On the Legitimacy of Israel as a State

I questioned, in a Facebook post, the legitimacy of Israel's self-proclaimed right to exist. It seems to me, anyway, that God did not give Israel to the Jews, but rather England did. And I think Palestine is the main test of Israel's right to exist.

The way Israel is treating the Palestinians is not justifiable. Israel isolates them from the outside world. It would be better if the Palestinians could leave, or become a part of Israel. But this is impossible. Why? Because Israel sees it in their best interests to isolate them. The problem, of course, is that the Palestinians probably have a more legitimate claim to that land than Israel.

Israel is forced to battle Palestine. Peace is impossible for them. Why? Because if they make peace, the Arab states will take advantage of a weak stance and attack Israel one way or another. I believe this is the case. Also, I believe that there are Arab states who might ultimately win in the conflict (if peace were made) which are worse states than Israel. States like Syria.

But really, all this is a battle more for the State of Israel than for anyone else. Israel was founded on questionable principles. The right of an ethnic-based State to be formed by an external oppressor because it's in the Bible is questionable. The right of any ethnic-based state to be formed is questionable. If Israel has any shred of legitimacy to its existence, I think the true test will be Palestine. Also, I think Israel fully realizes this, which is why they are in so much trouble about it.

Israel has very few options. They can't exterminate the Palestinians. They can't let them emigrate to Israel or elsewhere. They can't make peace with them. They can't fight them too hard. They can't fight them too soft. There are no choices for them. And the way they behave in Palestine is very similar to the way a failing regime behaves when its legitimacy comes into question. They imprison people without cause, place them in concentration camps, incite violence to legitimize violence, spend more money on security than research, and so forth. I've never been to Palestine, but from what I've read of the situation there, it's like a concentration camp. It's very similar to psychiatry. A failing regime grasping at straws to ward off its inevitable defeat.

I've had experience living in a concentration camp kind of existence. And when you're inside the concentration camp, sometimes it's a difficult decision you have to make whether to threaten or use violence or not. Because sometimes an oppressor will only respond to violence. This is a fact. I had to threaten to stab hospital wards with a pen in order to force them to bring food to my seclusion room. The decision was part of a long series of pressures I put on them (this one being the only truly violent one), which probably resulted in enough food to survive. Barely.

But oppressors all ultimately act the same. They inevitably spend all their energy on bolstering security rather than gaining knowledge or helping people. This is why fewer and fewer people choose to be psychiatrists: the pay really isn't very good, the training is exhausting, and the fact that they will be pigeonholed into an existence where they must oppress people every day really makes it hard. Why is the pay not so good? Probably because psychiatry prisons are locked down tighter than military compounds. They spend all their money on more and more traumatic seclusion rooms, rather than actually helping people, or gaining knowledge. Why don't they spend money on knowledge? Because as research comes out about psychiatry, it shows them that they're all doing it wrong; that psychiatry is an illegitimate institution.

And the fact that these oppressors act the same, when they're not bolstered by an external oppressive force, indicates that they all eventually cannibalize themselves in the end. So the smartest strategy for someone who is NOT living in a concentration camp system is non-violence. It is to put political pressure on the oppressors, forcing them to cannibalize themselves, without resorting to violence, and thereby legitimizing their oppression. The problem comes when your motivation is bad. People with bad motivation will collect up these victims of oppression and pray on their sufferings to the point of inciting them to violence. It will legitimize both oppressors, until they go to war and one oppressor is defeated. All oppressors act the same.

In a lot of ways, America is behaving the same way. But I'm not sure that the outcome for any of these oppressors is set in stone. I feel America will survive. America is a legitimate state with a troubled history of oppression. That's how I feel. But in order to survive, America has to do soul searching. This is what is happening with the Occupy / Tea Party movements. This is happening internally within the Republican Party, I'm aware, and may also be happening in the Democratic Party. Obama has made surprising decisions, such as the decision following the will of the people not to go to war with Syria. Even this decision may have been a mistake, but it's an example of soul searching.

The problem for Israel is that I'm not sure they have the luxury to be able to do soul searching, surrounded as they are by all these Arab states who do not believe in their right to exist. America is a world superpower, very rich, and having the most powerful military in the world. We can do soul searching. Allowing Israel to do soul searching for the benefit of Palestinians, unfortunately, is not very much on the to-do list for these Arab states. A lot of them are very authoritarian, and rely on strong security forces. And the problem is, these security states require some kind of propaganda to keep their publics supportive of the current regimes. Palestine is a good propaganda point for any dictator in a Muslim majority state.

So really, the right for Israel to exist is less of a test for Israel as it is a test for Arab Muslims. Are these Muslims going to point to the passages in the Qur'an which say that Jews will be hiding behind rocks and the rocks will tell them to kill them? While conveniently ignoring the passages enjoining us not to dispute with the People of the Book except by means better than mere disputation? Or are these Muslims going to work to promote more and more functional democracies at home, so they can deal with Israel intelligently? This is the test. Arabs as a nation have a right to exist on their own land, of course, but many of their states, I feel, are as illegitimate as Israel's or more so. The fate of Israel rests on the fate of Palestine. And the fate of Palestine, and Palestinians, I feel, rests on the ability for Arab Muslims to combat oppression in their own states so they can restrain their own militants from attacking Israel, and allow Israel to sort out its right to existence on its own. If Israel is purely an oppressor, the more it becomes isolated from support from the outside, the more they will cannibalize themselves. If not, they will survive, and peace will prevail.

Why The Free Market is Not Made for Insurance Companies

Wealth is generated through innovation. And, it is impossible to create an innovative insurance company.

Think about it. Insurance companies make money by analyzing risk, and taking premiums that add up to more than the cost of acceptable risk. The problem is that there's no way to be innovative about analyzing risk. When you analyze risk, you hypothesize a certain event and count the number of times the event occurs over time. As an insurance company, you have no control over what the event is, or any aspect of it. What you get is reams of data about the event, and the knowledge that such an event is undesirable. Think a broken leg. Insurance companies all know exactly what a broken leg is, and they all have reams of data which count the number of times people tend to break their legs over a given time. Then they take everybody's money and pay money to the people with broken legs. That's all there is to it. Color me second-rater, but it doesn't take a John Galt to do that.

The only possible way for an insurance company to be innovative is to be innovative about analyzing risk. However, the innovation involved here is extremely insignificant. Everyone knows what a broken leg is. It's public knowledge. It's very obvious. And unless you're a Mafioso, it's really really difficult to be innovative about the way people tend to break their legs. The best you can do is count the number of times people break their legs, and factor that into your mind-blowingly simplistic equation for generating profit.

The idea that insurance companies can operate as businesses in the free market is insidious and stupid. Insurance companies calculate risk and take premiums that exceed the cost of acceptable risk. We've already discussed how it is impossible to be innovative about calculating risk. You calculate risk, and if you have enough money, you're correct. That leaves two ways to create profit. Either you 1) increase the cost of premiums, or 2) don't pay out the money you're supposed to. Surprise surprise; this is exactly what health insurance companies were doing before Obama passed the Affordable Care Act. Critics of the Affordable Care Act say that it will kill business. Hopefully, they're correct, because insurance companies shouldn't be businesses. The free market doesn't apply to them. They don't deserve to make profit, because they don't innovate.

A good way to think about it is the difference between reading a book and writing a book. You don't deserve to generate a profit by reading books. It's the writers who sold you the books who deserve to generate a profit. Studying the empirical world is like reading a book. Creating new products is like writing a book. And the moment you turn risk-taking into an innovative endeavor, and begin writing books, you're no longer in the business of insurance; you're in the business of investing.

Hope for Obama

The set of things that can be known differs in both quantity and nature from the set of things that can be believed. Which implies the possibility that sometimes they complement each other. Beliefs are sometimes more desirable than facts for these reasons:

1. Facts don't give a complete picture, because there are inevitably facts you don't know.
2. Facts can seduce you into believing something false, because facts correlated with one perspective don't necessarily justify that perspective. E.g. it may be a fact that you met a Communist in College, but that doesn't justify the perspective that higher ed is Communist. This is how logical fallacies work. However, the fact that you met a Christian in church does work to justify the perspective that church is Christian.
3. Facts may produce a picture that's incoherent. This is why PR firms for immoral companies always seem to drum up a litany of facts to justify whatever they want to do.

Beliefs, on the other hand, can be more powerful than facts (especially when supported by facts), because the picture is complete enough to justify action, true enough to work from, and coherent enough to get people to buy onto it. If beliefs didn't have power, religion, advertising, public relations, politics, etc. would have never come about.

Case in point: cynicism about how bad congress is and how ineffective politics are is what allows Republicans to do whatever they want, because people continue to vote for them out of cynicism.

When I Would Vote Republican

Psychiatry is Thought Policing. The Thought Police, especially in public schools, are trying to outlaw emotions and vast territories of free thought. There is nothing positive about psychiatry.

In order to advance their agenda of control and mental slavery, the Thought Police first make school life intolerable, then when any student in any way expresses how intolerable school life is, they use fear tactics to frighten parents into believing their son or daughter has something called a "mental illness" (a thing which they simply made up) and that the kid cannot be trusted to think for themselves. They then encourage every effort to forcibly disallow the child to think for themselves and make authority figures think for them. This, of course, causes the child immense suffering, which they will obviously express, and when they do, it confirms their proposition that they have a "mental illness."

No tactic is too extreme to force the child not to think for themselves. Schools have been known to put children in isolation for hours and not allow them to go to the bathroom. They also torture children with electric shocks to get them to fall in line. If they express suicidality (who wouldn't in such a situation?) they use police force to incarcerate them and deny them all basic rights in a "mental hospital" (prison). Abuse is rampant at these hospitals. While according to the first Amendment, people should be allowed to videotape orderlies at these hospitals, if you try to force them to respect this right, they will violently tackle you to the ground, take away your camera permanently, put you in isolation, not allow you to eat with the other inmates, and put you on a higher dosage of mind-killing medications in order to subdue you.

Parents naturally have a bond for their children. So when they are afraid for them, they take control of the situation. This instinct is twisted and perverted into a sadistic form of mind-control and manipulation by the Thought Police. If you can get a parent to believe that their child has illegal thoughts ("mental illness"), they will use any and all tactics to force the child to think the way they prescribe. They will try to "help," which in essence means torture and traumatize the child into allowing the parent totalitarian mind-control to force out the illegal thoughts.

How do they frighten parents into becoming proxy Thought Police? Consider a publication I found at the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, entitled "Red Flags in Children's Behavior." What exactly are some of these "red flags?" For adolescents, some include, "drug and alcohol use," "difficulty with relationships," "inattention to appearance or grooming," "risk taking behaviors with little thought of consequences," "extreme sensitivity to rejection or failure," "social isolation." In other words, being a normal adolescent is illegal. In order to satisfy the Thought Police, you must be a completely abnormal teenager--a freak. But of course, if you ever get depressed because you're a freak, that's an illegal thought, and they will bear down on you using every tactic they have in their arsenal.

According to the Thought Police, humanity is illegal. And to punish being human, they will torture you and traumatize you any way they can.

I am a solid Liberal, but the Republicans have a great track record against psychiatry. If Democrats EVER take up the position that we should "help" people with "mental illness," I won't care about the environment, I won't care about gay rights, I won't care about rampant corporate corruption, I won't care about civil liberties, I won't care about domestic spying, I won't care about foreign wars, I won't care about militarizing the police, I won't care about the war on drugs, I won't care about regulation of Wall Street; if Democrats EVER try to "help" people with "mental illness," I WILL vote Republican. Period.

It is imperative that right-thinking people let the world know how we feel about the disgusting anti-human institution of psychiatry and oppose it in any possible way we can.