I love my parents and I think they did a very good job raising me, especially in comparison with my cousins and some of my childhood peers, who were spoiled rotten and remain rotten as young adults.

But one of the things my parents did that fucked me up for life is making me have a job all the time from when I was of legal age to work (and even before) in high school. It started in the summer after ninth grade: my father got me to work part-time in the mailroom beneath his office. It was easy, simple work and the idea was that it would instill in me a good, healthy work ethic. It did, and I also earned some pocket money, though at 15 years old and without a social life to speak of, I had no opportunity to spend it.

Then after I turned 16, they made me apply for jobs in restaurants. I got hired in a crappy sub shop / ice cream parlor and worked there for about half a year – in the evenings after school and full-time during the summer. I was actually the last person hired before the summer, which meant I was the low man there and did all the lousy, crap jobs – washing dishes, washing floors, washing the bathrooms, washing the equipment, washing the windows – and if I ever managed to finish all those things in a shift, the dishes would be piled up and waiting for me all over again. This job was also for minimum wage, which at the time meant I was taking home a cool $4.85/hour before taxes.

In my junior year of high school, I had a pretty cool after-school job that I’d rather not discuss except to note that, in the late 1990s, I already knew all about a guy named Osama Bin Laden, who’d come to the attention of most Americans a few years later.

Then in my senior year of high school, I had to get more hours, so I switched to a job at an insurance company, where I was earning a pretty impressive $7.50/hour before taxes. Also, it was right next to my school, so I didn’t have to pay to commute to it. Unfortunately, being next to the school meant that every day at 2:30 as I trudged across the high school parking lot toward my dreary insurance company job, I’d pass groups of my friends who were, naturally, chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool and shooting some b-ball outside of the school (by that time I was popular and had a great social life, so I really felt it). And then for the next few hours, I’d file papers for the agents and collect and distribute all the company’s mail, while staring out the insurance company’s windows at my friends while they had fun. It was miserable.

That summer I kept the insurance company job part-time and also got an additional part-time job as a research assistant that I can’t really go into except to note that I have seen archival Holocaust information that would blow you away if you – as a person who knows a bit about the Holocaust – would also see it. But you won’t.

I’ll not make the whole account my various college jobs so tedious; suffice it to say that I worked all through college.

Suffice it also to say that almost none of my friends had jobs during high school and very few did during college or in the summers. They also all got cars from their parents (I didn’t), which was the big thing that everyone requested, demanded or expected. Why did my parents make me work? It wasn’t because we needed the money. Actually, if I had to guess, I’d say my parents earned just about the same amount as most of my friends’ parents. Making me work was all about giving me a lesson. And all through this period of my life, I appreciated that lesson. I didn’t try to make a point of it with my friends, but I also didn’t ever stop it from becoming a point that I couldn’t always go out because I was working, that I didn’t always have money to spend because I was working for it, that internships and things of the sort were elusive to me because I had to work at paying jobs.

Based on Mencius Moldbug’s caste system, I’d say that my family straddled the border between lower Brahmin and higher Vaisya. My father’s background was definitely Vaisya and my mother’s family was both closer to Brahmin than my father’s and continuing to move closer for at least a century, but the decisions my parents each made between roughly 1975 and 1985 – their careers, where they lived, their aesthetic tastes in art, music, television, their hobbies and lots of other things – were all much more Brahmin.

But sending me to work was a very Vaisya decision and in the decade and a half since then, I’ve not really recovered from it. At all of these roughly dozen after-school, part-time and summer jobs, I was always the low man in the office, or at least on the team. I got used to it – being diffident and quiet, taking orders and not giving them, not feeling in control of my present and future in the company. Because of being trained over time to feel this way, I have no ability at all to manage other people. I can’t really think strategically for the company. I’m pretty good at working independently (years in a mailroom will do this) but I’m not good at all at figuring out what needs to be done without instruction. I don’t adjust well to change in an office setting. What it all boils down to is that I have no sense of entitlement and this ruined my chance of becoming a Brahmin through success at work.

Fortunately I have some skills and I am able to support myself by working at home in my own profession, for myself and without a boss telling me what to do. But this isn’t ideal for me.

Brahmin parents who come from Vaisya backgrounds should think long and hard before doing something silly and stupid like sending their children to work. Doing so will likely result in instilling Vaisya values in those children. One of my younger brothers didn’t have to do after-school jobs like I had to do. Instead he got internships that not only didn’t pay, but actually cost money, and now he’s an engineer who’s working on a Phd and has visited about 15 countries in Asia. He also used his good Brahmin connections to get a very high-paying job as a government contractor, which he used to pay off his student debt. Wouldn’t you rather have a son like that than a son who might make some money but will never function well in an office?

If you have kids, be smart with them. Don’t send them to work. Get them good internships and lots of connections so they can make money effortlessly after finishing their advanced degrees.

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One of the most momentous conversations of my life came about ten days after 11 September 2001. I lived in New York at the time and, having been about two blocks from the World Trade Center when the first tower fell, was very much in a “12 September” mindset then as I am today. Some friends and I were gathered uptown to discuss something or another, and we naturally turned to the recent act of terrorism that we’d all witnessed, several of us without having had to watch it on television. Were we, one of us wondered, in a religious war?

Yes. No. Maybe. Hard to tell. Islam this and Muslims that. Christianity, the west, etc. For all the reasons we could think to name.

Finally someone piped in: if two groups of people are at war, and one side says it is a war about x but the other side denies it, then yes, it is a war about x. That doesn’t mean it’s not necessarily a war about y and z, but it doesn’t take mutual agreement between enemies to agree on the nature of their hatred for one another. That pretty much ended the conversation.

This is something that most American conservatives get pretty well. Newt Gingrich gets it. Progressives think that they can, by denying the religious nature of America’s conflict with Islam, transform it into one that doesn’t make them participants in a religious war. The progressive rush to denounce conservatives who admit that America is in a religious war reflects, besides progressive arrogance, a sort of machismo and zero-sum approach to conflict that I’d rather expect to see among Israelis.

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Sometimes I can read an advice column just for the questions, and ignore the answers. This is one of those times:

Dear Prudence,
Twenty years ago, I had a child out of wedlock. I had slept with two men during that period, “Tom” and “Mike.” I assumed Tom was the father, but when I told him, he said he was infertile because of a childhood illness, and he showed me some paperwork to prove it. When my daughter was born, she looked just like Mike. I told him he was the father, but he didn’t want anything to do with her. When my daughter was 5, I got married, and my husband was the only father my daughter has known. She loves him, but she always had questions about her biological father that I couldn’t answer. I eventually got divorced, and when my daughter was 18, she wrote a letter to Mike. They started corresponding, and he flew out to meet her. They developed a relationship. We did a DNA test because he needed proof to add her as beneficiary to his will and other things. When the test came back, it proved Mike was not her father. So now my daughter wants to go to Tom’s house and meet him. What do I do?

Holy bat-crap, Batman. Let us list all the ways this horrid woman fucked things up:

1. Sleeping with two men in the same time period.
2. Sleeping with two men in the same time period and not using birth control with either of them.
3. Having a child without getting married.
4. Jumping to the conclusion that she knew which of the two men was her child’s father (by the way, if she admits to having slept with two men during that time, it means she was sleeping with those two men regularly, but we have to assume a girl who sleeps with two men regularly also has one-night stands with various other men, presumably with birth control).
5. Taking his denial at face value (He showed me some paperwork? Come on!).
6. Confirmation-biasing her belief that the other guy was the father after she let herself be convinced of it.
7. Getting married and divorced within a few years during her daughter’s childhood (besides knowing that her father was just one of her mother’s flings, having a father figure introduced and then taken away in the crucial formative years will destroy the poor daughter’s self esteem and almost surely turn her into a worse slut than her mom).
8. Not doing a DNA test to confirm things as soon as it became possible.
9. Not telling the real father immediately upon finding out the news.

Wow. This woman is a piece of work. By my account, she’s fucked over: her daughter (immeasurably), her daughter’s biological father, the other guy she misled into believing he was her daughter’s biological father, the guy she married who was presumably her daughter’s adopted father, and of course all manner of friends and family members who’ve also been misled, confused and outright lied to (like the not-father’s parents who thought they had a granddaughter but actually didn’t). By being an acutely horrible person, she gave her daughter three potential father figures – but no father.

By no means would I say that this sort of behavior is typical of girls, but I also think many, many girls would read the above passage and not find much wrong with what the woman did. Certainly girls these days are led to believe that they can fuck their way through life with multiple male partners (at a time or in a row) and never have to deal with the inevitable consequences.

In fact, while the woman above signs her letter “So Ashamed,” it’s hard to figure out just what she’s ashamed of having done. Has she bothered to list all her fuck-ups like I did for her?

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When I wrote recently about the upcoming Israel-Iran War, I predicted that “Israel will provoke a war with Hezballah in 2010 to defeat them and to deplete their arsenal in the context of a conventional war.”

Now I see Haaretz is agreeing that Israel might be planning to attack Hezballah preemptively. The article mentions the upcoming negotiations between Israel and the PA and a Syrian concern that any final solution agreement would effectively leave the bizarre and fanatic Alawi-Ba’ath regime isolated in the middle east. If peace were ever actually to be achieved in Israel, the Syrians worry, we would suddenly face enemies for the first time on a mere two fronts – the north and northeast, one of which has been quiet for a long time – and almost no incentive to resolve those relatively minor conflicts. In that event, Syria would be locked out of reclaiming the Golan Heights not only in the near future, but under almost any conceivable turn of events in the next generation. It’s imperative, consequently, that they make sure to derail the negotiations or get included in them: anything but another agreement limited to Israel and the PLO.

Also, Haaretz and the AP say that Hezballah and Syria may be preparing for a war with Israel jointly.

Why would the Syrian regime risk open conflict with Israel after fighting Israel almost entirely by proxy since the 1970s and negotiating sporadically since 1991? A resounding defeat could more than put Assad on very shaky ground – it could end his rule and possibly his life. But there’s also a lot to gain. The Golan Heights is on the table now in every single interaction between Israel and Syria. If Israel’s war with Hezballah and Syria proceeds like every other war Israel has fought, a negotiated settlement will be imposed by the international community, meaning by the United States. And that means by President Obama and his administration.

The Syrians may believe that they have a better chance to wrest the Golan from Israel now by getting Damascus bombed in an open war and then by having Obama step in to shore up their regime as a way of isolating Iran further to prevent the Mullahs’ regime from finishing a nuclear weapon that could destroy Israel. If that’s true, it reflects some extremely cunning and bold thought, as the schismatic-heterodox Alawi, who aren’t even Muslims by a reasonable definition of the term, actually could do the job of maneuvering Hezballah away from direct Iranian influence (though they’d still hate Israel and try to destroy us).

Bottom line: I still predict a war between Israel and Hezballah in 2010. If it doesn’t happen this year, then I’m even more inclined now than before to think it will happen before the shit hits the fan with Iran – Israel simply does not want to risk allowing Iran to sit at the table that dictates the terms to end Lebanon War III.

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Like TJIC, I read the firmly middlebrow Slate very regularly (I’ve subscribed to the main Slate RSS feed for about three years). Also like him, I have noticed some changes in Slate’s overall quality over time. Here are some things that I think Slate is doing right:

• Podcasts. I listen to the Political Gabgest and the Cultural Gabfest every week. The overall tone of both is of course reliably progressive, but in the Political gabfest Plotz and Dickerson usually manage to think independently and in the Cultural gabfest it doesn’t matter much.
• Christopher Hitchens. He’s at his best when picking on someone like Mother Theresa or Princess Diana; I just ignore whatever he writes about Israel.
• Farhad Manjoo.
• TV Club. This is a cool addition to watching a program that’s good enough to merit it. Some are better than others (I specifically didn’t like the LOST TV Club), but overall they’re excellent.
• Off-the-beaten-path features, like Julia Turner’s series on signage and June Thomas’s articles about dentistry. Where else would I have to go to get a couple of good layman’s articles on subjects like these?
• Emily Bazelon. She’s very poorly used by Slate. I think she does have an excellent legal mind, and certainly in the Political Gabfest they always use her to explain what the Supreme Court is doing. But why does she constantly write about child-rearing and bullying?
• Commenting. Slate’s old commenting system, the Fray, was notoriously a pain in the ass to use, so I never commented on articles. Fortunately they’ve now overhauled it.
• Full disclosure. Slate is the only magazine I know that publishes a list of which candidate each of its writers supports in whatever presidential election is approaching. Sure, they almost invariably support the Democrat, but wow – I really appreciate that Slate is not afraid to make this information public. Respect.

On the other hand, Slate also has been doing some things very, very wrong:

• The Green Lantern. This column is so mind-numbingly awful that I’m convinced “Nina Shen Rastogi” is secretly a robot who’s been programmed progressively to suck the joy out of life like marrow from a bone, as progressives are wont to do.
• Double X. Like TJIC, I don’t think I see the point of this. Slate has plenty of women writers and they are prominent enough, writing well enough on general subjects, that a special section for women doesn’t seem necessary. Besides, we live in a feminist age, with feminism transmitted culturally at every level, so women don’t need to go to special women-only sections of their online magazines to get feminist ideas.
• Other special sections – like The Root, the Money thing, and the Sports thing. I don’t see why these must be a part of Slate. Write about those issues when they’re interesting to a middlebrow, general interest online magazine, but don’t devote entire sections of the magazine to them.
• Eliot Spitzer. Come on, who made the decision to hire this guy? He’s contemptible and, being a politician, every time he writes something I take it just as a politician running for his next office.
• Advertising. I had to install Adblock specifically to get rid of Slate’s new social networking menu bar at the bottom of every page. Fortunately it was successful, but I resent having to do it.
• Crap design. I hate those hover drop-down menus. Every time I accidentally move my mouse over the menu, it expands and covers the text that I’m trying to read. Why like this?
• Fighting Safari Reader. The “Reader” feature in Safari is one of the best things to come to the web in a long time. Virtually every site I read complies with Reader and allows me to consume articles in it (some also include advertisements, which do not bother me because they don’t detract from my experience). With Slate, Safari Reader only works about a third of the time. This bothers me to no end, and if I ever quit reading Safari daily, it will probably be because having to deal with their site without Reader as a recourse diminished my quality of life too much.

I’m not sure I’d say that Slate has declined. I don’t think it’s gotten better over the years, but I still enjoy reading it a lot and I’m glad it’s around.

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Intelligent people usually don’t start their letters like this: “Say my man, Ain’t nothing happening man…” But then, no one ever accused the boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay of being particularly intelligent (right?). Please note, however, that this guy who threw fists for a living and converted to Islam actually has penmanship that puts most people educated in my generation to shame. Sure, I’ve seen great handwriting from some of my artsy friends, but you can always tell when someone has artistic talent and writes neatly and you can also tell when someone has simply been taught, typically against his will, to write neatly because it’s a civilized thing to do.

What does passable penmanship say about a person? It says he’s a decent, civilized fellow who respects those around him. It says he believes his ideas matter and are worth communicating, that he matters and is worth other people noting. And it says that he put some time, even a short time, into preparing a letter, rather than just scribbling down points that came to him. I hope I’ll live to see a day when we go back to penmanship taught as a serious subject in schools.

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The United States arms its client Israel (or Israel is the puppetmaster that controls the United States – it depends whom you ask). The United States also arms a (former) close ally of Israel, Turkey. The United States also arms some of Israel’s neighbors, like Egypt and the Hashemite entity, as a reward for not going to war against Israel. And the United States also arms some of Israel’s neighbors, like Lebanon and the Saudi entity, that actually are still formally in a state of war with Israel.

WTF! Why does this happen?

This is empire if I have ever seen it; the only countries not receiving American arms – Syria, post-1979 Iran, and Iraq between the late 1980s and 2003 – are the exactly the ones in American sights. The Americans don’t make big demands. Really they mostly just want all of their clients not to go to war against one another. When one commits a major aggression against another that’s an act of war, Congress can get antsy and, depending o the client’s value, threats may issue.

That all makes as much sense as it can. What doesn’t make sense is when one of these clients pipes up out of turn and reminds everyone that his country is at war with another client country. What was he thinking? Was it just a gaffe?

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IHTG asked what I thought about this article. He wrote:

My feeling is that the settlers with their sense of community and extremely high birthrates find it easier to imagine surviving in a multi-ethnic society along with Arabs, in a sort of mini-Austro-Hungary, with themselves as the Austrians.
For the rest of us, it could turn out more like Lebanon, with us as the Maronites…

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following proposed solutions (in Israel) to The Conflict:

• Maintaining the status quo of Israeli sovereignty within the 1949 borders, plus limited territorial autonomy for Fatah in Samaria and Judea total Hamas autonomy in Gaza.
• Coming up with another form of autonomy, such as the personal autonomy mentioned in the Camp David Accords.
• The Jordanian Option: Israeli law is extended to Samaria and Judea; the non-Jews there get Hashemite citizenship (again) and remain as permanent residents, with Gaza residents getting Egyptian citizenship. The Hashemite regime gets special influence and authority in Jerusalem and of course over its subjects.
• Expulsion, forced or voluntary, of Samaria-Judea Muslims and extension of Israeli law to these territories.
• Redefining Israel and Samaria-Judea as one binational (or multinational) state, with two or more ethno-national-religious groups that each get formal status and recognition of specific rights, either territorially based like in Yuogslavia or personally based like in Lebanon.
• Partition into two states, with or without border adjustments and population exchanges.
• Confederation of some sort, with independence for Samaria-Judea but as part of a regional arrangement with at least Israel and the Hashemite entity, and possibly other countries, that binds the confederates together and limits all of their ultimate sovereignty.
• Secular-unitary state, which means granting full citizenship and full equality of citizenship to everyone, and also erasing the Jewish character of Israel and even changing its name to something non-sectarian.
• City-states replacing nation-states (ok, this is only my idea and I haven’t yet heard anyone propose it for Israel).
• What did I miss?

Some of these ideas are more far out than others, but all of them make the same mistake: they treat the Muslims as non-actors who can be acted upon (mostly) and who’ll (mostly) accept whatever is acted upon them. This mistake is deeply ingrained in the Israeli and western psyche that seeks an explanation for every problem here in something Israel has done.

But actually, Muslims do more than respond in an instinctual and mechanical way to stimuli: they can think and act according to their values and goals. The core of the Palestinian identity is Islamic-colonialist and Arab-imperialist, hatred of Jews and opposition to Zionism and everything Israel does and wants. In short, they will reject any solution we propose. Hence Ariel Sharon’s strategy of cultivating extremely close relations with President Bush while simultaneously never ceasing to act and trying to balance his actions against every side, if possible.

Anyway, in the last generation we’ve seen war rebranded as a “peace process” (no need to stop the hostilities first!) in a chillingly Orwellian manner, and then just since 2002 we watched as “peace process” was redefined as Fatah-state-generation process. Almost no one even stops to ask anymore if “peace” could have any other meaning aside from President Bush’s “vision” from June of that year. I was barely aware of Israel before the early 1990s and I’ve read the Israeli news every day since the Oslo Accords were announced; it’s weird for me to think to what extent partition has supplanted every other option above in just that time, but I can’t even imagine what people who actually support partition are thinking.

The article above does a pretty decent job trying to get into the heads of the settler types (in my dreams, the religious/right/settler media would have this kind of analysis of leftist/progressive thought) who want to do a sort of modified version of secular-unitary. I know a lot of these people. I first heard discussions about it in early 2005, in the run-up to Expulsion 2005. My more radical friends then were coming to a new understanding: Israel’s conflict was not one of Arabs/Muslims vs. Jews/Israelis, but actually it was Arabs/Muslims vs. Jews/Settlers vs. Israelis/Leftists (I’ll simplify this as Arabs vs. Jews vs. Leftists, even though the “Leftists” are of course Jewish Israelis). They saw that the Leftists sided with the Jews sometimes, in some issues, and with the Arabs sometimes, in other issues, and that the Leftist-Arab alliance was not being adequately combated due to the Jews’ unwillingness to lift their arms against their brothers, the Leftists, in a civil war.

They saw that the whole game was quite rigged and that, in order to change the rules of the game, they needed to do some different things and think about things differently (like everyone’s favorite descendant of Trotsky was doing at the time with Revava). Changing the rules of the game meant finding a way to formalize the complex and unspoken relationship between Arabs and Leftists. Taking away from Leftists the power to transcend Israel’s political system and use enemy outsiders to manipulate us could bring them closer in a lot of ways. It could also push them further way…

But no one really knows how any of the three groups would be transformed by implementing a solution like the one in the article. Make no mistake – these ideas are not a dalliance, like the ideas for an Israel-Palestine-Jordan confederacy or a binational state. They are an endgame. Their proponents understand that they are playing with fire and that changing the rules of the game could help them but could also lead to the destruction of everything they’ve built. But they are tired of being pawns of this other group, the Leftists, and in order to shake things up they’re willing to co-opt some Leftist ideas.

So would it work? Jabotinsky argued that the local non-Jewish population could not be bought off with human rights and economic development. Their demands for group political rights would have to be addressed head-on, either by granting them or by defeating them totally. Successive Israeli leaders have tried to grant them in negotiations in the past decade and a half, only to learn that the demands grew and grew because their identity is based on a negation of ours. Granting them access to share in our identity isn’t realistic.

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Wow. Divorce insurance is a real thing.

I can understand the case for auto insurance, though I don’t make car ownership a part of my life. Same for homeowners’ insurance, though I don’t own a home. I can even understand the rumors that Jennifer Lopez insured her ass.

But divorce insurance? Really? Why would somebody do this? Just don’t get married.

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Uh oh. According to Jpost, there’s now a debate over the ownership of David.

I don’t know how this is going to affect my, my blog, my self-image and my avatar. I’ve been happy as David for nearly a year, but what if I can’t be any longer? What should I be if I can’t be David? Perhaps another David? Or yet another?

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