The problem with J Street is that it doesn’t make sense. It is conceptually self-implosive. This was never really very hard to see. Last year, during the 2009 J Street Conference, Jonathan Chait wrote. The problem, though, was that J Street had loosened the definition of “pro-Israel” to the point where it had virtually no […]
People Give Themselves Away
They do. They really do. Once they cross a certain psychological border of irrational – but always rationalized – bias in their thinking about a subject, and it thus emerges as a kind of fetish, they give themselves away. They can’t help themselves. Often, the clues are subtle, though hardly hidden, and they are frequently […]
Seeing the World (We Want to See)
One can analyze at length how one, seeing the world, transforms into the other, seeing the world we want to see. There are varied predictors and indicators of the phenomenon. One is the the commitment to a closed, systematic ideology, especially reinforced either by supernatural belief or a fixed animus. We see this in the […]
Ship of Fools 1
One of the questions of the Normblog profile, of which I was the subject a little while back is What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? I responded like a blogger. The excesses of the international Left that are in part responsive to the […]
Counter Thinking in the Israeli Palestinian Conflict
In the contemporary field of education, few concepts are more heavily promoted than that of what is called critical thinking. Very simply, thinking that analyzes itself, that habitually questions suppositions and established intellectual foundations – the warrants on which we base our claims about the world – is critical thinking. Revisionist histories arise from critical […]