Once again, an argument has been started in the TPM Cafe Reader Posts section over a post from a relatively unknown contributor shooting to the top of the Recommended Posts list.  I don't know what is responsible for these strange leaps to the top of the list. Perhaps some of these writers have signed up with publicists or blog promoters who employ spamming and recommendation techniques that the authors themselves might not realize are being employed on their behalf. On the other hand, there are many, many users at TPM Cafe, and most of them don't post here frequently, if ever, or follow the dominant cliques around. So maybe they comprise a silent majority whose tastes, and occasional presses of the "recommend" button, diverge from those of the more prominent regulars.

Anyway, the relatively few cases of a random post here or there rising to the top of the Recommended Posts list through recommendations-gaming, if that's what it is, are <i>not at all</i> the most pressing problem with the Reader Posts section. Most of the posts that rise to the top at this site are instead from a relatively small clique of posters who are all apparently either unemployed or retired, who have formed a self-selected community of group huggers, and who appear to have mountains of time to spend hanging out here and recommending each other's posts reflexively, no matter how trivial, inconsequential, mawkish or self-indulgent the posts might be. The site is now cluttered with these soft, rambling and introspective finger-paintings and exercises in mutual flattery and banal sentimentality.  And the recommendations system offers no way to discourage these kinds of posts in a gentle way, and that unfortunately necessitates a more overtly critical post such as this one.

TPM Cafe's reader post section is now very word-rich but information-poor. People whose chief concern is the exchange of information and informed debate on public policy questions, and who might hope to find serious contributions here from well-informed people, are now faced with a mountain of clutter. The level of policy discussion is even worse than what one finds on the cable news, and dramatically lower than what one finds in the other, hypocritically despised print and broadcast sources of the MSM.

In addition to the indiscriminate recommending of everything written by their friends, the members of the maudlin ruling clique stuff the comments sections with long stings of fatuous "way to go!"'s and "great jobs!"'s of the kind mothers typically hand out to their infant children when the latter make a nice poo-poo in the potty chair. They decline to engage in any serious critical examination of the content whatsoever. I guess critical thinking and vigorous intellectual challenge are considered too mean and threatening to be tolerated. When criticism does occur, it generally occasions little but hypersensitive temper-tantrums and flaming. I have personally sometimes refrained from posting things here because I can no longer stand to be treated like a child with silly little pats on the back.

The posts on political issues that prove most popular generally steer clear of informed discussion of policy debates, and are instead repetitive meta-discussions on such immortal themes as:

Why are Republicans so stupid and crazy when they talk about so-and-so?

Glenn Beck is crazy.

Michael Savage is crazy.

Republicans make me depressed.

Bernie Madoff is evil and still in jail.

Follow this link to read this crazy Republican saying stupid and scary things!

I watch FOX all the time and then come here to talk about how crazy they are.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Republicans are a minority but they dominate my life.

My daddy was a Republican but I still love him.

Simultaneously wallowing in and complaining about ignorant Republican rants helps me feel better about how little I know and how intellectually lazy I am.

Why do some of these other posters say so many things I disagree with? The trolls are harshing my buzz!

... and other topics of this exhausted and well-mined genre. They typically offer little to the substantive part of the national discussion of policy.

For many months this dumbing-down, sentimentalization and debasement of the discussion in the reader section has marginalized more serious discussion on the site, discouraged the vigorous exercise of critical thinking, and created a culture of indulgence and emotionalism that is something like a cross between a kindergarten class, a support group and a lonely hearts internet chat room. But these watery and moonstruck weepers stamp their little feet tyrannically and squawk the loudest when some interloper barges in on their territory and rises to the top of the recommended list without their permission.

It's not that there aren't many smart and interesting people contributing to the Cafe on occasion.  But the reigning culture of sentiment, confession, raillery and subjectivity discourages them from producing their best stuff.   Why do a few days worth of homework, get one's facts and numbers and arguments straight, and then post a sober, no-nonsense post on regulatory reform of the financial industry, or trade relations with China, or the structure of the defense budget, or tax policy as it relates to health care, or military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only to see that kind of content sink quickly to the bottom?  Since such posts are rarely rewarded by the people who rule the roost, and who are in love with the recommend button and each other, many of the best thinkers here probably ask, "Why bother?"

I am dismayed that the management has implemented neglectful policies that have allowed the site to degenerate in this embarrassing fashion, and have prevented it from achieving anything close to the public service potential it once appeared to have. TPM Cafe has become part of the problem, not part of the solution. It is filled with self-indulgent writers spinning their wheels without going anywhere, complaining about their enemies' ignorance without contributing anything of substance themselves, and getting lost in unproductive and hyper-reflexive navel gazing. TPM Cafe's readers section has lately contributed very little of substance to the advancement of progress and genuine understanding in health care policy, financial regulation policy, national security policy, education policy, budget policy, industrial policy, energy policy or other policy areas. If the substance is there, it is buried and hard to find, like a good book buried beneath a pile of tchotchkes and gee-gaws at a yard sale. There are a few writers on the left-hand side of the screen who are contributing real knowledge and advancing understanding of hard issues, but the right-hand side of the screen is a can't-do ghetto of mopey whiners and ill-informed ranters, and the two halves are working against each other: one half tries to smarten people up and empower them with knowledge, the other half works to dumb them down and cripple them with indulgent encouragement of weakness and self-preoccupation.

Now I know some people must think I am terribly mean and arrogant to say these things.  Maybe I am mean and maybe I am arrogant, and maybe I am all alone in my perceptions. But I suspect not. I also suspect that many others who visit this site think the same things, but are reluctant to challenge the status quo of majority-approved bed-wetting and "I LOVE you man!" stroking and fondling.  Since the writers in the back-patting clique present themselves as a bunch of sensitive and depressed sad sacks, maybe others are afraid to criticize them lest they send these writers off into a spiral of over-drinking, over-eating or binge blubbering. Yet I have a feeling that if management employed a different sort of system for recommending, discouraging and editorially approving posts, they might find that there is a large untapped audience of people craving knowledge and eager to discuss policy nuts and bolts at a higher level. The editorial tolerance for the ascendancy of bawling esteem-cravers and their self-indulgent antics is disempowering and enfeebling the "progressive" movement - at least the corner of it that appears here.

Frankly, I believe this reckless lack of editorial direction by the TPM management is a cynical attempt to attract eyeballs to the advertising on the site by permitting whatever forms of mutually titillating gibberish the readers want to distract each other with.  The sell-out is apparent all over.  Personally, I find TPM Café to have the slowest page-load of any site I visit on the internet, <i>bar none</i>, and I suspect that's mainly due to the barrage of flashing, popping and scrolling advertising crap one has to swim through to visit this site.

The upshot is an irresponsible failure of civic and public responsibility.  Josh and company should be truly ashamed of what they have done here, whether the sad outcome is a result of sins of commission or omission.  I understand that Josh actually has a PhD in history from Brown University. How can he associate himself with this rot?  Like it or not, Josh is now Citizen Marshall, and he has a civic responsibility to use the influence he has acquired to raise the level of public discourse, not pimp for infotainment and mediocrity.

If I'm wrong, let me have it.  But if you agree with me, please speak up in support.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is approximately a century old.   What does it mean to view this conflict objectively?  What constitutes a balanced perspective on what is happening in the land of which Great Britain took paternal charge under the Palestine Mandate, and which now contains the state of Israel and its ever-expanding colonies?

One may choose to focus on the many battles in this war, and on the conduct of the different sides and parties in the battles.  On both sides, we have seen many clear violations of norms regarding the acceptable use of force and legitimate behavior in the conduct of war, norms on which both international legal canons and the moral traditions of most nations would concur.  We all know how to evoke the litanies of atrocious acts that have occurred by the hands of both Israelis and Palestinians, and their various sponsors, over the long decades of the conflict.

But what must not be missed in these rehearsals of the many wrongs pertaining to the battles comprising the conflict over Palestine is the broad nature of the conflict itself, the whole of which the battles are parts, and which is by no means a tale of tragic and counterbalanced moral parity.  When we step back several lengths from the up-close contemplation of the morally gnarled and ambiguous instances, and contemplate in broad generality the sweep of the entire conflict, we see a smooth and unambiguous progress of blatant, aggressive dispossession.

On one side you have a people who are taking the land upon which others have long lived, plied their livelihoods and made their homes; on the other side you have the people who are fighting, with increasing desperation and little prospect of ultimate success, to prevent that land and those possessions from being taken from them.  This is not ambiguous: it is manifest criminality confronted with manifest resistance to criminality.  We see across the century a long violent tidal movement that has scoured homes, farms, villages, and people from the land, and even abraded away the centuries-old names of places, and deposited in the place of what once existed an invading people and their works, and a new language with new names.   The movement is not some subtle and natural effect of gradual migrations and political evolution.  The conquest is forceful.  It has been carried out deliberately by it perpetrators and suffered unwillingly and with resistance by its victims.

The movement to take this land was begun long ago, by 19th-century European nationalists living in distant European cantons, most of whom had never once stepped foot upon the land in question, yet who dreamt strange, chauvinistic fantasies of redeeming the land of their dreamscape from its presumed captivity.  The dreamers were utterly neglectful and often contemptuous of the real inhabitants of the real land.  Their dream was given unfortunate life by European imperial powers whose habituated, racist arrogance made them feel entirely at liberty to promise and deliver land which did not belong to them to other people to whom the land also didn't belong.  From the beginning the project was concocted of a mixture of bigoted presumption and mercenary reasons of state, sprinkled with daubs of irrational religious legends and fanaticism, or with metaphysically dreamy secular political doctrines that were the superstitious descendants of the older religious doctrines.

Eventually the barbarity of the Nazi holocaust, and the worthy instinct among the people of the western powers to atone for their collective guilt in that holocaust, gave to the project of conquest and colonialism in Palestine the radiant allure of a noble cause.   But it is barely necessary now to point out how morally dubious and comically unsatisfactory were the means taken for the atonement.   For one person to make amends for his crimes against a second person by awarding damages out of the property of a third person is transparently perverse.

This chauvinistic movement of conquest has been spectacularly successful, although it required the mid-century handoff from one western imperial power to another, and the conquest continues to this day, dunam by dunam, with each new Israeli settler domicile erected on the West Bank and with each act of military intimidation, subjugation and humiliation.  The conquest has been accomplished predominantly through the use of sheer force, with the occasional and timely diplomatic intervention of those same western imperial powers.  At each stage in the conflict, the colonial settlers now known as Israelis have worked energetically, through governments of the left and the right, in peace and in war, to fill the foreground of debate with extensive and diversionary talk: with endless excuses, rationalizations, importunings, complaints, sophistries, fulminations, menaces, pulings and bellyaches, while in the background they worked incessantly to press, push, kick, bomb and shoot the Palestinian Arabs off the lands still coveted by Israelis.   The bad faith has been rank and impenetrable.   It is hard to summon any more patience for this behavior, or to care any longer about how criticism will be received by Israelis.  Anyone who has paid attention to the conflict for any length of time is already quite aware of the fact that Israelis will certainly and always continue to regard both the claim that they are the aggressors in the long war, and the disposition to deliver more criticism to the aggressors than to those aggressed against, as evidence of gross unfairness.  So, alas, responding intelligently to the conflict cannot depend on being overly-concerned to frame messages that are appealing to Israelis.

There have been unjust, aggressive and brutal movements all over the world during the past century, some substantially more brutal than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and yes, Americans manage to ignore most of them.  But Americans can't ignore this conflict because they are deeply implicated in it.  Unlike almost all of those other wars of aggression, America contains many people today who send money, resources and people to Israel to fuel the conflict and drive the ongoing aggressive seizure of land   Some Americans agitate incessantly on behalf of the aggressive party in the conflict, and have very successfully enlisted the American government as an ally in the conquest, to the extent that neither Americans nor others around the world can any longer tell where American action ends and Israeli action begins.  As a result, the security of all Americans has been put at extreme hazard.  There are many conceivable and plausible contingencies that, should they occur, might easily spark the expansion of the conflict beyond Israel and Palestine.  Such an expansion would likely draw the United States into a major war in a vital region, and draw in others as well.  There is a depressing sense of inevitability hanging over America's obsessive and confused march toward the edge of  the precipice.  Many Americans will lose their lives though a fatally misguided alliance and sentimental attachment to a rogue, expansionist state, the bastard offspring of racist colonialism of the past and the vestigial organ of racist colonialism in the present.

The temptation to leap into the Iranian fray with both feet must be great.  But as president, Obama has to keep his eyes on the long-term security interests of the American people, and is not permitted the luxury of issuing idle statements of support just because they feel good.  Obama has a complex set of interrelated challenges on his Middle East agenda, and needs to remain focused on the ultimate goals, even if that means exercising frustrating restraint at this juncture.  His willingness to endure the incoming taunts and attacks from irresponsible Republicans is brave, and he deserves credit for it.

What some of the Republicans are doing with this issue is beneath contempt.  They are playing games with the lives of Iranians and the lives of Americans, for the sake of their own short-term political fortunes.

And the more radical Republican lovers of violence and creative destruction are doing something even worse: going for a chaotic Persian train wreck, by means of which they can maneuver Obama into an unavoidable military intervention and escalation in the region.  That's what they do.  They engineered an Iraq train wreck to tie the US military into the Middle East for good, and a fiscal and financial train wreck to sink what was left of the US social welfare system.  But right now they are threatening the very lives and security of the next generation of Americans.   They need to be stopped.

I firmly believe President Obama is looking out for the security of me and my family, and I'm grateful to him for it.   This is the job he was elected to do.

As I said in my comment, I appreciate the thought and earnest moral searching that went into Thera's piece. But I would like to play a few dissonant notes.

Thera says we are experiencing "a meltdown precipitated by the deceit and selfishness and greed of unscrupulous financiers, whose only allegiance was to the almighty dollar and their cronies in crime." This puts far too much emphasis, I believe, on the individual moral failures of certain capitalists, and not enough on the structural problems, legal inadequacies and institutional deformities of the American capitalist order. So long as we stay focused on the trees of the alleged moral depravity of individuals, and respond on that individual plane, whether with outrage or compassion, to the moral or spiritual failure of other individuals, we will miss the social forest. The chief problem is not immoral or amoral individuals. Rather, we have a legal-economic system in the United States that is bound to produce the kinds of outcomes we are seeing now.

Thera's analysis suggests that our chief response to the challenge should be to work on the moral and spiritual improvement of individuals. This is the "bad apples" theory of social problems. It suggests we have a system of laws and institutions that are capable of working fine, and will advance humane values, so long as we have humane individuals manning the positions of this system. I don't believe that is the right diagnosis of the central problem we are facing. We have a bad system. That system hones and fashions the mores of the people who are constrained to work within it. It establishes the basic framework of rules and constraints, of incentives and norms, of what is required and what is permitted, and the outcomes we get are pretty much those that we should expect when ordinary human nature is combined with these flawed structural design features of the social and legal order. If we want better outcomes, we need to act politically to change that order.

I worry that the kind of psychological and spiritual discourse that Thera is engaging in, in response to a social problem like the one we face now, is another expression of Americans' extreme individualism, and consequent apolitical politics. In its own way, the discourse suggests "it's about me". It asks, what can I do to make myself a better person? But it's not about me. It's about us, collectively. The chief question is what can we do, working collectively, to improve the social order.

I don't believe the focus on individual spiritual improvement is either practical, or would achieve the desired results. That's because you can stuff self-actualized Ericksonian saints in the mouths at one end at the corporate system, in their personnel offices, and after passing through the goose of the corporate-based system, those saints are going to wind up in a few years time at the other end, hustling and scamming and running pyramid schemes. The system we have created is a bundle of inherently competitive and anti-social incentive structures, and it produces people who are driven by those incentives.

We can't wait for a religious revolution, or a new Great Awakening. We can't wait for everyone to become self-actualized or to achieve enlightenment, or to experience their truest inward vision. We need politics and wide-ranging social reform.