Livni to tell Gulf leaders in Qatar: Iran the threat, not Israel

[bemildred]

DOHA, Qatar - Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni arrived here Sunday to attend the 8th annual Doha Forum on Democracy, Development and Free Trade, at which she has been invited to give a keynote speech. Senior Lebanese and Iranian officials responded by canceling their participation.

"The Arab states cannot continue sitting on the fence when it comes to support and backing for the peace process," Livni told Haaretz Sunday.

The most prominent cancellation over Livni's speech came from the Lebanese parliament speaker and leader of the Shia Amal movement, Nabih Beri. Beri was scheduled to address the forum as well, and to hold talks with senior Qatari government officials concerning the political crisis in Lebanon. Others boycotting the conference are former Lebanese foreign minister Fawzi Salloukh, who has close ties to Hezbollah, and former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.

Livni wants to enlist Qatar and other Persian Gulf states represented at the conference in the peace process, she told Haaretz. Specifically, she wishes to convey to the Arab officials she meets that "Israel is no longer the enemy," and that "a situation has been created in which the threat is posed by Iran and extremist elements such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/974457.html

[Vegasaurus]

1. She is completely right

Iran, and its funding of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, and proxy governments, like Hamas, has created tremendous regional instability in the middle east.

[number6]

2. wrong

Iran the threat, not Israel

correct answer US, UK, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan

[bemildred]

3. Qatar's emir tells Livni Israel should lift blockade on Gaza

DOHA - Qatar's prime minister, Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir al-Thani, on Monday urged Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to end Israel's "crippling blockade of Gaza due to the difficult humanitarian situation."

Meeting Livni at the 8th annual Doha Forum on Democracy, Development and Free Trade, Sheikh al-Thani also called for the acceleration of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on a final-status arrangement.

In her address, Livni declared that Gaza militant groups' ongoing conflict with Israel is frustrating Palestinian ambitions for statehood. "The situation in the Gaza Strip is not just Israel's problem - Gaza is becoming an obstacle to the establishment of a Palestinian state," Livni said in a keynote address.

Although Israel fully withdrew all its forces from the Gaza Strip, "dismantled all settlements and allowed for Palestinian self-rule in this territory, instead of coexistence, we have received terror in return," she said.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/974743.html

[bemildred]

4. Lieberman: Tibi must go, Hitler too was elected democratically

Arguing that Adolf Hitler too was elected democratically, Yisrael Beiteinu head MK Avigdor Lieberman called for the dismissal of Arab MK Ahmed Tibi from his position as deputy Knesset speaker after Tibi told Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, during her diplomatic visit to Qatar, that Israel is an "apartheid state."

"Any parliament that respects itself would not let this happen. Tibi is using the international forum to hurt Israel's name and status," the right-wing party leader said.

When Lieberman was told that Tibi was elected by the Knesset democratically, he answered that "Hamas were also chosen democratically and so was Hitler."

At Livni's visit to the Doha Conference on democracy, Tibi said that "Israel discriminates against Arab citizen and has established an apartheid state in the occupied territories where Arabs have different roads and different laws. How can you speak of democracy when you speak of a Jewish state?"

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/975184.html

[Lithos]

5. And by that logic

So to was Lieberman.

Lieberman's comments have tended towards the ultra-nationalist side as well.

L-

[bemildred]

6. Sort of like Kissinger.

Democracy is fine, as long as the vote goes the way we want it to. But heaven forfend that the electorate should actually exercise sovereignty for themselves, or throw me and my friends out of office, or vote my enemies in, or attempt to control policy. Mugabe comes to mind here, but the list is in fact very long.

[Lithos]

7. There is one addendum

Politics in general promotes an over-simplification where extremely complex issues and nuances are cast to a yes/no or very limited series of choices. It is also dangerous to assume a population voted for a group when in fact they may have been voting against another group - ie not voting "for" something, but voting "against" another group or against the perception of something else.

In the US, the tendency, probably best illustrated with the election of Reagan, is to identify with personalities than with policies - sometimes to the detriment of the voter who otherwise has voted against their real best interests.

[bemildred]

8. That's "framing the debate".

It was already understood in the time of the Enlightenment a couple hundred years ago that democracy will only work if the electorate is educated for the role it has to play. One could say the same of Kings, of course, and Kings don't have a particularly sterling record of running things either. In the US, great effort is spent on keeping the electorate confused and distracted, and little effort on educating and supporting them in carrying out their political role. Why are elections on Tuesday? The US political establishment seems to view elections largely as a source of power and legitimacy, but appears to have little interest in using that power and legitimacy to carry out the public will.

[Lithos]

9. LOL

And the cynical person in me might say that was our European inheritance and what we are bequething to the rest of the world under the guise of "Democracy".

[msmcghee]

10. The greatest danger is in assuming that an "educated" . .

. . electorate is likely to make better decisions than an uneducated one - which you both seem to imply.

Human decisions are made according to beliefs. Humans can be educated to hold any number of beliefs. They can believe that their God gave them the land they wish to live on for example, and that they are doing God's will by killing anyone who wants to share it with them. Those people are then likely to vote for someone who convinces them that they will do a good job of killing the interlopers, just for one common example.

[LeftishBrit]

11. There are different types of education...

I would say that the sort of education that involves training in logical thinking and broad knowledge about the world is to some degree inoculation against indoctrination in fanatical beliefs that 'God says that the Xs deserve to die' or 'The Ys are responsible for all our misfortunes.' Not a perfect inoculation, of course: many highly schooled people do hold such views.

There are also other factors in political decision making besides those mentioned so far. Short-term self-interest may be one: a voter may vote for the leader who promises lower taxes right now, without considering the possibility that this will lead to their being poorly supported in their old age 25 years from now.

Moreover, when we look at other countries' voters' decisions, we tend to look at their *foreign policy* as the key issue - because this usually affects the rest of the world far more than their domestic policy. But perhaps the leaders who support the violent foreign policy also support social welfare programmes that are important to their voters (it's been suggested to me that this is one reason why groups like Hamas and Hezbollah get support). Perhaps some hawkish American senators got re-elected, not so much because their states' voters strongly endorsed the Iraq war, but because they are effective at bringing lots of 'pork' to their states. Etc.

As regards education and political decision making: it is my impression - which one could study systematically - that countries which provide a better education system are generally also the ones that have better leaders. Of course, this doesn't prove the direction of causation; more educated voters may choose better leaders, *and* better leaders may facilitate a better education system for their country.

[msmcghee]

13. I'm a bit busy these days so please consider this a reply to both you and bemildred.

I think you are both wrong on this and on so many levels that I don't know where to start.

How's this? One of the most difficult educations to acquire would be to achieve a doctorate in law at one of the West's most prestigious universities. Knowing and practicing the law requires exceptional abilities in critical thinking and objective analysis. Take the 9 Justices of the US Supreme Court. They not only achieved their various degrees, almost all with honors, they practiced law and most of them taught it as well at those same top schools. After many years of distinguishing themselves as outstanding lawyers, professors and judges, they were nominated and approved by the senate to lifetime terms on the highest court in the land. Certainly, if anybody has proven their ability as critical thinkers it would be this bunch.

How is it then that in the 2000 election, five of them decided that it would be prejudicial to GWB's interests to allow the Florida Supreme Court to permit a more complete count of the votes in Florida - the votes, as they stood, that put GWB in the Whitehouse? And why is it that the other four of them decided that the law requires that the Florida recount should continue to completion in order to assure that all the voters of Florida had their votes counted? (As capably argued by Alan Dershowitz BTW.)

All nine of them heard exactly the same testimony by the same bank of lawyers and had access to whatever legal books they wished plus they all had highly qualified assistants ready to research any areas that required further analysis. Apparently, some of these justices were not thinking as critically as the others. And guess what, the five who saw the recount as a violation of GWB's civil rights, just happened to be Republicans. What a coincidence.

I'd say that if achieving PhD's in law and appointment to the US Supreme Court is not sufficient education to endow someone with the critical thinking skills that you propose can be "taught" to them - then what is sufficient?

As I have said in several comments over the years, people make choices and decisions according to their emotionally held beliefs. The more important the decision, i.e. the more it affects someone's survival as they perceive it in emotional terms, the more this is true - the less likely they will have the ability to impose objectivity on their decision and the more likely they will follow their emotional beliefs. We basically use our brains (our critical thinking skills) to justify our beliefs and the decisions they lead us to. When someone says "critical thinking" - what they generally mean is "agreeing with me".

Back to the topic - no democracy could ever achieve the educational equivalent of sending all its citizens to the best law schools. The vast majority of students simply don't have the ability to deal with the subject matter much less pass the courses. And besides, as my example shows, there's absolutely no reason to believe that even if they all achieved PhD's, that they'd make better decisions in the voting booth.

I'm not buying the "simple peasants manipulated by evil politicians" argument either. Politicians that get elected simply are better at plugging in to the electorate's existing emotional beliefs, as they are. "Educating" the electorate to change their beliefs so they'll vote for you is a fools errand. It can't be done. All a politician can do is frame their image to become part of the existing beliefs of a majority of the voters. Shot of whiskey?

Despite what we are taught in civics class "educating the electorate" is just a buzz-phrase. It only produces good leaders and good and moral societies when the majority in those societies already hold beliefs that are good and moral. Beliefs regarding morality are generally learned at an early age and are "taught" by cultures, parents and those we look up to as we're growing up. These things are seldom taught by schools - although we sometimes look up to special teachers and learn some of these things from them. Those beliefs - the ones that can can cause us to make moral decisions in life and choose wise leaders - become part of a person's personality, their identity. We get such values mostly from our culture. Traditional education has little or nothing to do with it.

[bemildred]

14. Ah, I see, you don't believe in critical thinking.

Well, there isn't much to add to that.

[LeftishBrit]

15. I don't think he doesn't believe in critical thinking.

He just doesn't believe it can be taught in school.

I disagree. And to clarify: I don't mean that I have great faith in formal courses in 'critical thinking', with exams at the end of them. But I think that there is a difference between the sort of education that emphasizes solely memorization and following instructions, and where original thinking is met with injunctions to 'know your place' and 'not contradict grown-ups', and the sort of education that emphasizes - or at least permits - thinking and experimenting for oneself. Moreover, any sort of education exposes people to wider sources of information: the better your reading comprehension, the more you can find out about what different people think, and discover that there *are* variations in opinion, and not just one single way in which it's possible to think: that of one's parent, spouse, boss, or political or religious leader. Knowledge of foreign languages may further widen one's access to different ways of thinking.

I may be wrong (and I should declare a personal bias; my 'day job' is as a researcher in education-related matters, which may bias me to think that school education is important!) But if education has no power to make people more critical and independent in their thinking, why were 19th century conservatives in Britain so concerned that educating working-class children might lead them to be 'discontented with their station in life'? Why were American slaves forbidden to learn to read? Why are most fundamentalist religious groups so concerned with controlling the content of education? Of course, they could all be/ have been mistaken - but they certainly all did believe and fear the power of education to induce nonconformity and critical thinking.

I have never thought that education is the ONLY - perhaps not even the most important - factor in political decision-making. Bush had the best education that money could buy, after all! Moral and religious values and prejudices; short-term and long-term self-interest; emotional reactions to the personal characteristics of candidates all play a significant role. But education may help to modify some of these to some degree.

[bemildred]

16. I didn't read it that way. Perhaps we will find out more.

I think it's clear people can be taught to think for themselves, since some people manage to do it. Whether any particular school system wants to do that, or carrys it off well, is another matter.

[msmcghee]

17. Again, this is for both of you.

I am trying to explain that "thinking" - as I think you mean it - is not really what happens when we make important behavior choices. I know that this premise is a violation of the prime paradigm of human nature in psychology and philosophy - that man is the "thinking" animal. You both reveal your acceptance of this paradigm in the way you state your objections. (Nothing wrong with that.)

I am suggesting a different paradigm - that "thinking" (as in logic) is not the way humans make behavior decisions. (At this point you'll be thinking that this person is really nuts because that's what happens when someone questions a paradigm.) What I'm saying is that for important behavior decisions we (adults) instinctively follow whatever beliefs we have acquired in life that apply, not our reason. If we are facing a new situation for which we have no existing beliefs - then we may use our reason to come up with a provisional belief that would cover the decision. Then we'll cautiously try it. If it works then and repeatedly in the future it may become part of our trusted belief system - so we don't have to think next time.

But, as we get older we come across fewer and fewer situations for which we don't have beliefs in place to guide us - beliefs that have worked for us in the past. No adult could function if they had to "reason out" every behavior choice starting from scratch. That takes a lot of time and energy anyway. Children make lots of mistakes attempting to do that. What they are doing is building up a personal belief system to take them through life - a much more efficient system. (If this was not true evolution would have created us in the image of Mr. Spock - not Captain Kirk.)

Once we expend all the energy and make all those errors attempting to establish a working set of beliefs we are very reluctant to change them. That's why you can't educate an electorate to vote for you. You can only try to convince them that you share their beliefs.

There are other reasons why this is true. Logic is not nearly as powerful as most "believe" it to be. For example, would anyone try to reason out who they should marry - or what career path to choose - or which puppy to take home. Would anyone use logic to decide if they loved their children? We might try to impose reason on our emotions but it usually doesn't work. Marriages entered without love die, careers taken for the money cause bitterness. Such important, life affecting decisions, are far more complex than yes/no logic in any case. A Mr. Spock can never exist as a life form. There has to be a motive for behavior decisions. They have to support a cause - i.e. the survival of the life form making them. Evolution has provided almost all vertebrates with an emotion-based decision mechanism that is really an amazing system that allows us to cautiously build up the set of beliefs that become our identity. That's why five SC justices can see a question in a completely opposite way as the other four. All nine were expressing their identity beliefs, not their reasoning ability, in that fateful decision - although several felt the need to use their reasoning ability to justify their decision after the fact.

As humans, evolution has given us a large mind to store many thousands of emotion-grounded beliefs. That makes us survival generalists that have little need for instincts. We've also been endowed with a logical mind with which we can edit those beliefs when we acquire them and later - but only to the extent that we "believe" emotionally that such editing is worthwhile. We generally adopt beliefs that feel good because they work - and that depends on our cultural environment to a great extent.

People who become scientists/scholars usually develop the belief at a young age that objective, tested evidence in support of falsifiable premises is an honored path to success and esteem in their field. That belief can ideally becomes an emotional beacon in their professional lives. Some scientists even apply that principle to their personal lives to some extent but many don't even try. Even then their objectivity can be very selective. There are plenty of scientists willing to pray to a God that their child doesn't die from some disease. (That can be a good, but not a logical, behavior.)

We make behavior decisions according to the emotional value of our beliefs - and we believe things that make us feel good. My compliments to anyone who can use reason (which often gives us answers we don't like and makes us feel bad) to continuously and scrupulously edit their most cherished beliefs. It's possible but not very common. In any case I prefer a world where Lord Jim willingly faces the shot that ends his life - hardly a choice that would result from cold logic.

[bemildred]

18. So you believe all this because it makes you feel good? nt

[msmcghee]

19. You got it right. It makes me feel good . .

. . to read about psychology and brain science and figure things out in terms that make sense to me - rather than accept the existing paradigm because that's what everybody else believes. And I do enjoy it. Although there are a few neuroscientists whose recent research has led them in this direction.

Added on edit: I don't think I'd say "I believe all this" in the sense you said it. It's more like this is an hypothesis that seems to make sense to me. It would be cool to find out it was true (or somewhere close) but I'm neither a neuro-scientist nor a psychologist and it will take some of those to determine if this hypothesis is a useful theory. And then, even highly useful theories in psychology are almost certain to be overturned by even better ones as times go by.

In the meantime I'll keep on reading and speculating because it feels good. If you think this hypothesis is wrong feel free to show me an example from your experience where it fails. I'm always open to new evidence.

[bemildred]

20. No, I've long since given up on trying to refute your theories about what I think

and why I think it. I was just wondering if you think that you think in the same way as you think other people think, or not. If not, I was going to ask you your basis for thinking you are different. Since you think you are the same, there is really nothing to discuss. Especially since discussion clearly would have no hope of changing anything, since your attitudes are not based on any rational thought process, but rather on conditioning and feelings.

[LeftishBrit]

21. I think that political attitudes are influenced by many things.

Although I work in psychology with some links to neuroscience, my work involves very different topics from this one, so I can't really comment much on that side: except that so far as I know, there's been very little work on the neuroscience (as opposed to social psychology) of political attitudes; and that more gnerally, our brain includes both the emotional amygdala and the planning, problem-solving frontal lobes, and no doubt both are involved in political choices.

As regards the specific issue of relationships between education and political attitudes: there is quite a lot of evidence that educational level is positively associated with social/cultural liberalism in a number of countries. More educated people tend to be less militaristic; less rigid about sex roles; more accepting of homosexuality; and in particular are less likely to vote for or accept racist parties of the extreme right. On the other hand, educational level is not particularly associated with economic liberalism. This may be because more educated people tend to earn more money, which leads to their self-interest being more in the direction of economic conservativism. Or it may be that education has a specifically liberalizing effect on social attitudes.

This may reflect specific educational content. It may reflect experience of critical thinking, meaning that they are less likely simply to accept 'traditional' values. Or - perhaps most likely - it may reflect the fact that better education provides the opportunity for exposure to a wider variety of lifestyles, opinions and values, which can reduce absolutism in social judgements. One may still think that there is only one best way to live one's life, but one cannot think that there is only one possible way to do so. This is to some degree recognized by the strong social conservatives: Christian Righties often wish to homeschool their children or send them to private schools for children of like-minded families; and to censor their reading and TV watching to exclude 'dangerous' ideas. Muslim Righties often explicitly express a wish to keep themselves, their families, and where possible their countries free of dangerous 'Western education'.


Of course, high levels of formal schooling do not automatically lead to greater social liberalism, partly because education is *not* the only factor in political thinking, and partly because some forms of advanced education can themselves become associated with conservative values, especially in countries where type of school is strongly linked to social class (in the UK, there is the cliche of the 'Eton and Oxbridge Tory').

[bemildred]

12. There is a difference between brainwashing or indoctrination and education.

Education is about learning to think for yourself, as opposed to thinking what everybody else thinks. The main problem democracy has had, ever since the Greeks first tried it, is the ability of politicians to manipulate the electorate to vote for foolish things. Education, speaking in the sense I use it, means making the electorate immune to that sort of shallow manipulation with fear, hate, uncertainty, doubt.