Monday, March 18, 2024

She Did Too Much Therapy

As I have been saying, lo these many years, too many people have had too much therapy. Thanks to Abigail Shrier the effectiveness of therapy and the influence of therapy culture are now being debated seriously in the media.

Also, we are starting to see parodies of therapy, filled with therapy-speak, popping up in serious media outlets. Consider this, in the New Yorker.


Its author was Meghan Indurti. The title of the piece is: “An Intervention for my Friend Who’s Done Too Much Therapy.” In fairness, it is not very funny and it is not even especially good. Tom Wolfe it is not. And yet, given its subject and given the nature of this blog and Substack, I feel morally obligated to report on it to you.


Indurti offers a series of concepts that her friend might have learned from therapy. They will feel utterly familiar. She begins with this:


Stop analyzing my life!


Not only did therapy provide her friend with a series of bad mental habits. It made her friend feel like a therapist. Considering how much she paid for the new concepts and the bad mental habits, she felt compelled to apply them to the lives of other people, to treat friends as potential patients.


Among the bad habits that therapy teaches, count this one: free association. Invented by Freud and imposed on patients, it says that if you are doing therapy you must say whatever comes to mind, regardless. No more filtering. No more tact and indiscretion. Speak like you spoke when you were a child.


It is a bad habit. It will make you insufferable. As will the tendency to offer therapeutically correct interpretations of everyone’s behavior.


As in,


But, since you started unlearning your patterns, you won’t stop theorizing about how Derek’s avoidant-attachment style keeps us in a toxic dynamic of short-term reconciliation. And how the generational divide between me and my co-worker requires patience, owing to our divergent ethics.


Next, Indurti counsels her sometime friend to:


Stop being so honest.


Therapy teaches people to be tactless and inconsiderate. It is the enemy of discretion. Most people do not want to know all of your opinions. Learn to keep them to yourself.


Indurti explains:


I’m sorry I listen to Beyoncé and drink cheap whiskey. I know, I’m basic as hell! I’m sorry I’m a left-lane gatekeeper. If I’m going to let someone into the fast lane, they’d better be on their best behavior. It’s a privilege. They’d best not embarrass me with student-driver energy after I so graciously let their Kia in. I think it’s only fair that I then cut them off. If you don’t like that, don’t carpool with me.


She adds that she finds it tiresome that her friend is so emotionally available. Hmmm.


Thanks for being more emotionally available, but can you be a little less available? There’s no mystery, there’s no push and pull—it’s all pull, and I’m suffocating. You can’t be hitting me up every day to hang out. We are lunch friends, not FaceTime friends. We are “send each other memes and recipes” friends, not triple-text friends. Don’t mess with the delicate forces of the acquaintance ecosystem. Be harder to get hold of.


She then recommends that her friend cease with all the therapy-speak. Stop pretending to be a therapist. Stop trying to make all human interactions into therapy:


I am certainly happy for you that you were able to label your self-absorption and lack of punctuality with a pseudo TikTok diagnosis. But the therapy-speak has gone too far. Watching reality TV 24/7 is not “self-care,” clipping toenails in the living room is not “prioritizing your needs,” cancelling at the last minute when I’m already at the bar wearing my bell-bottoms for disco night is not “setting boundaries,” and telling you that I’m gay is not “trauma dumping.”


She adds that her friend’s vulnerability shtick has gone a bit too far:


There was a time when Ariana Grande being called out for being a home-wrecker would’ve been the topic of an hour-long discussion between us. Now all we ever do is dissect your trauma. I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through, but now I’m going to need therapy to unpack your therapy. Is this your therapist’s goal? Is there some therapist M.L.M. I don’t know about? I can’t discuss how your pattern of dating Geminis is related to your childhood neglect every time we hang out. I need it to end.


The meaning is clear. A patient who has suffered too much therapy ends up seeing everyone as a potential patient. She believes that everyone is suffering from an unresolved childhood trauma. This renders her socially dysfunctional and it leads to the final point. 


People who have done too much therapy believe that all human interactions should be modeled on therapy. They do it because they want to help. In truth, they are being intrusive and rude:


Now all you want to do is ask me deep questions about my past. I feel like I’m at a press conference led by Brené Brown. I don’t want to examine my triggers or understand my coping mechanisms. Ignorance is bliss. Self-awareness is a mental prison. If I awake to our reality, I will have to acknowledge that I’m not doing enough to help people or this planet. That I’ve given up. For the love of God, please go back to stonewalling me until we order takeout. 


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Sunday, March 17, 2024

Transmania

Matt Taibbi calls it the dumbest cover story yet. One cannot help but agree. New York Magazine, which used to be a respectable publication, has published an article by trans writer Andrea Long Chu wherein he argues that children should have a constitutional right to tell physicians to mutilate their bodies. 

Chu dismisses the notion that transgenderism might consist of a psychiatric condition. And yet, given that what is falsely called gender affirming care does not change the nature of any one of a body’s trillions of chromosomes, one must conclude that we are dealing with something akin to a delusional belief. 


Worse yet, as I noted in a previous post, another aspect of the issue tends to be ignored. You might believe that you are a different sex, but if you are constantly interacting with people who either refuse to accept your new sex or simply ignore you, you are not going to be very happy for very long.


We should never get into the business of telling people that they should make themselves social outcasts.


Chu is obviously not a serious thinker, so we do best not to pretend that he is. And yet, Judith Butler, the godmother of this nonsense has a chair at the University of California, at Berkeley, so we should expect something resembling coherent thought from her. We are shocked and dismayed to discover that Butler confuses the concept that grounds her analysis, that of performative utterances.


You might or might not know that the concept was bequeathed by British philosopher, J. L. Austin. He was arguing that certain sentences do not mean something, but do something.


When the minister declares you to be husband and wife, he is doing something. When the duchess christens the boat she is doing something. 


And yet, consider Long’s presentation of Butler’s confusion: 


For Butler, gender was performative, a term they [she] borrowed from the philosophy of language, where it referred to sentences that seem to do things: “I promise,” for instance, a phrase that literally makes a promise. Gender, too, was a kind of promise — “It’s a girl” — one that, because it was not anchored in biological sex, had to be constantly reaffirmed through performative acts, thus allowing the dominant norms to be renegotiated or even subverted. Butler’s example was drag performance, which, by exaggerating the normal rules of gender, acted as an allegory for the way everyone performed gender every day.


And Long continues:


The sentence “I am a girl” is performative speech in the classic sense: It performs an action. She is not only declaring her intent to exercise her freedom of sex in the future; she is, by uttering these words, already exercising it. She is working the weakness in the norm. She is not afraid of sex — she is against it. That is not nothing. There is, in fact, a very important population of Americans who do want trans kids to exist. I am told they are small but growing.


Obviously, this is idiotic. When you say, “it’s a girl” the statement is not divorced from biological reality. Only a fanatical ideologue would argue the point. When you say, “I am a girl” you are not making yourself a girl. 


The best-known performatives, the ones introduced by Austin, involve social actions. Speech is a social action; it is not an expression of something welling up in the depths of your psyche. When the pastor pronounces you man and wife, when he marries you, he most often does so in front of your friends and family. 


If the marriage ceremony includes the phrase: With this ring I thee wed, it is as an adjunct to an action performed by the pastor or minister.


Similarly, when you make a promise to another person you are not redefining your sex. You are engaging in a social transaction, not imposing your delusion on other people.


If you declare yourself to be a girl or a boy you are stating a fact. Your statement is descriptive, not performative. It has everything to do with reality and nothing to do with your illusions.


By Austin’s definition, performative utterances cannot be affirmed or denied by referring to anything real. 


When a drag queen struts and frets like a woman he is only performing in a narrow sense of the word, the sense wherein an actor on stage performs a part and a role. But, he does not become a woman. He pretends to be a woman in order to trick people into believing that he is. If that is what floats your boat, go for it. But, do not imagine that the world will come to an end if people do not accept your lies as truth.


Similarly, when a child is growing up and plays with dolls, wears dresses, puts on makeup these are not performative gestures, even if Judith Butler thinks they are. 


Unfortunately, the misinterpretation of performative utterances has been used as a means to attack social norms. It has especially been used to create the absurd construction called gender. And to insist that gender is real. Long writes:


 If gender really is an all-encompassing structure of social norms that produces the illusion of sex, critics ask, why would the affirmation of someone’s gender identity entail a change to their biology? 


As for the numerous actions that constitute growing up male or female, they are not performatives. They do not make you a boy or a girl, a man or a woman. They place you in society and define your relations with others in your society. They affirm your membership in society and provide you with the ethical bearings that make you a member in good standing of the society. 


Human beings are not Silly Putty. You cannot contort them in any shape you wish, bounce them against the wall and expect that they will become whatever you want them to become.


As for the other deception, this time philosophical and metaphysical, children who are brainwashed into become trans gendered are not discovering who they really are. The notion of being who you really are is another aberrant concept, one that pretends that you can be radically different from your biological constituents.


In truth, recent studies suggest that adolescents who want to transition are often attracted to members of the same sex. Transmania is a modern form of homophobia.


More importantly, these children are being sacrificed to a lesson in advanced brainwashing. We as a civilization are hard at work trying to see if we can not just mutilate bodies, but can mutilate minds, to persuade them to take as true what we say is true. It represents a descent into totalitarianism.


Transmania is a delusional belief. Normally, people who suffer from delusions are considered to be mentally ill. Now, we are working to produce delusional beliefs in children, the better to exercise complete control over their minds. It is a horror, one that cannot be mitigated by the pretense that it is science.


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Saturday, March 16, 2024

Saturday Miscellany

First, as though on cue, Senator Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor to denounce Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace. Schumer called for new elections in Israel.

I have been following New York Times columnist Tommy Friedman and I suggested that he was promoting the Biden party line. Now, we see the same party line promoted by Schumer himself, the leading Democratic Jewish politician in America.


Most people are appalled by Schumer’s election interference, but  is the cover up is more important. By emphasizing Netanyahu and by blaming him for being an obstacle to peace, the Democratic Party is doing everything in its power to ensure that no one figures out that the person who is most responsible for what is happening in Israel and Gaza is-- Joe Biden himself. It is setting the terms of the narrative, which shifts blame away from Biden.


Second, we should keep in mind the unexampled moral depravity shown by Hamas. Blaming Netanyahu is rich indeed.


David Goldman tells us about Hamas:


Hamas is the first combatant in all of history that tries to maximize casualties among its OWN civilian population, to win sympathy from the squeamish and credulous. Not even the Nazis did this. Not even the Nazis, for that matter, raped their victims before butchering and burning them. It is the wickedest entity in the whole grisly history of warfare. The civilian death toll--even if inflated by Hamas propagandists--is horrifying, but not nearly so horrifying as the Hamas strategy. This is an evil that must be extirpated, and Israel is fighting the fight of all civilized peoples.


Evidently, saving Joe Biden is more important for Congressional Democrats.


Third, meanwhile back in Ukraine, things aren't going very well for the beleaguered and outgunned Ukrainian forces. The French magazine Marianne has the story, based on analysis conducted by the French military:


"A Ukrainian military victory now seems impossible" 


The reports Marianne consulted write that Ukraine's counter-offensive "gradually bogged down in mud and blood and did not result in any strategic gain" and that its planning, conceived by Kiev and Western general staffs, turned out to be "disastrous": "Planners thought that once the first Russian defense lines were breached, the entire front would collapse [...] 


These fundamental preliminary phases were conducted without considering the moral forces of the enemy in defense: that is, the will of the Russian soldier to hold onto the terrain". 


The reports also highlight "the inadequacy of the training of Ukrainian soldiers and officers": due to a lack of officers and a significant number of veterans, these "Year II soldiers" from Ukraine - often trained for "no more than three weeks" - were launched into an assault on a Russian fortification line that proved impregnable. Without any air support, with disparate Western equipment that was less efficient than the old Soviet material ("obsolete, easy to maintain, and capable of being used in degraded mode", the report mentions), the Ukrainian troops had no hope of breaking through. Add to this the "Russian super-dominance in the field of electronic jamming penalizing, on the Ukrainian side, the use of drones and command systems".... 


The reports also highlight that contrary to Ukraine "the Russians have managed their reserve troops well, to ensure operational endurance."


"To date, the Ukrainian general staff does not have a critical mass of land forces capable of inter-arms maneuver at the corps level capable of challenging their Russian counterparts to break through its defensive line," concludes this confidential defense report, according to which "the gravest error of analysis and judgment would be to continue to seek exclusively military solutions to stop the hostilities". 


A French officer summarizes: "It is clear, given the forces present, that Ukraine cannot win this war militarily." "The conflict entered a critical phase in December" "The combativeness of Ukrainian soldiers is deeply affected," mentions a forward-looking report for the year 2024. 


"Zelensky would need 35,000 men per month, he's not recruiting half of that, while Putin draws from a pool of 30,000 volunteers per month," observes a military officer returned from Kiev. In terms of equipment, the balance is just as unbalanced: the failed offensive of 2023 "tactically destroyed" half of Kiev's 12 combat brigades. Since then, Western aid has never been so low. It is therefore clear that no Ukrainian offensive can be launched this year. 


Now you know why Ukraine has disappeared from the news cycle.


Fourth, the singularly inept Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Qatar. He managed to declare that Israel’s most important job in Gaza was protecting civilians.


To which Sean Durns replied on Twitter. Here, he said, are a few words that American general never pronounced during World War II:


‘America’s no. 1 job in WWII is protecting Japanese and Germans’


Fifth, let them eat meat! So says a Harvard trained doctor in the Daily Mail:


Meat is essential for warding off depression and anxiety, a top nutrition expert has revealed, sending a blow to veganism

Dr Georgia Ede, a Harvard-trained nutritional and metabolic psychiatrist, studies the relationship between what we eat and our mental and physical health. 


And despite the health halo that vegan diets have been given over the last few years, she claims that giving up meat could be detrimental for mental health.


'The brain needs meat,' she told KIRO News Radio


'We’re used to hearing that meat is dangerous for our total health, including our brain health, and plants are really the best way to nourish and protect our brains.'


'But the truth of the matter is that it’s actually — that’s upside down and backward.'


And also,


She noted that meat is 'the only food that contains every nutrient we need in its proper form and is also the safest food for our blood sugar and insulin levels.

 

These nutrients include vitamin B12, omega-3 fatty acids, zinc, choline, iron, and iodine. 


Vitamin B12, for example, helps with the formation of oxygen-rich red blood cells and DNA. However, it has also been linked to regulating mood-boosting serotonin, and low levels of serotonin have been linked to increased risks of depression and anxiety. 


Sixth, more and more universities are reinstituting standardized test scores for applicants. They have learned their lesson.


Jazz Shaw explains it in Hot Air:


The University of Texas at Austin released the academic performance data for students who submitted standardized scores versus those who did not submit such scores. The result is unambiguous: Students who did not submit standardized tests performed drastically worse than students who did submit their scores. 


The students who did not submit ACT or SAT scores finished the fall 2023 semester with a grade point average 0.86 grade points lower than students who did. This demonstrates an average difference of almost an entire letter grade. Had the University of Texas utilized all applicants’ standardized scores, it very well might have decided against admitting many of those who did not provide their scores. Students who did not provide scores had a median SAT of 1160, markedly lower than that of the students who did provide their scores: 1420. The University of Texas would have been correct in deciding against admitting those students with lower scores given how much better students with a higher average SAT performed academically.


Seventh, economist Angus Deaton has changed his mind about immigration. Previously, he had supported it. Now, not so much. From Breitbart News:


Importing tens of millions of third-world people with no skills and no money into a first world nation with an enshrined welfare state, does not benefit the people of that nation, as the latter are forced to foot the bill.


Eighth, speaking of unintended consequences, the rage against Donald Trump, playing itself out in courtrooms across the east coast, has produced a situation where businesspeople might now hesitate about doing business in New York City.


Roger Simon writes:


Meanwhile, what businessperson—high or low—wants to incorporate in a state where a wanton judge can suddenly decree his or her estimates of their real estate valuations to obtain a loan to be inflated, impose ridiculous fines, and then shut them down—possibly forever?


In President Trump’s case, as those same businesspersons surely noted, not a soul had been damaged by the former president’s estimates, inflated or not. All the loans had been repaid and the banks involved, of course, made money. There were no victims.


Ninth, were you worried about Gen Z? Were you worried about the love life of these overgrown adolescents? If so, you were right. Olivia Dean pulls back the curtain in the Daily Mail:


Welcome to the world of youthful romance in the 21st century, where charm is no longer a currency and boozy nights out end not with phone numbers scrawled on receipts, but with a lonely kebab in bed and a scroll through Instagram.


Gen Z, born at the turn of the Millennium, should be in its dating prime, yet research shows that we are having fewer romantic trysts than ever.


A recent study revealed that the proportion of people aged 18 to 24 having no sex at all increased from 29 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women in 2009 to 43 per cent of men and a huge 74 per cent of women in 2018. And things only seem to be getting worse.


What happened to the bed-hopping hedonism of past generations? Our parents — even our oldest siblings — fell in and out of love with ease, yet we twentysomethings seem incapable of having any sort of normal relationship.


But why? Is it dating apps, social media, Covid, mental health, the economy — or a miserable mix of them all?


Give it some thought.


Tenth, from Prof. Sallie Baxendale, regarding puberty blockers, no longer allowed in Great Britain.


Prof. Baxendale challenges the claim that puberty can be paused & resumed: 


“If you deprive the brain of any input during the critical windows of opportunity, the brain will move on and whatever it was that was supposed to be developing, doesn't develop properly.” 


Keep this in mind when you are considering what happens to children’s brains when they are not allowed to attend school at certain ages.


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Friday, March 15, 2024

You Don't Need Therapy

The bloom seems to have come off the therapy mystique. Now that Abigail Shrier’s new book, Bad Therapy, has been riding the top of the Amazon best seller list, other therapists are stepping forth to explain that therapy is not all that it is knocked up to be.

Considering that I have been beating on this particular drum for well over ten years, I am happy to welcome Shrier and the other therapists who have now discovered that encouraging people to have therapy is something of a con.


Now, Illinois therapist Emily Edlynn explains when you do and do not need therapy. From the pages of the Washington Post:


Psychological suffering can signal a time for reflection and change, but it does not always require therapy. There are many resources that can help alleviate stress, anxiety and loneliness without turning to the limited resource of a therapist.


She is, however, overly optimistic about what therapy can and cannot do. 


Therapy is a science-backed treatment addressing mental health symptoms that cause significant problems in daily functioning. For instance, mindfulness-based stress reduction for anxiety or cognitive processing therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. 


Sessions focus on setting goals for change, developing and practicing skills that improve psychological health, and an ongoing evaluation of progress toward goals and continued treatment needs.


Saying that therapy is science-based is simply wrong. Mindfulness meditation comes to us from religion, as do 12 Step programs. Most therapy involves psychodrama. Therapists want you to understand that you are living out a family drama. They want to teach you to play your role better, and with more feeling. Beginning with Freud, therapy comes to us from the theatre.


Some cognitive therapy has a scientific basis, but Edlynn’s notion, which is commonplace in the therapy world, that treatment involves developing relationship rapport, is not science:


Therapy involves developing trust and rapport because the therapist-patient relationship is proven as the most essential predictor of positive change


Of course, the therapeutic rapport is largely one-sided. As Edlynn points out, therapists do not share personal details but expect their patients to overshare. In truth, it is difficult to develop relationship rapport when one person is exposing himself and the other does not reciprocate.


Edlynn suggests that you need therapy when you cease to function effectively in your everyday life. True enough,  For some reason she does not mention that medication can often be an essential part of therapy or its adjunct. 


She suggests that therapists can help people who cannot manage their symptoms:


People need therapy when their mental health symptoms are causing serious impairments in their daily functioning — in close relationships, work performance, sleep or social activities. For instance, if a person’s work stress overwhelms them to the point that they miss work and are subsequently at risk of losing their job.


Among the new techniques that people use to get a handle on their lives-- is coaching. Considering that I stopped doing psychoanalytic therapy and replaced it with coaching several years ago, I find this to be persuasive. 


Edlynn explains it clearly:


Consider a coach who specializes in the area where you want to make change, such as your career or parenting. Therapists can coach, but coaches don’t need to be therapists. There are important differences between coaching and therapy.


Coaching is not about insight and awareness. It evaluates the game, teaches the rules, identifies the players and considers any one of a number of possible moves. The patient is not sick, literally or metaphorically. Through coaching the patient learns how better to play the game.


Coaching, like improving your skills at playing a game, is not about the drama. Life is not theatre, the past is not playing itself out in the present, like a bad play.  


And your life does not follow a script. Even if your therapist teaches you to emote, therapy will still make you a character in a play, following a script.


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Thursday, March 14, 2024

The View from Gaza

Israel is fighting for its existence and the Biden administration is trying to undermine the duly elected Israeli prime minister. Thus, to sow dissension in the Israeli ranks, the better to save Hamas.

One does not like to put it this way, but the Biden administration is now so thoroughly suffused with empathy for the Palestinian people that it is even building a landing pier in the South of Gaza, the better to deliver supplies to the besieged Hamas supporters.


Building a pier is building infrastructure for Hamas. And rewarding Hamas for October 7.


Joe Biden promised that this operation would not put boots on the ground in Gaza. Unfortunately, you cannot build a pier without putting boots on the ground. 


As a sidelight, two New York Times columnists have gone to press with markedly different analyses of the situation in Gaza. Bret Stephens supports Israel while Tommy Friedman carries water for the Biden administration and blames the problems on the Israeli prime minister.


Given that the Biden administration funded Hamas and Iran, you understand why a shill like Tommy Friedman is arguing that the fault lies with the Israeli prime minister.


Thinking more clearly than most Stephens blames Hamas for the devastation in Gaza. 


And Hamas, which started the war, could put a halt to that rain of fire tomorrow. It rejected a six-week cease-fire that would have paused the fighting and allowed much more aid in exchange for the release of roughly 40 of the remaining 100 Israeli hostages. It could stop the fighting for good by simply surrendering.


If Hamas does not want to surrender, Israel has few other options short of beating it:


The best way to get Hamas to stop fighting is to beat it. If Israel were to end the war now, with several Hamas battalions intact, at least four things would happen.


But, keep in mind the vapid musings about a two state solution. It does not solve anything. Stephens speaks clearly:


First, it would be impossible to set up a political authority in Gaza that isn’t Hamas: If the Palestinian Authority or local Gazans tried to do so, they wouldn’t live for long. 


Second, Hamas would reconstitute its military force as Hezbollah did in Lebanon after the 2006 war with Israel — and Hamas has promised to repeat the attacks of Oct. 7 “a second, a third, a fourth” time. 


Third, the Israeli hostages would be stuck in their awful captivity indefinitely.


Fourth, there would never be a Palestinian state. No Israeli government is going to agree to a Palestinian state in the West Bank if it risks resembling Gaza.


As for the supposedly innocent victims, the fault lies with Hamas:


It might be more speculative if this weren’t the fifth major war that Hamas has provoked since it seized power in Gaza in 2007. After each war, Hamas’s capabilities have grown stronger and its ambitions bolder. At some point this had to end; for Israelis, Oct. 7 was that point.


Are the Israelis being especially brutal? Are they failing to avoid civilian casualties? Would any other force do things differently?


The reality of urban warfare is that it’s exceptionally costly and difficult. The United States under Barack Obama and Donald Trump spent nine months helping Iraqi forces flatten the city of Mosul to defeat ISIS, with results that looked even worse than Gaza does today. I don’t remember calls for “Cease-Fire Now” then. Hamas has made it even more difficult for Israel because, instead of sheltering civilians in its immense network of tunnels, it shelters itself.


As for the aberrant notion that Israel is committing genocide, Stephens responds:


Well, since you’re alluding to the Holocaust, it surely can’t be in Israel’s interests to be seen perpetrating a version of it in Gaza. Just look at the worldwide explosion of antisemitism since Oct. 7.


That analogy is false and offensive on many levels. Israel is fighting a war it didn’t seek, against an enemy sworn to its destruction and holding scores of its citizens hostage. If Israel had wanted to wipe out Gazans as Germans sought to wipe out Jews, it could have done so on the first day of the war. Israel is fighting a tough war against an evil enemy that puts its own civilians in harm’s way. Maybe there should be more public pressure on Hamas to surrender than on Israel to save Hamas from the consequences of its actions.


Some have argued that Hamas is an idea and that you cannot defeat an idea. Stephens responds:


By that logic, the Allies should have spared Germany because National Socialism was also an idea. You may not be able to kill an idea but you can defang it, just as you can persuade future generations that some ideas have terrible consequences for those who espouse them.


Stephens concludes that the Biden administration should help Israel win the war, “decisively so that Israelis and Palestinians can someday win the peace.”


And then we have the other side of these arguments, presented by Tommy Friedman, all-around Biden apologist. One understands, because one has said so often enough, that Tommy is working for the Biden administration. He is working to undermine Israeli resolve and to let Hamas survive. And, he wants to assure that no one hold Biden to account for the events in Israel and Gaza.


Tommy’s view is that Israel needed to have a plan for the after effects of its military. He also believes that the Palestinian Authority should be allowed to govern Gaza, a dubious proposal at a time when the PA has just joined with Hamas in the campaign to destroy the state of Israel.


Anyway, when someone attacks you and you decide to fight back, do you await the moment when you have figured out the aftermath of the war? Since when?


In my view, there is only one thing worse for Israel, not to mention Gazans, than a Gaza controlled by Hamas: That’s a Gaza where nobody is in charge, a Gaza where the world will expect Israel to provide order but Israel cannot or will not, so it becomes a permanent, grinding humanitarian crisis.


Tommy is happy to pay lip service to Israel’s just cause, but the thrust of his argument, such as it is, emphasizes how badly the Israelis are doing. In his largely warped mind the fault lies with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. With allies like that, why do you need enemies?


Anyway, according to Tommy, no one is in charge of the rubble that once was called Gaza:


…basically no one was providing day-to-day governance for the civilians left behind, save for a few hundred Hamas fighters and local gang leaders.


One should understand that the Palestinians have been militating for self-determination, as an adjunct to their wish to destroy the state of Israel and to kill as many Jews as possible:


I immediately understood how a chaotic scene unfolded over food distribution two days earlier. Israel is breaking Hamas’s control yet refusing to take responsibility with its own forces for civilian administration in Gaza — and refusing to enlist the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has thousands of employees in Gaza, to perform that task. It is behaving this way because Netanyahu does not want the P.A. to become the Palestinian government in the West Bank and Gaza, which might give it a chance at credibility to grow into an independent Palestinian state there one day.


Of course the PA is allied with Hamas, which makes Tommy’s reasoning even more lame than usual. It is not about whether the PA wants to become the Palestinian government. Now that it is associated directly with Hamas there is no chance that that will happen.


Then Tommy indulges some reveries about other situations in other countries. Analogies are dangerous because they cause people to ignore the specificity of the current problem. They allow leaders to indulge wish fulfillments, to the effect that the Palestinian Authority will become a responsible steward of the West Bank and Gaza.


And yet, this assumption forms the basis for Biden administration policy toward Israel and Gaza. 


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