism at best, an impediment to moral progress at worst. The existence of those giant chiseled words so disturbs the media that, consciously or not, they do not want Americans to see them

Our elites, of both parties, have become so removed from any knowledge of the power of faith to move people that they are trapped in a massive miscalculation with potentially dire consequences.  Men have always been moved more by the irrational than any rational evaluation of risks and benefits.  Even if you believe that religion is merely a human invention designed to corral our irrationalities (as most "sophisticated" people now believe) the fact that you no longer believe and are unaware of your own irrationalities does not mean that others also do not believe.

[The apotheosis of sophisticated irrationality today resides in those radical environmentalists who believe that people should be murdered for transgressing against their carbon limitation schemes.  However, we also see similar irrationalities in those who profess admiration for authoritarian regimes or believe we should send people to re-education camps.  It is easy to see the irrationality in those who openly profess racist and anti-Semitic ideas on the Right, but the irrationality on the Left is at least as pronounced.]

Our narcissism and arrogance, combined with disdain for the power of any God to move people, is problematic.  We can still confront Islam and limit the impact of its irrationalities without such recognition but we make our job much more difficult and blind ourselves to the nature of the task when we imagine they are really just like us and forget that we can  be just like them. 

It Was -2°F (-19°C) in Northern Westchester this Morning...

in the Okhotsk Sea, in February, the average temperature is −11 °F (−24 °C).  After a period of particularly bad weather, it has apparently warmed up to -14°C (-26°F), warm enough to resume rescue operations.

This could be a Hollywood blockbuster but it doesnt even make it into the MSM.  I know, they are Russians and therefor uninteresting (except as villains), and it involves surprisingly thick ice, which is contra-narrative, but the story is remarkable:

They were only playing leapfrog

Events in the Okhotsk Sea crisis are moving apace, with TASS reporting that the Bereg Nadezhdy fish carrier "has been led by two icebreakers from the ice area to clear water." Now the Admiral Makarov and Krasin icebreakers are returning to the Sodruzhestvo factory ship "in order to guide the vessel to ice-free waters."

Why did the Chilean miners become front page news and the Russian sailors have not?

Reality, Ideology, and Alternative Media

[Note Update at end.]

The underpinnings of modern Liberalism include a number of assumptions, among them the following:

1) Conservatives are bad people, usually racist and anti-Semitic, though the more clever among them are typically subtle enough to keep their beliefs hidden.  Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the most reasonable Liberal commentators, illuminates how this works:

Glenn Beck's Jewish Problem

It is fair to ask if Beck knows that these people are Jewish (It is not widely-known that Rendell is Jewish, I think). But Beck is a smart person, and has researchers at hand with access to Wikipedia. Further, most of these people on Beck's "big lie" list are already the targets of straightforward attacks in the dark, anti-Semitic corners of the Web, so an extended Google search, in some cases, would show that much of the opposition to some of these people is motivated by anti-Semitism. That said, Beck has not crossed a certain line, by identifying his targets openly as Jewish. Nevertheless, this, to me, is a classic case of anti-Semitic dog-whistling. Beck is speaking to a certain constituency, and the thought has now crossed my mind that this constituency understands the clear implications of what Beck is saying.

2) Republicans are in league with Corporate America and control the government in ways which increase the power and wealth of the corporations.  Democrats/Liberals, are the party of the people and fight against the special (corporate) interests.  (Citations are far too numerous to list.)

3) The world is divided into Oppressors and their victims.  Typically the oppressors are White and Western and Israel and the Palestinian conflict is the paradigmatic example; as such, all of the ills pertaining to the conflict can be best understood as the result of Israeli intransigence.  A subsidiary assumption, the centerpiece of the Obama "Peace Process", is that Israeli settlements (as symbols of the neo-colonialist appropriation of Palestinian land) is central to the conflict and must be addressed first, before any other movement toward Peace can be made.

There are, of course, additional aspects of the Left/Liberal ideology that are active at any one item but it is fascinating to see how each of these assumptions have faired recently in light of dis-intermediated news.

Jeffrey Goldberg's perception of a "dog whistle" anti-Semitism has been addressed by Steve Sailer.  (For the record, there are often comments at Steve Sailer's website that echo traditional anti-Semitic tropes; however, such ideas do not require a dog's auditory acuity to perceive and I have seen no real evidence that Steve Sailer harbors anti-Semitic beliefs.)

Glenn Beck, Jeffrey Goldberg, And The Dog-Whistle That Wasn't

Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, was born and bred in America. Yet, having enlisted in the Israeli Defense Force, he seems to have picked up some of the Jewish state’s characteristic frankness. So, while much of the rest of the MainStream Media was flailing about trying to concoct new rationalizations for their furious attempt to pin that Arizona psycho’s rampage on mass-market Republican spokespeople like Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, Goldberg cut to the chase. In Glenn Beck’s Jewish Problem (January 18, 2011), Goldberg simply accused Beck, the autodidactic Fox News talker, of anti-Semitism.

Now, Beck might strike a neutral observer as wildly pro-Semitic. But, you see, Goldberg has a list. He wrote:

"This is a post about Beck's recent naming of nine people—eight of them Jews—as enemies of America and humanity. … "

According to Goldberg, Beck denounced billionaire George Soros, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, 1920s’ PR man Edward Bernays, 1920s pundit Walter Lippmann, Obama Administration official Cass Sunstein, National Welfare Rights Organization co-founder Frances Fox Piven, former Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell, former SEIU labor boss Andy Stern, along with one unnamed gentile, as "enemies of America and humanity."

Goldberg is willing to concede:

"That said, Beck has not crossed a certain line, by identifying his targets openly as Jewish."

But Goldberg can just tell that Beck is guilty anyway:

"Nevertheless, this, to me, is a classic case of anti-Semitic dog-whistling. … My modest suggestion to those Jews who fear the building of mosques in American cities is that they look elsewhere for threats that seem to be gathering against them." [Links added]

The first question is whether there’s actually any story here at all. Did Beck announce a list of enemies of America and humanity? Or is Goldberg just overexcited?

Goldberg doesn’t link to any page on the Web to support his claim. This lack of documentation should have made me immediately suspicious, since it’s easy to put in a link … if you have one. (The large number of links in VDARE.com articles are often accused of being hard on the eyes, but at least we show you exactly where we get our facts.)

Please read the whole post (replete with links) to see how Sailer answers his own question.  I do  not regularly follow Glenn Beck but my impression is that he is quite pro-Israel (though not in the acceptable to Liberals way that J-Street, which advocates policies that most Israelis believe would cause great harm and increase terrorism for Israelis, are "pro-Israel") and his animus is reserved for those, Jewish or otherwise, who propose policies that he thinks are damaging to this country.  He may be overly simplistic but I doubt he is anti-Semitic.

What about the idea that Democrats are virtuous protectors of the people from the predations of crony Capitalists?  Allow Dave Shuler to comment on this:

Theodore Vail’s America

Somewhere Theodore Vail must be smiling.

This morning GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, recently tapped by President Obama to chair his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, has an op-ed in the Washington Post sketching his thoughts for the new council. The preliminaries rest on three principles: re-emphasize manufacturing and exports, free trade, and innovation.

...

As to innovation, I’m reminded of something my old business partner used to say in parody of Voltaire from time to time, “I agree with what you say but I deny your right to say it.” Among the greatest barriers to innovation are the industrial giants like GE which have shed jobs at an alarming rate over the last 30 years while wielding intellectual property laws and political clout to crush upstart competitors which are hiring. One way of spurring innovation would be to get dinosaurs like GE, grown huge through rent-seeking, the hell out of the way. I doubt we’ll see suggestions in that vein from Jeffrey Immelt.

Theodore Vail was the legendary CEO of American Telephone & Telegraph (later AT&T Corp.) during its heroic period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He believed that competition in business was inefficient and immoral. His vision for America was one in which each industry was dominated by a single massive company and these titans would meet together to set the course for the future. Welcome to Theodore Vail’s America.

I heartily endorse Mark Safraski's comment on the matter:

Perhaps We Can Call it “The Crony Capitalist Council”

The only jobs Immelt will create in America are for K Street lobbyists to secure yet more government contracts for GE. Expect a blizzard of proposed agency regs and executive orders this year as the Oligarchy tries to lock in as much of a permanent rentier economy as they can before the next election cycle.

Rent seeking is a concept in which every Liberal should be well versed, but their primary organs of perception (The New York Times, et al) carefully craft their narrative to make it appear that those rent-seekers who are on their side, like Immelt, are never questioned, while those who do the same with Republicans are uniquely evil (think of "Big Oil" or Pharma.)  

[Come to think of it, isn't The New York Times a for profit enterprise that is looking to the government to protect them?  After all, laws that restrict speech of which The Times does not approve (ie, hate speech) would have the effect of muzzling their competitors.]

[Interestingly, The Times framed the Glenn Beck controversy over Frances Fox Piven as a case of Beck labeling her as an enemy and therefore encouraging violence against her. In reality, Frances Fox Piven has overtly called for violence and Beck was simply quoting her writings.  Ron Radosh has the details. (HT: Glenn Reynolds)  Where else have we seen this idea, that those who quote actual hate speech in an effort to shine a light on the fomenters of violence are themselves guilty of hate speech? When a commentator notes the vicious hatred being propagated routinely by those who speak in the name of Islam, the commentators are guilty of hate speech and inciting Muslims.  The parallels are remarkable; it must simply be a coincidence.]

As to the third assumption, concerning the Israeli-Arab dispute (over Israel's existence), recent leaks by Palestinians interested in undermining the PA have revealed that Israeli settlements were never a major impediment until Obama made them so.  Robin Shepherd, among many others, including the Jerusalem Post, has the story:

British Foreign office, BBC, European liberal-left devastated by leaked revelations on Israeli settlements, Guardian furious at “weak” and “craven” Palestinian leadership

Game over. No way back. An entire edifice of anti-Israeli demonisation definitively consigned to the scrap heap, never to be recycled again. This is the uncompromising message that comes out of yesterday’s revelations on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. To the horror of a European political intelligentsia which has been steadfast to the point of fanatical in its opposition to Israeli “settlements” in east Jerusalem, the Palestinian leadership itself, we now know, has long accepted that the vast majority of Israeli settlements can be considered legitimate and would become part of Israel under any reasonable peace agreement.

This is utterly devastating since it simultaneously shows that everyone from the British Foreign Office and the BBC to the European Commission and the continent’s passionately anti-Israeli NGO community have been adopting a position which was significantly more uncompromising on “settlements” than the Palestinian leadership itself, and also that that same Palestinian leadership had accepted that the so called 1967 “borders” — the gold standard for practically every anti-Israeli polemic around — are irrelevant to the prospects of a lasting peace.

[While this news was leaked by Palestinians for their own purposes, ostensibly to discredit the "moderate" Abbas regime, a debt is owed to Wikileaks for inadvertently showing an alternate route by which a reality signal can emerge from the noise of the MSM.]

Robin Shepherd, being British and polite, does not mention that equally as devastated by this news should be the Obama administration's approach to the Middle East, yet if we have learned anything in the last 30-40 years (or the last 2000 years) it has been the Protean nature of anti-Israel (anti-Jewish) sentiment. 

The primary link between these disparate stories is that they represent parts of the conventional Liberal narrative that have sprung leaks (pun intended) through which a different narrative which, to most people more closely approximates reality, has begun to emerge. 

The erosion of a longstanding consensus narrative is a slow process at first; like most collapses, it will continue to occur "slowly, and then all of a sudden." 

[Update: Barry Rubin suggests that the "Palestinian Papers" are probably altered, forged, or mistranslated.  The wonderful thing about this is that either way, they support the idea that the Palestinians have never had any interest in making Peace.  Abbas is claiming he never offered to compromise and his enemies are using the suggestion that he did as a way to undermine him with the Palestinians and the Arabs!  So either he did offer to compromise (but then why would Israel not have accepted the plan they  had already proposed?) but then reneged because he could never sell the idea to his followers or (much more likely) he never offered to compromise in the first place; either way the story of Israeli intransigence is revealed as nonsense.  It has always been the Arabs who proclaimed the "Three No's."

Vibrators and Other Forms of "Snake Oil"

During the 19th century, Hysteria and Neurasthenia were debilitating disorders that affected a great many people, predominantly women, residing in civilized, modern societies.  The scientific consensus was that such disorders were caused by disorders of the uterus.  The treatment followed form the understanding of the genesis of the disorder:

Hysteria

In the Western world, until the seventeenth century, hysteria referred to a medical condition thought to be particular to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus (from the Greek ὑστέρα "hystera" = uterus). The origin of the term hysteria is commonly attributed to Hippocrates, even though the term isn't used in the writings that are collectively known as the Hippocratic corpus. The Hippocratic corpus refer to a variety of illness symptoms, such as suffocation and Heracles' disease, that were supposedly caused by the movement of a woman's uterus to various locations within her body as it became light and dry due to a lack of bodily fluids. One passage recommends pregnancy to cure such symptoms, ostensibly because intercourse will "moisten" the womb and facilitate blood circulation within the body.

By the mid to late 19th century, hysteria (or sometimes female hysteria) came to refer to what is today generally considered to be sexual dysfunction. Typical treatment was massage of the patient's genitalia by the physician and, later, by vibrators or water sprays to cause orgasm.

[Sigmund Freud, using the cutting science of electro-magnetism (based on a hydrology analogy) as his template, at first believed that such disorders were caused by "damned up libido."  His great insight was to recognize that the reasons that a woman's libido might be damned up were not purely physiological but were based on psychological conflicts within the mind.  Although this is now considered of historical interest only, it did mark the beginning of the sciences of the mind that emerged from the early days of Psychoanalysis.]

As with so many things, the people of the 19th century were as devoted to finding simple solutions to complex problems as we are today.  Their "snake oil" was the vibrator.

The vibrator was invented in order to save the Medical Doctor from exhaustion from treating so many disordered women:

Vibrator (sex toy)

For centuries, doctors had been treating women for a wide variety of illnesses by performing what we would now recognize as masturbation. The "pelvic massage" was especially common in the treatment of female hysteria during the Victorian Era, as the point of such manipulation was to cause "hysterical paroxysm" (orgasm) in the patient. However, not only did they regard the "vulvular stimulation" required as having nothing to do with sex, but reportedly found it time-consuming and hard work.

One of the first vibrators was a steam-powered device called the "Manipulator", which was created by American physician George Taylor, M.D.  This machine was a rather awkward device, but was still heralded as some relief for the doctors who found themselves suffering from fatigued wrists and hands. Circa 1880, Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the first electromechanical vibrator, then, in 1902, the American company Hamilton Beach patented the first electric vibrator available for retail sale, making the vibrator the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle, and toaster, and about a decade before the vacuum cleaner and electric iron.

The home versions soon became extremely popular, with advertisements in periodicals such as Needlecraft, Woman's Home Companion, Modern Priscilla, and the Sears, Roebuck catalog. These disappeared in the 1920s, apparently because their appearance in pornography made it no longer tenable for polite society to avoid the sexual connotations of the devices.

There has been tremendous progress in the last hundred years in science and technology.  As a result we now imagine ourselves to be so sophisticated and scientific that we no longer believe nonsense on a regular basis.   Because our world has become so much more complex, we are now being advised at every turn to defer to the experts, especially those who make a living in the Government-Academia-Journalism Complex, who can order our world, based on the latest scientific knowledge, for the good of all.  From climate to diet, the experts remind us constantly of their knowledge (and their acolytes in the echo chamber parrot the "experts" in their typical appeals to authority) and eschew the kind of humility that all true experts typically intuitively understand is necessary when discussing the complex issues facing us; certainty is usually a sign of intellectual laziness.

Although I am not an expert on Nutrition, I have done a fair amount of reading on the topic and have become e convinced that the dietary guidelines that our G-A-J Complex have promulgated over the last 30 years have been a disaster.  Tom Maguire offers an illuminating discussion of some of the controversy that is lighting up the field of Nutrition:

The Most Important Book You Will Read This Year

Glenn has a copy of Gary Taubes "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It" in the mail.

Let me say this - my understanding is that this is a restated and simplified version of his 2007 tome, "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health" (Chapter by chapter summary here).  Read as a diet book it is interesting.  However, it is fascinating as a story of how science can run off the rails.  Mr. Taubes does not attempt to politicize his views, but our national obesity epidemic can certainly be told as a story of an Epic Big Government Fail.  And for right-wingers who want more red meat, one can cast a bit of blame on hair-shirt environmentalists who noted (probably correctly) that an American diet high in beef and meat is not sustainable and achievable for the whole world.  From the other side, lefties can cite Big Sugar, Big Corn (and its high fructose corn syrup) and Big Wheat as the enemy; why Big Meat and Big Dairy were outmuscled puzzles me.

Wherever you stand on the diet controversies, it is incontrovertible that we are suffering an epidemic of obesity.  It may well simply be the result of low cost food allowing ad libidum caloric intake for everyone; maybe the source of the calories does not matter.  On the other hand, if the current thinking gaining currency in Medical Nutrition is correct, refined sugars and carbohydrates are a significant contributor, perhaps a primary contributor, to the obesity epidemic.

It may be another 10-20 years before our understanding of the physiological responses to diverse diets is good enough that we can tailor particular diets to particular metabolisms, however, the fact that in their hubris the experts have created a catastrophe and that in our passivity we have allowed it, should be instructive.

If I may reference the counter-culture for some wisdom; the first is a bit of advice:

Don't follow leaders,

Watch your parking meters,

And you don't need a weatherman,

To know which way the wind blows.

The second is a bit of poignancy:

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

At least the "snake oil" salesmen of the 1900's had the virtue of bringing women to orgasm.  I will defer to your imaginations as to what the 21st century "snake oil" salesmen are doing to their customers.