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www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/opinion/the-crypto-collapse-magical-thinking-capitalism.html
I have come to view cryptocurrencies not simply as exotic assets but as a manifestation of a magical thinking that had come to infect part of the generation who grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession — and American capitalism, more broadly.
For these purposes, magical thinking is the assumption that favored conditions will continue on forever without regard for history. It is the minimizing of constraints and trade-offs in favor of techno-utopianism and the exclusive emphasis on positive outcomes and novelty. It is the conflation of virtue with commerce.
Another manifestation of magical thinking is believing that the best hopes for progress on our greatest challenges — climate change, racial injustice and economic inequality — are corporations and individual investment and consumption choices rather than political mobilization and our communities.
Corporations are valuable socially because they solve problems and generate wealth. But they should not be trusted as arbiters of progress and should be balanced by a state that mediates political questions. Trade-offs are everywhere and inescapable. Navigating these trade-offs, rather than ignoring them, is the recipe for a good life.
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www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/world/middleeast/hamas-israel-gaza-war.html
Hamas leaders in Gaza were flooded with images of Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, Jews openly praying at a contested site customarily reserved for Muslims, and the Israeli police storming the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a touchstone for Palestinian claims to the holy city. The prospect of Israel’s normalizing ties with Saudi Arabia, long a deep-pocketed patron of the Palestinian cause, appeared closer than ever.
Mr. Sinwar took the helm of Hamas in Gaza in 2017. A tough, unsmiling man with closely cropped white hair and a trim beard, he hailed from the first generation of Hamas, an armed group founded during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the late 1980s and ultimately classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and many other nations.
In 2011, Mr. Sinwar was released in a prisoner swap that Hamas took as a signature lesson: Israel was willing to pay a high price for its captives.
Many in Israel’s security establishment also came to believe that its complex border defenses to shoot down rockets and prevent infiltrations from Gaza were enough to keep Hamas contained.
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www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/11/05/netanyahu-suspends-israel-minister-nuke-gaza/
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has indefinitely suspended a far-Right minister from the cabinet after he raised the option of “nuking” Gaza.
The country’s heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu, a member of the far-Right Otzma Yehudit party, told a local radio station that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip “is one of the possibilities” the government is considering.
He added that those who raise the Palestinian or Hamas flag “shouldn’t continue living on the face of the earth”, and that “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza”.
“Amichai Eliyahu’s words are detached from reality,” said the Mr Netanyahu’s office in an initial statement on social media on Sunday morning
The Israeli prime minister then added that Mr Eliyahu would be suspended from cabinet meetings indefinitely, although how meaningful that is while a separate war cabinet is running the country is unclear.
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podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-al-franken-podcast/id1462195742
An essential for understanding israel
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www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/04/ukraine-has-blown-its-best-chance-to-defeat-putin/
the hard truth is that the counter offensive could have succeeded if the US and European countries had stepped up to the plate. They failed to do so, providing only enough military aid to keep Ukraine fighting but nowhere near enough to secure victory against such a powerful enemy. Every step has been marked by procrastination and heel-dragging reluctance to give Ukraine the tools it needed to finish the job.
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This war is unlike any other—and must begin at home.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/end-israels-gaza-illusionsFirst, it is crucial to understand that this is not just another round of conflict in Gaza. To be successful, the country must countenance a war of exceptional scope and difficulty that could last for many months.
The second insight is that the horrific massacre of at least 1,200 Israelis by Hamasdeath squads marked a catastrophic collapse of Israel’s existing security strategy. The failure of Israeli intelligence and security forces and of their overseers in the government cannot be overstated
In this regard, Israel’s political and security leadership has much to answer for. Although the full details have yet to be uncovered, stark findings have already come to light. Potential warning signs were ignored, dismissed, or downplayed, and misguided security priorities may have made the attack more deadly. In addition to a comprehensive postwar inquiry about what went wrong, the Israeli public will demand a full accounting from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about his own role in the debacle.
Despite Hamas’s growing capabilities, these failures convinced Israel that its defense strategy was working: Hamas was unable to effectively strike Israel’s population; and it faced significant retribution for attempting such strikes and could be rewarded with material support for keeping calm. Israeli officials also concluded that trying to destroy Hamas’s forces outright would be too costly and might create dangerous new problems. That assumption was widely shared by Western officials: toppling Hamas, they feared, would result in a power vacuum that Israel would have to fill by directly ruling Gaza—a prospect that Israel has long shunned.
Thus, in the weeks before the October massacre, there were again large gatherings of people near the border fence. Six Gazans died when an explosive device blew up on September 13 in what was very likely part of the preparations for the attack. Also in the weeks before the October 7, tractors were brought to the border area under the pretext of agricultural work and to prepare for the border protests. Later, these tractors would be used to tear down the fence and open the way for Hamas’s death squads
Almost instantly, the concepts, policies, and beliefs that had for so long governed Israeli security doctrine came crashing down. Among them were the assumptions that the Palestinian conflict could be contained, that Hamas had put its own governance and the economic well-being of the Gaza Strip ahead of its jihadi ideology and its genocidal plans for Israel, and that simply having a far stronger military than Hamas’s was sufficient. It had become almost axiomatic that simply employing advanced ground and air defense technologies, such as the border fence and Iron Dome, with occasional recourse to airstrikes from the outside, could prevent major attacks, allowing Israelis to contain Hamas with moderate costs and relatively limited manpower.
