Noung's New Writeups

Parmenides' fallacy (idea)

2009-10-04T15:55:28Z

Parmenides' fallacy is a term invented by author Philip Bobbit to describe a mistake people often make when they are evaluating particular courses of action, especially in politics and international relations. Parmenides' fallacy "occurs when one tries to assess a future state of affairs by measuring it against the present, as opposed to comparing it to other possible futures." This means that when one is contemplating a particular course of action - say, whether to launch a war - the important comparison to make isn't between the present situation and what the situation will be like five years after the war. Rather, the important comparison is between the different situations that would obtain in five years if one did launch the war and if one didn't.

This may seem counter-intuitive; it certainly seems difficult. After all, predicting the future with any degree of accuracy is one thing our social sciences are wholly incapable of. The standard trick is simply to extend…

armed propaganda (idea)

2009-08-21T06:50:22Z

Armed propaganda is a term used in security circles to refer to particular violent actions, usually carried out by an insurgent or terrorist group, designed more for their psychological impact than because of their inherent value to the cause of the group. When the Taliban plant a few dozen IEDs and kill several American soldiers, this is standard insurgency; when they launch spectacular co-ordinated suicide attacks on government facilities, this is armed propaganda.

Insurgents or terrorists adopt their particuar tactics because they have a better chance of achieving their goals through sporadic, low-level violence than they do through direct engagement with the enemy. If someone occupies your country, then you make sure they pay a cost for it in lives until eventually they decide the cost is too great and they leave. If there are a lot of them, then all the better: there are more targets for you, and their occupation is costlier. Tactical defeats, or a series of them, can turn into…

right of return (idea)

2009-06-10T13:55:36Z

The Palestinian "right of return" is one of the most important but least-understood aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its importance is attested by the fact that it is commonly cited as among the main reasons for the breakdown of peace negotiations at Camp David and Taba in 2000 and 2001 respectively, and because it has consistently been a central demand of the Palestinians and the Arabs in general. The latest proposal from the Arab side - the much-touted Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 - is considered moderate on the issue because it does not contain the phrase "right of return", but it does reference a UN General Assembly resolution which calls for the same thing. Meanwhile, the audacity of this demand is often clouded by an inadequate understanding of its practical impossibility and historical bizzareness.

First, I should establish just what the "right of return" is. It envisages the potential migration of some four million…

L'Etat, c'est moi! (idea)

2009-05-07T14:53:11Z

"L'Etat, c'est moi!" is a slogan ascribed to Louis XIV, a French monarch of the seventeenth century who had the distinction of the longest reign in European history, ruling between 1643 and 1715. Louis saw a great deal of change during his long reign and was driven to this particular exclamation because of changing theories of political power and sovereignty which came into being around this time, theories that would eventually develop into our modern notions of authority and the role of the state. As such, a brief understanding of what exactly Louis meant serves to encapsulate the difference between how political authority worked in his day and how it works now.

Louis was a great believer in something called the divine right of kings, which in French was called la grâce de Dieu. His belief in it is hardly surprising, because it suited him very well. According to this widely-accepted idea, kings ruled their realms according to the grace of God, and they…

Iran, Israel, and the Arabs (idea)

2009-05-05T13:58:04Z

The modern Middle East is about as complicated as the Middle East has always been, which is very. We in the west tend to impose our own narratives on the region to simplify and understand it, especially because the area is of such vital material and ideological importance to us. The main story we like to tell about the Middle East is that of the "Arab-Israeli conflict", which has come to dominate our thoughts on the region to such an extent that "Middle East conflict" has almost become a synonym for Israel's relations with its Arab neighbours.

Our fixation on Israel and its relations with the Arabs has mainly found expression in an obsession with finding a "solution" to the Palestinian question, which in turn has mainly been expressed through the quest for a formal diplomatic agreement on a "two-state solution". This has had the unfortunate effect of placing the emphasis on diplomatic formulae rather than the root causes of hate and fear, as if everyone would wake up the…

Sons of Iraq (idea)

2009-04-16T16:41:32Z

When the Americans invaded Iraq, they were invading one of the most tightly-controlled societies in the modern world. The famous Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya called it a "republic of fear", implying that fear was the emotion that dominated the Iraqi res publica, the public thing. But it was not a democracy of fear; although ultimately no-one was safe, some had more to fear than others. The country's Sunni minority - at least those trusted by Saddam Hussein - sat at the country's helm. They, quite literally, knew where the bodies were buried. When the Americans came, it was them who had the most to lose.

One feature of the faulty worldview which characterized the run-up to the Iraq invasion was the belief among some Bush administration officials that they were essentially reliving the war against Nazism. The way they saw it, a vicious ideology - Ba'athism, which in their defence does at least bear some resemblance to Nazism - had cruelly gripped a nation, and if…