Seems what really keeps the debate alive is ANY determination that it’s over. It seems to be a debate whose beginning is its end, and vice versa, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, til kingdom or caliphate or chaos come.
#Israel
Bibi Christ
The concept of revelatory sacrifice may even be the best frame for understanding potential Israeli action, but also the potential withholding of action, against Iran. If the effect is more maddening than practical or helpful, it may be because the whole predicament is already so tragically mad, something Morris probably understands, or at least understood, as well as anyone.
Posted in International Relations, Religion, War Tagged with: America, Benny Morris, Dual Covenant, Iran, Israel, Netanyahu
Extra ordinary fragments never to be read, understood, or thought
you may think you understand but you do not understand you will never understand understanding of this kind is beyond you
Posted in Books, Featured, History, Internet, Philosophy, Religion Tagged with: Hegel, Hermann Cohen, Holocaust, Israel, Jabotinsky, Judaism, League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Rosenszweig, Zionism
a better very, very bad translation of Grass’s poem + some bonus research
just for the sake of keeping track of this stuff and maybe someday doing something more with it, for the best social-scientific-philosophical reasons,
Posted in History, Internet, Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: anti-semitism, Conspiracism, Israel, Lunacy, political-mental integrability, Trutherism
letztlich auch uns (Beinart + Grass)
To connect the apostate Beinart to the declared enemy Grass, and both of them to everyone else: While we may fear a radically illiberal enemy state gaining possession of nuclear weapons, we may also wonder if we’re witnessing the slow transformation, with our aid and under our own protection, of our ally into a radically illiberal state, one that already possesses a nuclear arsenal.
what must be heard
“was gesagt werden muss”/”what must be said,” Guenter Grass’s un-poetic poetic response to current events involving Germans, Israelis, Iranians and all of the rest of the world, is dominated, and justified, by a recognition emerging from geopolitical facticity, by that murderously coercive course of the world that Adorno juxtaposes to art: The wheel of historical fortune has turned in such a way that the national heirs of Nazism (of the genocidal) are supplying delivery vehicles for weapons of mass destruction (weapons of genocide) to the heirs of Zionism (and of genocide).
Unheard in Open Discussion (re Iranian nukes)
Put simply: Israel = friend, and Iran = enemy – designations that, not incidentally, neither country’s leaderships have striven much to alter over the last generation or two.
Posted in International Relations, Politics, War Tagged with: Freddie deBoer, Iran, Israel, Non-Proliferation Treaty, nuclear weapons
The Neoconolist Conspiracy
Look: there’s nothing wrong with making strong arguments against those with whom you disagree. But when you call them anti-Semites and when you argue that there should be a campaign to isolate, defame and get rid of them, you have gone over into the kind of bullying that is inimical to an open society.
Nuke programs end with a lot of whimpering, not a bang
Qadhafi decided against WMD long before the Iraq war. Osirak was a complete failure. And so on.
Posted in International Relations, War Tagged with: Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Nuclear Proliferation