The Great Information Collapse — Part 3: Israel, Hamas and the Malice of Secret Services

Now, this is the least controversial thing you will read about the 7 October attacks; I know: funny it would be here. The fact is, I am not here to support Israel or Hamas: I am here to say I am sorry for the Israeli. And not in the usual look-at-my-boobs-on-Instagram-while-I-hashtag-the-latest-thing way: I am not only sorry for the Israeli because they are under attack from Hamas, but because those who are supposed to protect them oppress them instead.

As you might already know, Israel has three main information services: Shin Bet (whose real name I am not even trying to write), an internal service roughly corresponding to a violent, loutish FBI (i.e., to the FBI under Hoover), Aman, a military intelligence corresponding to the DIA/NSA and, finally, Mossad, the Israel’s CIA. The latter in particular has been lionized in both fiction and media as the best secret service in the world. I grew up with reports of Mossad agents who infiltrated Palestinian terror cells speaking perfect Arabic and quoting the Quran by heart; with tales of perfect assassinations of Palestinian leader everywhere. And still, Mossad didn’t predict the attack. Shin Bet didn’t. Aman didn’t. This has been widely compared to 9/11, but this comparison is flawed for two very weighty reasons:

• Only about a dozen people were aware of the 9/11 plot; hundreds, if not thousands were involved in the 10/7 attack.
• An attack by a Salafist group in the US, the country that had provided money and support to Salafist groups everywhere was not easy to predict; Hamas, on the other hand, had been a clear and present danger to Israel for decades.

You can find a partial explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqpur37h2jY ; this is by Simon Whistler, a Youtuber known for his charisma and notorious for the sloppiness of his research, who does nonetheless, this time, make some good points: but misses the main one.

That is that Israeli society has been steadily eroding since its heyday in the 60’s; this erosion is largely due to its embrace of capitalist ideas and its abandonment of socialist ones. This has created problems typical of hypercapitalist societies, namely:

• Callous individualism: large segments of Israel were organized in kibbutzim, utopian communities in which nobody owned any property, and education, health and child care were offered freely. These have largely become private enterprises, with their assets distributed unequally to private ownership of the members, and every service privatized with a fee.
• Racism: Israeli society sees an increasing divide between the Ashkenazim, Jews from mostly Eastern Europe, who moved to Israel of their own will, and the Mizrahim/Sephardim (I am not getting into the distinction), Jews from the Middle East who were forced into Israel by being expelled from their native countries. The two communities also have different religious practices but, mostly, Ashkenazim see themselves as “white” and therefore superior to the “brown” Mizrahim. Even within the communities, the “original” Ashkenazim that moved after WWII consider themselves superior to those who recently moved from the former Soviet Union, and pretty much everyone considers themselves superior to the Ethiopian Jews, who happen to be black. All Jews then consider themselves superior to everyone else in Israel, including not only Palestinians, but also those Arabs, like the Druze, who support Israel.
• Religious Fundamentalism: at the dawn of Israel, fundamentalists were rare, and largely concerned with themselves. However, successive Israeli governments have adopted the US/Polish playbook of encouraging fundamentalism because fundamentalists are a bunch of idiots and therefore easy to manipulate by just waving a bible in their face. As a consequence, fundamentalists, through no attempt at educating them into civil societies and producing absurd amounts of children, are now a large, problematic part of Israeli society. They occupy entire neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, constitute the vast majority of settlers, stir strife with other religious groups, advocate violence towards the Palestinians and, as intended, support the worst parties and policy decisions.

And, finally and most importantly for the subject at hand, corruption: it would take several posts to go through all the scandals that have rocked various Israeli governments; suffice it to say that, at the beginning of this year, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu decided it was tired of being held accountable, and promoted a reform that would make it nearly impossible to prosecute politicians by putting the judiciary under their direct control. That didn’t go well with the public, which started massive protests. And this brings us to what I consider the cause of the intelligence failure: in corrupt governments, secret services do not exist to protect the people from external threat. They exist to protect the oligarchy from the people. Their secrecy is not there to protect them from violence: it exists to protect them from accountability. Terrorism is not what they fight, it is an asset they cultivate to justify their own ignoble existence. The Mossad, Shin Bet and Aman did not fail the Israeli because of the cunning of Hamas: they failed them because they were spying on them, listening to their calls, gathering blackmail material on them, arresting and murdering them to prop up a corrupt, unpopular, and increasingly dictatorial government. And this government will use the attack to justify its own existence and its own corrupt legislation. Now, I want to be clear: I don’t think any of the secret services of Israel knew this was coming; I think they had no interest in it whatsoever; however, if they had known, they would have done nothing. While the common people of Southern Israel have to live in fear, or flee from their homes, Netanyahu and his basket of deplorables are dancing in their mansions, and celebrating a literal free get out of jail card.

This is not a war of Mossad, Shin Bet and Aman with the Israeli against Hamas: this is a war of Shin Bet, Mossad, Aman, Hamas, Netanyahu and his gang against the sensible, democratic Israeli citizens: and those I feel sorry for.

The Great Information Collapse — Part 2: Qoheleth

My memory is a horrible, evil thing. I couldn’t remember faces if my life depended on it. I can’t remember names, to the point I have to sneak a peek at the HR page of my company before each meeting so I am sure I remember everyone. I can’t remember the day, or year, I got married, and I know less than a dozen birthdays, a useless feat, as I generally don’t know the date of the current day. I have absolutely no muscle memory: I can’t remember a dance step for more than a few seconds.

I do, however, remember any fact of even trivial scientific relevance for years; the more depressing the fact, the more it is engraved in my memory. I remember hundreds of extinct species, thousands of symptoms of horrible diseases, the appearance and occurrence of every disgusting parasite, the name, effects, and often the smell of dozens of poisons and cancer agents; still, what do with my free time is try to keep up to date with hard science (that is what is generally referred to as science, minus psychology). A new part of the eye is discovered? A new tree kangaroo, a water centipede? Lichens are found to contain more fungus than we thought? Some guy in Spain invents a laser-based TPU? Some guys in Korea pretend to discover a superconductor? I’ve probably read about it. I, too, however, have stopped reading about climate change. I don’t need to read that the obviously rosy predictions for the increase in temperatures have been exceeded, or that this month was the hottest on record. Of course it was: this is how warming works. Reading this kind of thing teaches me nothing really new, it just depresses me. People who act as I do, however, don’t usually do so because they know already: they do it because they don’t want to know. One of the most intelligent people I know just fell for the bullshit that the only way to pay pensions in the future is to have more children: really? Of people born this year, maybe one in five will have a job. One in ten will have a home. They will be most likely to die of heatstroke in their 40’s and, if they make it past that, thirst and cannibals will be their chief concerns. And you think they will pay for your pension? New parents don’t want to be told that; they don’t just want to enjoy their children: they want to think they will be happy, For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

And, of course, there are those who bank on this. Why concern ourselves with global warming, when we can call it “climate change” and then deny it exists? The internet has become a collection of echo chambers in which you can live the rest of your life thinking the Earth is flat, Relativity is a Jewish conspiracy (seriously, I have seen this one), Corona is treatable with veterinary dewormers, and that you have any deadly disease you wish for.

And excuse me for the biblical quote: I still hold, of course, that religion is the opium of the people, and if religion hadn’t conditioned people to believe all sort of bullshit just because there’s a community believing it already, this entire phenomenon wouldn’t exist at all. But it is nice to have a common reference, sometimes.

The Great Information Collapse — Part 1: a Tale of Three Graduates

In 2020, a close friend of mine found out he couldn’t be vaccinated against COVID-19 because of a minor heart problem. Forced on furlough, and treated like a pariah by a system that basically patted itself on the back for its number of vaccinations, he started scouring the internet for people living under similar circumstances. In just a few weeks, he was extolling the virtues of chloroquine and ivermectin, in spite of the fact that both specific antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies were already available. This man, whom we will henceforth refer to as F1, is an IT professional, and early internet adopter, who was on UNIX from a VT100 terminal years before I had my first 56Kb modem (which he helped me set up).

In 2022, another close friend of mine (F2) started quoting Jordan Peterson to me. Made aware of Peterson’s broader ideology, he abandoned him but, just a few months later, he was quoting Matt Walsh. Just to spare you having to deal with such a disgusting character, Walsh is your typical American bigot, whose points boil down to god, climate change is a hoax, god, god, women can only be happy having children, god, god, god, men can only be happy driving an SUV and growing a beard, god, god, god, god, gay people are bad and they are convincing our children to become gay, god, god, god, god, god, christians are under attack and trans people are all bathroom rapists, god, god, god, god, god, god, god, if you don’t wear a baseball cap or a suit and tie, you’re probably gay.
My friend is not religious, doesn’t have a beard, is not even a right-winger, and drives a small city car: Walsh’s overarching message escaped him completely as he was watching him lambast people who albeit left-thinking, are even more retarded than he is. F2 has a Ph.D; he has pored over the complete works of German philosophers that’d make me doze off after half a paragraph.

Finally, a week ago, a third friend of mine, F3, suffering from symptoms of a common UTI, became convinced he had a specific STD, nay, an antibiotic-resistant strain of that STD and that, in spite of being tested for it two different ways, only a different test–one that is not used to diagnose that STD at all, and a doctor who “grew a pair” would be able to save him. He has bothered a number of specialists, and done nothing to treat what is probably just E. coli gone the wrong way. He is a biomedical engineer; he works at the faculty of medicine, among doctors. When asked to produce any evidence of the phantom test he needs, he quoted a single post from a symptoms forum in his own language (forums in that language tend to be even more stupid than English ones). It’s the kind of forum where you find people complaining that EMPs from the CIA give them headaches. The post was answered by a specialist, who certainly said something along the lines of “wtf are you talking about?”, but the answer was cut in the screenshot.

I’d love to say I’ve made things better for my hapless friends, but I don’t think I have: F1 is possibly the touchiest man on earth, and telling him anything would just have resulted in him sulking for months. Luckily, he went through the pandemic without ever getting sick.
F2 dropped Matt Walsh, but I’m sure he’ll be quoting someone just as stupid next time I meet him.
F3 is walking straight into a septicemia: it’s just a matter of days, now.

What is going on? Up until the pandemic, finding objective facts was a matter of doing research. Intelligent people did not fall for fringe conspiracy theories or right-wing buffoons. Now internet experts fall into the wrong corners of the internet, philosophers can’t tell philosophies, and medical professionals diagnose pathogens based on feelings: this is the Great Information Collapse. This is what you thought AI would cause, but came before AI, and was used to train AI.

This is where good men have to stand and point to the truth.

Good men, comrades, and I.

I am back…

…and not happy about it. I have a website full of harmless old poetry that I curated while on sabbatical. I had a lovely wife. I learnt how to make a decent biryani, and listened to all of Bach’s organ works; I learnt a new language, and dusted off an old one. I was enjoying life. But while I was doing so, things got worse. They got to the point that even men of good will and good sense are lost in a quagmire of faulty information. I can’t stop this. But I can shelter my readers, as many as I still have. Nice to meet you again, comrades: it is still me, with the lines on the forehead and the grey hair in my beard. I just wish we met under better circumstances.

Happy 1 May, Comrades!

Yes, Dr. X only appears to wish you a happy 1 May, I know. Lazy, I know. This year, instead of the usual Soviet posters, here is one from East Germany, the most functional of Communist states, right before it joined the rest of the country to become its reserve of unemployed and neonazis. It was a time in which the government blamed all social ills on fascists, that it strived to eliminate, instead of blaming it on the unemployed, that all current governments strive to increase. Anyhow, to those of my reader who read German, to those who read Russian, and to those who, victims of a school system that only teaches capitalist propaganda, can’t read either, happy 1 May!

Happy 1 May, Comrades

And, as every year, Dr. X comes out of his semi-retirement to wish all his 3 followers a happy labour day. Happy labour day, comrades!

We Lost It. Again.

It is no wonder that people don’t take the Left seriously. I myself wonder if most of us are idiots, or just pretend to be for some kind of gain. However, the typical left wing idiot, in my mind and, doubtlessly, that of most of my readers, is someone who thinks important problems are the fact that women in the West are not jaded enough, or that we don’t have a complete enough set of pronouns. Today, however, I found a different kind. This youtuber posts quite a lot of videos criticizing the British government in general, and Brexit in particular, and often makes good points. Here, however, he jumped on a bandwagon, and completely lost the point of the situation. British farmers, post Brexit, leave crops to rot in the field because their normal influx of seasonal workers from Eastern Europe isn’t forthcoming because of Brexit; the author of the videos sees this as a problem caused by Brexit. It fucking isn’t. The fact that a nation can only function if it has an underclass of migrants who will work for starvation wages is. The agricultural sector, in England and elsewhere, depends almost entirely on workers that will accept wages, and treatment, that nobody with access to labour unions and knowledge of labour regulations will accept. This is the problem, not Brexit. Brexit, for once, did something good, by abolishing modern slavery and forcing people in the United Kingdom to see agricultural workers as their fellow humans, and not as a formless mass of foreigners to exploit.

And be it clear: I do not intend to throw this particular youtuber under the bus. The problem is that he is one of dozens, most of which are, or claim to be, on the left, who are simply so accustomed to having a separate, and certainly not equal, caste of workers that they don’t even see it as a problem. People, please: when you see an issue, don’t turn off your brain.

Happy 1 May, Comrades

What’s Actually Fucked Up in the US

A week has passed since a mob of colourful buffoons invaded the US Capitol (what would be referred to as ‘the parliament building’ in a civilized country) and everyone down there and, occasionally, here, is still yakking about it. While I didn’t really plan on talking about it because it tends to reinforce the idea that the US should be above these things, I decided to, in the end, because I think people are surprised, and outraged, at the wrong things.

People, both in the US and in civilized countries, feign, or feel, surprise at the fact that a mob, incited by a losing presidential candidate, decided to invade the parliament. In reality, losing ex-presidents are disgruntled pretty much everywhere, and mobs try to invade parliaments regularly in all but the most advanced democracies. Just in 2020, it happened in Serbia in July and in Kyrgyzstan and Thailand in October. And mind that, due to The Virus, rioting wasn’t quite as popular in 2020, and that these three are only the ones I could think of quickly. What makes the US riots special is:

1. It worked. A mob armed only with rudimentary melee weapons successfully broke into a building defended by a special corp of 1700+ agents.
2. Several of said agents actually sympathized with the mob and did absolutely nothing to stop them.

People keep watching the Hollywood propaganda, and get the idea that American police is competent, well-trained, loyal and brave. It is none of these things: it is treacherous, incompetent, prejudiced, sadistic and cravenly. Faced with a like-minded but slightly-less-cravenly mob, it just melts.

However, the morbid incompetence of its supposed defenders is not, by any length, the most fucked-up thing about the American parliament (or, as those lunatics keep calling it, ‘the congress and senate’). The most fucked-up thing is this.
Let me TL;DR it for you: Democrats are actually scared that Republicans sympathizing with the mob will finish the job and actually murder them on the floor of the parliament. To prevent this, the Capitol Police (that’d be those 1700+ morons we were talking about above) started checking MPs (lunatics call them ‘representatives’) with metal detectors. Instead of denying their murderous intentions, said Republicans threw a tantrum about having their firearms removed. This happens nowhere else: parliament shootings have happened (a famous one in Armenia in 1999), but they were carried out by external agents. MPs punching each other and, occasionally, bashing each other with chairs are common throughout Europe; but nowhere outside of the US, not even at the heights of political violence in Jamaica, has a party faction been unashamedly planning mass shootings of its political opponents live on a public affairs network and bitched about being inconvenienced in this pursuit.

My message to those who still hold the US as a shining beacon of democracy for everyone is: you, Ladies and Gentlemen, are a bunch of idiots.

Dr. X, the Prophet

So, in my last post of 2020, I called, several times, the US a “banana republic”, much to the irritation of some of my readers. A little more than a week later, I was joined in my opinion by none other than George W. Bush. Oh well, odd fellow travellers, I suppose.