Insulting Police in Georgia: Totalitarianism Criminalizing Politics

Whereas the Georgia in North America has been a member-state of the U.S. from that union’s beginning, the Georgia in Europe was still not annexed by the E.U. slightly more than 30 years after that Union’s beginning. Whether to join an empire-scale union of states is a political decision, as a union of states is a political animal. When a prospective state government criminalizes political protest and public discourse on that decision, such a government violates the federal requirement that the state governments adhere to democratic principles, which exclude criminalizing the political opposition. The government of Georgia in Europe crossed this line when a politician of the opposition was arrested for insulting the state police.

Just days after protests against the pro-Russian leanings of the ruling Georgian Dream group began in May, 2025, police detained Nika Melia, “one of the figureheads for Georgia’s pro-Western Coalition for Change” and who was in his car at the time rather than at a protest.[1] That “he was bundled away by a large group of people in civilian clothing . . . on charges of verbally insulting a law enforcement officer” undercuts the government’s claim that the arrest was of a criminal rather than a political nature.[2] Typically when a motorist is given a speeding ticket, a large number of people not wearing police uniforms does not deliver the ticket and haul the driver away.

As for the charge of verbally insulting a police employee, which is distinct from assaulting such an employee, not even municipal employees are gods (although generals on a battlefield may come close). In fact, Nietzsche’s expression human, all too human sadly applies all too often to police around the world because such power as in being legally permitted to use a club, taser, or gun is all too tempting for human pride and presumptuousness to abuse. In other words, police itself can be said to be a necessary evil because human nature itself is not strong enough to responsibly and proportionally use police power.

Continuing on the distinction between verbally insulting and physically assaulting someone, only the former can fall under free speech (i.e., political speech). Only the former brings to mind the thought police in George Orwell’s book, 1984. In other words, to make insulting a state functionary a crime comes dangerously close to making certain thoughts or beliefs illegal if they are verbally expressed. Even criminalizing publicly insulting a deity, which no police employee has been, is, or ever will be, essentially makes certain thoughts or beliefs, which are interior to a mind and thus inherently beyond the reach of the state, verboten. The contradiction is in making something inherently beyond the reach of the state to control subject nonetheless to such control. Totalitarianism itself may be said to end in such a contradiction.

Georgia’s chances of being annexed by the E.U. were thus being lessened by the criminalizing of verbally insulting police employees, who are, after all, taxpayer funded, and the detention of Nika Melia in particular. His criticism of the pro-Russian ruling Georgian Dream group was also a criticism of that government putting on hold the annexation process. Russia’s President Putin had made no secret of his strong preference that the E.U. not extend eastward, and the Georgian Dream group in Georgia’s government may have been doing Putin’s bidding in literally arresting pro-E.U. political beliefs. If in fact the vast majority of residents in Georgia were in favor of their state being annexed by the E.U., then the Georgian Dream regime was on tenuous grounds from a democratic standpoint not only in unilaterally bringing that process to a stop, but also in arresting pro-E.U./anti-Russian politicians. Interestingly, most of Serbia’s residents may have been opposed then to Serbia being annexed by the E.U. because of the higher prices and decrease in population (and increase in immigration) that had occurred in Croatia since it had become an E.U. state; and yet, Serbians tended to oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So being against annexation by the E.U. did not necessarily come from pro-Russia sentiment.

---

1. Euronews Georgia, “Georgia Arrests Second Opposition Figure in Days as Ruling Party Faces More Protests,” Euronews.com, May 30, 2025.
2. Ibid.

The Humanities on Climate Change

William Paley claimed that the “university exists to form the minds and the moral sensibilities of the next generation of clergymen, magistrates, and legislators.”[1] The assumption at Cambridge in 1785 was that both “individual conduct and a social order pleasing to God can be known and taught.”[2] To know what is pleasing to God outside of divine revelation was typically considered to be presumptuous back then because human finite knowledge cannot claim to encompass all possible knowledge. This could not even be claimed of AI a couple decades into the twenty-first century. Although infinity itself is not necessarily a divine concept—think of infinite space possibly being in the universe—it cannot be said that humans have, or even are capable of having infinite knowledge. Theists and humanists can agree on this point. So, when a professor decides that a political issue is so important that using a faculty position to advocate one’s own ideology in the classroom, presumptuousness can be said to reek to high heaven. I assume that any ideology is partial rather than wholistic. Both the inherently limited nature of human knowledge and the presumption to use the liberal arts, or the humanities more specifically, to advocate a personal ideology were firmly on display on a panel on what the humanities should contribute on climate change. The panel, which consisted mostly of scholars from other universities, took place at Yale University on Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, 2024. Perhaps on that day in which the two holidays aliened, both fear of our species going extinct—literally turning to dust—and love of our species and Earth could be felt.  That we can scarcely imagine our planet without our species living on it does not mean that it could not happen; and yet I contend that the humanities should not sell its soul or be romanticized ideologically to be transacted away into vocational knowledge, as if the humanities would more fittingly ask how to do something rather than why something is so. Going deeper, rather than departing from its intellectual raison d’être to tread water at the surface, metastasizing into training and skills, is not only the basis of the humanities’ sustainable competitive advantage in a university, but also the best basis from which the humanities can make a contribution in getting at the underlying source of climate change. Neither a political ideology or skills in “knowledge-use” can get at that; rather, they are oriented to relieving symptoms.

The full essay is at "Humanities on Climate Change."

---

1. A.M.C. Waterman, Political Economy and Christian Theology Since the Enlightenment: Essays in Intellectual History (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 211. 

2.  Ibid., p. 212.

On Israel’s Public Relations Campaign against the Charge of Genocide

In theory, state media is more vulnerable to doing the bidding of its sponsoring government than are privately owned media companies. In practice, governments are able to pressure even private news outlets to sway public opinion for political purposes. Even allied governments can pressure the government of a country in which a private news company resides in terms of what stories to air and when to air them, in order to sway that country’s public opinion, and even global public opinion. The sudden appearances in print, online, and on television news networks of former Israeli hostages being interviewed just after the International Court of Justice had announced on December 29, 2023 that Israel would be tried on charges of genocide in Gaza. Not coincidentally, I submit, emotionally-charged hyperbole was used to pull emotional “heart-strings” in order to convince the world, including the justices at international court, that the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 had been so bad that even Israel’s extremely disproportionate military attacks in Gaza were justified and thus should not be considered to be genocidal. Besides the logic being flawed, for the infliction of such disproportional harm was not justified, and even a justified genocide would violate the Convention on Genocide, which Israel had agreed to be bound. In short, I suspect that much was happening behind the scenes not only in Israel, but also in the U.S. Government and even private media companies in the U.S. immediately following the Court’s announcement.

On December 29, 2023, the International Court of Justice announced that South Africa had filed papers accusing Israel of being “in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention” because “acts and omissions by Israel . . . are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . . to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.”[1] On January 2, 2024, a spokesperson for the Israeli government “announced that representatives of the country would appear very soon before the court to defend Israel’s position.”[2] Being a signatory to the Genocide Convention, which had been adopted by the UN’s General Assembly in 1948, Israel was not only subject to the court’s jurisdiction on genocides, but also obligated to send representatives to the Court when a defendant. In anticipation, Israel unleased a public relations offensive, which included not only Israeli media outlets, but also American ones too, perhaps from pressure from Washington, an ally of Israel. Not having proof of the complicity, I am basing my hypothesis on the very convenient timing involved, as well as the fact that multiple interviews were published and aired within days of the Court’s announcement.

Admittedly, the first casualty in war is truth, but even subjectivity goes only so far before it becomes hyperbolic or otherwise excessively manipulative (i.e., used as a weapon of sorts) by twisting the meaning of words beyond recognition. In fact, the 20^th century philosophical phenomenologists, including Jaspers, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre overrated human subjectivity in using it to anchor their respective philosophies. Those philosophers and others like them may have been unduly pessimistic on the potential of human reason because the horrors in the Nazi Holocaust had followed the optimism in the Enlightenment in the 18^th century. As Nietzsche wrote, a philosopher is not a person of one’s day. This means that a philosopher worth one’s salt thinks outside the box, as it were, and so one’s philosophy is not unduly delimited by one’s immediate context. In short, the decadence in the bloodiest century so far had swallowed the philosophical phenomenologists. Meanwhile, analytic philosophers allowed themselves to become reductionists in obsessing on language.

Israel’s government responded to being charged with genocide by exploiting the worst of the 20^th century to stir the world’s emotions against South Africa’s accusation of genocide. In particular, the Israeli government spokesman announcing that Israel would send representatives to the court described South Africa’s accusation as “a blood libel” against what The Times of Israel labeled as “the Jewish state,” as if the South African ministers were antisemitic.[3] The intended allusion was to the Jewish origins of the state due to the blood of the Holocaust, and an implicit claim may have been that the heirs of victims cannot become victimizers, which is not so. Indeed, vengeance against current adversaries can be intensified by resentment of the unspent justice against past aggressors. Such disproportionate vengeance is not fair to the contemporary enemies unless they were also the past aggressors. The Israeli government spokesperson suggested such a link in labeling the South African government as an heir of the Nazis.[4]  In being aided by South Africa, the Palestinians in Gaza too could be vicariously linked to an old enemy. I would not be surprised to find press reports of the Israeli government ministers referring to Hamas as Nazis so as to justify expending even the unrequited vengeance in the previous century following the collapse of Nazi Germany.

Of course, the Israeli spokesman’s “heirs of the Nazis” comment was wildly off the mark. Real heirs would not have waited to see Israel’s wholesale destruction and killing in Gaza before attempting a genocide against not only Israelis, but Jews anywhere. Also, filing an accusation in an international court pales in comparison with what heirs would have done, and is not even close to what the Nazis actually did to Jews in Europe. In actuality, the South African government had pointed to the obligation of any signatory to the Genocide Convention to report possible genocides to the court. With more than 1.8 million Palestinians displaced from their homes and Gaza residents facing the “highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded,” according to the UN’s emergency chief, Martin Griffiths[5], the natural human sentiment of disapprobation—a visceral emotional reaction of revulsion—had more than enough stimulus to be activated worldwide, including in South Africa. Hume refers to such an activation to be what ethical judgment is, underneath—a visceral emotional reaction rather than a Kantian contradiction of reason. In heeding an ethical obligation, the officials in the South African government were hardly heirs to the Nazis.

Another allusion to the Nazis occurred just three days after the court had announced that Israel had been accused of committing genocide. Jake Tapper of CNN headlined a former Israeli hostage, Mia Schem, who had been held in Gaza for a harsh 55 days at the home of a Palestinian family (hence thankfully rape was not committed). Schem, a young, beautiful woman who obviously deserves much sympathy for her ordeal as a hostage, nonetheless shamelessly described her ordeal as incorrectly as “a Holocaust.” 

The deliberate misappropriation of such an emotionally-tinged word—and that an Israeli of all people would use the word opportunistically and inaccurately beyond recognition—suggests an underlying motive to manipulate public opinion. Ironically, survivors of the real holocaust would probably bristle at the attempted comparison. What you experienced for 55 days is nothing like what we experienced in Nazi Germany, the retort might insist. The implication that the Palestinians in occupied Gaza—a “ghetto” so called by Israel’s Finance Minister Smotrich (who also said on the day after the court’s announcement that “Israel must reduce” the Palestinian population there to 100,000-200,000 from 2.3 million[6])—are like Nazis conveniently denies the decades of oppression exacted by Israel on the residents of Gaza and the obvious difference between the attack by Hamas of October 7, 2023, including the taking and holding of hostages, and Nazi Germany’s many atrocities over more than a decade.

Besides exaggerating in furnishing a label for her ordeal as a hostage, Schem extrapolated in generalizing concerning the entire population of Palestinians in Gaza. Interviewed on Israeli television on the day the court announced that Israel had been accused of committing genocide, she accused every Palestinian in Gaza of being a terrorist. “Everyone there are(sic) terrorists . . . there are no innocent civilians, not one,” she said.[7] She based her empirical claim on the acquiescence of the wife and child of the man who had held Schem in his home. No auditor would make such a projection to a population of numbers based on such a small sample size. After Hamas’ attack of October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 240 were taken hostage, Israeli President Herzog had claimed, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” as Israel was ordering 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza to evacuate their homes.[8]  The implication to be drawn from both statements is that retribution against every Palestinian there would be justified. Indeed, reports from the UN suggest that precisely that was occurring.

Gemma Connell, Gaza team leader for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), referred to conditions in even north Gaza as, “No food, no water, very little medical supplies.”[9] By January 4, 2024, many people in southern Gaza had been “displaced not once, not twice, but six or seven times,” according to Connell. With 2.2 million people in Gaza “in desperate need of help,”[10] South Africa was on firm ground empirically as well as ethically, whereas Schem’s attempt to justify the wholesale annihilation of the Palestinians living in Gaza was empirically and ethically spurious. In outlining plans for Gaza after the Israeli military attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Yaov Gallant said on January 5, 2024 that the Palestinian “entity controlling the territory” would “build on the capabilities” of “local non-hostile actors” already present in Gaza.[11] Clearly, not every Palestinian in Gaza was a terrorist, and did not deserve the onslaught of Israeli “collective justice” as if they were.

I contend that Schem’s interviews were part of a coordinated PR offensive by Israel that reached as far as CNN in America. CNN interviewed another former hostage, Doran Asher, days after the Court had announced the accusation of genocide. She was more accurate in labeling the infliction of “psychological warfare” on her during her 50 days of captivity in Gaza.[12] CNN claimed in its headline, "This is what she wants you to know." My question is, who else wanted the world to know?  Who would have had the motive and political power to see it it that you hear or read her story?

That she wanted to tell her story would not have been sufficient to get her on CNN, which would surely not have been acting solely on her behalf. 

It can also be asked what did not make it onto CNN. For instance, the American media had been practically silent in putting the Hamas attack in the wider context of decades of harsh Israeli occupation of Gaza, maintaining it as a subjugated “ghetto.” Not that enduring such harsh conditions for so long justifies the killing and hostage-taking committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023; rather, the context is explanatory, and could have resulted in a global public opinion less dismissive of Israel’s vastly disproportionate destruction of Gaza. The omission of proper context can point back to CNN’s bias or the media company’s role as part of a broader PR campaign possibly being pushed by the Israeli government to set public opinion against the accusation of genocide in Gaza in spite of the facts on the ground there.

In conclusion, Israel’s attempt to manipulate global public opinion (and even the justices at the International Court of Justice) may have eventuated into the following narrative: The entire population of Gaza committed a holocaust by killing 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 240 more.  Every civilian in Gaza is culpable, and thus is a legitimate military target and deserves to be homeless and starving. Furthermore, any serious effort to hold Israel back from its extremely disproportionate “collective justice,” which is an inherently flawed ethical theory because even people living in the same geographical area do not all have the same beliefs, values, and ideology, is to be discredited as “blood libel.” Unfortunately for Israel’s credibility in its PR offensive, much more blood had flowed in Gaza than in Israel, and this alone, rather than any antisemitism, had brought South Africa to the International Court of Justice. While it is easy to throw public-relations “bombs” such as Holocaust, Nazi heirs, and terrorists, such irrationality is expedient, and thus may end up working against Israel’s interests. For instance, by inserting Nazi-era terms into the public discourse, calls for a genocide of the Jews could be transformed  from constituting hate speech to being merely countervailing political speech. Additionally, the hyperbole could ultimately undercut Israel’s credibility at the International Court and in the court of world opinion. Viewing an opposing political position on the war as antisemitic even though Israel’s military response had been so very disproportionate could erode Israel’s credibility further. The attack of October 7, 2023 was indeed horrific, as were the ensuing experiences of the Israeli hostages, but so too was the ironic banality of evil in the decades in which Israel occupied Gaza as a “ghetto” subject to the flawed ethical concept of collective justice. To say it has not been a fair fight, even taking the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 into account, is not to be antisemitic. Rather, the charge is political, as were the interviews given by freed Israeli hostages.

---

1.. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023; Jeremy Sharon, “Israel Confirms It’ll Defend Itself from Gaza Genocide claims in the Hague Next Week,” The Times of Israel, January 2, 2024.
2. Jeremy Sharon, “Israel Confirms It’ll Defend Itself from Gaza Genocide claims in the Hague Next Week,” The Times of Israel, January 2, 2024.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Heather Chen and Eve Brennen, “Famine in Gaza ‘Around the Corner,’ as People Face ‘Highest Levels of Food Insecurity Ever Recorded,’ UN Relief Chief Says,” CNN.com, January 6, 2024.
6. Sanjana Karanth, “Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is a ‘Ghetto’ For Palestinians,” The Huffington Post, December 31, 2023.
7. Amy Spiro and Michael Horovitz, “Freed Hostage Mia Schem: ‘I Experienced Hell. There Are No Innocent Civilians in Gaza,” The Times of Israel, December 29, 2023.
8. Paul Blummenthal, “Israeli President Suggests that Civilians in Gaza Are Legitimate Targets,” The Huffington Post, October 13, 2023.
9.  Michael Rios, “’No Food, No Water, Very Little Medical Supplies’: UN Aid Worker on Devastating Conditions in Gaza,” CNN.Com, January 4, 2024.
10. Ibid.
11. Amir Tal, “Israeli Government Divisions Burst into Open as Ministers ‘Fight’ over Post-War Plans,” CNN.com, January 5, 2024.
12. Christian Edwards and Bianna Goldryga, “Freed Israeli Hostage Says She Endured ‘Psychological Warfare’ during 50 Days of Hamas Captivity,” CNN.com, January 4, 2024.

Climatic Presumption: What is the Forecast?

Al Gore stated that we face a choice regarding whether the earth’s ecological system will remain viable for our species.  He cites the carbon that is frozen in the permafrost in the north.  As the permafrost melts, carbon is added to the atmosphere, making it “difficult” for the human species to live.   I am not a scientist so I have no means of knowing what the state of the research is on these matters.  Nor am I particularly interested in debating it.   In my view, if there is a chance that we could be effectively ending our our species, we ought not to be held back from acting in a prudent fashion even if it is “just in case.”   I understand the economic costs, and that some are particularly attached to short-run costs (and less enamoured with long-term benefits).  Still, that the debate itself would be allowed to stall even a “just in case” response reflects badly on our species.   At a worse case, it could be something like two parents debating which of them will get their baby out of their burning house.  Meanwhile, the baby burns.   We would call that a dysfunctional family, would we not?  Still, no such appellation goes to those involved in the continuing debate on climate change.

It strikes me that we as a society may be too innured in our own presumptuousness to even realize how badly we are handling such decisions.  I can’t believe that the society is predominantly made up of the two, rather vocal, extremes on the matter.  The extremes are presumptuous in their determination to continue the debate unless they get exactly what they want while the rest of us have been guilty of allowing them to dominate the decision-making process.  Consider, for example, a reasonable person saying, “ok, we need to make a decision,” and one is made.  The refusal to make compromises (whether an extreme in the US following a rigid ideological agenda or the Chinese government presuming that national sovereignty is absolute) is not only childish, it is rather arrogant concerning that the eventual demise of our species might hang in the balance.  Even this “might” should be a wakeup call that posturing and debating evince a selfishness that the rest of us ought not to countenance.  Yet we do.  We are too passive, those of us without a dog in the fight.   The truth is, we all have a dog in this fight.  Are we to be survived by cockroaches?   Wouldn’t it be fodder for a divine comedy were the antics of the cockroaches superior to the presumptuousness of humans?   The species left standing is the one that wins.  

I can visualize a later generation (of humans) looking back at our generation as incredibly selfish and incompetent even to reach a decision.  “They knew what might hang in the balance, and yet they were so caught up in their own petty circumstances.”   It is like we are captains on the Titanic debating which way to turn after it being reasonable to believe that there is an iceberg somewhere ahead.   It could even be that we see the iceberg and still we debate.  Such pettifoggery is mere dribble in the divine comedy that may well already be in Act III.  

We are so small, even smaller than the cockroach, and yet we presume ourselves to be so big.  We we to have the distance of perspective such that our immediate pathos would not blind us, how would we view our society…ourselves?

European Officials at the G20 Grapple with a New American Trading Position: Beyond the Joint Communiqué

It is perhaps only natural---only human—for us to take ourselves and our produced artifacts too seriously. Diplomats and other government officials, for example, fret arduously over mere words. When those words are etched in governmental or treaty parchment, the effort is understandable. The flaw of excess is evident in all the time and effort that go into the joint communiques of international conferences and meetings. I submit that the real politic at such occasions is much more significant even if nothing shows from it for some time.

At the March 18, 2017 meeting of the Group of 20, which includes the E.U. and U.S., the joint statement “became an unlikely focus of controversy” issuing in “a tortured compromise stating, in effect, that trade is a good thing.”[1] I submit that the use of such language is spurious—certainly much less than the attendees and even their principals back home supposed. The real politic was instead that the U.S. was “overturning long-held assumptions about international commerce,” and such transformational change takes time even just to register in minds ensconced in the status quo. That is to say, the real shift in power would need to play out in actual negotiations on trade, rather than in how to word a meeting’s joint statement.

A European official, Wolfgang Schauble, perhaps straining at the meeting to understand the new American position. (source: NYT)

“We thought that it was very important for the communiqué to reflect what we discussed here,” Steven Mnuchin, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, said at the time.[2] He added that the historical language was not relevant. I submit that neither was it important that the joint statement reflect what was actually discussed, for such discussions—laying out the initial bargaining positions for upcoming negotiations—had legitimate importance. Yet even such importance was only as “the first shots,” for the true importance lie in the arduous negotiations to come, for the tyranny of the status quo never gives up without a struggle. At that G20 meeting, the American government’s “lack of reverence for existing norms and treaties” was “particularly unsettling to the change-averse Europeans.”[3] It is precisely such a struggle that is so important—for real shifts in power must somehow be accommodated or defeated. In relative terms, the importance of what to hand to the press after an initial meeting is but a napkin dwarfed by the real politics underneath.

Therefore, we need not be distraught that the best the Group of 20 could come up with on that Saturday was this: “We are working to strengthen the contribution of trade to our economies.”[4] Such an obvious statement is worth only scant time. Much more important were efforts of the Europeans to understand—in the sense of comprehending—just what the new American perspective was, for something new that does not fit within the existing modus operendi takes effort to be understood, and only from this basis can real negotiations begin.

1. Jack Ewing, “U.S. Breaks With Allies Over Trade Issues Amid Trump’s ‘America First’ Vows,” The New York Times, March 18, 2017.

2.  Ibid.

3.  Ibid.

4.  Ibid.