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Has been brilliantly presented by the South African lawyers, with some assists.
I don’t want to waste your time, though. Israel is committing genocide. Everyone knows it and yes, it meets the legal definition.
But the case is a thing of beauty, because whatever the ICJ decides way the outcome is almost the same:
If the ICJ orders an restraining order America, Israel and most of Europe will ignore the order. This will discredit the post-war “rules based international order”. It will be seen as a joke.
If the ICJ doesn’t order a restraining order when everyone can see, in real time, the genocide happening, the post-war rules based international order will be discredited.
The only difference is is that if the ICJ does its job, the ICJ itself may survive into the new order.
It’s interesting to me that the current order is in this “no win” situation. They feel they must support Israel, but doing so is losing them massive legitimacy. They have no way out.
There will be no weekly roundup today or next Sunday. It should return on the 21st of January.
Hezbollah just hit Meron airbase hard, in retaliation for Israel assassinating a Hamas leader in Lebanon. This was a major intelligence center, commanding drones and connecting other radar centers.
They have recently withdrawn two brigades from Gaza and intend to pull back more. They don’t control even the land in Gaza they claim to control, and are being bled white by an insurgency they can’t come to grip with and which is outfighting them.
Hezbollah has forced hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers to leave their homes near the Lebanese border. They’re systematically dismantling Israeli surveillance systems. If there’s a real war: if Israel tries to bomb the hell out Lebanon, they’ll strike Israel’s air bases with vast numbers of missiles. Without an air-force, well, Israel has nothing but terrible ground troops and some nukes.
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Meanwhile, the US (no one else matters) has not been able to stop the Houthis from attacking Israeli shipping. It matters less than people make it out to, they can go around the cape and much of Israel’s supplies come from Europe and North America anyway, but the sheer powerlessness, the inability to bigfoot, is instructional: American missiles cost millions, the resistance’s cost tens of thousands most.
What Israel is trying to do is to hold on and let famine do the work. Right now, 80% of the people starving in the world are in Gaza. They can’t win militarily, they’re too incompetent and their enemies are no longer punching bags, but if they can keep the blockade of Gaza going, they can still ethnically cleanse.
It’s worth pointing out that historically, Israelis have been very good at ethnic cleansing: after all, almost everything in Palestine was Palestinian less than a hundred years ago, and now almost nothing is. This is the last gasp, the attempt to finish the job.
But Israel has systematically trained up its enemies. Hezbollah is their creation, it would not exist if they had not invaded and occupied Lebanon. Hamas was actively supported by them in order to undercut the PLA and fragment resistance.
Israel taught its enemies how to fight against overwhelming force; how to hide from assassinations and shrug them off when they inevitably happen; how to operate against air superiority and American style electronic intelligence.
EU Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borell, has met a delegation from Hezbollah, in a last ditch effort to contain tensions on the Lebanese Israeli border and prevent a full-scale war Hezbollah informed Borell that there will be no discussions regarding the Lebanese front until the war on Gaza is stopped, and reiterated that they will not retreat a single inch from Lebanese territory.
Israel has been a US dependency for a long time, but right now, if it weren’t for the US, it would probably collapse economically and militarily.
This war an embarassment for the Israelis. It shows they can’t protect the settlers, they can’t win against Hamas and they can’t stop Hezbollah from striking settlements. It’s just embarassment all around. They want to widen the war and get Iran and the US into it, but they overestimate the US: the US can’t send ships into the Gulf and expect to leave. Most of its regional allies would be unwilling to let it run its airforce off their airfields, and the US can devastate Lebanon but it can’t stop Hezbollah from devastating Tel Aviv.
Israel’s on its way down. I don’t know how this mess will turn out, in the end, but US and Israeli weakness has been made clear. Neither are what they were. Add this to the humiliation of Ukraine and it’s clear the American century is all but over and that its allies are no longer safe.
As for a peace, if it’s negotiated, it’ll be done under Chinese auspices. Think about that a little.
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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 31, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Oligarchy
Jeffrey A. Winters [The American Interest, via The Big Picture 12-24-2023]
Winters is professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of Oligarchy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.
Everyone is by now aware of the staggering shift in fortunes upward favoring the wealthy. Less well understood is that this rising inequality is not the result of something economically rational, such as a surge in productivity or value-added contributions from financiers and hedge-fund CEOs, but is rather a direct reflection of redistributive policies that have helped the richest get richer.
[TW: I would argue that this is, in fact, well understood: that’s why Biden’s polling is so terrible. People generally understand the economy is rigged, and the see no effort being made to unrig it, nor any effort to rein in the worst abuses of economic predators, such as private equity. ]
The tiny proportion of wealthy actors among eligible voters cannot account for the immense political firepower needed to keep winning these policy victories. While motivated and mobilized minorities—those organized over issues like gay marriage, for example—can sometimes win legislative victories despite broad opposition from the electorate, America’s ultra-rich all together could barely fill a large sports stadium. They never assemble for rallies or marches, sign petitions, or mount Facebook or Twitter campaigns. So how do they so consistently get their way?
One increasingly popular answer is that America is an oligarchy rather than a democracy.1 The complex truth, however, is that the American political economy is both an oligarchy and a democracy; the challenge is to understand how these two political forms can coexist in a single system. Sorting out this duality begins with a recognition of the different kinds of power involved in each realm. Oligarchy rests on the concentration of material power, democracy on the dispersion of non-material power. The American system, like many others, pits a few with money power against the many with participation power. The chronic problem is not just that electoral democracy provides few constraints on the power of oligarchs in general, but that American democracy is by design particularly responsive to the power of money….
Oligarchy should be understood as the politics of wealth defense, which has evolved in important ways throughout human civilization. For most of history, this has meant oligarchs were focused on defending their claims to property. They did so by arming themselves or by ruling directly and jointly over armed forces they assembled and funded. Every great increase in wealth required oligarchs to spend additional resources on armaments, castles, militias and other means of defense. The greatest transformation in the politics of wealth defense and thus of oligarchy came with the rise of the modern state. Through its impersonal system of laws, the armed modern state converted individual oligarchic property claims into secure societal property rights. In exchange, oligarchs disarmed and submitted to the same protective legal infrastructure that applied to all citizens (in theory if not always in practice). Property rights offered reliable safeguards not only against potential antagonists without property, but also, no less important, against other oligarchs and the armed state itself that administered the entire arrangement.
[TW: Here, I think Winters commits a grievous error of omission by not considering the mental and social pathologies which characterize the rich, and the society they dominate. Theorists of civic republicanism repeatedly warned of the self-glorification the rich engage in. ]
December 29, 2023 [The Lever]
The Lever’s upcoming podcast series exposes the 50-year plot to legalize corruption in America. Listen to the trailer now.
In MASTER PLAN, The Lever’s journalists unearth never-before-reported documents showing how a group of extremists and tycoons legalized corruption and took over the U.S. government. In this epic journey from the 1970s to the present, you’ll hear the untold history of famous villains you already thought you knew—people like President Richard Nixon, Senator Mitch McConnell and Fox News boss Roger Ailes. You’ll also meet operatives and oligarchs you’ve probably never heard of, because they’ve wielded their power in the shadows.…
Is a core of right ring conspiracy theories.
But here’s the thing, while they’re clearly wrong about the details, that a significant chunk of elites are involved in statutory rape is almost certainly true.
More true is that violation of laws and strong social more is common in elite circles.
The main thing to understand is that violating social norms is a thrill. It heightens experiences. When people become powerful, the opportunity to violate norms that as someone weak they had to obey opens up and the experience can be thrilling.
If you were raised in a very Christian society, pissing on a crucifix or homosexuality or the black mass (which is essentially just an inversion of a normal mass). Pedophilia is a massive taboo in our society, and so on. Same reason some people get off on sex where there’s risk of being discovered.
When you become rich or powerful you also run into desire satiation: you can have what you couldn’t have before: the good food, gambling, legal sex, travel, lovely house, servants, automatic respect and pandering and so on. You become used to that, and soon they don’t satisfy. A normal person can eat gourmet food occasionally, you can have it every day, and soon it means little, and so on.
In general doing what even power isn’t supposed to let you do and forcing people to even what power and money aren’t supposed to let you force people to do, however, remain able to juice your emotions: the last vices of power. “What does even my society forbid to people with as much power as I have?
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The only thing that remains which are able to life you past your hedonic baseline are the taboos and the illegal thrills.
Those who enable, encourage and pander to such “evil awakenings” gain a hold over the people who engage. Indeed, in many circles, to truly be trusted with power, one must have done something transgressive. If you haven’t, other members can’t trust you–they have no hold on you. The Skull and Bones society at Yale operates in this fashion: everyone has to give up blackmail material to the society.
In a properly functioning “evil elite” this blackmail is mutual. Everyone has something on each other. In a pathological one, the blackmail is gathered up and used not for in-group enforcement, but outside control. See Israel’s control over US politicians, for example. An internal or external group, controls other elite groups by having their blackmail, while they don’t have blackmail on them (or don’t dare use it.)
There are many reasons why men and women with actual integrity don’t make it to the top very often or change from good people to bad once they have power. But the hedonic adjustment to the normal perks of power, the panderers who want a hook and the elite need for everyone with power to be compromised are a big part of why.
We’re at $8,700, unlocking three more chapters. The next milestone is $10,500, which unlocks the final chapters, and the full fundraising goals is $12,500, in which case there’ll be an article on the medieval university bubble and what it tells us about ours, including some commentary on the idea of elite overproduction.
I appreciate everyone who’s given so far. Times keep getting harder for most of us. This is a reader supported blog. Everyone reads for free, but the work and food and so on aren’t free. If you value my writing and you aren’t in money trouble, I’d appreciate it if you give. Could be I’m wrong, but it seems to me that this blog and my writing is right a lot more often than wrong (way more than most establishment pundits or big influencers) and I hope you consider it worth keeping around.
To those who celebrate, and to those who don’t, I hope you have the day off and enjoy it.