Blindingly obvious

   To anybody paying the slightest bit of attention, it is blindingly obvious that the only thing that the powers that be in the conservative movement care about is money for the rich.  Everything, and I mean everything, is just for show.  If guns reduced the amount of money the uber rich got, possession of a firearm would be a cardinal sin.  And it is clear that the rich believe in the money they can see, not the God that they cannot.  Once that key fact is understood, money for the rich, all the other nonsense can be seen for what it is, a distraction.  Code talk about freedom, immigrants and terrorism is merely flakka for the masses.

A little more imagination

Imagine you live a city of one hundred people.  A hundred years ago, some thirty percent of the workforce was involved in manufacturing while an equal number was involved in agricultural production.  Now, only 20% is in manufacturing and less than 5% are in agriculture.  In the meantime, the number in service industries has gone doubled to 75%.  The problem is that those who control industries involved in production of goods, in your town only one or two people, are collecting larger shares of the income while paying proportionately less salaries, can only buy so many haircuts and get so many car washes.  The only way to have a viable economy in your town is to redistribute wealth among all the citizens.

A little imagination

Imagine that you live in a beautiful mansion with an enormous garden in the back.  To the south of your mansion are a series of tenement slums.   You are now worried that the residents of those slums will break into your garden and steal the fruit from the trees.  Some residents may  become squatters in your garden or even in your house.  You have two options:  One, you could build a fence, hire security guards to protect the perimeter, and hire some more guards to find the squatters and throw them off your property.  The second option would be to improve the lot of those living in the tenements so that they will be content to stay in their own homes.  The second way is better because it is cheaper, safer, and more ethical.

Religion

All religions are Rorschach tests.   Mine, yours, or theirs, they all can say what it is you want it to say.  If you want your religion to say, "kill all unbelievers,"  it's there.  If you want it to say, "Love your neighbor,"  that's there, too.  The problem isn't the religion, it's the adherents.

Mediation and its problems

   Too many mediators value a resolution, any resolution, over a resolution that will be acceptable to all parties.  Thus the mediator will pressure the party he perceives to be weakest.  That may work in the short term,  but if the mediator is dealing with the same parties on a repeated basis it won't work quite so well.  The parties will quickly figure out that the most successful strategy is to be the most obstinate.  The mediator will then be faced with two parties who believe intransigence is the best policy.

Resolving Middle East conflicts

   The first problem of resolving conflicts is understanding what each party wants.  Having mediated divorce cases, I know that it is essential to find out what each party wants.  Too often parties will go through years of litigation without addressing the real issue:  What it is that they want.  In international relations, it is obvious that the first issue to be determined is what the parties want.  One problem is that what a party to a negotiation wants may be entirely different than what his constituents may want.  Lord Acton noted that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  The advantage to a democracy is that power is not absolute because those in power can be voted out of office.  As an aside, democracy is more than voting.  A democracy presumes a free society, for which we should apply the town square test.  When we look at trying to solve conflicts, the idea of simply appealing to the better nature of negotiators is silly.  We have to convince the negotiator that a resolution is in his best interest, not that it is in the best interest of those he is purportedly representing.
   Specifically, let us view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Abbas is currently worth north of 100 million dollars.  In a just society, his money would be taken and used for the benefit of the Palestinians. That, however, is not his goal.  If it was, he could distribute the money today.  To negotiate terms of peace the terms of which would entail an actually free and just society is not in his interest.  The same is true of Hamas, of Assad and of any other dictatorial kleptocracy, including ISIS.  

Different thinking

    Psychologist Martha Stout says that one in twenty five, or 4%, of all people are sociopaths.  Sociopaths are those people who simply don't have a conscience.  They completely lack empathy.  For those of us who are not sociopaths, the idea of seeing a baby, a child, or any other human being in pain and feel nothing is inconceivable.  One of the reasons con men can become successful is that it is hard for us to understand that not only can some can lie to us with a straight face, but they can do so without any feeling of remorse.  And that is the crux of the problem, we tend to think that other people think like us. When they don't, we become easier prey for them.
   The same is true of cultures.  In the west we believe in the Golden Mean as a means of compromise between two adversarial positions.   Compromise, giving something up to get something else, is seen as a good and righteous thing to do.  Conversely, much of the Arab and Persian world views negotiations as something to be won.  Rouhani, after the nuclear negotiations, announced that he had gotten everything that he wanted.  It is apparently important that he won the negotiations.  Ruth Benedict was a cultural anthropologist who helped the United States understand Japan during World War II.  One of her observations was that Japan was an honor/shame culture as opposed to the guilt culture of Western Civilization.  Shame is external, what others think of us, rather than internal, what we think of ourselves.  Guilt can be overcome by atonement, shame cannot.  Elderofziyon, a fervently pro-Israel blog, constantly says that Arab culture is also honor/shame.  The main symptom of that culture is the acceptance of honor killings, which eliminate the source of shame but which the West finds abhorrent.  Trying to negotiate with an culture which values honor above all is difficult because the goal is preservation of honor rather than conflict resolution.  I think rather than an honor/shame culture being the problem, it is the win/lose culture.  The result is the same, that is that negotiators have different goals, one being compromise and the other being winning, meaning negotiators are talking past each other.  Resolving military conflicts between nations that have different goals in the negotiations requires, at the least, that negotiators understand what the other side wants.

Thinking and not thinking

One of the problems with thinking these days is that many people don’t seem to know the difference between axioms, conclusions and hypotheses.  An axiom is a postulate that at least the proponent accepts as true.  The most famous axiom, of course, is “We hold these truths to be self-evident...”  Being self evident, they are not capable of argument.  A conclusion is a result derived by the use of logic predicated on the axiom.  A hypothesis is an assumption which can be proved or disproved by evidence or experimentation.  Too often, people believe that their axioms are conclusions.  For example, when one argues that America, Israel, Russia or Iran is good or bad, that statement isn’t a conclusion, it is most likely an axiom.  The correct way to analyze the issue would be to set forth, as an axiom, those qualities that make a country good or bad.  Step two would be set up a hypothesis that the country is good or bad.  Finally, evidence or logic would be used to reach a conclusion.  For example, one might believe, as an axiom,  that a good country is one in which there are three coffee shops for every one hundred citizens. He could then hypothesize that Russia is a good country.  He would then count people, count coffee shops and divide people by coffee shops and reach a conclusion.  Many of us posit axioms as conclusions and then cherry pick reasons for that axiom believing that we have reasoned to a conclusion.  The important thing is to know starting points from end points.