Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Gopnik On Smith And What Obama Said: I.E., What Does "That" Mean
A simply excellent note on what Obama said, in his putative "biggest gaffe of the campaign" by Adam Gopnik on what Obama said and Adam Smith, aka, what "that" is: (I liked it so much I'm repeating it word for word rather than just pasting the link.)
....
July 20, 2012, Barack, Mitt, and Adam Smith Posted by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
From the meaning of what “is” is to the meaning of “that”—American political discourse can sometimes move in depressing monotony around its little circles. Where former President Clinton’s defense of his famous sentence on his deposition turned on the problem of the past tense, President Obama’s so-called “un-American” words depend on his using “that” as a kind of pronoun, with the question being the antecedent to which this “that” referred, if that, uh, makes any sense.
Anyway, his precise words are worth reviewing:
...Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together...
What President Obama was saying was perfectly clear: the “that” in his statement refers to the bridges and roads and “this unbelievable American system.” He wasn’t, despite what one may have heard from Mitt Romney, saying that you didn’t build your own business. He was saying that your neighbors and ancestors helped. We drive on roads built for each by all. What is strange about this bizarre adventure in amplified untruth, apart from its simple mendacity, is that what the President was saying was not some late arriving, New Deal-style codicil to the theory of free markets; it’s what the theory of free markets is. It’s the premise at the very heart of all free-market theory as Adam Smith—the guy whose profile is on every libertarian tie—conceived it.
As I had occasion to write in a long piece on Smith’s thought a year or so ago, the notion of Adam Smith as an apostle of laissez-faire who would have recoiled in horror, or even narrowed his eyes in suspicion, at the idea that a healthy state precedes and oversees a truly free market is not merely a caricature of his actual thought—it is in many ways the direct reverse of what he said and argued for length and with great lucidity. Smith’s work comes in two volumes, his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” and his “Wealth of Nations.” In both, his primary concern is not to free mankind from the hold of government but to free the market from the undue influence of a handful of hereditary plutocrats (nothing personal, Mitt) who seek to escape the rules of the market, control their own costs, and set their own prices, contributing only as much to the public weal as they feel like. It’s a radical, not a conservative doctrine (which is why Dr. Johnson distrusted him so much).
Smith was for a government that intervened regularly and actively on behalf of consumers and against the natural tendency of “producers”—i.e., very wealthy people, whether aristocratic landowners or manufacturers or, perhaps, financial-leverage experts—to band together for their own benefit. The laissez-faire economy, truly “left alone,” becomes a conspiracy of producers against consumers, of sellers against buyers, and makes the submissive state hostage to special interests. As Smith wrote, “The interest of the dealers”—i.e., manufactures and merchants—“in any particular branch of trade or manufacture, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public.” Smith, as I wrote, does not think that “government is the problem”; he thinks problems arise when the rich are able to make the government take their side.
A healthy sovereign state is what serves the public against the producers. (He was all for high wages, by the way, on the now old-fashioned grounds that the actual wealth of a society can be discerned not by how much its top class has—you can find rich topsters in Ur or ancient Egypt—but by the dissemination of wealth to the many. “The high price of labor,” he wrote, “is the essence of public opulence.”) It isn’t just that a free market can survive regulation; it’s that the free market is the product of regulation, regulation designed to protect the public from the kind of arrangement that, let’s say, allows people with undue influence on the government to have a lower tax rate than people who don’t.
This makes Smith, as I wrote, a firm believer in public goods: his state has an obligation to build roads and schools, establish an army, build bridges and highways, and do all the other things necessary for a sane polity in which the market can function naturally. Everyone should pay for them, and the rich should always pay more than others. “The rich should contribute to the public expense not only in proportion to their revenue,” Smith writes, “but something more than in that proportion.” (He also thought, Mitt, that taxes should be paid with joy, as a contribution to the well-being of all.) And this—that—all goes deeper than questions of efficiency, to questions of what we can only call the common emotional tone that lets prosperity happen.
As Emma Rothschild writes in “Economic Sentiments,” her matchless 2001 study of Smith’s thought, it depends on what might be called niceness: Smith’s “faith … is in the mildness and thoughtfulness of most individual men and women. He is induced thereby to believe that they will usually not pursue their interests in grossly oppressive ways, and that they will usually wish to live in a society in which other people are not grossly oppressed or deprived.”
Even if more money can be made by the producer by enclosing the land the peasant’s animals grazed on or by hiring child labor—or by looting someone’s pension funds—a decent concern for the opinions of mankind will stop the wise producer from doing these things, because he will know that they will break the bonds of common sympathy, the sense that we’re all in this together, on which the producer’s—or the equity manager’s—well-being ultimately depends. It’s always easy, Smith knew, to provoke a cycle of exploitation, rage, and revolution; that’s what most of history has been.
What’s hard is to replace it with one of “mildness”—of public decency, progressive reform, and shared prosperity. You couldn’t have a free market unless you had all the institutions of trust in place that only a sovereign state can guarantee. (If you want to know what capitalism looks like without those institutions, think of words like “Russia,” “oligarchs,” and “kleptocracy.”)
Everything we mean by a free market depends on a functioning, sympathetic state—a state rooted not in selfish individualism but in a social sympathy so broadly articulated and institutionalized that every man is confident that he can make an honest deal with his fellow man. So the view that the President was articulating the other day in the “that” speech wasn’t even a mild and “acceptable” form of social democratic reproach; it was the root foundational view of the free market as its greatest apostle imagined it.
So don’t apologize, Mr. President, and don’t explain. Say it again! What you were articulating were the principles on which the free market, and with it this republic, is built. And that … is … that...
July 20, 2012, Barack, Mitt, and Adam Smith Posted by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
From the meaning of what “is” is to the meaning of “that”—American political discourse can sometimes move in depressing monotony around its little circles. Where former President Clinton’s defense of his famous sentence on his deposition turned on the problem of the past tense, President Obama’s so-called “un-American” words depend on his using “that” as a kind of pronoun, with the question being the antecedent to which this “that” referred, if that, uh, makes any sense.
Anyway, his precise words are worth reviewing:
...Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together...
What President Obama was saying was perfectly clear: the “that” in his statement refers to the bridges and roads and “this unbelievable American system.” He wasn’t, despite what one may have heard from Mitt Romney, saying that you didn’t build your own business. He was saying that your neighbors and ancestors helped. We drive on roads built for each by all. What is strange about this bizarre adventure in amplified untruth, apart from its simple mendacity, is that what the President was saying was not some late arriving, New Deal-style codicil to the theory of free markets; it’s what the theory of free markets is. It’s the premise at the very heart of all free-market theory as Adam Smith—the guy whose profile is on every libertarian tie—conceived it.
As I had occasion to write in a long piece on Smith’s thought a year or so ago, the notion of Adam Smith as an apostle of laissez-faire who would have recoiled in horror, or even narrowed his eyes in suspicion, at the idea that a healthy state precedes and oversees a truly free market is not merely a caricature of his actual thought—it is in many ways the direct reverse of what he said and argued for length and with great lucidity. Smith’s work comes in two volumes, his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” and his “Wealth of Nations.” In both, his primary concern is not to free mankind from the hold of government but to free the market from the undue influence of a handful of hereditary plutocrats (nothing personal, Mitt) who seek to escape the rules of the market, control their own costs, and set their own prices, contributing only as much to the public weal as they feel like. It’s a radical, not a conservative doctrine (which is why Dr. Johnson distrusted him so much).
Smith was for a government that intervened regularly and actively on behalf of consumers and against the natural tendency of “producers”—i.e., very wealthy people, whether aristocratic landowners or manufacturers or, perhaps, financial-leverage experts—to band together for their own benefit. The laissez-faire economy, truly “left alone,” becomes a conspiracy of producers against consumers, of sellers against buyers, and makes the submissive state hostage to special interests. As Smith wrote, “The interest of the dealers”—i.e., manufactures and merchants—“in any particular branch of trade or manufacture, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public.” Smith, as I wrote, does not think that “government is the problem”; he thinks problems arise when the rich are able to make the government take their side.
A healthy sovereign state is what serves the public against the producers. (He was all for high wages, by the way, on the now old-fashioned grounds that the actual wealth of a society can be discerned not by how much its top class has—you can find rich topsters in Ur or ancient Egypt—but by the dissemination of wealth to the many. “The high price of labor,” he wrote, “is the essence of public opulence.”) It isn’t just that a free market can survive regulation; it’s that the free market is the product of regulation, regulation designed to protect the public from the kind of arrangement that, let’s say, allows people with undue influence on the government to have a lower tax rate than people who don’t.
This makes Smith, as I wrote, a firm believer in public goods: his state has an obligation to build roads and schools, establish an army, build bridges and highways, and do all the other things necessary for a sane polity in which the market can function naturally. Everyone should pay for them, and the rich should always pay more than others. “The rich should contribute to the public expense not only in proportion to their revenue,” Smith writes, “but something more than in that proportion.” (He also thought, Mitt, that taxes should be paid with joy, as a contribution to the well-being of all.) And this—that—all goes deeper than questions of efficiency, to questions of what we can only call the common emotional tone that lets prosperity happen.
As Emma Rothschild writes in “Economic Sentiments,” her matchless 2001 study of Smith’s thought, it depends on what might be called niceness: Smith’s “faith … is in the mildness and thoughtfulness of most individual men and women. He is induced thereby to believe that they will usually not pursue their interests in grossly oppressive ways, and that they will usually wish to live in a society in which other people are not grossly oppressed or deprived.”
Even if more money can be made by the producer by enclosing the land the peasant’s animals grazed on or by hiring child labor—or by looting someone’s pension funds—a decent concern for the opinions of mankind will stop the wise producer from doing these things, because he will know that they will break the bonds of common sympathy, the sense that we’re all in this together, on which the producer’s—or the equity manager’s—well-being ultimately depends. It’s always easy, Smith knew, to provoke a cycle of exploitation, rage, and revolution; that’s what most of history has been.
What’s hard is to replace it with one of “mildness”—of public decency, progressive reform, and shared prosperity. You couldn’t have a free market unless you had all the institutions of trust in place that only a sovereign state can guarantee. (If you want to know what capitalism looks like without those institutions, think of words like “Russia,” “oligarchs,” and “kleptocracy.”)
Everything we mean by a free market depends on a functioning, sympathetic state—a state rooted not in selfish individualism but in a social sympathy so broadly articulated and institutionalized that every man is confident that he can make an honest deal with his fellow man. So the view that the President was articulating the other day in the “that” speech wasn’t even a mild and “acceptable” form of social democratic reproach; it was the root foundational view of the free market as its greatest apostle imagined it.
So don’t apologize, Mr. President, and don’t explain. Say it again! What you were articulating were the principles on which the free market, and with it this republic, is built. And that … is … that...
Thursday, July 19, 2012
God And The Holocaust.
1. Abstract of an article, The Last Witness, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-last-witness/
2. My response:
...I read with aroused interest Rabbi Joseph Polak's The Last Witness in July/August 2012 Commentary. What aroused my interest was Rabbi Polak's imagining briefly the unanswerable question in relation to the Holocaust. As the Rabbi uniquely cries it out:
"'Where is G-d?...Is he out there reciting the names of the camps? Belsen, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor? Is he reading the names of the victims?...Is He weeping?'"
These questions are meant to rebuke two imagined dialectically opposed assertions put to Elijah as to the "great absence while one-and-half million Jewish children were being murdered." The first imagined assertion is Dostoevskian, that there can be no answer to, explanation of, such transcendental injustice, horror and cruelty. God should stay silent. The second opposite assertion is Abrahamiac, that man cannot question God, cannot demand explanations and answers of such awesome divinity.
The rebuke is a raging. How dare anyone remain silent? What self indulgent self luxury allows such silence when Holocaust memory might evanesce? Rabbi Polak's questions "thunder." They admit of no answer. They take a position on the unanswerable question of what kind of a God would allow such transcendental suffering and killing to six million of His flock? Who is this God? Wherefore his "great absence?" What penance does He do? Polak "would pound the tables with both hands." His God must be held to account.
The Rabbi's enraged, thundering questions are his imagined confrontation with his creator, from whom he demands some action of contrition, atonement, remembrance and remedy to signify His great wrong.
I take a different view. I, a non-believer, ask no such questions (of whom, after all?). I am aroused by Rabbi Polak's questions insofar as they reveal to me the absurdity of belief and faith in light of the transcendental evil of the Holocaust, (in which an uncle and a cousin of mine were killed, and during which a cousin of mine, still alive, suffered but survived the depredations of the concentration camp.)
I thunder no such questions or demands to such absurd reification. I get no succor or relief from being able to make my God human and contend ferociously with Him. It is a wasted ferocity. For its presupposition is that there is some divinity worthy of such contention, which concedes reification altogether too much, which in fact accepts reification's very terms. If there ever were an occasion that instructs Jews precisely that "God is not great," that belief and faith in Him are preposterous, that by them we diminish ourselves and the meaning of the Holocaust, for Jews its transcendental horror must be that occasion...
2. My response:
...I read with aroused interest Rabbi Joseph Polak's The Last Witness in July/August 2012 Commentary. What aroused my interest was Rabbi Polak's imagining briefly the unanswerable question in relation to the Holocaust. As the Rabbi uniquely cries it out:
"'Where is G-d?...Is he out there reciting the names of the camps? Belsen, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor? Is he reading the names of the victims?...Is He weeping?'"
These questions are meant to rebuke two imagined dialectically opposed assertions put to Elijah as to the "great absence while one-and-half million Jewish children were being murdered." The first imagined assertion is Dostoevskian, that there can be no answer to, explanation of, such transcendental injustice, horror and cruelty. God should stay silent. The second opposite assertion is Abrahamiac, that man cannot question God, cannot demand explanations and answers of such awesome divinity.
The rebuke is a raging. How dare anyone remain silent? What self indulgent self luxury allows such silence when Holocaust memory might evanesce? Rabbi Polak's questions "thunder." They admit of no answer. They take a position on the unanswerable question of what kind of a God would allow such transcendental suffering and killing to six million of His flock? Who is this God? Wherefore his "great absence?" What penance does He do? Polak "would pound the tables with both hands." His God must be held to account.
The Rabbi's enraged, thundering questions are his imagined confrontation with his creator, from whom he demands some action of contrition, atonement, remembrance and remedy to signify His great wrong.
I take a different view. I, a non-believer, ask no such questions (of whom, after all?). I am aroused by Rabbi Polak's questions insofar as they reveal to me the absurdity of belief and faith in light of the transcendental evil of the Holocaust, (in which an uncle and a cousin of mine were killed, and during which a cousin of mine, still alive, suffered but survived the depredations of the concentration camp.)
I thunder no such questions or demands to such absurd reification. I get no succor or relief from being able to make my God human and contend ferociously with Him. It is a wasted ferocity. For its presupposition is that there is some divinity worthy of such contention, which concedes reification altogether too much, which in fact accepts reification's very terms. If there ever were an occasion that instructs Jews precisely that "God is not great," that belief and faith in Him are preposterous, that by them we diminish ourselves and the meaning of the Holocaust, for Jews its transcendental horror must be that occasion...
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Legality Of The Settlements
US agrees, settlements are “not illegal” By Ted Belman/Israpundit 7/11/12
The legal tsunami gathering strength in Israel will soon engulf the world. A report is soon to be released that says, the Fourth Geneva Convention (FGC) does not apply to Judea and Samaria aka West Bank and that Israel has every right to build settlements there. In January of this year, PM Netanyahu set up the Levy Committee to investigate the legal status of unauthorized West Bank Jewish building. The Committee was headed by Supreme Court Justice (ret) Edmund Levy. It included Tel Aviv District Court Judge (Ret.) Tehiya Shapira and Dr. Alan Baker an international law expert, who was part of the team that devised the Oslo Accords.
The Committee reviewed legal briefs from right of center groups but also from far left groups such as Peace Now, Yesh Din and Btselem. Its 89 page Report was submitted to PM Netanyahu a few weeks ago and is now under review by his Ministerial Committee on Settlements. Though the Report has yet to be formerly published, the contents are already well known. It found that the settlements are not illegal. To reach this conclusion it first found that the Fourth Geneva Convention which applies “to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party” does not apply to Judea and Samaria because “Israel does not meet the criteria of ‘military occupation’ as defined under international law” … as “no other legal entity has ever had its sovereignty over the area cemented under international law.”
Furthermore it found that there was no provision in international law which prohibited Jews settling in the area. The UN and the EU have for decades repeated the mantra that the land is occupied and the settlements are illegal, both pursuant to the FGC but there has never been a binding legal decision on which they based their assertions. The US has been more cautious and considers the settlements “an obstacle to peace” or “illegitimate”. Nevertheless, it leads the chorus in demanding an end to Israel’s settlement construction.
In 2010, Nicholas Rostow, in the American Interest , regarding the legality of the settlements, wrote:
“On February 2, 1981, President Reagan stated that the settlements were “not illegal”, although he criticized them as “ill-advised” and “unnecessarily provocative.”
Throughout the Reagan Administration the U.S. government did not question the legality of the settlements; rather, it criticized the settlements on policy grounds as an obstacle to the peace process. In the United Nations, the United States voted against resolutions describing Israeli settlements as illegal.” President George Bush followed suit and so did President Obama.
The Levy Report confirms the opinions of a large list of experts who have long claimed the same, including Stephen M. Schwebel, Professor of International Law at the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University (Washington), former Deputy Legal Advisor of the U.S. State Department and President of the International Court of Justice from 1997 to 2000; Eugene W. Rostow, Former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and Distinguished Fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace; Julius Stone, one of the 20th century leading authorities on the Law of Nations, Doctor of Juridical Science from Harvard and Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at universities in Australia and California; David Matas, world-renowned human rights lawyer and honorary counsel to B’nai Brith Canada and David M. Phillips, Professor at Northeastern University School of Law.
The question of the applicability of the FGC was considered by the International Court of Justice (IJC), an arm of the UN, in its advisory opinion on the legality of the fence. The IJC held that “the Convention applies, in particular, in any territory occupied in the course of the conflict by one of the contracting parties.”. In other words it ignored that the lands occupied must be the lands of “another High Contracting Party”. This is not considered sound law and in any event, is not a binding decision.
The Supreme Court of Israel in its decision approving the fence as legal, said that “the question of the application of the Fourth Geneva Convention is not before us now, since the parties agree that the humanitarian rules of the Fourth Geneva Convention apply to the issue under review.” Thus it didn’t decide on the applicability. The Left in Israel are screaming blue murder and referring to the Report as “born in sin” and a “political manifesto”. On Monday, while speaking to reporters, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said:
“The US position on settlements is clear. Obviously, we’ve seen the reports that an Israeli government appointed panel has recommended legalizing dozens of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but we do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity, and we oppose any effort to legalize settlement outposts.”
What is interesting about this statement is that Ventrell did not comment on the finding that the FGC did not apply or that the settlements were not illegal. He merely reiterated the US government position without substantiating it. Furthermore, the settlement outposts that the State Department doesn’t want “legalized” are legal save for having not received their final approval from the Government of Israel. If they were really illegal by international law, Israel wouldn’t be able to “legalize” them.
Put another way, the US position is that Israel shouldn’t exercise her rights because such exercise would be an obstacle to peace. It prefers to recognize the non-existing Arab rights over the real rights of the Jews/Israel. Accordingly, the legal conclusions of the Report are sound. What will the fallout be? Well for starters, the UN may ask for another advisory opinion from the ICJ on the validity of this report but why bother, it already has one on the applicability of the FGC. It probably will choose to ignore it as just another opinion. Meanwhile the existence of the report will take the wind out of the sails of the US and the EU as they try to damn the settlements and Israel’s actions.
The US will have to acknowledge that since President Reagan, it has considered the settlements to be “not illegal” but only, ”ill-advised”. PM Netanyahu will have to decide whether he will embrace the Report and act accordingly or whether he will wait for the issue to be adjudicated by Israel’s High Court. It is highly unlikely that this Court will fly in the face of the named experts, the US Government and the Levy Report. From a political point of view, he cannot ignore the Report.
A political storm is raging. MK Tzippi Hotovely, Likud, is preparing a Bill that will endorse the principles of the Levy Report and will require the establishment of a judicial tribunal in Judea and Samaria which will be given the responsibility of discussing matters related to land ownership, the establishment of an Israeli land registry in Judea and Samaria and applying Israeli building and planning laws on Judea and Samaria.
Where does that leave the international community?
The foundation of their attacks on Israel will have been destroyed. It will be hard to ignore the Report and harder still to ignore a confirming decision by Israel’s High Court. It will no longer be able to claim with a straight face that the lands are “occupied Palestinian lands” or that the settlements are illegal. Congress will no doubt strongly endorse the Report with or without a decision of the Supreme Court of Israel. The upshot of all this will be that Israel will end the de facto building freeze and start construction of settlements in earnest. It will also signal the end of the pursuit by Israel of the two-state solution.
The Israeli center will no longer believe that Israel is an occupier and instead will believe that the land is theirs, which it is. Presently there is significant movement in Israel advocating Israeli sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria, even if that means making citizenship available to qualifying Arabs. Israel must decide between two risky alternatives; either accept the two-state solution based on ’67 lines with swaps or annex the land and contend with an extra 1.5 million Arabs within its borders.
With the latter alternative, the Jews would be left with a stable 2:1 majority. Israelis are already trending to the latter and this Report will accelerate that trend. The Arabs in Judea and Samaria will not accept such a two state solution because it will preclude the “right of return” and will require them to recognize Israel as the Jewish State. Furthermore it will require them to sign an end-of-conflict agreement which they will never do. If Israel chooses to claim sovereignty, the Arabs will have to decide whether to push for citizenship or to accept autonomy. This tsunami will change the political landscape for the better and forever.
Posted by Ted Belman @ 8:37 am
The legal tsunami gathering strength in Israel will soon engulf the world. A report is soon to be released that says, the Fourth Geneva Convention (FGC) does not apply to Judea and Samaria aka West Bank and that Israel has every right to build settlements there. In January of this year, PM Netanyahu set up the Levy Committee to investigate the legal status of unauthorized West Bank Jewish building. The Committee was headed by Supreme Court Justice (ret) Edmund Levy. It included Tel Aviv District Court Judge (Ret.) Tehiya Shapira and Dr. Alan Baker an international law expert, who was part of the team that devised the Oslo Accords.
The Committee reviewed legal briefs from right of center groups but also from far left groups such as Peace Now, Yesh Din and Btselem. Its 89 page Report was submitted to PM Netanyahu a few weeks ago and is now under review by his Ministerial Committee on Settlements. Though the Report has yet to be formerly published, the contents are already well known. It found that the settlements are not illegal. To reach this conclusion it first found that the Fourth Geneva Convention which applies “to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party” does not apply to Judea and Samaria because “Israel does not meet the criteria of ‘military occupation’ as defined under international law” … as “no other legal entity has ever had its sovereignty over the area cemented under international law.”
Furthermore it found that there was no provision in international law which prohibited Jews settling in the area. The UN and the EU have for decades repeated the mantra that the land is occupied and the settlements are illegal, both pursuant to the FGC but there has never been a binding legal decision on which they based their assertions. The US has been more cautious and considers the settlements “an obstacle to peace” or “illegitimate”. Nevertheless, it leads the chorus in demanding an end to Israel’s settlement construction.
In 2010, Nicholas Rostow, in the American Interest , regarding the legality of the settlements, wrote:
“On February 2, 1981, President Reagan stated that the settlements were “not illegal”, although he criticized them as “ill-advised” and “unnecessarily provocative.”
Throughout the Reagan Administration the U.S. government did not question the legality of the settlements; rather, it criticized the settlements on policy grounds as an obstacle to the peace process. In the United Nations, the United States voted against resolutions describing Israeli settlements as illegal.” President George Bush followed suit and so did President Obama.
The Levy Report confirms the opinions of a large list of experts who have long claimed the same, including Stephen M. Schwebel, Professor of International Law at the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University (Washington), former Deputy Legal Advisor of the U.S. State Department and President of the International Court of Justice from 1997 to 2000; Eugene W. Rostow, Former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and Distinguished Fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace; Julius Stone, one of the 20th century leading authorities on the Law of Nations, Doctor of Juridical Science from Harvard and Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at universities in Australia and California; David Matas, world-renowned human rights lawyer and honorary counsel to B’nai Brith Canada and David M. Phillips, Professor at Northeastern University School of Law.
The question of the applicability of the FGC was considered by the International Court of Justice (IJC), an arm of the UN, in its advisory opinion on the legality of the fence. The IJC held that “the Convention applies, in particular, in any territory occupied in the course of the conflict by one of the contracting parties.”. In other words it ignored that the lands occupied must be the lands of “another High Contracting Party”. This is not considered sound law and in any event, is not a binding decision.
The Supreme Court of Israel in its decision approving the fence as legal, said that “the question of the application of the Fourth Geneva Convention is not before us now, since the parties agree that the humanitarian rules of the Fourth Geneva Convention apply to the issue under review.” Thus it didn’t decide on the applicability. The Left in Israel are screaming blue murder and referring to the Report as “born in sin” and a “political manifesto”. On Monday, while speaking to reporters, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said:
“The US position on settlements is clear. Obviously, we’ve seen the reports that an Israeli government appointed panel has recommended legalizing dozens of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but we do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity, and we oppose any effort to legalize settlement outposts.”
What is interesting about this statement is that Ventrell did not comment on the finding that the FGC did not apply or that the settlements were not illegal. He merely reiterated the US government position without substantiating it. Furthermore, the settlement outposts that the State Department doesn’t want “legalized” are legal save for having not received their final approval from the Government of Israel. If they were really illegal by international law, Israel wouldn’t be able to “legalize” them.
Put another way, the US position is that Israel shouldn’t exercise her rights because such exercise would be an obstacle to peace. It prefers to recognize the non-existing Arab rights over the real rights of the Jews/Israel. Accordingly, the legal conclusions of the Report are sound. What will the fallout be? Well for starters, the UN may ask for another advisory opinion from the ICJ on the validity of this report but why bother, it already has one on the applicability of the FGC. It probably will choose to ignore it as just another opinion. Meanwhile the existence of the report will take the wind out of the sails of the US and the EU as they try to damn the settlements and Israel’s actions.
The US will have to acknowledge that since President Reagan, it has considered the settlements to be “not illegal” but only, ”ill-advised”. PM Netanyahu will have to decide whether he will embrace the Report and act accordingly or whether he will wait for the issue to be adjudicated by Israel’s High Court. It is highly unlikely that this Court will fly in the face of the named experts, the US Government and the Levy Report. From a political point of view, he cannot ignore the Report.
A political storm is raging. MK Tzippi Hotovely, Likud, is preparing a Bill that will endorse the principles of the Levy Report and will require the establishment of a judicial tribunal in Judea and Samaria which will be given the responsibility of discussing matters related to land ownership, the establishment of an Israeli land registry in Judea and Samaria and applying Israeli building and planning laws on Judea and Samaria.
Where does that leave the international community?
The foundation of their attacks on Israel will have been destroyed. It will be hard to ignore the Report and harder still to ignore a confirming decision by Israel’s High Court. It will no longer be able to claim with a straight face that the lands are “occupied Palestinian lands” or that the settlements are illegal. Congress will no doubt strongly endorse the Report with or without a decision of the Supreme Court of Israel. The upshot of all this will be that Israel will end the de facto building freeze and start construction of settlements in earnest. It will also signal the end of the pursuit by Israel of the two-state solution.
The Israeli center will no longer believe that Israel is an occupier and instead will believe that the land is theirs, which it is. Presently there is significant movement in Israel advocating Israeli sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria, even if that means making citizenship available to qualifying Arabs. Israel must decide between two risky alternatives; either accept the two-state solution based on ’67 lines with swaps or annex the land and contend with an extra 1.5 million Arabs within its borders.
With the latter alternative, the Jews would be left with a stable 2:1 majority. Israelis are already trending to the latter and this Report will accelerate that trend. The Arabs in Judea and Samaria will not accept such a two state solution because it will preclude the “right of return” and will require them to recognize Israel as the Jewish State. Furthermore it will require them to sign an end-of-conflict agreement which they will never do. If Israel chooses to claim sovereignty, the Arabs will have to decide whether to push for citizenship or to accept autonomy. This tsunami will change the political landscape for the better and forever.
Posted by Ted Belman @ 8:37 am
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Sincerity
Say It as If You Mean It: By R. Jay Magill: Reviewed By Daniel Akst in WSJ 7/10/12
About sincerity nobody can say we haven't been warned. Niccolo Machiavelli, Ben Say It as If You Mean It: By R. Jay Magill: Reviewed By Daniel Akst in WSJFranklin, George Bernard Shaw and countless others have cautioned against its hazards, but W. Somerset Maugham may have done so most vividly. "I don't think you want too much sincerity in society," he said. "It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards." There is good reason for caution. Extreme frankness is often called "brutal," after all, and unbridled truth-telling at all times and in all places would probably result in bloodletting. Despite such doubts, sincerity is a cherished trait. We admire it and feel badly treated when a comment or action, assumed to be heartfelt, turns out to be insincere. Sincerity—broadly speaking, the alignment of outer and inner selves—would seem to be essential to the modern conception of a virtuous life.
But how did we get here?
R. Jay Magill Jr. tries to answer this question in "Sincerity," a fascinating cultural survey and intellectual investigation. The postwar world, he notes, has given us a whole field of sincerity studies. Lionel Trilling took on the task in "Sincerity and Authenticity," a series of Harvard lectures published in 1972. In Trilling's account, the focus on sincerity arose in the 16th century, with the Protestant Reformation and its emphasis on individual conscience rather than institutional ritual and doctrine.
Over time, travel and trade made sincerity ever more important in judging the bona fides of strangers. According to Trilling, sincerity was eventually elbowed aside by the need for authenticity, "a more strenuous moral experience" that responds aggressively to received moral opinion. Authenticity, in this view, is sincerity plus autonomy.
Mr. Magill's own definition of sincerity is both broad and precise: "confronting one's innermost thoughts or emotions and relaying them to others straightforwardly, no matter how relevant to the topic, injurious to one's own reputation, or embarrassing—or however correct or incorrect." This sounds more like what most of us would call over-sharing, but no matter. In the author's hands, it serves to encompass a wide range of human experience.
Mr. Magill is especially clever about tracing his subject through the arts. The history of design, he says, can be seen as the search for a visual expression of sincerity, a claim he supports by taking the reader from the simplicity demanded by Protestantism (in rebellion against Baroque Catholicism) to the rise of abstraction in art. Decoration, after all, implies dissembling, something that would become anathema to the form-follows-function crowd. In painting and sculpture as well, we see a long movement toward the purest possible presentation of material.
The apotheosis of sincerity in the arts was Ad Reinhardt's black-on-black paintings; they "achieved what modern art—and the Protestant religion—had for so long wanted to be: sincerity itself." They did this by being only themselves: paint on canvas. In the realm of the literary arts, Mr. Magill has a field day, zeroing in on Rousseau as the source of our modern literary obsession with sincerity, which the author finds manifest in German and English Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, French Symbolism and other currents that come to look like a tidal wave in favor of finding and flaunting the unvarnished self. All such movements carry "the echo of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the subsequent romantic impulse: go forward and leap toward vigilant, violent self-expression; stress your own experience over the commercial and social developments surrounding your unique life."
Freud helped push literature in this direction, Mr. Magill says, by replacing "the traditional 'holy space' reserved for the reception and discovery of God" with "drives for sex, violence, death, and pleasure." The problem here was that, unlike Rousseau, who saw man without civilization as happy and good, Freud saw him as "a homicidal little beast who wants to have sex with his mother and murder his father." A fine reason, in other words, for moderns to be wary of sincerity.
Yet the war on artifice inspired by the forces of sincerity seeped into popular culture and commerce anyway. It was abetted by the likes of H.L. Mencken and such other lampooners of cant and inauthenticity as Dorothy Parker and W.C. Fields. Mr. Magill's range is extraordinary, and his wit, erudition and powers of observation give credence to judgments that might otherwise strike us as just a tad, well, insincere. "Our frustration with insincerity," he says, "is itself disingenuous—a kind of performance of upright moral sensibility." For much of this deeply pleasurable work
Mr. Magill is properly wary of his subject. The Puritan emphasis on sincerity, he shows, led to a climate of suspicion and misanthropy, as if these energetic divines had intuited Nietzsche's later comment that "the truly sincere person ends up understanding that he is always lying." Ultimately, though, the author comes down in favor of sincerity, if not too much of it.
With sincerity, as with most things, it is the dose that makes the poison. Readers interested in the science behind sincerity might want to pair Mr. Magill's book with Dan Ariely's "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty," just published by Harper. Mr. Ariely, a behavioral economist, shows that hardly anyone comes close to the ideal of sincerity all the time; yet our false beliefs about our own honesty keep us from lying even more. It is probably too much to ask that Mr. Magill, already covering so much ground, bridge C.P. Snow's "two cultures"—science and the humanities. "Sincerity" is a delightful work just as it is.
I mean that. Sincerely.
About sincerity nobody can say we haven't been warned. Niccolo Machiavelli, Ben Say It as If You Mean It: By R. Jay Magill: Reviewed By Daniel Akst in WSJFranklin, George Bernard Shaw and countless others have cautioned against its hazards, but W. Somerset Maugham may have done so most vividly. "I don't think you want too much sincerity in society," he said. "It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards." There is good reason for caution. Extreme frankness is often called "brutal," after all, and unbridled truth-telling at all times and in all places would probably result in bloodletting. Despite such doubts, sincerity is a cherished trait. We admire it and feel badly treated when a comment or action, assumed to be heartfelt, turns out to be insincere. Sincerity—broadly speaking, the alignment of outer and inner selves—would seem to be essential to the modern conception of a virtuous life.
But how did we get here?
R. Jay Magill Jr. tries to answer this question in "Sincerity," a fascinating cultural survey and intellectual investigation. The postwar world, he notes, has given us a whole field of sincerity studies. Lionel Trilling took on the task in "Sincerity and Authenticity," a series of Harvard lectures published in 1972. In Trilling's account, the focus on sincerity arose in the 16th century, with the Protestant Reformation and its emphasis on individual conscience rather than institutional ritual and doctrine.
Over time, travel and trade made sincerity ever more important in judging the bona fides of strangers. According to Trilling, sincerity was eventually elbowed aside by the need for authenticity, "a more strenuous moral experience" that responds aggressively to received moral opinion. Authenticity, in this view, is sincerity plus autonomy.
Mr. Magill's own definition of sincerity is both broad and precise: "confronting one's innermost thoughts or emotions and relaying them to others straightforwardly, no matter how relevant to the topic, injurious to one's own reputation, or embarrassing—or however correct or incorrect." This sounds more like what most of us would call over-sharing, but no matter. In the author's hands, it serves to encompass a wide range of human experience.
Mr. Magill is especially clever about tracing his subject through the arts. The history of design, he says, can be seen as the search for a visual expression of sincerity, a claim he supports by taking the reader from the simplicity demanded by Protestantism (in rebellion against Baroque Catholicism) to the rise of abstraction in art. Decoration, after all, implies dissembling, something that would become anathema to the form-follows-function crowd. In painting and sculpture as well, we see a long movement toward the purest possible presentation of material.
The apotheosis of sincerity in the arts was Ad Reinhardt's black-on-black paintings; they "achieved what modern art—and the Protestant religion—had for so long wanted to be: sincerity itself." They did this by being only themselves: paint on canvas. In the realm of the literary arts, Mr. Magill has a field day, zeroing in on Rousseau as the source of our modern literary obsession with sincerity, which the author finds manifest in German and English Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, French Symbolism and other currents that come to look like a tidal wave in favor of finding and flaunting the unvarnished self. All such movements carry "the echo of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the subsequent romantic impulse: go forward and leap toward vigilant, violent self-expression; stress your own experience over the commercial and social developments surrounding your unique life."
Freud helped push literature in this direction, Mr. Magill says, by replacing "the traditional 'holy space' reserved for the reception and discovery of God" with "drives for sex, violence, death, and pleasure." The problem here was that, unlike Rousseau, who saw man without civilization as happy and good, Freud saw him as "a homicidal little beast who wants to have sex with his mother and murder his father." A fine reason, in other words, for moderns to be wary of sincerity.
Yet the war on artifice inspired by the forces of sincerity seeped into popular culture and commerce anyway. It was abetted by the likes of H.L. Mencken and such other lampooners of cant and inauthenticity as Dorothy Parker and W.C. Fields. Mr. Magill's range is extraordinary, and his wit, erudition and powers of observation give credence to judgments that might otherwise strike us as just a tad, well, insincere. "Our frustration with insincerity," he says, "is itself disingenuous—a kind of performance of upright moral sensibility." For much of this deeply pleasurable work
Mr. Magill is properly wary of his subject. The Puritan emphasis on sincerity, he shows, led to a climate of suspicion and misanthropy, as if these energetic divines had intuited Nietzsche's later comment that "the truly sincere person ends up understanding that he is always lying." Ultimately, though, the author comes down in favor of sincerity, if not too much of it.
With sincerity, as with most things, it is the dose that makes the poison. Readers interested in the science behind sincerity might want to pair Mr. Magill's book with Dan Ariely's "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty," just published by Harper. Mr. Ariely, a behavioral economist, shows that hardly anyone comes close to the ideal of sincerity all the time; yet our false beliefs about our own honesty keep us from lying even more. It is probably too much to ask that Mr. Magill, already covering so much ground, bridge C.P. Snow's "two cultures"—science and the humanities. "Sincerity" is a delightful work just as it is.
I mean that. Sincerely.
More On Tax Versus Penalty
I want to make a point on tax against penalty, which I got from reading Randy Barnett on the ACA decision.
That point is this: I argue Obama and his agents are right to keep calling the payment for no insurance a penalty because it's both a penalty and a tax depending on what angle it's looked at from.
Under the ACA's clear wording and intent it's a penalty. Under the case law that obliges the court to give the law all "fairly possible" readings to try save its presumptive legality, it can be construed to be a tax, even though that's not it's most likely construction.
"Most likely" is not the issue. "Fairly possible" is the issue.
So based on obligation of the court to strive to preserve the mandate's constitutionality, the court for that precise purpose deems, or constructively, calls the payment a tax. It’s a kind of legal fiction employed for a narrow and specific purpose.
That deeming or constructive characterization does not logically need to vitiate calling the payment a penalty and Obama and his agents are right to do that for his political benefit.
That distinction is what balled up Romney for a few days before he got down to his own mug’s game of politics and started calling the payment a tax. Republicans who seize on the payment as being a tax and say Obama therefore lied when he denied it either don't know what they are talking about or do and are cynically and recklessly indifferent.
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