On Analogies
I did a post the other day that used an anecdote from my real life to illustrate a point about the concept of self-defense. Since the point was relevant to the debate over the fighting in Gaza, I tried to explicitly say that I didn’t want the story to be read as an analogy since I don’t believe in trying to conduct arguments by analogy. Well along comes Michael Moynihan to point out that the facts in my story don’t precisely parallel the situation in Gaza.
This, though, is why I don’t believe in analogies. If you make an argument that hinges on an analogy then people fire back by pointing out some respect in which the situation you described isn’t precisely analogous to the thing you’re arguing about. It then becomes a contest to specify the analogy so as to exactly mirror the situation you’re debating. In which case you may as well just debate the situation. Long story short—these analogy fights are stupid.
But to repeat, I wasn’t offering an analogy. I was, rather, offering an example designed to prove a narrow point, specifically that a claim of self-defense doesn’t operate as a blanket license to wreak destruction. Granting that the situation in Israel isn’t identical to the situation on the bike (and the differences cut both ways—the blame in the bicycle case lies 100 percent with the rock thrower, which isn’t the case in the Holy Land) the point is simply that the particular mode of argument that relies on saying “self-defense!” does not, in fact, suffice to vindicate Israel’s actions.
54 Responses to “On Analogies”
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January 12th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
This is from my college paper (I was quoted elsewhere in the paper, I went to a ceasefire demonstration):
http://media.collegepublisher.com/media/paper871/stills/ed215wzy.jpg
I think it sums things up.
January 12th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Well then, Matt would have not only the right, but the RESPONSIBILITY to fire back with a bazooka! ! ! ! !
So then Matt should. . . eliminate the right of the rock-throwers to create political parties?
January 12th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
I didn’t think you needed the example. Your point was reasonably clear without it.
Unless I’ve misunderstood you Isreal has a right of self defense, but thats hardly controversial except when that right is taken to justify lots of bad stuff like maintaining the occupation. At the same time, the evils of the occupation do not justify (your word I belive) folks firing missles in the general direction of civilians, which I (but perhaps not you) take to mean that neither the Isreali state nor the Palestinains resistance should do so. Of course, and this point is disputed but I’ll say of course anyway, the requisite protions of the Geneva Conventions give all persons living under occupation the right to resist that occupation and forbid the occuppying power from taking any acts to support the continuance of the occupation, these acts including destroying or grabbing property…so no knocking down houses or sealing off borders or building settlements or snatching resources like watwer and the like.
Please feel free to tell me where I’ve got you wrong or where you disagree.
January 12th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
1) It might have been simpler to have just pointed out that the laws which govern the common citizen’s use of force should apply to US Presidents and nations like Israel as well.
Bush’s invasion of Iran was similar to the crime of using deadly force based simply on “Bare Fear” — i.e., using deadly force based on an unreasonable and greatly exaggerated fear. (”I shot him because he’s black and he looked at me funny and I suspected he had a knife in his pocket –based on no evidence whatsoever but because it’s well known that Negros carry knives.”.)
That’s ignoring for the moment that Bush’s crime actually was more in the way of armed robbery on behalf of Houston.
2)Israel’s crime is more in the nature of “Excessive use of force”. You can shoot someone if they reasonably endanger you or an innocent third party — but you have to halt as soon as the threat is past.
You can’t continue to shoot an attacker once they are down and no longer pose a threat. Nor can you shoot all their relatives and children.
January 12th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
I’m pretty sure that using an example to describe something is, by definition, an analogy, whether you call it one or not. That said, Moynihan takes your imperfect analogy and makes it more imperfect.. Of course, utilizing an analogy to justify killing people is horribly crude and stupid, but par for the course from the pro-war crowd..
January 12th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Analogies have their dangers, but their benefit, I think, is that they allow you to look at history for guidance, which allows for a longer term perspective, how policies look over 10 years rather than 10 days. At the moment of conflict a “wipe them out. all of them” mindset quickly takes hold, so it’s essential to be able to learn, by looking at historical analogies or by some other way, that “wiping them out” is not the only or best way to deal with a conflict, or a conflict’s aftermath.
January 12th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
It was an analogy Matt, deal with it. It was a very narrow analogy, designed to get at one point of a very complex situation: proportionality. But there will always be assholes that confuse analogy with identity, and criticize because your example is not identical. But there is a utility to arguing over the applicability of analogies — to see if it isolates the concept properly. Often analogies don’t (see: Kristol, William), and those need to be called out for the bullshit they are.
January 12th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
BTW, one of the finest recent analogies is the cholesterol/tax cut analogy used in Nate Silver’s takedown of Mankiw. That boy’s got some game.
January 12th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
I heard someone from the Israel Project the other day talking about proportionality. She brought up how ridiculous it was to talk about the subject because to be proportional the Israeli response would be to fire a rocket back at random.
I guess if you are really invested in believing that the IDF sits around works day and night to avoid killing the wrong people and just fucks up over and over maybe it sounds crazy to think that wouldn’t be a more appropriate response.
I’d even up the ante and give the Israeli’s a catapult with ten pound shot. Significantly more dangerous than a Quasam rocket, and they could probably aim it a little better.
January 12th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Maybe make them kids bowling balls with m-80’s stuck in the fingerholes to make them sound more impressive when they land.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
“But to repeat, I wasn’t offering an analogy. I was, rather, offering an example designed to prove a narrow point,”
Look, I majored in physics, not philosophy. Your world is so esoteric to me that that I could not possibly make the distinction. I work in the world where there are mathematical equations defining real world results. To me, an example is a tangible result, not the kind of experience you may have. We all have experiences, but there are no tangible measurements attached to it. But when we get tangible results, we make theories out of them. We don’t make analogies. We use analogies to explain to philosophy majors what we’re talking about because you can’t get it otherwise. So what the hell are you talking about? And how is this example any different than an analogy? You may think an example is somehow more real, but I don’t see any experimental controls. You could have just made it up. At that point, how is it any different from an analogy? I understand there’s a need for flair in writing, and personal examples help, but how do you say one data point is an analogy and another is an example? I’m thinking you’re just engaging in intellectual masturbation here.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
That’s pretty stupid right there. That’s like saying if someone robs my house I should get to rob his. No thanks.
Of course, Isarel is hardly conducting non-random attacks anyway, unless they know with absolute certainty who is in the building they blow up, and can guarantee beyond a reasonable doubt that their munitions will hit where they are aimed at in the first place.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Actually, I didn’t think it was so stupid at all. You could take the idea too far: I don’t think a great response to a Palestinian suicide bomber would be to send a Jewish Israeli one to hit back. OTOH, yeah, crappy rockets sent into a big Arab pen you are maintaining shouldn’t deserve any response than sending crappy rockets or some similar surrogate back into your Arab pen.
No, obviously if I was running things, I wouldn’t have to create an alternative Israeli foreign policy. I wouldn’t have an Arab pen for them to shoot at me from.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
“I guess if you are really invested in believing that the IDF sits around works day and night to avoid killing the wrong people and just fucks up over and over”
I’m willing to believe that they really do think about how to avoid killing people. The problem is that their only solutions end up killing themselves. I tend to advocate against Israel’s policies, but only because I want Israel to survive. Israel has not learned Game Theory, and they should. First lesson: Tit for Tat. You give me something, I give you something. And we keep doing that process. Israel responds to anyone trying to make peace with them by financing their enemies. They financed Hamas because they didn’t want to deal with Arafat. Now how’s Hamas treating you? Want to play the game again? Next time it’s Al Quaeda in Palestine. Want to play that game? For all it’s transgressions, Israel is playing the game by normal war theory. And it will lose. Maybe if it applied Game Theory to it’s approach, it might win. But God forbid that math might influence people. It always does, but who listens to mathematicians?
January 12th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
I don’t think Israel can be expected to put the life of a single Israeli soldier at risk if it can be avoided. So they use standoff munitions –we would do the same in the same circumstances. Look at the early 2002 operation in Afghanistan.
But for some reason, Israel is needlessly wasting the lives of Israeli soldiers — by going far beyond what’s needed to indict some crappy , ineffectual rockets. The best explanation I’ve seen is that the government of Israel thinks Obama will be less supportive of its aggression than George W Bush has been — so it’s trying to reduce its enemies as much as possible before the new Administration arrives.
Hamas also appears irrational. I can understand them wanting to attack Israel — but their rockets just make them look ridiculous. As well as giving Israel an excuse to hit back hard.
The only explanation I can think of is that Hamas is a puppet of a foreign power — that its leaders have been told to stir up trouble by the people who bankroll Hamas. Or that the Government of Israel covertly did something to provoke Hamas into giving them a casus belli.
January 12th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
In defense of Matt, with the caveat at the end of his original post, he’s correct in asserting that it wasn’t an analogy. What he was doing instead was disproving a general principle by example, thereby establishing that “self defense” has limits as a justification for action. Whether Israeli actions excede those limits is not addressed by the example – only that the general principle of self defense has limits.
However, the way that the example was framed, with so many obvious parallels to the Gaza situation, a normal person would first think analogy. And it would not be surprising for the caveat to confuse. People generally relate more easily to real world than the abstract, and that example naturally connects to the real world events more strongly than to the abstract idea he was promoting.
I’d suggest to Matt that in the future he use a more distanced example to make that kind of point.
January 12th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
I’m willing to believe that they really do think about how to avoid killing people.
I can’t figure out why. I know too many people who have lived in Palestine. Presuming you are an American they would go out of their way not to kill you (although at a unit level they might let you know they could if you angered them). Palestinians? They don’t give the slightest shit. They don’t have a policy of killing them at random but if someone down the chain of command does no one cares unless they get caught. Then the priority is covering the PR war, they could care less about the error. It’s important to scrub it over and pretend it didn’t happen.
Assuming I didn’t have a lexicon of personal anecdotes on why that’s true, what would make you believe the IDF cared a whit about anyone else? I’m curious. Shimon Peres jumps on TV once in awhile to tell you this? That’s all I’m coming up with.
January 12th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
“Hamas also appears irrational.”
Not at all. They don’t win by defeating Israel, they win simply by opposing them. They did the perfect trick. They were losing popularity, but by forcing an Israeli response, they look like the only people fighting the Israelis. And when bombs are dropping, the people who fight the bomb-droppers look pretty. And look, nothing could make Churchill look like a decent man but bombs dropping on London. But that made him a hero, didn’t it? You want a Palestinian Churchill? You got it now. It doesn’t take intelligence, Churchill proved that. It takes guts (and drunkeness). And the Palestinians have plenty of people with that. Kill their people, and there’s plenty more to come. If you think this operation will work in Israel’s favor, then you must believe that Britain gave in to the Germans when they where being bombed. Turns out, it didn’t happen that way. The current leader of Hamas is not that Churchill, but there will be one. The only question is who will it be?
January 12th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
This makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense. One of the bad rhetorical habits of Americans (especially on the right) is to refuse to engage any comparison or example or hypothetical, by claiming that the premises don’t match up. When the premises do match up, the comparison is still not valid, because it draws an improper “moral equivalence”, whatever the heck that means.
Matt is saying he knows his example differs in particulars, so you don’t need to tell him that. Rather, either accept the point (self-defense does not justify all retaliatory actions) or tell him why he is wrong. But don’t get into a useless pissing contest about his comparison. That doesn’t get us anywhere. Indeed, ensuring we don’t have a substantive discussion is exactly the point of this sort of objection.
January 12th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
I should add that the best hope for Hamas is that their leader would be martyred. Their strategy is already so simple that a child could do it. Lay back, and let Israel fuck up. The martyrdom will inspire leaders. Now, it sounds crazy that anyone would walk into that trap, but Israel has always walked into it. It’s the nature of their democracy, and it’s the nature of their people. To win an election in Israel, you must look tough. Stepping into a trap looks tough. They’ll do it gladly. And the Palestinians are more than happy to set the trap. I don’t wish misfortune on Israel, but if Israel wants misfortune, they should get it. It’s their choice.
January 12th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Re Don Williams
What’s this, Don Williams saying something not totally negative about the Government of Israel. Might this have something to do with the results of Sundays football game in Giants stadium?
January 12th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
“Might this have something to do with the results of Sundays football game in Giants stadium?”
I can’t speak for Don, but as a Giants fan, I know damn well that the Eagles can always beat us. It just in our nature and theirs.
January 12th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
The analogies, of course, needn’t come from your life, Matt, but from the very common occurrence of a country being attacked by guerrillas in another country. By comparison with, say, Turkey, Israel has lived a blessed existence – and yet, for all the talk of Turkish generals about wiping out the PKK nests in Northern Iraq, they have been much more patient, and suffered much more provocation, than Israel ever has. Similarly, Afghanistan is under constant attack from sanctuaries set up in Pakistan – and by militia groups that have deep and enduring ties to Pakistan’s ISI. Yet Afghanistan has only attacked Pakistan verbally. India recently suffered attacks in Mumbai that coulld easily be linked to groups in Pakistan, but so far, they have neither bombed nor strafed Pakistan. Chad has long supported guerilla groups that attack neighboring Sudan, but Sudan, with a government that has plenty of blood on its hands, has refrained from attacking Chad – showing Israel how civilized nationa operate. Ecuador complained that Colombia incursed on its borders in supposed pursuit of FARC, but did not respond by bombing Bogota.
Analogies like these can help get rid of the canard that only Israel is somehow prevented from ‘defending’ itself. Just the reverse is true – only Israel has been given carte blanche to bomb its neighbors. Meanwhile, the trickle of emigration into Israel is drying up, reflecting the difference between Israel, a culture that has become militaristic and reactionary, and the generally liberal diaspora Jewish community. Surely the Gaza atrocity will continue to widen that gap. As it widens, fewer Jews will migrate to Israel, not because of the lack of safety, but because of disinclination to live under an evidently barbarous regime.
In the long run, given the probable effect of the Gaza atrocity on the Arab governments Israel needs to work with, and its symbolic severing of the cultural tie with liberal Jewish culture, it will be evident that Israel lost in Gaza.
January 12th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Israel is allowed to do whatever it wants and U.S. politicians had better like it, or else face a well-funded challenger in their next election…you decide? go on…fuck with us, see what happens
January 12th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Matt is right — he wasn’t making an analogy in the other post. He was offering a counterexample.
If your opponent relies on the premise that “All P’s are Q’s” and you point out an example of a P that isn’t a Q, you’ve used a counterexample to show that his argument proceeds from a false premise. (Specifically, your opponent might say that “All cases of self-defense involve a blanket license to wreak destruction” and you give an example where this isn’t the case.) That’s different from an analogy, where you say that two things are alike.
The only problem I have with this post is that Matt should’ve used the word “counterexample” to explain what it is that he’s doing.
January 12th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
I was, rather, offering an example designed to prove a narrow point, specifically that a claim of self-defense doesn’t operate as a blanket license to wreak destruction.
Your comment about the right of self-defense not justifying anything & everything was perfectly clear, and also “narrow,” and trivially true. So your example didn’t help to clarify or prove anything that wasn’t obvious. If the guy at Reason misread your point, that’s just proof that your “example” only confused the issue.
January 12th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Or that the guy at Reason has problems with reading comprehension.
January 12th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
But I’d ask you, SLC, can you name just one aerial bombing operation where the people being bombed welcomed it? Where they thought the people bombing them were so great that they opposed their own leaders and fought for the other side? I’m just asking you to name one in history. I can produce a list of thousands of cities who reacted against the bombers. But if you could just produce one against my thousands, I might consider your thoughts to be reasonable.
January 12th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
According to Wikipedia, as of 2006, 484,562 Israeli settlers were occupying territory conquered during the six-days war…what could Palestinians have to complain about?
January 12th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
for all the talk of Turkish generals about wiping out the PKK nests in Northern Iraq, they have been much more patient, and suffered much more provocation, than Israel ever has.
Wikipedia says, citing a Turkish newspaper: “According to official figures released by the Turkish military for the 1984-2008 period, the conflict has resulted in the capture of 14,000 PKK members, and the death of 32,000 PKK members, 6,482 soldiers, and 5,560 civilians.”
India recently suffered attacks in Mumbai that coulld easily be linked to groups in Pakistan, but so far, they have neither bombed nor strafed Pakistan. Actually, India and Pakistan have fought 4 wars. Most recently, in 1999, “The Indian Artillery fired over 250,000 shells, bombs and rockets during the Kargil conflict. Approximately, 5,000 Artillery shells, mortar bombs and rockets were fired daily from 300 guns, mortars and MBRLs. Such high rates of fire over long periods had not been witnessed anywhere in the world since the second World War.”
And of course, Sudan and Chad fight regularly, contrary to Roger’s claim. The US regularly launches attacks on Al Qaeda & Taliban in Pakistan.
So, it seems that many countries other than Israel are able to defend themselves without drawing international criticism, or even much notice. I wonder why that is?
January 12th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
People always say you can’t compare apples and oranges, but why bother comparing things unless they’re different? Comparing things that are the same is kind of pointless unless you’re a quality control engineer.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
I wonder why that is?</i?
Because everybody hates Jews. Why can’t you just type this? What’s way more annoying than just listening to this bullshit is to get it implied and then when someone bitches about it, “Oh, we didn’t say that! You feel guilty?”
Maybe someone does hate Jews. Actually, I’m sure of it, you start talking about Israel and someone out there with an axe to grind about Jews will pipe up. What does that matter to the rest of the argument?
January 12th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
I wonder why that is?…What does that matter to the rest of the argument?
Well, mostly I just thought it was a punchy conclusion.
But I am mystified about why Israel is constantly accused of acting beyond the pale when it does the same kind of thing that any country would do, and what many other countries do without much comment. Is it antisemitism? Anti-Americanism? Because of the crappiness of the US media? The failures of the US educational system? All that propaganda purchased by all that oil money? I have other theories too. It’s a puzzle.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
INTELLECTUAL OUTPUT
FROM THE [ARAB] MUSLIM WORLD
.
ARAB / ISLAMIC NOBEL WINNERS
From a pool of 1.4 BILLION Muslims
20% of World’s Population
(2 out of every 10 people)
Literature
1988 – Najib Mahfooz *
2006 – Orhan Pamuk
Peace
1978 – Anwar El-Sadat
1994 – Yasser Arafat… A Joke!!! **
2003 – Shirin Ebadi
2005 – Mohamed ElBaradei
2006 – Muhammad Yunus
Chemistry
1999 – Ahmed Zewail
Physics
1979 – Abdus Salam (arguable because he is Qadiani)
* Najib was stabbed in the back by Egyptian Moslem fundamentalists in 1997 because he supported the Peace Process between the Arabs (”Palestinians”) and Israelis. Najib was partially paralyzed as a result.
**The Norwegians played an ugly joke on the world by pretending Arafat was a Man of Peace.
Note: Elias James Corey (Chemistry 1990), Peter Brian Medawar (Medicine 1960) and Ferid Mourad (Medicine 1998) are Nobel Prize winners but are Arab-Christians, not Muslims.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.Masada2000.org
special Nobel Prize for
I N T E G R I T Y!
Norwegian, Kaare Kristiansen was a member of the Nobel Committee. He resigned in 1994 to protest the awarding of a Nobel “Peace Prize” to Yasser Arafat, whom he correctly labeled a “terrorist.”
JEWISH NOBEL WINNERS
From a pool of 12 million Jews
0.2% of the World’s Population
(2 out of every 1,000 people)
Literature
1910 – Paul Heyse
1927 – Henri Bergson
1958 – Boris Pasternak
1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 – Nelly Sachs
1976 – Saul Bellow
1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 – Elias Canetti
1987 – Joseph Brodsky
1991 – Nadine Gordimer
2002 – Imre Kertesz
2005 – Harold Pinter
World Peace
1911 – Alfred Fried
1911 – Tobias Asser
1968 – Rene Cassin
1973 – Henry Kissinger
1978 – Menachem Begin
1986 – Elie Wiesel
1994 – Shimon Peres
1994 – Yitzhak Rabin
1995 – Joseph Rotblat
Chemistry
1905 – Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 – Henri Moissan
1910 – Otto Wallach
1915 – Richard Willstaetter
1918 – Fritz Haber
1943 – George Charles de Hevesy
1961 – Melvin Calvin
1962 – Max Ferdinand Perutz
1972 – William Howard Stein
1972 – C.B. Anfinsen
1977 – Ilya Prigogine
1979 – Herbert Charles Brown
1980 – Paul Berg
1980 – Walter Gilbert
1981 – Ronald Hoffmann
1982 – Aaron Klug
1985 – Herbert A. Hauptman
1985 – Jerome Karle
1986 – Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 – Robert Huber
1989 – Sidney Altman
1992 – Rudolph Marcus
1998 – Walter Kohn
2000 – Alan J. Heeger
2004 – Irwin Rose
2004 – Avram Hershko
2004 – Aaron Ciechanover
2006 – Roger D. Kornberg
2008 – Martin Chalfie
Economics
1970 – Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 – Simon Kuznets
1972 – Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1973 – Wassily Leontief
1975 – Leonid Kantorovich
1976 – Milton Friedman
1978 – Herbert A. Simon
1980 – Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 – Franco Modigliani
1987 – Robert M. Solow
1990 – Harry Markowitz
1990 – Merton Miller
1992 – Gary Becker
1993 Rober Fogel
1994 – John Harsanyi
1994 – Reinhard Selten
1997 – Robert Merton
1997 – Myron Scholes
2001 – George Akerlof
2001 – Joseph Stiglitz
2002 – Daniel Kahneman
2004 – Richard Axel
2005 – Robert J. Aumann
2006 – Andrew Z. Fire
2007 – Leonid (Leo) Hurwicz
2007 – Eric Maskin
2007 – Roger Myerson
2008 – Paul Krugman
Physiology / Medicine
1908 – Elie Metchnikoff
1908 – Paul Erlich
1914 – Robert Barany
1922 – Otto Meyerhof
1930 – Karl Landsteiner
1931 – Otto Warburg
1936 – Otto Loewi
1944 – Joseph Erlanger
1944 – Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 – Ernst Boris Chain
1946 – Hermann Joseph Muller
1947 – Garty Cori
1950 – Tadeus Reichstein
1952 – Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 – Hans Krebs
1953 – Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 – Joshua Lederberg
1959 – Arthur Kornberg (father)
1964 – Konrad Bloch
1965 – Francois Jacob
1965 – Andre Lwoff
1967 – George Wald
1968 – Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 – Salvador Luria
1970 – Julius Axelrod
1970 – Sir Bernard Katz
1972 – Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 – David Baltimore
1975 – Howard Martin Temin
1976 – Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 – Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
1977 – Andrew V. Schally
1978 – Daniel Nathans
1980 – Baruj Benacerraf
1982 – [Sir] John Vane
1984 – Cesar Milstein
1985 – Michael Stuart Brown
1985 – Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 – Rita Levi-Montalcini
1986 – Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 – Gertrude Elion
1989 – Harold Varmus
1991 – Erwin Neher
1991 – Bert Sakmann
1992 – Edmond Fischer
1993 – Richard J. Roberts
1993 – Phillip Sharp
1994 – Alfred Gilman
1994 – Martin Rodbell
1995 – Edward B. Lewis
1997 – Stanley B. Prusiner
1998 – Robert F. Furchgott
2000 – Eric R. Kandel
2000 – Paul Greengard
2002 – Sydney Brenner
2002 – Robert H. Horvitz
2006 – Roger Kornberg (son)
2006 – Andrew Z. Fire
Physics
1907 – Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 – Gabriel Lippmann
1921 – Albert Einstein
1922 – Niels Bohr
1925 – James Franck
1925 – Gustav Hertz
1943 – Gustav Stern
1944 – Isidor Issac Rabi
1945 – Wolfgang Pauli
1952 – Felix Bloch
1954 – Max Born
1958 – Igor Tamm
1958 – Il’ja Mikhailovich
1958 – Igor Yevgenyevich
1959 – Emilio Segre
1960 – Donald A. Glaser
1961 – Robert Hofstadter
1962 – Lev Davidovich Landau
1963 – Eugene P. Wigner
1965 – Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 – Julian Schwinger
1967 – Hans Albrecht Bethe
1969 – Murray Gell-Mann
1971 – Dennis Gabor
1972 – Leon N. Cooper
1973 – Brian David Josephson
1975 – Benjamin Mottleson
1976 – Burton Richter
1978 – Arno Allan Penzias
1978 – Peter L Kapitza
1979 – Stephen Weinberg
1979 – Sheldon Glashow
1988 – Leon Lederman
1988 – Melvin Schwartz
1988 – Jack Steinberger
1990 – Jerome Friedman
1992 – Georges Charpak
1995 – Martin Perl
1995 – Frederick Reines
1996 – David M. Lee
1996 – Douglas D. Osheroff
1997 – Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
2000 – Zhores I. Alferov
2003 – Vitaly Ginsburg
2003 – Alexei Abrikosov
2004 – David Gross
2004 – H. David Politzer
2005 – Roy Glauber
..
There are a mere 12 Million Jews in the entire world yet they have received 184 Nobel Prizes.
The Muslims number 1.4 Billion (with a very big “B”)… or 117 times the number of Jews! Based upon this 117:1 Muslim-to-Jewish ratio, one might expect the Muslims to have 24,920 Nobel Laureates.
They have NINE! and one of them [Arafat] is a murderer (Allahu Akbar, indeed!)
Unless the Swedes and Norwegians start awarding Nobel Prizes for plane hijackings, pizza shop bombings, civilian bus attacks, Jihad suicides/homicides, drive-by shootings, throat-slittings, embassy attacks and other such acts of barbarisms, the embarrassing low level of contribution to the welfare of Civilization and Mankind by the [Arab] Muslim world will continue. The Jewish People, meanwhile, will continue being the Lights Unto All Nations.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Uh, obviously you know little about the Turkish Iraq border. The war wasw conducted inside Turkey. As your littlemindbending journey to Wikipedia should have taught you. Here’s a recent story about the U.S. response to the PKK: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/world/middleeast/29kurds.html?scp=1&sq=tURKEY%20kURDS%20Iraq&st=cse. Notice, 12 Turkish soldiers are killed and you don’t heaer Bush saying that the Kurdish government of Northern Iraq is a terrorist sympathizer. Hmm, wonder why?
As for India and Pakistan, the U.S. and the EU have put on a lot of pressure to make sure that India didn’t respond to the bombings in Mumbai – remember, that was the subject? – by making war on Pakistan. So, was there a war between India and Pakistan over Mumbai? No. Was there a war over clashes in Kashmir in 2003, or 2004? No. Has the U.S. urged India not to war against Pakistan? Yes. Here’s the story from this December. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/world/asia/04diplo.html?scp=1&sq=India+Pakistan+war+u.s.&st=nyt.
Is it a joke to say that Israel, poor Israel, uniquely has its hands tied behind its back when terrorists attack it? Of course it is.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Yeah, it’s an incredible mystery. It’s a 20th century settler society, it’s the last one left after all the rest pretty much got run off. I can’t understand it’s bad luck. It must be related to anti-semitism or it it’s cousin, anti-americanism. Your theories are sure to be world-shattering.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Re Ragout’s comment “But I am mystified about why Israel is constantly accused of acting beyond the pale when it does the same kind of thing that any country would do, and what many other countries do without much comment. Is it antisemitism? Anti-Americanism? ”
——————
No, it’s anger that certain factions in this country feel free to bring death, destruction and disaster down upon America — to betray us in the pursuit of their personal agendas while enjoying all the protection and privileges of US citizenship.
As I’ve noted before, one of those factions is Big Oil. Another is Big Defense. A Third is the Israel Lobby.
When Israel drops bombs on Gaza and kills children, 1 billion Muslims out there know that the bomb was made in America, the F16 was made in America and that those weapons were given to Israel because of the influence of the Israel Lobby.
Bin Laden, in several 1997-1998 interviews with US TV networks, stated that US government support for Israeli aggression was one of the three reasons why Al Qaeda was going to declare war on the USA. He reiterated that casus belli as justifying the Sept 11 2001 attack in an interview given in Nov 2001.
Yet , due to the influence of the Israel Lobby, our own President LIED to us after Sept 11 — saying that 19 Saudi citizens committed suicide in order to strike us because they “hate our freedom”. The pro-Israel New York Times expanded on that lie in a Sept 23 2001 news article “Israel as Flashpoint Not Cause ” which claimed that US support for Israel was not a motivation for Al Qaeda. And of course, you had David Horowitz, Michael Savage etc putting out a lot of racist bullshit about the “Islamofascists”. Last time I checked , those guys weren’t Methodists.
Harvard historian Ernest May, a consultant to the 911 Commission, admitted that the Commission refused to examine what motivated the Sept 11 attack –because the issue was too hot politically. Which was a despicable betrayal of the families of the 911 victims.
But it didn’t stop there. The puppets of Big Oil, Bush and Cheney, saw a way to manipulate 911 into seizing Iraq’s oil deposits by a deal with the Israel Lobby. Part of that was kneecapping any opposition from the Democratic Party by going to that party’s financiers and casting the invasion as protection of Israel. Best case was that billionaires like Israeli Haim Saban would defect to the Republican Party — worse case was that the Democrats would be powerless to oppose Big Oil’s oil grab for fear of retaliation from their big money guys. Look at how AIPAC fucked Cynthia McKinney. Or how S Daniel Abraham stabbed Howard Dean in the back in the 2004 Iowa Primary merely for saying that the US needed to be more evenhanded in the Israel-Palestinian dispute.
It worked. Jewish American Tom Friedman, in an interview with Haaretz, said that the Iraq War would not have occurred if not for the propaganda campaign waged by roughly 25 people. Haaretz added helpfully that “most of whom are Jewish”. The names weren’t given but some are obvious: Richard Perle. Charles Krauthammer. William Kristol. Plus Scooter Libby and Judith Miller. Kenneth Pollack and Marty Indyk at Haim Saban’s Center for Middle East Policy. Plus who can forget Ariel Sharon, Bibi Nathanyahu, and Shimon Peres telling us in 2002 that we needed to attack Saddam Hussein immediately before Saddam acquired nukes and used them on us. Has Mossad found those nukes yet?
So on top of 3000 dead /$1 Trillion lost in New York, we now had another 4000 dead /$2 Trillion lost in Iraq. Plus no one in the Islamic World has dropped a dime on Bin Laden — or the Al Qaeda leadership — in spite of huge rewards. Because many people in the Middle East see the US government as being as evil as Al Qaeda.
If the above are the acts of friends and fellow citizens, I would hate to see what an enemy would do.
Should 4 million Jewish Americans be blamed for the acts of the above people? Of course not. What is real anti-Semitism, in my opinion, is the claims of the Israel Lobby that their disloyalty is supported by the American Jewish community.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Request to Matthew Yglesias: Would you please give me the IP address and email of the asshole who forged my name to post 36 above?
January 13th, 2009 at 12:02 am
Re Post 36:
“Unless the Swedes and Norwegians start awarding Nobel Prizes for plane hijackings, pizza shop bombings, civilian bus attacks, Jihad suicides/homicides, drive-by shootings, throat-slittings, embassy attacks and other such acts of barbarisms, the embarrassing low level of contribution to the welfare of Civilization and Mankind by the [Arab] Muslim world will continue. The Jewish People, meanwhile, will continue being the Lights Unto All Nations.”
——————–
Does that “Light” refer to the flash at Trinity Test Site created by those Nobel Physicists as a way to reward German Universities for the education they received?
Or does it refer to the 1949 flash in Russia that occurred after the Rosenberg and Cohen spy rings gave mass murderer Stalin the plutonium implosion design? A flash that may one day be echoed over 50 major American cities.
PS Why is it that when I — and astronauts –do celestial navigation , almost all the stars we steer by have Arabic names?
January 13th, 2009 at 12:25 am
PPS Why did so many Jews flee to the Islamic world in the Middle Ages if that world was always genetically destined to be a benighted shithole?
January 13th, 2009 at 1:28 am
If I’m not mistaken, there’s a difference between “analogy” and “homology,” yes? It seems to me that you were making an analogy but, perhaps, people want you to make homologies all the time? This would, indeed, be frustrating and rhetorically limiting, but I don’t see why it should stop you from making apt analogies, useful as they are. You did appear to be making an analogy with the example, even if you didn’t want to call it that.
January 13th, 2009 at 3:27 am
Analogies are quite useful, when they are used correctly. But the whole point of a good analogy is that its similarities to the thing-in-question far outweigh its differences.
That is why Moynihan shot you down for the bicycle analogy. The differences in principle between that and Hamas’s rocket-lobbing are so numerous and so weighty that your parable is rendered useless. Don’t blame analogies in general for that sloppiness.
But you were merely demonstrating “that a claim of self-defense doesn’t operate as a blanket license to wreak destruction.” Well, that doesn’t relieve you of the obligation to craft a decent analogy. If your example is off-base and simplistic, then you haven’t demonstrated anything that isn’t immediately obvious to everyone without the aid of the bicycle story.
Besides, I haven’t heard a single person say that any old form of self-defense is a license for destruction. Anyone who said such a thing would be in an absurd and childish position, and wouldn’t be open to bicycle-based persuasion. For all I know, you may really think that (a) the analogy is in some way good as a guide to the situation of Sderot, and (b) defenders of Israel’s Gaza campaign say Israel would be justified in blowing up a merry band of rock-throwers. Unless you think those things are true, though, find a better example/analogy/fable.
Given that the subject of Israel seems to attract an amazing number of spurious analogies – “Well, of course I don’t think Israelis are really Nazis, but…” – you’ll find people don’t have much patience for this sort of thing.
January 13th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Re Don Williams
Does that “Light” refer to the flash at Trinity Test Site created by those Nobel Physicists as a way to reward German Universities for the education they received?
Mr. Don Williams, as usual, is full of shit. Those Nobel physicists were rewarding his hero, Adolf Hitler, for his anti-Semitic actions, acquiesced to by their fellow former German compatriots.
January 13th, 2009 at 8:13 am
It should be noted that the faux Don Williams also posts as the faux Richard Steven Hack.
January 13th, 2009 at 8:18 am
That is why Moynihan shot you down for the bicycle analogy. The differences in principle between that and Hamas’s rocket-lobbing are so numerous and so weighty that your parable is rendered useless. Don’t blame analogies in general for that sloppiness.
Crap. Matt is, indeed, making an analogy (not sure why he denies it), but he’s doing it in the correct way. He’s found a situation in which he is highlighting exactly one parallel, to make a point about exactly one principle. In an argument by analogy, you don’t “win” by finding the generally closest analogy. The general proximity of the analogy to the real situation has no logical effect on the argument. Rather, the analogy is an intuition pump to make us think about some principle which also applies to the original situation. The connection is the principle, not the general similarity. I don’t know why this is so hard for people to understand.
But then, I also don’t understand how people can justify to themselves the slaughter in two weeks of 900+ people, including 200+ children, in retaliation for rockets that have killed 19 in seven years. I suppose it’s just racism, fundamentally, but the irrationalities of the wingnut mind are often a mystery to me.
January 13th, 2009 at 8:30 am
Re Don Williams
The reason so many Jews fled to the Muslim world was that they were kicked out of Spain in 1492.
January 13th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Tim:
That is why Moynihan shot you down for the bicycle analogy. The differences in principle between that and Hamas’s rocket-lobbing are so numerous and so weighty that your parable is rendered useless. Don’t blame analogies in general for that sloppiness.
What do you think about the analogy with apartheid South Africa? I mean in the occupied (after the ‘67 war) West Bank, you have the new highways which the settlers can use but the Palestinians can’t. They’re relegated to old roads, and the regions where they live are being sytematically broken up into small, separate cantons via new Israeli settlements. I think if an unbiased alien came from a different galaxy, it would see an analogy with apartheid South Africa.
It’s been interesting to watch Reason deal with the breakdown of the American free-market system. I don’t think they’ve done a very good job, spending their time taking pot shots at liberal bloggers, who are in reality just the messenger. One shouldn’t blame the messenger, even if they can get a little snarky.
January 16th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
I find it funny that someone went through great lengths to compare jewish (or rather anyone who is even a quarter-jewish) nobel-prize winners, with muslim nobel-prize winners who are then asterisked for things. Several people in the Jewish column of nobel peace winners are arguably terrorists…
also, the estimation for number of jews in the world is such a lowball. Under the definition used, 2/3rds of the jewish nobel prize winners wouldn’t count, or if you use the standards for nobel prize winners to be jewish, then you’d have to revise your figures for world jewry up to 50 million maybe.
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