Saturday, December 7, 2013

Obama's Embedded Foreign Policy

For the file:
Obama's foreign policy is either incoherent, or it has meaning. This article by David Solway reveals the embedded meaning:
Back in July of 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama visited Sderot, the southern Israeli city battered by rocket fire from Gaza, and delivered a speech emphasizing Israel’s right to defend itself and stressing that “peace should not undermine its security.” He vowed that he would not, as president, force Israel to make dangerous concessions and warned that “the world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” The Israeli leadership — not least the irresponsible and spineless Ehud Olmert — and many of the country’s citizens, including the leftist, anti-Zionist newspaper Haaretz, could scarcely restrain their enthusiasm for the fine words and noble sentiments expressed by the president-in-waiting.


The speech was a stirring one for those who had not tracked Obama’s less-than-stellar record to that date, who had not examined his chequered past and problematic mentors and acquaintances, and who wanted desperately to believe in the empty mantra of “hope and change.” As I watched the YouTube* clip of Obama’s address and listened to those familiar sinusoidal cadences, I knew instantly that the man did not mean a word he said, a conclusion that anyone who had done his homework would have reached. Regrettably, it has taken much of the world five more years to realize that Obama is a trained prevaricator of the first water, whether the issue is government transparency, receding oceans, competitive bidding, citizen surveillance, deficit cutting, the closing of Gitmo, unilateral military action, Fast and Furious, Obamacare, and, in the realm of foreign policy, Iran and Israel. Obama’s evasions and hollow assurances on this latter file demonstrably imperil the future of the Middle East and, quite possibly, the safety of the planet. It certainly spells imminent danger for Israel.

A recent article by Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick claims that the nuclear deal reached with Iran, eagerly pursued by the Americans, was “not just to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power…the goal of Obama’s foreign policy is to weaken the state of Israel.” Her thesis is cogently argued and based on persuasive evidence. Behind-the-scenes negotiations have been going on for an entire year, “yet the deal reflects Iran’s opening position.” Since nothing had changed from day one, why did Obama wait until the present moment to conclude an agreement?

The answer Glick provides makes considerable sense. Obama needed the year to marginalize the Jewish state, to work against its interests by portraying it as a belligerent nation trying to conscript the U.S. into an unnecessary war, and compelling it once again to enter negotiations with the Palestinian Authority “engineered to weaken Israel strategically and diplomatically” and furnishing support to the European Union’s propaganda blitz and economic war against it. Obama knew full well that Israel’s inevitable rejection of the Palestinians’ outrageous and unacceptable demands would make the country look intractable and bellicose to a denunciatory world. Within that portico time-frame, Obama gave his blessing to the anti-Zionist Jewish organization J Street, appointed anti-Israeli officials to key positions, and managed to embarrass the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC. “When we consider Obama’s decision,” Glick writes, “to wait a year to sign the deal that enables Iran to become a nuclear power in the context of his main activities over the past year, we understand his foreign policy.”

Glick’s analysis should not come as a surprise. One recalls the contemptuous usage Obama meted out to Benjamin Netanyahu in their March 2010 encounter in the White House, with the Israeli prime minister ushered in furtively through the back door, left to stew in a room while Obama dined with his family, and unceremoniously ushered out minus a photo session and a joint statement between heads of state. It should have been clear by then, if not years earlier, that Obama’s geopolitical intention was to box Israel in and to treat the Jewish state as an international pariah. The humiliation suffered by Netanyahu was a kind of tableau vivant, a metaphor or analogy of the treatment Obama had in store for the country itself.

The interim agreement signed in Geneva was implicit in that vulgar White House drama, establishing a political homology that was to play itself out three years later. The relation between Obama and Netanyahu in the White House meeting reflected and prefigured the relation between the U.S. and Israel on the international and diplomatic stage, culminating in an agreement with Iran in which Israel had no part and was effectively ostracized. To say that Obama has no love for Israel is to put it mildly.

More at the source...

Friday, December 6, 2013

Hiatus Interruptus

I will be using the blog only sporadically for the next month (*), partially due to the busyness of the season, partly because I am so far behind in my reading that I need to concentrate on getting it done. Here are a few of the books which I have not read, or read only partially, and which rise to the top of the "unread" pile:

In no particular order (since I tend to read them all simultaneously):
The Higgs Fake; Unziker. (half read)
Higgs; Baggot.
Higgs Discovery; Randall.
The Trouble With Physics; Smolin. (half read)
A Manual For Creating Atheists; Boghossian.
The Death of the Grown Up; West.
Pure; Anderson. (half read)
The Art of Making Sense; Ruby. (one of my favorite logic authors: half a century ago)
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle; Barrow and Tipler. (partially read)
Philosophy of mind; Jaworski. (partially read)
Chesterton, Collected Works, Vol 2. (Partially read)
The Outer Limits of Reason; Yanofski. (partially read)
Information and the Nature of Reality; Davies and Gregersen.
Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life; Yockey. (Started, nearly up to "the central dogma of molecular biology).
Mind and Cosmos; Nagel. (half read, this book caused an uproar amongst the faithful materialists - I need to finish it).
A decade ago I read three books a week, mostly philosophy and logic texts. I was obsessed with completing my education, and forming a rational basis for a valid worldview. Now, I find that my new worldview is validated by virtually everything I read, regardless of the source. Still, education never stops, and knowledge is never complete - much less access to truth (which must be inferred from deductions).

It's a fascinating intellectual life, and my real life tends to get in the way.

Today, for example, we have snow and frozen livestock waterers, so I have to get suited up and get with the program.

(*)I might get sucked into an interesting conversation, should one arise.

Free Logic and a Modal Ontological Logic Argument.

I have begun studying "non-predicate" logics (non-Aristotelian/Fregian) such as "Free Logic" and the modal logics. (There is a predicate logic tutorial here.) Because they go so far outside the standards of universals-grounded, deduced, necessary and sufficient, premise/conclusion-type of logic, they are difficult to follow, at least at first. And I currently have no idea of their value for determination of personal worldviews. Deontic logic, for example, seems related to the personal assumption of moral authority, which in turn presupposes Atheism as an unsupported axiom.

Modal Ontological Logic deals with the probabilities of what is "possible" and "necessary". Plantinga offers this Modal Logic argument for the existence of God. I usually don't present arguments (theodicies) like this, since they devolve into disputations of the meanings of words, rather than the premised existence of events and things.

Perhaps Atheists would care to use their logical capacities to refute this argument.

From Philosophy of Religion:
Plantinga favours a possible world analyis of statements about possibility and necessity. Possible worlds are ways that the world might have been. Any logically consistent description of a world is a possible world. On Plantinga’s view, to say that something is possible is to say that there is a possible world in which it is actual, and to say that something is necessary is to say that in every possible world it is actual.

The modal ontological argument, like Anselm‘s, begins with a statement about God. God, if he exists, is a necessary being. That is, if God exists at all then he exists in every possible world.

The next element in the modal ontological argument concerns the possibility that God exists. It is possible that God exists, according to the modal ontological argument. These two claims are sufficient, according to the modal ontological argument, to establish the existence of God.

For if it is possible that God exists, then there is some possible world in which God exists. If God exists in some possible world, though, then, because he is a necessary being, he exists in all possible worlds. God, then, exists in all possible worlds. If God exists in all possible worlds, though, then he certainly exists in this one. God, therefore, exists.

A more formal analysis of this argument goes like this:
(1) If God exists then he has necessary existence.

(2) Either God has necessary existence, or he doesn‘t.

(3) If God doesn‘t have necessary existence, then he necessarily doesn‘t.
Therefore:
(4) Either God has necessary existence, or he necessarily doesn‘t.

(5) If God necessarily doesn‘t have necessary existence, then God necessarily doesn‘t exist.
Therefore:

(6) Either God has necessary existence, or he necessarily doesn‘t exist.

(7) It is not the case that God necessarily doesn‘t exist.
Therefore:
(8) God has necessary existence.

(9) If God has necessary existence, then God exists.
Therefore:
(10) God exists.
The first premise is based on the idea that God is perfect, and that something is better if it has necessary existence than if it has merely contingent existence.

The second premise of the argument is simply the law of the excluded middle.

The third premise, “Becker’s Postulate”, is a widely accepted principle of modal logic. All modal properties are generally accepted to be necessary.

Four follows straightforwardly from the second and third premises.

Five is entailed by premise one.

Six follows from four and five.

Seven is plausible at first glance, but is widely thought to be the greatest point of weakness in the argument.

Eight follows from six and seven.

Nine is self-evident.

Ten follows from eight and nine.

There is an alleged refutation from a person self-appellated "The Incredible Halq", here.

However, his argument is less with Plantinga's specific argument than with the concept of modal logic, itself.

If one insists on first order predicate logic (which follows universal axioms and empirical observations) for the rational basis for one’s worldview, perhaps the higher order and modal logics are not applicable. I suspect that they are objects of curiosity more than utility for worldviews, unless, like Nietzsche, the observable is rejected, which negates classical logic in favor of AntiRationalism.