Man, this is spooky

Starting with Intifada's Legacy at Year 4: A Morass of Faded Hopes, I mostly changed Arafat to Chen Shui-bian, the intifada to Chen's administration, and Israel to China, plus a few judicious cuts, and ended up with A-bian's Legacy at Year 4: A Morass of Faded Hopes. Of course it's not nearly that bad yet, but who knows what the future will bring.

Tyler Cowen writes, despite the negative economic consequences of the intifada,

many Palestinians support the intifada, and obviously some are willing to die for it. I conclude that economists need a better theory of human irrationality. Analogies from expressive voting theory suggest that (many) Palestinians support the intifada because their voices are not decisive. The support is seen as a kind of "cheap talk," leading to a collective insanity which perhaps no single person intended. But do individual Palestinians who support the intifada really mind that so many other people go along with them? Doubtful, the contrary is sooner true, namely that people prefer that their peers follow their position.

In my (admittedly unorthodox) view the degree of decisiveness is not the key to determining the degree of human rationality. I would sooner believe that the amount of pride at stake is what turns on the irrational part of our brains, whether we are decisive or not.

Oh, and by the way, the substitute for terrorists financed by outsiders became the US--which is probably how many Mainland Chinese view us in this context.