Weekly Grounding #113
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“What the World Gets Wrong About Israel”
This revealing New York Times op-ed by Blue and White party chairman and former Israeli defense minister, Benny Gantz, illustrates how a divided Israel has united around the indefinite occupation of Palestine: “There are deep political divisions and disagreements in Israel. I myself have been a vocal critic of Mr. [Benjamin] Netanyahu. But the nation’s core security interests are not partisan property. Today more than ever, they are anchored by a national consensus that is rooted in the hard realities of our region. Opposition to the recognition of Palestinian statehood stands at the heart of that consensus. Any path forward for broader Palestinian civil autonomy must first incorporate a proven long-term track record of accountable governance, comprehensive de-radicalization reforms and a successful crackdown on terror elements targeting Israelis.”
Gantz continues: “The real question is whether the international community will respect the overwhelming consensus, a declaration passed last year by 99 of 120 members of the Knesset in a democracy proclaiming that ‘Israel will continue to oppose unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State,’ and that ‘such action following Oct. 7 would be an unprecedented rewarding of terror and prevent any future peace arrangement.’”
“After Oct. 7, it was not politics that shaped Israel’s military response. It was necessity,” Gantz argues. Seeking to outdo Netanyahu’s warmongering, Gantz boasts that “Despite Mr. Netanyahu’s hesitation, I pressed for an immediate ground operation in Gaza. I called for a stronger and faster ground offensive in Rafah despite the international pressure. I called for a powerful response on Iranian soil following the first Iranian attack on April 13, 2024, while Mr. Netanyahu opted for a more restrained symbolic response. And still today, I fully support retaining an Israeli military presence in Gaza long term to prevent Hamas from ever regrouping by maintaining a military presence on the entire Gaza perimeter…On the eastern front, Israel must prepare to assume formal control over the strategic Jordan Valley in the West Bank, which it has controlled since 1967, in order to prevent smuggling into Palestinian territories and terror infiltration into Israel. These are not political positions. They are, in my view, security requirements to prevent the next Oct. 7.”
“How Israel is Losing America”
In light of Israel’s disregard for any limits on its belligerence, The Economist reports that “As Israel becomes isolated over its war in Gaza, it depends increasingly on America. During the current UN General Assembly old friends, including Australia, Britain, Canada and France, will recognise a Palestinian state, even as Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank makes real statehood less likely. America is all that stands between Israel and a pariah status that would have dire implications for its diplomatic, legal and military security.”
“For all Mr Netanyahu’s blithe assurances that relations with America are perfectly solid, they are not. The prime minister has riled the Trump administration and is ignoring cracks deep within the foundations of the alliance. Democratic voters have long been drifting away from America’s most indulged ally. Republican voters are increasingly losing faith, too. A sudden loss of popular American support would be a catastrophe for Israel—a small country of 10m people in a dangerous and hostile neighbourhood.”
The article reports that “The polling in America is startling. The share of Americans who back Israel over the Palestinians is at a 25-year low. In 2022, 42% of American adults held an unfavourable view of Israel; now 53% do. A recent YouGov/Economist poll finds that 43% of Americans believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In the past three years unfavourable views of Israel among Democrats over 50 rose by 23 percentage points. Among Republicans under 50, support is evenly divided, compared with 63% for Israel in 2022. Between 2018 and 2021 the share of evangelicals under the age of 30 who backed Israelis over Palestinians plunged from 69% to 34%. Pollsters think that shift has endured.”
The piece concludes by noting that “Long-run shifts in public opinion are more dangerous than rows between governments. Although they are slow to gather momentum, they are hard to reverse. When voters change their minds, political taboos can suddenly crumble. Even today, some Israeli analysts fear that Joe Biden will be the last instinctively Zionist American president…This week Mr Netanyahu talked of Israel as a ‘super-Sparta,’ ready to stand alone. As Israel fights on in Gaza and attacks Arab capitals at will, it is betting that military domination over the Middle East will make it more secure. That muscle-bound, autarkic vision is a tragic misconception. It could eventually drive away its irreplaceable protector. For Israel, no strategic blunder could be more dangerous.”
“Notes From No Man’s Land”
In a remarkable essay at Sublation Magazine, a community college professor writes that “No Man’s Land is the American community college in the twenty first century.” She argues that “In the late twentieth century, a careerist dogma took over higher ed, pushing out a competing vision which framed public colleges and universities as ‘one piece of a wider set of social and economic rights necessary for full citizenship’ and general human flourishing. This revision dovetailed with shifting employment horizons brought on by the late 1970s post-industrial economy. Since then, public policy and popular dialogue has framed higher ed institutions as employment agencies. Community college students, perhaps more than other college students, have taken this transactional approach to heart. They do things to get them done and move on—to get the credit, to get the credential, to transfer to another college, where they will strive to get the credit, get the credential, get the degree, to get the job.”
“With the economy presenting unsure prospects for many, higher ed is floating,” the essay argues. “It has no cultural bedrock or firm political standing. There is little social respect for the life of the mind, for learning as a useful and necessary human endeavor, for learning as an end itself. Teachers, the stewards of these values, are at once mawkishly adored and acidly disdained. There is no simple pedagogic or technocratic fix for this turn. When I make such arguments to fellow faculty, some nod in agreement, but think this commentary is abstract and not useful.”
Of two students, she writes that “My conversations with Freddie and Oliver have crystalized something I knew but never fully articulated. They and most of their classmates are part of the working and lower middle class that the New Left abandoned and that the post-sixties Left has ignored ever since. They are not the global subaltern heroically resisting neo-colonial oppression. They are not the mass incarcerated, the deported (although sometimes they are), or the homeless. They are not the bleeding edge of society. They are often white, although increasingly less so. Their parents may own a home, although increasingly less so. Their families are not on welfare, although sometimes they are. Before college, as suburban high schoolers, they slogged through insipid educations keeping themselves entertained with Tik Tok, video games, sports, work, and friends. They do not see themselves as working class, because no one says they are. America says nothing about them, because they, their families, and the community colleges they attend are invisible. While the (so-called) Left and Liberals protest the arrest and detainment of Columbia U activist Mahmoud Khalil, Freddie anxiously waits for his mother, his brother, and he to be deported. And while the (so-called) Left and Liberals stew over the Trump administration’s attack on Harvard, Oliver worries that funding for public archives and the jobs that go with them may vanish. ‘I’m fucked,’ he has decided.”
“Tracing the History of India’s Universities”
Turning to higher education in India, Tanika Sarkar reviews a recent book by Debaditya Bhattacharya’s for The Wire: “The theme of Debaditya Bhattacharya’s book The Indian University: A Critical History intrigued me: truly, we may spend a lifetime teaching at universities, and we may have a fair idea about our own institutional spaces. But we rarely—if at all—reflect on what the concept of the university implies, what it has been and what it can become, as a specific site of learning.”
“The introductory chapter begins with Rabindranath Tagore’s speech on the swadeshi idea of the ‘National University,’” Sarkar writes. “As Bhattacharya reminds us, Tagore opposed colonial pedagogy not because it originated in a foreign context, but because it lacked organic connections with the material lifeworld and socio-cultural experiences of the Indian ‘public’ that it sought to educate. Bhattacharya clarifies and extends the concept of ‘publicness’ of education which should be sustained by, and also sustain, the immediate local environment: a cooperative model, co-partnered by the public and the university.”
She continues: “We commonly define ‘publicness’ in opposition to private investment: state-funded universities as against private ones, which come out of corporate funding and are, ultimately, dependent on corporate directives and interests. Our postcolonial public universities, like their colonial predecessors, were funded by the state. But they did not significantly intrude upon the institutions’ pedagogical and curricular arrangements for many decades after independence. Those matters were, by and large, left to the decisions of the individual academic communities. By and large, too, at least some universities did admit subaltern social segments, who received higher education—sometimes of excellent quality—at affordable costs. Jawaharlal Nehru University’s admission policy used to be remarkably inclusive; in 2017-18, I found many working class students were studying at the postgraduate levels at Delhi University. Of course, gross caste inequality and inequality among religious communities remained dominant; but the fractures, however small, cannot be forgotten.”
“Against Treating Chatbots as Conscious”
writes that “A couple people I know have lost their minds thanks to AI. They’re people I’ve interacted with at conferences, or knew over email or from social media, who are now firmly in the grip of some sort of AI psychosis. As in they send me crazy stuff. Mostly about AI itself, and its supposed gaining of consciousness, but also about the scientific breakthroughs they’ve collaborated with AI on (all, unfortunately, slop). In my experience, the median profile for developing this sort of AI psychosis is, to put it bluntly, a man (again, the median profile here) who considers himself a ‘temporarily embarrassed’ intellectual. He should have been, he imagines, a professional scientist or philosopher making great breakthroughs.”Hoel goes on to argue that, ““while AIs as boyfriends, AIs as girlfriends, AIs as guides and therapists, or AIs as a partner in the next great scientific breakthrough, etc., might not automatically and definitionally fall under the category of ‘AI psychosis’ (or whatever broader umbrella term takes its place) they certainly cluster uncomfortably close. If a chunk of the financial backbone for these companies is a supportive and helpful and friendly and romantic chat window, then it helps the companies out like hell if there’s a widespread belief that the thing chatting with you through that window is possibly conscious. Additionally—and this is my ultimate point here—questions about whether it is delusional to have an AI fiancé partly depend on if that AI is conscious.”
Hoel contends that AI is not conscious and militates against so-called “exit rights” for Chatbots from conversations with users: “Even ceding that LLMs are having experiences, and even ceding that they are having experiences about these conversations, it’s also likely that ‘conversation-based pain’ doesn’t represent very vivid qualia (conscious experience). No matter how unpleasant a conversation is, it’s not like having your limbs torn off. When we humans get exposed to conversation-based pain (e.g., being seated next to the boring uncle at Thanksgiving) a lot of that pain is expressed as bodily discomforts and reactions (sinking down into your chair, fiddling with your gravy and mashed potatoes, becoming lethargic with loss of hope and tryptophan, being ‘filled with’ dread at who will break the silent chewing). But an AI can’t feel ‘sick to its stomach.’ I’m not denying there couldn’t be the qualia of purely abstract cognitive pain based on a truly terrible conversation experience, nor that LLMs might experience such a thing, I’m just doubtful such pain is, by itself, anywhere near dreadful enough that ‘exit rights’ for bad conversations not covered by terms of violations is a meaningful ethical gain.”
“Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?”
At Letters for a Post-Material Future,
writes that the “maxim ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,’ popularized by Carl Sagan, is one of the most frequently cited phrases in public debates surrounding science, religion, and philosophy. So-called ‘skeptics’ often resort to it, to quickly dismiss metaphysical speculations. When someone proposes ideas such as out-of-body or near-death experiences, PSI phenomena, or more philosophical speculations such as mind beyond the brain, the presence of a cosmic intelligence, or panpsychism, the standard response is almost automatic: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”Against Sagan’s maxim, Masi argues that “Sometimes (perhaps most of the time), science frames hypotheses, conjectures, intuitions, and sometimes wild speculations first, sees where they lead, and only later looks for ways to back them up with empirical data. Because what we believe, and especially feel and how we see, determines what we are looking for. Old assumptions that cling to an old paradigm can hold us back, while new assumptions allow us to look and eventually see further, even if they might be completely wrong. It is precisely because we fail to recognize how our assumptions, based on a subjective and personal inner feeling and perception of the world (or the lack thereof), drive our actions that we often put the horse before the cart. It is by this unscientific attitude that skeptics brand Sagan’s standard (of course, in the name of science), while some philosophers make claims about the structure and nature of the world that cross the boundaries between science and philosophy, and then pretend to be exempt from any scientific scrutiny (of course, in the name of philosophy). Both attitudes are at odds with the history of science and, to some degree, even with that of philosophy itself.”
“What we often overlook is how intuition—an inner feeling and a first-person approach to reality—can guide us in choosing our direction,” he continues. “Initially, we seek logical and empirical evidence, only later allowing ourselves to adopt alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and perceiving the world around us. However, taking the opposite approach has often been the key to progress. By changing our perspective and sometimes embracing non-rational viewpoints rooted in holistic understanding, we can advance further.”
Masi concludes: “The standard of requiring extraordinary evidence before considering extraordinary claims leads to stagnation. Progress often starts with a bias, belief system, or unconventional speculation that is ultimately rooted in our personal and subjective perceptions of reality. The divergences arise more often from our different ways of seeing and perceiving reality, rather than from our intellectual knowledge or the available empirical data. Acknowledging this can propel us forward, as long as we do not exempt ourselves from the burden of proof.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.