=jplt18 13 Jun '04 -- 26 sIvaN If I understand this morning's radio news: The Sharon goverment, continuing the Momentum of the Peace Process, will, in its ongoing attempt to please everyone, build a security fence next to the West Bank town of Ariel, but will not attatch either end of it. ------------------------------------------------------------------ 13 Jun '04 -- Re: JP 13 Jun '04 (Medad/Pollack) Apparently Orly Vilnai-Federbush was forced out of IBA Channel 1 News for defending the poor against the bureaucratic callousness in the administration of legislated public assistance entitlements by the present government's Treasury department. That is a matter of systemic media bias; apparently the Treasury Department implicitly threatened IBA Funding, and the IBA head caved in. It is suprising that Medad & Pollack, distinguished for critiques of anti-Israel media bias, should here "blame the victim". And it's a pity that, lacking justification, they should try to do so with an off-the-shelf media-bias__mix of tendentious selectivity, picayune instances, and sophistic contrived convoluted reasoning. Jabotinsky was a quaint old duck; it's odd that his realization that Israel should exist behind secure borders (the Tigris and Nile might do) should be conjoined to the sort of sophmoric capitalist romanticism held only by Calvin Coolidge, Ronnie Reagan, Ayn Rayn Fan Clubs, our mecurial Minister of the Treasury, and the present editorial elite of the Jerusalem Post. ================================================================= Sent JP 13 Jun '04 Sharon has offered the Jews in Gaza 1/3 of a million dollars per family to leave now -- assuming, of course, that the Knesset eventually approves and appropriates. And that Netanyahu eventually disburses. Sounds like the ultimate post-dated cheque. ================================================================ YUCKY GIRLS Occasionally the Jerusalem Post yields to sophmoric sexism. In the good old days, when it took more than 15 minutes to read, the Post pushed ladies' totebags with a properly unprintable much less unwearable slogan. Nowadays a practically captive readership is exposed to "Mark Steyn"'s recent slag of an impoverished young woman from West Virginia who had dreamt of becoming a meteorologist but was ruined by the moral turpitude of the Bush Jr. Administration; and a snide headline to Medad & Pollocks's attempt to trash a woman journalist who exposed the callousness of Netanyahu's Ministry of the Treasury. ================================================================== How about everybody from Gaza moves onto Sycamore Ranch? =============================================================== Sent JP Monday 14 Jun '04 THE ONLY PLAUSIBLE EXPLANATION: On Wednesday Mini Mazuz is expected to conclude that there is insufficient evidence to accuse Sharon of accepting a bribe. And on Thursday the Prime Minister will announce that, in accord with Likud policy, we are unilaterally annexing Jordan. ================================================================= Re: JP Letters 13 Jun '04 (Steckbeck) WHICH MALLS? In recent years I have spent even less time in Tel Aviv. Still, I was intriguied that a reader from Tel Aviv urges that "we ban public nudity ... from local shopping malls." ================================================================ It seems that one might say of Israel's security service and anti- terrorist forces, as Churchill said of the RAF: "Never have so many owed so much to so few." ================================================================== Re: HaAretz 15 Jun '04 (Gorali) The question is not possibility, but plausibility. Alernatives are always logically possible, if not plausible. A person is convicted if he is found guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt". Gorali, with less than sophmoric reasoning, writes: "The dilemma(!) ... derives from the diffrence between human logic and the logic of criminal law." ---------------- First of all: a dilemma it ain't. Ryle took the term 'dilemma' to characterize the (apparent) paradoxes of empiricist epistemology: conclusions of apparently sound reasoning based on obvious truths (the Euclidean model of philosophyy), which stand in contradiction to common sense. (Not merely that they affront common sense; they stand as its opposite.) Incidentally, a paradox has the form 'p if_and_only_if not_p' -- a self-contradictory bi-conditional. The paradigm is 'This statement is false'. (Or more colorfully: The Cretan who says all Cretans are liars; or the barber who shaves every man who does not shave himself. Theres's also one about whether the number of indenumerable numbers is itself denumerable, or some such; but I forget how it goes.) A formal paradox stands, it cannot be resolved, except by an ad- hoc stipulation that it is illegitimate -- Russel's theory of types, which attempts to prohibit self-reference. An 'informal paradox' is merely a Hegelian dialectic contradiction -- the juxtaposition of thesis and antithhesis, which contradiction is to serve as a stimulus for finding and/or articulating a synthesis' which will resolve that contradiction. --------------- But this is the fallibilist fallacy, which might be put: if anything can go wrong, it will. It is the philosophic reflection of a psychologic refusal to act in a world of inevitable uncertainty. So it is aborted development; an adolescent temper tantrum; Achilles in his tent. Why should "criminal law" diverge from "human logic"; it is not a rich man's vice, but a matter of live and death, freedom and slavery, a harmonious or a chaotic society. Criminal law should reflect the best of human logic; not its degeneration into sophism. On the face of it, this was blatantly bribery. Sharon's son was paid at least 3/4 of a million, maybe much more. The money was deposited into the account of the "ranch" that Sharon owns and lives on. There was practically no pretense that this payment was for services rendered. It was paid in advance. It is not even clear what work Sharon's kid did, nor where he did it; except at the family breakfast table. A high-class hooker would be more discrete. It does not fit even into the categories of corrupt business payoffs. It was not an hourly fee (like a lawyer's preposterous charges), not yearly salary (like a mutual fund manager's), nor a bonus for extraordinary sales commissions earned for the firm, nor a "golden parachute", nor stock option boondoggle. In the USA Enron executives are sitting in jail for less. Hannah Krim (HaAretz 16 Jun '04) makes it clear that in fact the case against Sharon is much stronger than had, as far as I know, been hitherto generally reported. As HaAretz makes quite clear, Sharon's personal financial if not political corruption -- the former at least apparently nothing new (and the later consistent only with his Yamit episode) -- is overshadowed by the institutional corruption of the Attorney General's office. As HaAretz notes, the State Prosecutor's office must be independent, analagous to the USA's episodic special investigators. If the Attorney General continues to serve as legal counsel to the Prime Minister, and/or to other government officials, he cannot without a conflict of interest also hold authority over the State Prosecutor's office. "Attorney General Menachem Mazuz cannot base his decison on the fact that many in the public and the media do not believe Sharon if there is a chance that three judges will believe him." To which the counter-point is: Why not. But the journalist's phrasing here has enough red herrings to feed my cats until lunchtime: A decision to indict is not based upon public opinion (as, ostensibly, the decision to expel Jews from Gaza was to have been) nor upon the predominant 'conventional wisdom', a sort of scented smoke-screen, like the slowly-building emanations of a garbage dump, put forth by the media to enfold all the citzenry except its elite in one of Plato's shared "myths of the marketplace" (agora, shuk). A decision to indict is supposedly based upon the available information. And there is always a chance of anything. Three judges could sprout wings and fly off to Notre Dame of Paris to pose as gargoyles; but it ain't all that likely. So again: this is the fallibilist fallacy: that since there is always a possibility that something will go wrong, one should never do anything. Taken seriously, rather than sophistically, it is of course a psychopathologic state. NOr should there be any reason to suppose that Judges will be less reasonable than the public, or even than the media. Once again: indictment is not trial. Indictement is based upon criteria for a reasonable hypothesis; trial is based upon evidence sufficiently strong to justify conviction and punitive measures. Criteria for conviction are (in principle) made extremely strong, to ensure that no innocent person will be incarcerated, even if some guilty persons go free. Gorali: "If the case is closed, it will be on the basis that the explanations -- even if they do not seem plausible -- are possible. That is the beauty and that is the weakness of criminal law." But it's neither; it's merely the ugliness and weakness of the present AG. And if criminal law was applied in this way, no-one could ever be indicted. Again: anything is always possible; just ask Lazarus. But human society, eg undertakers, run on the basis of realworld plausiblity, not fantasied possiblity. As for the question of a principal knowing what a cutout is doing; there should be no lack of cases and precedents in law to establish criteria for that; or rather, such criteria musst surely have been established. It is disingenuous of the AG to pretend that we must re-invent that wheel. Again, this comes down to the dispute of the 'synthetic' Wittgenstein approach -- which, as needed to resolve a philosophic pseudo-problem (here we might phrase it: "how can the right hand (the principal, here Sharon) ever know what the left hand (the secondary, here, Sharon's son) is doing." -- edduces criteria from examining actual and responsibly imagined possible cases -- "my wife goes out each evening, and comes back late, usually with a new ring; do I have any grounds for supicion?" (after deMaupassant) -- vs. the sort of -- well, really atomistic, even if one is tempted to term it 'analytic' -- approach associated with empiricist epistemology. "If there was evidence in the file indicating Gilad told his father than we was getting the money for nothing, an indictemnt wojuld be served. But there is no evidence taht nails down Ariel Sharon's knowledge and awareness of the apparently corrupt nature of the payment." Tendentiousness sir facilitates the publication of drivel. OK: In the simplest case, I know that the cat is on the mat if someone tells me, 'Hey Mac, the cat is on the mat.' But in the general case, one can be told something without words ("And you sense taht things are not as they were / when foreplay is four- handed solitaire" (sa, Hamburg '91)). And so, one can be presumed to have known something, under certain particular conditions, even if one has not been told so. This article by Gorali is interesting only because conceptually it's just about as bad as logically possible. ================================================================= Sent JP 17 Jun '04 Israel should unite behind Sharon, and push. =============================================================== Russians should not be criticized for eating pork with vodka shots; a good layer of fat and a hit of instant heat can save one's life in a Siberian winter. But in an Israeli summer, yogurt and iced lemonade are more appropriate. ================================================================ Reportedly, the government will order only a limited number of lifeguards back for work in order "to 'balance' the need to protect batehrs and the right of the lifeguards to strike." (HaAretz English 21 Jun '04). If so, the government should also balance the right of sharks to freedom of movement. A government is obligated to do its best to protect the lives of its inhabitants, especially in public spaces. An employee has the right to strike. But protecting life is more than a job; it is also a trust. And one does not have the right to disregard a trust. ================================================================ The Post editorial of 20 June '04 is specious. Mazuz did not "demolish floor by floor the case Arbel built". Mazuz did not discover new evidence, nor introduce new legal reasoning. As Sarid has pointed out, he merely adjudicated from the perspective of a defense attorney, It is not necessarily a criticism of the State Prosecutor's Office that "it has had scant success in secuirng convcitions against a long list of public figures". A justified indictment can be a detterent to political corruption; and a quashed indictment may be further evidence of it. =================================================================