As the years go by and the evidence continues to pile up for what we might call the iSteve worldview, a general trend seems to be for public figures to make ever more strident and boneheaded declarations of True Belief in the Dogmas of the Age, whether to protect themselves or to bully their victims.

For example, Jeffrey Goldberg, the American-born former IDF prison guard who is a prominent journalist regarding the Middle East for The Atlantic, is angry about something the head of Human Rights Watch tweeted:

A few days ago, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, tweeted the following statement: “Germans rally against anti-Semitism that flared in Europe in response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza war. Merkel joins.”

That seems pretty unobjectionable. So why is Goldberg up in arms over it?

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not flare “in response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza,” or anywhere else.

How does he know this? He knows from first principles:

It is a universal and immutable rule that the targets of prejudice are not the cause of prejudice. Just as Jews (or Jewish organizations, or the Jewish state) do not cause anti-Semitism to flare, or intensify, or even to exist, neither do black people cause racism, nor gay people homophobia, nor Muslims Islamophobia.

Now, you know and I know and Jeffrey Goldberg knows that he is BSing us. (If Goldberg doesn’t realize he’s being disingenuous, he ought to be humiliated by his public display of ignorance.) Most likely, Goldberg is just laughing at both the silly people who believe his nonsense and at the public-spirited people who open themselves up to hatred and attack by the mob by pointing out the implausibility of his bullying.

A general principle I’ve been enunciating for many years is that stupid principles really don’t benefit stupid people; instead, dopey ideas typically are most exploitable by clever, ruthless guys like Jeffrey Goldberg.