Author Archives: Editors

“The Last Temptation of Israel” By Andrew Sullivan

Posted on by
Reply

(Posted By F. Sheikh)

What is one to make of the fact that the deputy speaker of the Knesset has called for ethnic cleansing in Gaza?

He’s not an obscure blogger for the Times of Israel. He is a luminary of the Likud – a man who got 23 percent of the vote in a contest for the Likud Party leadership. He was appointed to his current high position by Benjamin Netanyahu. And this is his proposal for Gaza:

a) The IDF [Israeli army] shall designate certain open areas on the Sinai border, adjacent to the sea, in which the civilian population will be concentrated, far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling. In these areas, tent encampments will be established, until relevant emigration destinations are determined. The supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected.

b) The formerly populated areas will be shelled with maximum fire power. The entire civilian and military infrastructure of Hamas, its means of communication and of logistics, will be destroyed entirely, down to their foundations.

c) The IDF will divide the Gaza Strip laterally and crosswise, significantly expand the corridors, occupy commanding positions, and exterminate nests of resistance, in the event that any should remain.

You read that right. There will be temporary “camps” where the Gaza population will be “concentrated”; they will be expelled with subsidies; basic supplies of water and electricity will be cut off for those who remain. The war-time ethics he recommends are: “Woe to the evildoer, and woe to his neighbor.” He backs the “annihiliation” of Hamas and all their supporters. His strategic goal is to “turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians.” (Modern Jaffa, of course, was built on the ethnic cleansing of most of its Palestinian inhabitants in 1948.)

The usual response to this kind of thing among the lockstep pro-Israel community is that it is a tiny fringe opinion. And I can only hope they’re right. But what concerns me is that this racist, genocidal bigot was appointed deputy speaker of the Knesset by the current prime minister. What concerns me are the statements of Ayelet Shaked, the telegenic young protege of Naftali Bennett, who is touted as a future prime minister. This is from a Facebook post she wrote the day before the gruesome lynching of an Arab teen who was forced to drink gasoline and then burned to death by Jewish extremists. Note that her call for war came before any Hamas rocket was fired:

Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

I suppose someone will claim that the deputy speaker of the Knesset, and the former head of the National Security Council or the former chief rabbi in Israel or the head of the largest Jewish youth group in the world are fringe figures. But I note that, so far as I have been able to find, there have been no consequences for their statements for any of them. And I have to ask a simple question: which leader of another American ally has appointed a man who favors genocide and ethnic cleansing as the deputy speaker of the legislature? Which other democracy has legitimate political parties in the governing coalition calling for permanent occupation of a neighboring state – and deliberate social engineering to create a new demographic ethnic reality in that conquered land? Putin’s Russia has not sunk that low.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/05/the-last-and-first-temptation-of-israel/

 

Subject: Setting rivers free: As dams are torn down, nature is quickly recovering – CSMonitor.com||

Posted on by
Reply

The article in the Christian Science Monitor carries a critical message we humans would do well to remember. Mother nature is far more adaptable than we think. It is a good lesson for people who deny climate change.  When humans improve their behavior, nature rewards and we are all better for it.

Nasik Elahi

Setting rivers free: As dams are torn down, nature is quickly recovering –
CSMonitor.com
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2014/0803/Setting-rivers-free-As-dams-are-torn-down-nature-is-quickly-recovering#.U-ex2XpqJlQ.email

 

 

BBC report on Baroness Warsi

Posted on by
Reply

Baroness Warsi is a woman of principles and courage. She challenges the politics and the elite in the UK and the west to address the moral conundrums of the Gaza campaign by Israel. Equally her actions draw attention to the deadly virus of sectarian warfare afflicting many Muslim countries, sponsored by Iran and Saudi Arabia and their cohorts, for narrow ends that are leading to the destruction of the culture, history and cohesion of the region. None of these powerful states, whether Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Egypt, can escape the dark forces like ISIS unleashed by their strong arm tactics. As baroness Warsi states so eloquently the world needs a spirit of compromise where the basic values are uniformly observed. The alternative is a descent into the type of disintegration in Syria where all value systems are being wiped out in the name of god and religion.

Nasik

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-28656874

http://m.bbc.co.uk/search?q=Warsi

“The De-Darwinizing of Cultural Change” By Daniel C. Dennett

Posted on by
Reply

Interesting talk on how much Darwinian evolution plays its part in our lives and when De-Darwinism starts. (Posted By F. Sheikh )

You can’t explain human competence all in terms of genetic evolution. You need cultural evolution as well, and that cultural evolution is profoundly Darwinian in the early days. And as time has passed, it has become more and more non-Darwinian.

I have an example that I use when I’m writing about this, well, two examples: One is Turing’s computer. If there ever was a top-down design, that’s it. I mean, they would not have given him the money to build the Manchester Computer if he didn’t have proof of concept and drawings. This was the idea, the understanding preceding the physical reality. Just the opposite of, say, a termite colony, which is bottom-up designed, and although it’s brilliantly designed, it’s a product of little entities that are themselves non-comprehending but very competent in very limited ways.

Think for a moment about a termite colony or an ant colony—amazingly competent in many ways, we can do all sorts of things, treat the whole entity as a sort of cognitive agent and it accomplishes all sorts of quite impressive behavior. But if I ask you, “What is it like to be a termite colony?” most people would say, “It’s not like anything.” Well, now let’s look at a brain, let’s look at a human brain—100 billion neurons, roughly speaking, and each one of them is dumber than a termite and they’re all sort of semi-independent. If you stop and think about it, they’re all direct descendants of free-swimming unicellular organisms that fended for themselves for a billion years on their own. There’s a lot of competence, a lot of can-do in their background, in their ancestry. Now they’re trapped in the skull and they may well have agendas of their own; they have competences of their own, no two are alike. Now the question is, how is a brain inside a head any more integrated, any more capable of there being something that it’s like to be that than a termite colony? What can we do with our brains that the termite colony couldn’t do or maybe that many animals couldn’t do?

It seems to me that we do actually know some of the answer, and it has to do with mainly what Fiery Cushman was talking about—it’s the importance of the cultural niche and the cognitive niche, and in particular I would say you couldn’t have the cognitive niche without the cultural niche because it depends on the cultural niche.

What I’m working on these days is to try to figure out—in a very speculative way, but as anchored as I can to whatever people think they know right now about the relevant fields—how culture could prune, tame, organize, structure brains to make language possible and then to make higher cognition (than reason, and so forth) possible on top of that. If you ask the chicken-egg question—which came first—did we first get real smart so that now we could have culture? Or did we get culture and that enabled us to become smart? The answer to that is yes, it’s both, it’s a co-evolutionary process.

What particularly interests me about that is I am now thinking about culture and its role in creating the human mind as a process, which begins very Darwinian and becomes less Darwinian as time goes by. This is the de-Darwinizing of cultural change in the world.

http://edge.org/panel/daniel-c-dennett-the-de-darwinizing-of-cultural-change-headcon-13-part-x