Cloudy Language Masks Cloudy Thinking
On the Krissian style of argument by obfuscation
Writing is hard. One of my aspirations is precision and transparency. Basically, open source my arguments. Ideally you know my premises, my logic, and my conclusions, and it’s set in such a transparent structure that you could plug-and-play other premises in and see how my conclusions change. That’s the aspiration at least. Practically, there’s an inescapable tension between writing precisely and writing compellingly or succinctly. You just have to make sure the sweet spot doesn’t stray too far.
pursues a different sweet spot, and he pursues it extremely well. His prose is endlessly and floridly compelling, but it can also be drowned in inscrutable fog. There is nothing wrong with this. Sometimes writing needs to capture sentiment, something much more ethereal than a coldly-machined instrument, and Kriss can capture this extremely well, particularly on the topic of Israel-Palestine. His comment to one of my earliest pieces paints a vivid picture of the “calculated unfreedom” Palestinians in the West Bank live under. I thought his essay Against the Brave was beautiful, and yet the prose probably contributed to many misunderstanding his thesis (some deliberately ‘misunderstood’).So there can be a downside. I’m not cut out for the hot takes salt mines because
beat me to the punch and wrote basically exactly what I was planning to write:Sam Kriss makes good art, not arguments. Keep reading him because he’s interesting. But the words he weaves are a curious and enjoyable lie, and a self-admitted one at that, and I’m now unsure if he really understands anything he talks about.
I had an exchange with Kriss recently (ages in Substack years) that perfectly captured the pitfalls. The basic context you need is that I restacked a
essay that encourages supposedly “pro-Palestinian” activists to stop harassing random Jews and to instead:If you are truly passionate about any sort of Palestinian cause, go take a look at groups like Realign for Palestine. Go work with them and focus on peace.
Despite my disagreements with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, founder of RfP, I wholeheartedly elevate his efforts as a Palestinian voice earnestly seeking peace; a position that garners him intense hatred from the far-left (don’t watch this, it’s soul-draining).
Kriss took umbrage with this suggestion, vaguely decrying RfP as a “slimy initiative from the atlantic council”. The Atlantic Council is basically if NATO had a think tank — very much in favor of liberal internationalism and transatlantic security cooperation & interventionism. Because the Atlantic Council funds RfP, it’s reasonable to presume that the latter would reflect the former’s ideology, but does it?
RfP openly outline their principles on their website — namely advocating for a two-state solution while disavowing destructive extremism. It should be a trivial exercise to point out any objections!
Kriss refused to answer plainly, offering up various analogies1 instead:
“rough equivalent of responding to october 7th by promoting an iranian thinktank’s programme to make jews less covetous and disagreeable”
“it’s like responding to october 7th by asking why zionists don’t support the iranian revolutionary guard”
“imagine a white supremacist group set up a charity that claimed it wanted to lead black teenagers away from criminal gangs: even if you think leading kids away from gangs is a good idea, the institutional affiliation is clearly enough to make this a deeply suspect venture. asking al sharpton why he doesn’t support Klansmen for Hope would not be a particularly impressive gotcha.”
Sunbeams are finally peeking through the canopy with that last one, we’re getting closer to an actual answer!
After much cajoling, his most substantive response builds on the taint-by-association scaffolding:
i’ll explain it like you’re five. the atlantic council is a neoconservative thinktank based in the united states. it has two main roles: to provide analysis and talking points for friendly politicians, and to funnel money towards people and groups that share its interests. it’s a fixture in the american security and diplomatic establishment, draws funding from the state department, and there’s a long-established revolving door between its offices and those of the us government. politically, it supports an interventionist us foreign policy with a focus on maintaining the us’s ties with nato states and other allies. those allies include israel, which the atlantic council has broadly supported, including through the current war.
i know that you probably don’t share my deep scepticism of and revulsion toward foreign policy blob thinktanks. but please try to actually think about this for a moment. if you support the palestinian cause, the atlantic council is not a credible actor. it is an adjunct the infrastructure that is currently starving and killing the people of gaza. it doesn’t matter if you share their rejection of armed violence; the fact alone that they support armed violence on the other side means they are simply not a trustworthy vehicle for this message, because they are not a neutral party, they are an enemy. if you support one side in a conflict, you are unlikely to support its enemies. big brain stuff i know.
Clear?
There’s a way to resuscitate Kriss’s simpleton logic to focus instead on optics. As in, yes RfP themselves may not hold any objectionable positions, but their relationship with a neocon think tank kills their effectiveness. This is a theoretically cogent argument, but what demographic are we even talking about here? We have to identify the portion of the population that would be receptive to RfP’s message of peace but for their relationship with the Atlantic Council. In other words, someone who simultaneously has inside baseball knowledge about think tank funding, but shallow enough that they’re turned off by optics. Who the fuck is Kriss talking about here? Do these people even exist?
It’s very odd for Kriss to accuse RfP of supporting armed violence from Israel (using this tendentious argument-by-association) when Alkhatib has repeatedly and unambiguously criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, such as calling it a “ruthless and relentless war of annihilation”, blaming Israel’s “faulty intelligence, inconsistent rules of engagement” for causing needless loss of life, accused the IDF of dehumanizing Palestinian lives, criticized the restriction of humanitarian aid into Gaza, referring to Israel’s actions as “criminal”, even admitting he struggles with deep anger towards Israelis for the death of several of his family members in Gaza, and much much much more.
Kriss is incapable of denouncing any of RfP’s positions because he doesn’t know what any of them are. Ignorance is bliss. But even if he did, I can’t even predict what exactly he’d disagree with. Instead, it’s sufficient that they’re daisy-chained to something else he doesn’t like. His position is a road roller that squishes the world into delectably stark thin strips: Israel = Atlantic Council, Atlantic Council = RfP, and therefore if Israel = bad then RfP = bad. Don’t think too hard!
His reluctance to transparently articulate his position makes more sense in this context. He could’ve saved both of us a ton of time if he just said “RfP is bad because it’s vaguely connected to this other thing that is bad”…but that gives the game away doesn’t it? It’s a dumb thing to say out loud and without adornments.
As a wise man once said:
I think he’s a great writer who can dress up nonsense in fancy words so your brain doesn’t realize he ain’t saying squat.
Precision isn’t for poets.
This is a side note, but I thought it was really funny(?) that he doesn’t agree with his own logic when it’s mirrored onto a position he doesn’t like.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the foggy style of argumentation outlined in the article here. I think that a deep scepticism think-tanks is warranted, and their beneficiaries deserve an extra critical eye, but in the end it has to actually lead somewhere.
In the spirit of the scientific method, your hunches don't have to be strictly rational (although it does help to have a finely tuned intuition), but you need to back them up with hard data before claiming them as fact.
Without the ability to back up your beliefs with hard evidence, you're at best a well tuned hypothesis generator. Potentially useful, but a lot of work is needed to make your output into something rigorous.
So basically, Kriss needs to discipline Alkhatib for failing to perform a Palestinian's rightful role as an opponent of American imperial power, construed as the entire order of liberal-ish nation-states linked up through international institutions, irrespective of whether that's actually in the best interests of Alkhatib as an individual or Palestinians' as a nation.