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Notes -
A Dyslogy for Ireland's "Hate Speech" Bill
When someone shows you who they are, believe them
In several posts over the last few months I've alluded to a piece of legislation making its way through the Irish houses of parliament. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 (widely referred to as the “hate speech” bill) was a bill which would provide the government with sweeping powers to arrest and convict individuals they suspected of “stirring up hatred” against members of communities defined by one or more protected characteristics.1 This bill has been enormously controversial throughout its entire lifecycle, with precisely 40% of pollsters in favour and 40% opposed, and no less than Elon Musk pledging to pay the legal fees of anyone prosecuted under it in the event that it passed. It was first proposed in October 2022, passed in the Dáil2 in April 2023 after several rounds of amendments, and then made its way to the Seanad3, where it languished for well over a year, being neither approved nor rejected.
What an unmitigated joy and relief it was two weeks ago, to learn that the bill has officially been shelved by Ireland’s Minister of Justice, Helen McEntee. This specific bill has proved something of an albatross around the government’s neck for months, and not even a change in Taoiseach4 was sufficient to kill it. But a general election is due to be held no later than March of next year, and the incumbent Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition government now finds itself in the unenviable position of needing to hastily course-correct just in time to appeal to the median voter (the budget announcement of two weeks ago, with its generous salary tax cuts, is part of the same drive). After the national embarrassment of a referendum rejected by fully 70% of the electorate, the government is finally cottoning on to the fact that its woke agenda, while enormously popular among progressive think tanks, NGOs and media outlets, is absolute cyanide at the polling station. Of course an effort to save face must be made, and Minister McEntee has committed to still pushing for hate crime legislation in spite of dropping the hate speech bill itself. But it’s also too soon to be doing victory laps, as McEntee has promised to come back for another bite at the apple if she’s reelected.
If you live in Ireland, you will likely have heard plenty of claims about what this bill entails: that previous legislation of this type proved ineffective at its stated aims, and so more robust legislation is required; or that the existing incitement to hatred legislation was drafted in a pre-digital, pre-social media era, and that this bill represents a simple but necessary “modernization” of existing legislation. (“Modernization” is the preferred term among the pathologically oikophobic East Yanks making up Fine Gael’s rank and file to describe the changes they wish to bring to bear on Irish society, who seem wholly unable to conceive that one could be opposed to such changes without being a parochial cattle farmer who takes his marching orders from Rome.) Given that there’s a significant possibility that this bill could be resurrected next year, understanding exactly what it entails remains as urgent as ever, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain what it proposed to do, in plain, unambiguous language. I will be quoting at length from the text of the bill which was approved by the Dáil in April of last year.
The first few examples of what constitutes an offense under this legislation are alarming enough. As outlined in articles 7-9, the bill would make it a criminal offense if a person “communicates material to the public or a section of the public… that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics”; if a person “communicates material to the public or a section of the public… that condones, denies or grossly trivialises [sic]— (i) genocide, (ii) a crime against humanity, (iii) a war crime”; even if no actual hatred or violence resulted as a result of this communication. These offenses would be punishable by a maximum of 5 years in prison or twelve months in prison, respectively.
It’s article 10 where things get really scary, however (bolding mine):
Creating or owning material “likely to incite violence or hatred” against protected groups would be a criminal offense punishable by up to two years in prison, even if this material is never distributed. It’s not merely a crime to verbally express racist thoughts in public, or make sexist jokes on Twitter: writing something racist in a Word document on a private desktop computer to which you’re the only person with access and which isn’t even connected to the Internet would also constitute a criminal offense.
Actually, it’s even worse than that. Did you know that when someone sends you an image on WhatsApp, by default that image is automatically saved down to the internal storage of your phone? This is true even of WhatsApp chats that you’ve muted or archived. This means that every image sent to you on WhatsApp is hence “in your possession”, by virtue of being saved on a device which belongs to you - the fact that you haven’t sent that image on to anyone else is irrelevant. Think about how many group chats you’ve been added to that you’ve had muted for months, in which ex-colleagues or old GAA teammates you didn’t even get along with at the time are constantly trying to one-up each other by sharing tasteless memes about the topic du jour. Think about your family group chat, to which your annoying uncle sends crudely drawn newspaper cartoons about “the old ball and chain”, amusing to no one but himself. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t create any of these images, that you didn’t forward these images on to anyone else, that you don’t agree with the contents of any of these images and actually find them crass and offensive - they’re saved to your phone, which means they’re in your possession, which means you’re guilty of an offense punishable by up to a year in prison.
Somehow, it gets worse. The bill also explains how search warrants are to be executed. If a judge was to be presented with compelling evidence that a given person is guilty of one of the above offenses, they can issue Garda Síochána5 with a search warrant, which must be executed within a week (bolding mine):
Let’s imagine for a moment that you are sympathetic to the stated aims of this bill, and you sincerely believe that far-right people spewing vitriol about immigrants online really ought to be locked up. Imagine you share an apartment with a flatmate called Joe, a shy, quiet guy who keeps to himself. You don’t consider Joe a personal friend, you don’t know much about him, and you don’t even eat your meals together - but he’s neat and tidy and pays the rent on time, so you have no complaints. Completely unbeknownst to you, Joe operates a pseudonymous Twitter account in which he expresses opinions about immigration to Ireland which some people consider offensive. Unfortunately for Joe, he’s been a bit careless about his digital footprint, and an anti-racist activist on Twitter was able to connect the dots and figure out his real name, which they pass on to the guards. The guards in turn determine his residence and request a search warrant, which is granted.
One evening you’re home alone (as Joe is away on holiday) when you hear a pounding at the door. Fearful that the guards will kick the door down (which they are perfectly entitled to do), you open the door. The guards explain they have a warrant to search your apartment, as they suspect that Joe (named on the warrant) is guilty of incitement to hatred. You explain that Joe is away and they should call back later. The guards don’t care, and demand that you present your wallet/handbag, phone and laptop to them so that they can search them for hateful material. You retort that this is ridiculous - you aren’t even named on the search warrant, you barely know Joe, Joe has never touched your phone or your laptop (or vice versa). The guards don’t care, and again demand that you surrender your phone, laptop, and the PINs to both. At this juncture you have the choice:
I see no reason, none, why the above scenario could not have transpired exactly as described above if this bill had passed according to the wording approved by the Dáil.
Now perhaps you’ll say to me - come on, that’s ridiculous. Maybe they want to enact this bill, but they won’t actually use it - it’s only being enacted as a deterrent, and maybe there’ll be one prosecution every five years for extremely persistent neo-Nazis literally waving 14/88 flags outside the synagogue in Terenure. Ordinary people with a dark sense of humour have nothing to fear from this bill.
I wouldn’t be so confident. For an example very close to home, consider section 127 of the UK’s Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another” with online posts, on which it appears Ireland’s “hate speech” bill took at least some inspiration. As reported by the Times, at least 2,315 people were arrested under this section of the act in 2014, a figure which shot up to 3,395 in 2023. And before you say that all of these people were let off with a warning, 1,399 people were convicted under this act last year - and this was under a Tory government!6 Scale these figures down to the size of the Irish population, and ceteris paribus you would expect 253 arrests and 104 convictions in Ireland every year. In a period in which the Irish prison service is massively underresourced and ovecrowded, with the prison population consistently in excess of the total bed capacity by as much as 10-12% throughout the year - the government now wants to throw as many as another hundred people in jail every year for the crime of making tasteless jokes in the privacy of their own homes.
Or you’ll say, sure, the bill is written in an extremely sweeping fashion, but it’ll never actually be used to lock people up just for making a joke in poor taste. They’re keeping the wording expansive only so that genuine racists and far-right nutters won’t be able to weasel out of a conviction on a technicality, but the genuine racists and far-night nutters are the only people who’ll be targeted by it: otherwise decent, law-abiding citizens will be left alone.
I’m having none of it. Look at past efforts to control speech and behaviour and/or invade citizenry’s privacy from this century alone, and the apology outlined above pattern-matches to none of them. “Hate speech” legislation in France was adapted into ag-gag legislation so quickly it must have made those poor Parisians’ beret-clad heads spin (“stigmatizing agricultural activities” is certainly a colorful way to refer to any and all criticisms of factory farming). If you made a list of all the activities which could be reasonably characterized as aiding or abetting terrorism, I very much doubt “operating a fan website about the TV show Stargate SG-1” would make the top 100 such entries, or even the top 1,000: that didn’t stop the US government invoking the USA PATRIOT Act (enacted just six weeks after 9/11, ostensibly to combat terrorism) to subpoena the financial records of the unfortunate webmaster in question. When governments are afforded sweeping powers to invade the privacy of their citizenry, they tend to put them to full use. Consider the aforementioned section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 - do you think the only people convicted under it were outspoken neo-Nazis and white supremacists? Let’s see:
As I've gone out of my way to outline above, criminal offenses are defined so broadly under this bill that you would be hard pressed to find someone who isn't guilty of one of them - after all, who among us hasn't been sent an edgy or offensive meme by a relative, work colleague, or friend of a friend? Some apologists for this bill will use that very fact as a point in its defense: they think there's some kind of “safety in numbers” effect, wherein a bill which makes a criminal of just about everyone will quickly be exposed as a farce and abolished. But this defense rests entirely on the touchingly naïve assumption that the government (or more specifically, the director of public prosecutions) would have the slightest interest in enforcing this law in an impartial manner. On the contrary: a crime which is defined in such a way that everyone is guilty of it is an absolute godsend to a cabinet looking to silence or intimidate its opponents. Selective enforcement is the name of the game, and you can be certain that the DPP would come down like a tonne of bricks on anyone critical of the establishment, but look the other way when people who toe the party line crack offensive jokes or say hateful things.
Hell, even if they're unable to secure a conviction, being dragged through the courts is exhausting, expensive and humiliating enough. If you criticise the government, and then have to endure the embarrassment of the guards rifling through your personal effects and private documents for hours, getting arrested and charged with possessing materials which could be used for incitement to hatred, having to waste hundreds of man-hours and tens of thousands of euros mounting a legal defense before showing up for your day in court - even if you win, even if the state agrees to pay your legal fees (which they probably wouldn't), do you think you'll be as strongly inclined to criticise the government going forward? No one wants to go through that grief even once, never mind twice. The process is the punishment, and “hate speech” legislation can here function as the criminal justice equivalent of a SLAPP lawsuit. Don’t believe for a second that this has anything to do with combatting “hate” or “prejudice” or whatever: this is the iron fist in the rainbow glove all over again.
Apologists for invasive, authoritarian legislation of this type sometimes fall back on that old saw: “if you're innocent, you've nothing to worry about”, or as one commenter on the r/ireland subreddit put it, “just don't be a cunt and you'll be fine”. Putting aside the question of whether it's appropriate or proportionate to jail someone for a year or longer for the crime of “being a cunt”, what I've tried to do in this article is emphasise that this argument simply does not apply in the case of this specific bill. Whether by accident or by design, collateral damage and guilt-by-association are built into this bill from its foundations. If enacted, it will be entirely possible to go one's entire life without expressing a single hateful opinion or tasteless joke, and still be convicted of a criminal offense. All because you had the poor fortune to live in the same house as someone who has done one or more of these things, or because someone sent you a tasteless image on WhatsApp and you didn’t realise in time to delete it.
This government spent most of 2020-21 urging its populace to practise social distancing and limit their social contacts for fear of spreading a virus. Now they are doing the same thing, only for “viruses” of the mind. Think about the kinds of behaviour being incentivised, when people realise that they could be found guilty of a criminal offense simply because someone else (even someone they don't know, who they've never met) sent a crass image to their phone. The chilling effects are predictable and inevitable: people will steadily begin to avoid giving out their phone numbers (even to potentially valuable business contacts, or potential friends or romantic partners); will avoid joining WhatsApp groups unless they are certain that none of the members of that group have offensive opinions (something they can never be certain of, obviously); and will begin to curtail their documentable interactions with anyone without the “correct” politics (baldly counter to the basic goals and values of a pluralistic society). Ireland is already the loneliest country in Europe - how could such a situation not be exacerbated by this bill, if Irish people are reluctant to give their phone numbers to acquaintances out of an entirely legitimate fear that doing so will put them at increased risk of arrest and prosecution?
Meanwhile, anyone with unorthodox politics or a dark sense of humour will find themselves left out in the cold, their friends having blocked them on WhatsApp for fear of being convicted by association. Confused and hurt by rejection from all angles, they will retreat into online echo chambers of like-minded individuals, in which their worst tendencies will be amplified beyond all proportion. Far from serving as an effective antidote to far-right radicalisation, this bill is a recipe for it.
Assuming you reside in Ireland, I’m not going to tell you how to vote in the next general election - that’s entirely your business. But before you cast your vote, I’m pleading with you to consider this. Listed below are the names of the TDs who voted in favour of this bill when it passed in the Dáil.8 If you are considering voting for any of them, please bear this in mind: these people know that, as a consequence of this bill, a member of the public, just like you, could be sent to prison for a year for refusing to disclose the PIN to their phone to a police officer, without having ever been named on a search warrant or having been personally accused of incitement to hatred. They know that a member of the public could be sent to prison for a year merely for possessing an image that somebody might find offensive - even if they didn’t create it, even if they never sent it to anybody else, even if they literally didn’t know it was in their possession (because it was sent to a WhatsApp group of which they are a member, but which they’ve had muted for months). They know this for a fact, and they don’t care: they are completely fine with it. And if the opportunity presents itself, they’ll vote for it again, as Minister McEntee surely expects them to do.
Maybe knowing this fact about these politicians isn’t a deal-breaker for you. But it is for me, and I don't even care that this bill hasn’t been enacted (yet): by voting for it, these TDs have told me everything I need to know about them and their respect for ordinary people and their civil liberties. To keep myself honest, I am making a public pledge: I will never give any of the names which appear on the list below any preference in any ballot paper I fill out until the day I die, unless the politician in question gives a public apology for voting for this bill and expressly admits that they personally were wrong to have done so. If they canvass me, I will ask them point-blank why they think it’s appropriate to arrest someone because someone else sent them an offensive meme. If the only candidates running in my constituency are candidates who voted in favour of this tyrannical, authoritarian monstrosity and express no remorse about having done so, I will abstain.
Andrews, Chris
Berry, Cathal
Brady, John
Brophy, Colm
Browne, James
Browne, Martin
Bruton, Richard
Buckley, Pat
Burke, Colm
Butler, Mary
Byrne, Thomas
Cahill, Jackie
Cairns, Holly
Calleary, Dara
Canney, Seán
Cannon, Ciarán
Carroll MacNeill, Jennifer
Carthy, Matt
Chambers, Jack
Clarke, Sorca
Collins, Niall
Conway-Walsh, Rose
Costello, Patrick
Coveney, Simon
Cowen, Barry
Cronin, Réada
Crowe, Cathal
Crowe, Seán
Daly, Pa
Devlin, Cormac
Dillon, Alan
Donnelly, Paul
Donnelly, Stephen
Donohoe, Paschal
Duffy, Francis Noel
Durkan, Bernard J
Ellis, Dessie
English, Damien
Farrell, Alan
Farrell, Mairéad
Feighan, Frankie
Flaherty, Joe
Flanagan, Charles
Fleming, Sean
Foley, Norma
Funchion, Kathleen
Gannon, Gary
Gould, Thomas
Griffin, Brendan
Guirke, Johnny
Haughey, Seán
Heydon, Martin
Higgins, Emer
Howlin, Brendan
Humphreys, Heather
Kehoe, Paul
Kenny, Martin
Kerrane, Claire
Lahart, John
Leddin, Brian
Lowry, Michael
Mac Lochlainn, Pádraig
Madigan, Josepha
Martin, Micheál
Matthews, Steven
McAuliffe, Paul
McConalogue, Charlie
McGrath, Michael
McGuinness, John
McHugh, Joe
Mitchell, Denise
Moynihan, Aindrias
Moynihan, Michael
Murnane O'Connor, Jennifer
Nash, Ged
Naughton, Hildegarde
Noonan, Malcolm
O'Brien, Darragh
O'Brien, Joe
O'Callaghan, Cian
O'Callaghan, Jim
O'Connor, James
O'Donnell, Kieran
O'Dowd, Fergus
O'Gorman, Roderic
O'Reilly, Louise
O'Rourke, Darren
O'Sullivan, Christopher
O'Sullivan, Pádraig
Ó Broin, Eoin
Ó Cathasaigh, Marc
Ó Cuív, Éamon
Ó Murchú, Ruairí
Ó Ríordáin, Aodhán
Ó Snodaigh, Aengus
Quinlivan, Maurice
Rabbitte, Anne
Richmond, Neale
Ring, Michael
Ryan, Eamon
Ryan, Patricia
Smith, Brendan
Smith, Duncan
Smyth, Ossian
Stanley, Brian
Stanton, David
Tully, Pauline
Varadkar, Leo
Ward, Mark
Whitmore, Jennifer
I hope for our sakes that Elon Musk’s coffers are as deep as everyone says they are.
1In the order listed in the text of the bill: race, colour, nationality, religion, national or ethnic origin, descent, gender, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, disability.
2 Lower house of parliament.
3 Upper house of parliament.
4 Prime minister.
5 The Irish police service.
6 As pointed out by Greg Lukianoff, more people were arrested under this act in a two-year span than the total number of people arrested during that infamously repressive period in American history, the first Red Scare, even though the UK population in 2014-2015 was only 70% that of the US in 1920.
7 I wonder if the woke people defending legislation of this type, many of whom have “ACAB” (all cops are bastards) in their Twitter bios, are aware that it can and has been used to prosecute for playfully teasing police officers.
8 And believe you me, I never foresaw finding myself in a position in which I’d have to give credit where credit’s due to Richard Boyd Barrett, Paul Murphy, Bríd Smith and the Healy-Raes of all people. Coalitions make strange bedfellows indeed.
Damn. I’m not surprised by draconian speech laws so much as search&seizure ones. Do you have no protections against what ought to be an obviously expansive warrant?
I was also going to ask if you’d written whichever of these representatives might possibly run in your area. A statement on this board is weak. A letter might actually reach them. But I don’t know how allocation of reps works in Ireland.
I've written to my representatives on several occasions during Covid, but only one responded (which I did appreciate).
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This would seem to criminalize truthfully reporting on a person with a protected characteristic doing something which some members of the general public might find bad, which is vaguely linked to their characteristic.
Say you run some venue which is recorded by CCTV, and a member of a minority assaults another person. In the progress of their investigation into the assault, the police learn that you are in possession of video material which would likely incite hate against members of that minority. This is trivially true, post a video of someone doing something bad online and people will display hate towards them clearly linked to their protected status, like "$MINORITY are violent thugs and we should kick them out of the country".
Of course, this is unlikely. No cops will go to jail over a truthful police report which might incite hatred either. But to have a broad criminal law and trust the state that they will only selectively enforce that law against 'bad people' (perhaps someone who collects 'assaults by $MINORITY' videos for some political agenda) is a fucking stupid idea.
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if you support Israel and make the argument there is no genocide in Palestine or if you support Palestine but claim that October 7th attacks were not a war crime then you could end up in jail for 5 years depending on whether the state wants to prosecute you and how things shake out in court.
the other question is if it's a crime to possess such material and you accidentally come into possession of such material and delete it are you now committing the crime of obstruction of justice?
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Can it prosecute against "ACAB" in bios?
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For those watching the Presidential election, things have been looking very bad for Kamala lately, with national polls tightening, and Trump ahead in several key states. Although it remains too close to call, Trump's odds have shot up to 57% according to Polymarket.
Harris's 1.4% lead in national polls is cold comfort given that, at a similar point in the election, Biden was up by 9.4% and Clinton was up by 6.7%.
Democratics are panicking about Trump's support in the black community, which has traditionally voted 90/10 in favor of Democrats. While Trump will still lose the black vote by large margins, his style is more appealing to black voters (especially men) then previous Republican candidates like Mitt Romney. Democrats have responded by trying to shame black voters. Recently, Barack Obama was even unearthed to chastise black men for not wanting to vote for Harris.
Enter the latest vote-buying scheme, which I think is the most naked attempt to buy votes I've ever seen in recent US politics, even more than college debt forgiveness.
https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1845993766441644386
Harris-Walz have proposed a 20k forgiveable loan for up to 1 million Black (capital B) entrepreneurs to start a business. The fact that the loan is forgiveable means that this is essentially a gift to any grifter who wants to take advantage. But most importantly, it's explicit racial discrimination against the 86% of the country who isn't black.
Personally, I think this appeal is likely to backfire as most swing voters are sick of handouts to people who aren't them.
Will Trump counter with some asinine scheme of his own? Probably.
...what? I'm sure men are more involved in crypto than women, but why black men?
And what does "protect cryptocurrency investments" even mean? Providing a price floor for them? Making them more regulated? How?
My bias is that crypto is speculative gambling for the mass public, though I believe there are valid use cases for it. What's next, subsidies for Amway to protect women-owned small businesses?
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Okay wait, am I reading this right? Is 1 million times $20,000 actually TWENTY BILLION?
Good Lord, well I guess if you're going to give a naked bribe don't go small. But still. That is an INSANE amount of money to just casually throw out to a small part of the populace...
I had the same thought at first, but if you read carefully, the language implies that these "loans" will be available to others. Which others, it doesn't say--all entrepreneurs? Racial minorities? Women? Who knows? But it is a sneaky bit of rhetoric--"we will be giving $20 billion to black men and others!" allows her to make the same claim to several groups separately while only actually committing a single pile of $20 billion.
Not that it's a small amount of money even then. This is why cases like Citizens United were always straining at gnats and swallowing camels. When it comes to buying votes, no corporation in the world can outspend the U.S. government.
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While we're doing a campaign thread, I can't get through the ALCS without seeing ten of these fuckers, so y'all need to as well: How does everyone feel about this ad?
I generally think it is smart and well produced, except for the use of the term "Trimester" which is obfuscating for most people who don't think about abortion much, I think it would be more clear to say "after six months." I'm sure there's a focus grouped reason not to do that. Every time I talk to an abortion activist, pro or anti, they always talk in trimesters or weeks, instead of in months.
This represents a pretty major change from the messaging I, as an involved Republican, had been getting from the McCormick campaign for years now, which went something like "Pro-Life" or at the most liberal "Leave it to the States (Does Not Support a Federal/National Ban)."
This is McCormick directly advocating for a policy of elective abortion through six months of pregnancy, with exceptions for Rape etc. Though he does not indicate an intention to introduce national legislation on the matter, that is implied by the context of the ad when he's running for Senate, though limited by supporting "Pennsylvania's" laws on the matter. I suppose you could maybe weasel what he says here into supporting abortions for reasons of rape, incest*, life of the mother through six months; but it seems like the obvious meaning of his phrasing is that he's in favor of elective abortion through six months and exceptions later. This would, in my mind, be very hard to flip-flop on later; though of course we've seen worse.
My first thought is that this is the polity healing itself. Now that the legislated-from-the-bench forced compromise of Roe v Wade is behind us, Americans and their politicians are getting down to horse trading and finding a reasonable political compromise on the issue.
But of course this is dependent on McCormick winning using this strategy. If he gets back more votes from squishy pro-abortion voters than he loses from strident pro-lifers, then the compromise has been accepted and succeeded. But if he loses because pro-life voters are now watching him on TV every day say that he supports six months of abortion-by-choice, well then we might see a hardening of positions after this election.
Of course, my biggest frustration with McCormick remains that he refuses to talk about his best achievements. Every ad, every day, talking about how he grew up in Bloomsberg, went to West Point, wrestled. That's it. Nothing about his PhD from Princeton. Nothing about running one of the world's largest hedge funds. I only know these things about him from outside newspaper articles and wikipedia. According to McCormick's own campaign, he sorta went into stasis after the Army. By outside qualifications he is probably the smartest politician I've had the chance to vote for since Romney, and he refuses to bring any of it up. Sad commentary on modern politics.
*I've never understood why incest gets its own heading on the list. All the examples pro-abortion folk use to talk about incest are just rape-by-family-member which would obviously fall under the rape heading; and it's not clear to me that voluntary adult incest leading to pregnancy leading to abortion is a common enough situation to even need an exception drawn for it, or harmful enough to require one.
I would imagine that most people don't actually know how long a trimester is. I don't actually know myself, but from context I assume it is three months?
Abortions after six months sounds extremely late to me, given that a pregnancy is nine months long (usually). I would suppose that using "six months" also sounds very late to most people who aren't familiar with pregnancy. Meanwhile, a trimester could be anything to the common person. Three days? Three weeks?
So using "trimester" probably keeps timelines ambiguous, and "weeks" sounds a lot shorter than months (how many weeks are in a pregnancy? I think most people couldn't answer that without calculation).
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Vance is probably in the category. Yale JD. VC.
Hill dawg by qualifications as well.
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What are some examples of Republicans trying to implement overtly - not systemic - racist policies? The best example from Republican's I can think of are ant-ABS laws on behalf of Israel.
I’d personally count the Trump travel bans, but I understand that’s contentious.
North Carolina gerrymandering. Pretty explicit. Appealing to the VRA was a fig leaf; the easiest way to satisfy it would have been to draw reasonable districts.
If you’re willing to go back a generation, the cadre of former Southern Democrats provided plenty of examples. Thurmond and Byrd held on into the 2000s, even!
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It says 'for Black entrepreneurs and others'. It's not illegal, it's just false advertizing and empty promises. Granted that this even actually happened, this weasel language is certainly there to pretend its something specifically for Blacks, but wouldn't really be.
If it's for "anybody but whites" it still illegal, fits right into the memeplex it's invoking, and fulfills the promise.
"This won't actually happen" is a poor argument. If you don't want to be criticize for your proposals, don't make them.
Oh, don't misunderstand. That's not a defense. I'm saying it's probably even more shitty and weasely than just brazen racism.
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Er...
Young men at highest risk of schizophrenia linked with cannabis use disorder
Adolescents who frequently use cannabis may experience a decline in IQ over time
Now, before y'all @ me with "correlation is not causation," I don't have any strong feelings about marijuana either way. I'm just mystified by the idea that Harris is so certain that young men, especially young black men, would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, that she has made it a highlight of her campaign. Legalized recreational drugs are the ultimate act of privatizing profits while publicizing losses (in the form of negative community externalities), and the tax revenues rarely measure up to expectations. This sounds like a recipe for the exacerbation of a negative trend in the lives of young American men (of whatever color).
This feels like it rhymes with the argument that because most gun deaths are suicides, it's net negative for my own well being to own a gun.
It may be statistically correct, but it doesn't justify restricting my liberty to make my own choices.
If Harris had simply said she would decriminalize marijuana, I might agree with you. But what she appears to actually say is that she wants to both legalize (a step that implies greater government endorsement than mere decriminalization) and also see to it that young black men are maximally empowered to profit from slinging dope.
For the gun analogy to hold, you would need a candidate promising not only to make gun ownership easier, but also to ensure profitability and a free flow of inventory for aspiring arms dealers seeking to do deals that are currently illegal.
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Guns have valid uses, recreational drugs have less of a claim
In b4 “but what about alcohol” yes that’s also bad but much harder to restrict given yeast and fermentable carbs are omni-available
Alcohol has a pro social use as well.
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And cannabis is just a plant you can grow. Easily in fact. It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.
This is definitely false, you can make an alcoholic drink by blending fruits/berries and letting them sit for a few days. No need for seeds, soil, fertilizer, regular watering, sunshine, waiting for the plant to flower, etc.
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Recreation is not a valid use? Why? We have a long list to go through if we just start crossing off anything that's not at the bottom of the Maslow pyramid.
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Yep. The last thing the black community (or any community) needs is more drug use.
Let's also not overlook how bad the optics are here. "We heard that you black guys like smoking weed". Maybe they should throw in some benefits for 40 ounce malt beverages and scratch offs while they're at it.
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The idea is that since drug dealers are disproportionately black, they must have some special expertise that will give them an edge in legal cannabis sales.
Of course, most drug dealers' comparative advantage is in willingness to risk prison and engage in violence to defend their turf, neither of which are particularly useful in sales of legal products.
Surprising no one who gave it five minutes of thought in advance, neither black nor Latino people have, in fact dominated legal cannabis retailing.
Either she didn't get the memo, or she's alluding to some sort of program that privileges black-owned (i.e. mostly white-owned with black figureheads) cannabis businesses.
I think it’s more the idea of reparations. Given the war on drugs has hit blacks harder. They should profit more from the repeal of unjust drug laws, so as to heal their communities from these laws. Or something. I dunno it just feels like more racial welfare giveaways. But that’s the spin.
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Yeah she’s alluding to the NYC program that limited licenses to people convicted of weed dealing, but just led to the proliferation of various gray market stores.
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Not a fan of marijuana, but I think that Harris is banking on claiming that these young black men will have the economic benefits from legalization.
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I don't think either Harris or Trump or any particular politician that's running for office has any reason to care if policies they propose would actually benefit anyone. I think the implication of Harris making this a highlight of her campaign isn't that young black men would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, but rather that pushing for greater availability is more likely to cause young black men, as well as people who believe that young black men are disproportionately likely to go to prison for marijuana use, to giver her their votes.
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It was a common mode of speculation so far back as high school as to whether smoking a lot of pot made you stupid, or whether the stoners were dumb to begin with.
It makes you stupid. I have seen people who recover all right after years of heavy use. They become snappier.
I can’t speculate on whether it makes you permanently stupider, but in my experience it takes me at least a few months of total abstinence after heavy use before I’m back to my usual intellectual level.
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Aside from the egregious, aggressive, absolutely blatant 14th Amendment violation that makes this anti-constitutional, the most glaring thing to me is how incoherent the idea of a "forgivable loan" is. That's not what a loan is. Per Merriam-Webster, a loan is:
If you're informing someone up front that you don't expect the money back, you are extending them largesse or patronage, or perhaps you are providing them a fee for service, but you are not offering them a loan. There were many things that were terrible about Covid spending policies, but this might have been the absolute king of them. The PPP "loans" were never really intended to be paid back, they were always a handout to keep things moving and allow businesses to skip out on doing actual commercial transactions. Framing them as "loans" was intended to attach a couple strings, but these were mostly just helicopter money dispersed with the knowledge that there would be a huge amount of outright fraud and even more casual fudging of the program to collect money. Maybe that was a good idea, maybe it wasn't, but these weren't loans in any meaningful sense. Nonetheless, because they were called loans, now everyone that just took a totally normal loan with a totally normal expectation that they would pay it back thinks that PPP loans being treated that way justifies "forgiving" their loans too.
I could see this becoming a more frequent tactic, just calling handouts to fake businesses, affinity groups, and other favored constituents "loans" that are explicitly designed to never be paid. Really, it's a brilliant tactic, because the recipients don't even feel like they're just welfare cases, they feel like they've received a totally valid loan that they have met the terms of. I do wonder if there's an exploitable tax loophole here - no direct payments for me, thanks, I'll just take the money as a loan with no required payments until June of 2250.
The IRS has been wise to that sort of thing for a long time and will classify such "loans" as income. If they're not coming from the government of course.
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Her official policy release on the plan is wild. It’s specifically only for black men. “Black men” occurs 70 times in nine pages. “Black women” occurs zero.
Black women already vote solidly Democrat
Black men overwhelmingly vote Democrat, but now around a quarter of them prefer Trump. This is trying to pander to them.
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This obviously reads like they hired one of those charlamagne tha god guest black guy hustle bros to pen a scheme and he shrugged and said this is what it’s gonna cost you and they decided they didn’t have any better ideas. We’ll see whether it works, personally I think a Trump II administration will be kind of like Clinton II, pure vibes and maybe a slow motion financial crisis toward the end. I doubt he has another sex scandal in him, but there were those Laura Loomer rumors…
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Trump has mostly resisted the urge to engage in explicitly ethnic spoils, other than the obvious problems for certain Hispanics in certain places in an environment of mass deportation, which is priced in at this point.
Trump has mostly preferred, in the "asinine scheme game," stuff that sounds great if you don't think about it too hard. "No tax on tips;" "no tax on Social Security;" "X% Tariffs on everything in the world" etc.
WSJ Economists rated Trump's economic proposals worse than Kamala's, but also rated hers as terrible. Unfortunately, in this election I'm left hoping that the winning candidate is not able to implement their policies.
Did they double blind the proposals? How do they even know what the proposals are?
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Trump had a Platinum Plan in 2020 where he was offering about half a trillion for blacks. Who knows if he ever intended to follow through on that or what exactly he meant but he absolutely plays the ethnic spoils game...
Oh man I forgot all about that. Good pick.
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Yeah, both candidates have bad proposals. I believe that, in both cases, the proposals are meant to be taken "seriously, not literally". So what does that mean?
Trump cares about working people while Kamala cares about racial spoils.
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For the last 3 presidential elections I've explicitly been hoping for partisan legislative Gridlock as the only real check on bad policy. Granted, partisan gridlock tends to produce even worse policies, but at least its fewer of them.
With the added bonus this time around that the Supreme Court has managed to hamstring and will possibly continue gutting Administrative agency authority, I'm REALLY hoping for gridlock now.
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I'll take credit for a decent prediction back when she became the candidate:
I could not have anticipated this specific string of bad news, but "Kamala finally does unscripted interviews and comes across HORRIBLY" is exactly what I expected. Bad Product with good marketing. A fucking TAYLOR SWIFT endorsement didn't even help Harris! Granted, if Swift actually lent her muscle to the campaign itself it might have nudged things.
"JD Vance, an attorney with a YALE LAW SCHOOL Degree outperforms Walz in the VP Debate" was also on my bingo card.
I have to admit I was wrong on my prediction for the Trump-Harris debate.
I think I reasoned correctly with regard to the candidates, but did NOT foresee it becoming a 3 v. 1 with the Moderators basically carrying Kamala over the line, and thus the subsequent increase in her polls.
But she is precisely what she's always been, and I don't think it is possible to rehab her public image any further at this point. I do not know what affirmative action (heh) she could take to goose her polls, and it is extremely unlikely that Trump does something that actually hurts his standing much, or any new revelations come out that actually hurt him.
Also, several of the various legal cases against him appear to be imploding. Even the one where he was already found guilty.
I say this with pun slightly intended: The Dems appear to be mostly out of ammo. The one thing that is still out there is the extent to which they CAN get out the vote and/or the extent that election fraud does actually occur. I make no specific claims, this is OBVIOUSLY still a close election.
However I also expect that given the intense scrutiny on election integrity, some affirmative steps at securing the elections that some states have taken, and the fact that we're not in the same weird world that was Covid-Addled 2020, the fraud factor will be much lesser this time around.
I think the affirmative action that Democrats are still relying on is having a corrupt Eastern European dictatorship assassinate their political opposition for them. I hope and pray that doesn’t work, lest the country turn into Syria for the next ten years.
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They spent it at the right time. Michigan voters are already returning ballots in huge numbers. Remember, elections no longer happen on the first Tuesday of November, they happen over the course of five or six weeks and then take another week or so to actually count (or a month in California).
Correct, but overall there are WAY fewer mail-in votes.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/01/politics/election-2024-early-voting-data/index.html
https://nypost.com/2024/10/11/us-news/early-voting-is-down-and-the-numbers-hold-bad-news-for-democrats/
Goes to my point, we aren't in Covid Times. There's probably less room to hide any efforts to fudge numbers.
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Was this really not foreseeable? It was the only thing I would have given 90%+ certainty to.
Mostly about the degree. I wasn't expecting 'neutral' moderators, but the live and direct fact checking allowed them to speak for Kamala so she didn't have to risk a gaffe with her own responses.
So basically they mitigated a major risk by reducing Kamala's need to speak for herself, and THAT I hadn't foreseen.
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These bribes are the inevitable result of having racial voting blocs. It’s a literal racial spoils system with a race to the bottom. I wonder how much they offend swing voters actually though. I also wonder how serious the Dems are about it, or if it’s just an electioneer promise that will evaporate once any opposition starts.
The Dems know it won't happen. This is a plus for them. The proposal, if passed, would be a major embarrassment and result in massive fraud.
Better for the Dems would be for Republicans to block it proving they are racist or whatever.
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It says "and others". So it sounds like its available to all, she's just spinning it. In the same way that someone might say "this bill will create hundreds of jobs for welders and others" if trying to get a union vote.
I look forward to the day when politicians will promise spoils for "whites, and others" and people will say it's no big deal.
Her message is flat out racist.
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Come on, now. It's a fig leaf. If Trump proposed 'A Muslim ban and others' everyone would still call him racist.
If Trump said ‘the sky is blue’ everyone would still call him racist, so this doesn’t prove much.
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The NYT proposes an interesting metric to gauge Israeli misconduct in Gaza: the amount of one-shotted Palestinian children.
65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza
Quotes from the doctors:
I think this is a brilliant bit of journalism. First, they specify preteen children who are killed, a hugely important qualifier for a conflict which may see 16-year-old boys plant IEDS. Second, they queried a range of doctors, some of whom have no association with Palestinians or even Arabs (or even Muslims for that matter). Third, the data uniquely sheds light on possible Israeli misconduct. Blankly informing us about the number of dead Palestinian children tells us very little: are these combatant-aged? Did they die because of a nearby explosion targeting a combatant? The metric they chose is as beautiful as Abraham Wald’s famous WWII survivorship bias statistical work.
Looking specifically at the number of one-shotted children relative to the number of total shot children is an amazing way to determine intent on behalf of the Israeli soldiers. We should expect that, if these children are shot because they have caught stray bullets aimed elsewhere, that most of the children would be shot in places other than their head and chest. We should similarly expect a higher number of cases of multiple bullet wounds, as in the case of their being shot due to crossfire fighting. In gang-related shootings in America, we don’t see a high number of one-shotted adolescents, but wounds on arms and legs, abdomens, and multiple punctures. (Think 50 cent). Note that any Palestinian child shot or grazed by a bullet is going to be sent to the hospital, so there is no survivorship bias in the presentation of children to the hospital. These doctors have been presented with all bullet-wounded preteen Palestinians, and they are shocked at the high rate of one-shot critical hits — including the author who “volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti and grew up in Flint, Michigan.”
So, why are Israeli soldiers one-shotting children in Gaza? IMO, the most likely answer is that they want to. Israeli culture is not Western culture, neither is Israeli military culture identical to Israeli culture at large. There is an undercurrent of supremacism and extremism in Israeli military culture. When Israeli soldiers were found to be sexually torturing Hamas prisoners, extremists gathered to protest the soldiers’ arrests. These extremists included an Israeli politician, and the current national security minister publicly condemned the arrest of the soldiers. A Rabbi who specifically teaches orthodox military recruits alongside Talmud studied has specifically advocated for the killing of women and children in Gaza.
There is also a religious component to the Jewish extremism of the Israeli military, which I think is difficult for a naive Westerner to wrap their head around. When a Christian or post-Christian Westerner thinks about Judaism in Israel, they assume they must be worshipping something that is approximately the moral equivalent of Christ. “Sure, they don’t have our Jesus dude, but they recognize the same attributes and moral conduct in other ways”. But this is really not the case. With the same attention that Christians allot to Christ, Judaism allots to the practice of ritual rule-following. When Christians look at their God being tortured by sinners like themselves, Jews look solipstically at their own torturous history by outside threats. The attentional focus of the religion is different, and the moral focus is different. These are qualitative differences. When you combine this phenomenon with the independence of Rabbinical academies, you are going to see some extremist branches rise up in some Jewish academies, especially among the conservative and non-ultra orthodox. These extremist branches are most likely to pour out students onto the Israeli military. In other words, the Israeli military selects for the extremists which are raised up within the de-centralized schools of Israel. Don’t forget that it’s Israel under attack, not “secular country I happen to be citizen of”. They pray to Israel daily, it is their Christ, so for a Zionist extremism it is as if their deepest value is being terrorized.
The chorus of skeptics here should look at past events. The Israelis shoot children all the time. They even manage to get off in court after shooting a child in the back.
Can you even imagine what would happen if a white US police officer mag-dumps a 13-year old black girl for walking into a 'security area'? She was 70 m away when she was first shot. Heading away from the army camp and 'security area'. The soldier runs out to follow her and confirm the kill, as per procedure.
The officer who shot the girl is then acquitted of any malpractice in court.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/24/israel
I think leftists would undergo some kind of super-saiyan transformation upon hearing such a case, especially when the transcript has these extremely villainous lines. This is what actual systemic racism looks like, when you blow people away with impunity and get off in court.
That was 2004. In 2018 they shot and killed another 35 children peacefully protesting in Gaza, amongst others. There are probably many more cases that I haven't heard of, these are the two that immediately come to mind.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition
The base assumption should be that of course the Israeli army is shooting children. They did that before October 7th. They did that 20 years ago. Of course they're doing it today. There is a great deal of hatred in this part of the world. There is a reason people join Hamas, taking on roles with a pretty poor life expectancy and few perks.
I don't believe in a global crusade against every bit of unfairness in the world but the whole 'Israel is so noble and innocent' angle needs to be shut down.
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...because the spiritual purity of 15-and-younger boys disarms explosives?
You may feel this is brilliant journalism, but nothing in it really addresses child soldiers, which have a sordid history in islamic extremism even without touching on Hamas' deathcult tendencies. Child soldiers aren't merely 'are they big enough to carry a gun', which can be well below 10, but 'are they old enough to throw stone-heavy grenades,' which is even less. A preteen can easily be a child soldier, and even a cutoff of 6 is being arbitrary in terms of 'can they provide militarily-useful tasks.'
Nor does anything in the article address the nature of Hamas's influence in the information space, which is not only in the form of influence on intermediaries (by controlling access to Gaza) but also on the locals reporting to those intermediaries (by threats of retaliation).
Nor does the article- or you- make any effort to clear for selection bias on head/body shot children. For the article, there's only 8 cited speakers and the doctors who have the internal medicine specialty to be spending time on children shot in the head are, by the nature of their specialty, not going to be the medical experts handling walking-wounded children who got shot in the arm or non-critical parts of the leg but who don't rise to their need.
You say this...
...but the data doesn't uniquely shed light on possible Israeli misconduct. The data doesn't uniquely shed light on any misconduct. The data doesn't even demonstrate a pattern, because the data is depicted without time, context, or even attribution.
Heck, the data doesn't even provide an actual number of children shot.
Most of the article- the vast majority of the article- isn't even about gunshots. It's about malnutrition, psychological harm, baby mortality, and other things.
There are only 8 speakers cited with stories of children being shot. Given the relative range differentials between the Israeli small arms users and Palestinians, it would seem reasonable that a 'the Israelis are deliberately targeting children' to rely on snipers (shooting individual targets from range with precision), rather than closer-range options (pistol-executions) or mid-range-but-less-accurate fires.
On a very basic breakdown of -Attribution of who done it -Attribution of child-soldier era child -Characterized as single shot -Characterized as a sniper (single shot, single targets)
We have
Claim 1: 6 children, ages 6-12, single shots to skull
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: Yes Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (no claim of a sniper context, or how a sniper would be responsible for a singular group)
Claim 2: Pediatric gunshot-wound patients
Attribution: None Child-solder Age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: No (gunshot-wound patients is plural patients, not claiming all patients had a single gunshot wound) Sniper characterized: No
Claim 3: Several children with high-velocity bullet wounds in head and chest
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: No Sniper characterized: No ('high-velocity bullet' does not imply sniper, and no basis of what this means is provided)
Claim 4: 4-5 year old children, all shot in head with single shot, all delivered at once
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (Additionally, group delivery implies no risk in taking the time to load all individuals, supporting a close-killing, not snipers)
Claim 5: Child shot in the jaw
Attribution: None Child-solder age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (Not in nature of delivery or precision)
Claim 6 Father + Brother claiming children (3 and 5) were shot by snipers in house after rumored Israeli pullout
Attribution: None (Israeli attribution is of the rumor of an Israeli pullout from a neighborhood; the sniper is not attributed) Child-soldier Age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: Yes
Claim 7 18-month little girl with gunshot wound to the head
Attribution: none Child-soldier age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No
Claim 8 (Dr. 'Many' children, on almost daily occurrence, with nonfatal gunshot wounds to head
Attribution: none Child-solder age: Unclear Characterization as single-shot: No Snipe characterized: No (Not in nature of delivery or precision)
So of our 8 claims- claims that are clearly selected for shock impact to print and thus are probably at the bounds of what even the NYT would consider worth reporting- we have...
8 Claims
Attributions to Israeli Shooters: 0
Characterization of Non-Child Soldier Age Victims: 3
Characterization of single shots: 5
Sniper characterized: 1
So when you say this...
This is assuming a conclusion not supported by the data.
No evidence, or even claim, is made that it was Israelis in particular shooting the children. That may be the insinuation, but nothing in the article elevates the Israelis over other factors or actors, including...
-Revenge killings / crimes of passion targeting a family
-Armed criminals attempting to silence witnesses of a crime
-Suicide by traumatized children (see lower article on psychological trauma)
-Resource-shortage/'mercy' murders by caretakers unable to afford the children (see lower article on inability to care for children)
-Cross fire from other combatants
-Deliberate fire by other combatants*
*This is the due reminder that Hamas deliberately works to get Palestinians killed, uses human shields for military positions, and done the shooting themselves on occasion... and that the current conflict wouldn't be occuring if they weren't willingness to plan and execute theatrical murder of children for propaganda effects
And this is if the claims made are to be taken at face value, and not reflective of other data compromise issues such as selection bias (if Dr. Farah is the sort of doctor who can help children shot in the head, he's not going to be given the children who were shot less severely who other, less specialized, people can care for) or other issues of unintentional or intentional bias, or examples of outright deception.
(This is the due reminder that any Gazan medical center data that relies on the Gazan ministries is using Hamas-approved and provided data. This includes conflating gazan civilian and gazan combatant casualties, and exagerating claimed losses.)
And this doesn't even approach whether incidents which would be Israel were results of laws-of-war-acceptable action, which the article doesn't even try to address from any perspective. Naturally the Hamas-institutional data would not exactly be publicizing how many children who have been shot were shot in the context of being belligerents in the current conflict.
And this doesn't go into data collection issues, such as how the relevant medical authorities were picked, the lack of cross-reference to any sort of objective data sets (or even unobjective data sets), and the rather blunt use of emotive language and framings for what ends with a rather direct policy advocacy stance which itself would imply the selection of data was driven to justify the policy rather than the other way around.
So, as far as brilliant research goes, nah. Not really.
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One of my bullshit detector modes is applying the "Cui bono?" rule: If true, who benefits from it?
I don't see a tactical or political advantage for Israel to be doing this as a matter of policy: Committing high-value troops to take out low-value targets? And certain carry a highly negative publicity penalty? What's Israel's ROI on assassinating pre-teens?
On the other hand, we know that Israel's enemies love to play the Victim PR game, exaggerating and even inventing tragedies that cast a shadow on Israel's claim of moral legitimacy. What's the Hamas ROI on shooting a few of their kids in the head if it means widespread outrage aimed at Israel? While it's hard for me to imagine such a craven tactic*, Hamas has more to gain from this than Israel does. If they're faking the shootings, the ROI for them goes up even more.
There is not much PR value in publicly declaring your support for inserting sticks into prisoner's rectums, but Israeli politicians do it anyway. One can only imagine what this fellow says in private.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/
Why is it so hard to believe that many Israelis really hate Palestinians, that your natural thought is not 'Oh the Israeli soldier shot the enemy civilian' but 'Hamas is shooting their own children in the head to make Israel look bad'?
Hatred is a thing. In Israel, hatred clearly has a constituency, votes and gets elected. It follows that they are also in the military.
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It is very unlikely to be a sanctioned tactic. I hope no one read my post as implying such. What’s more likely, IMO, is that an extremist element of Israeli society has entered the military and is committing atrocities unpunished. This already occurred with the craven sexual torture of Hamas prisoners of war, tacitly approved by leading “far right” Israeli politicians who lobbied for the perpetrators to go unpunished. And the calls for these extremist actions have been made by a Rabbi who specifically trains up orthodox Jewish soldiers.
I have a hard time buying that IDF leadership is directly instructing its soldiers to shoot young children on sight, but, per your clarification, I absolutely believe that if a minority of IDF soldiers were doing this in a fit of rage and frustration, IDF leadership would probably look the other way unless it became really egregious.
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Every adult I know consistently underestimates age by 2-3 years when asked to guess, even those that deal with children on a daily basis. With a little effort, that can easily become 4-5, and you don’t even need journalist math to get there if you’re starving because your parents
fed you togave all your food to the soldiers.And you really don’t need to be that big to hold a gun. This also tends to shock people who intentionally ignore what someone of age X can or cannot do (typically because their culture encourages that) but I’m not at all shocked if a population that radicalized its citizens from birth has a non-zero number of unacceptably cute (by Western standards) enemy combatants, which even so much as “be a distraction, go set off some firecrackers” qualifies as, realistically.
So while the number of blatant-war-crime deaths (even if these kids are actually receiving fire directly) is almost certainly not 0, I question the default assumption of “they weren’t combatants”, just like and for the same reasons I question their practice of putting their HQ in a school.
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I have actually been following news from Gaza, not just the bits you might catch now and then on CNN, but by watching Western, Israeli, and Arab news channels ( including in Arabic). So I have a pretty good sense for how it's covered, including the biases most frequently exhibited by each side.
Bluntly, I do not trust anything reported directly from Gaza, especially from the people on the ground there. This is not to say I think Israelis or the IDF are always trustworthy (they are not), but no journalist is in Gaza without explicit permission from Hamas. That is just how things work there. There are literally Hamas soldiers in Gaza hospitals, but you will never see them shown by the journalists walking the halls to show you how terrible conditions are there. You will never see them criticizing Hamas, interviewing someone who criticizes Hamas, or presenting anything other than a Palestinian-sympathetic point of view. There are two reasons for this: (1) Most of them are sympathetic to Hamas, if not actually affiliated with them. (2) Even the ones who aren't know they will be expelled (at best) or disappeared (at worst) if they don't observe the ground rules. The ground rules are "Hamas is in charge here and Hamas controls the narrative."
This is a level of credulousness, and confidence, that I know for a certainty you would not display - especially from the NYT - on any other subject. This is not "high quality evidence." This is evidence that pleasures your priors. You took a sketchy story and from it wrote a carefully written polemic that argues, essentially, that Jews are taught by their religion that shooting children for fun is fine. You have already ignored a pile of contradictions to even your most specious claims (e.g., that the Israeli military is mostly made up of religious extremists), and ignored any sort of logical analysis. So let's take a few points in order:
Why would the doctors lie? Most aid workers in Gaza, unsurprisingly, are sympathetic to Palestinians and believe the "genocide" narrative. Some, like the journalists, are actually Hamas supporters. That doesn't mean they would all be willing to make up stories about children regularly being shot by Israeli snipers, but many of them would. Many others, if told this was happening, would be willing to believe it and/or at least not publicly display any skepticism. And if Hamas says "The narrative is now that the IDF is sniping children," doctors still working in Gaza are certainly not going to say "No, that isn't happening." Especially since they probably have seen a lot of children killed, a few might have actually been targeted, and so they're going to be willing to go along with "The IDF is now doing this regularly" – even if they know it's not really true, maybe the outrage will result in fewer children dying.
You have made it clear often enough in the past that you despise Jews and consider them a kind of invidious predatory species, so a story that portrays them as moral mutants clearly appeals to you and is easy for you to believe, but let's try starting from an assumption that Jews aren't monsters. Contrary to your careful argument above that Judaism is an alien and inhumane ethical system completely divorced from Western thought, Israeli cultural norms are mostly Western ones, especially considering how many of them came from the West. The IDF mostly behaves like Western armies, which is to say: they have rules and they follow the Geneva Convention. There are definitely breaches, as happens in all wars, but they aren't monsters who are given a doctrine of "preteen children are legitimate targets." Most people would not do that. It's only plausible that Israelis think sniping children is fine if one accepts your premise that Jews (all Jews!) literally Other gentiles into a "not human" category. You might believe this, but it's not actually accurate.
Do I believe that here and there, some fucked up soldiers have done fucked up things, like sniping children? Yes. Shit happens in war. Do I believe this is either explicitly or implicitly endorsed by the IDF? No. They might not spend a lot of time investigating claims by Al-Jazeera or looking too deeply into an accusation that Sergeant Steiner shot a kid, but they haven't been given the go-ahead to individually target civilians.
People have already talked a lot about the unlikelihood of military rounds (whether 7.62 or 5.56) entering a child's head and staying there, rather than turning it into an exploding pumpkin as it exits. Ballistics can be weird and unlikely things can happen, so one or two X-rays of kids with 7.62 shells in them? Maybe. Happening on a daily basis? A rash of children with 7.62 rounds in their skulls who are still alive? Come on now.
Basically, this story does not pass the sniff test on any level, and the NYT writing outrage porn with heavily biased sources is something you would normally readily pick apart.
There’s a reason why I trust the NYT on this specific topic. If the NYT tells me that Assad used poison gas against civilians, I doubt it pending further evidence because it is aligned with American geopolitical interests and the interests of the NYT’s Democrat + wealthy bent. Same with the hilariously biased title reporting on Kamala’s plagiarism today. This is par for the course of NYT. But NYT has no compelling reason to post anti-Israel falsehoods. It doesn’t help Democrats, it doesn’t help their financial status, and it goes against the values of some of the execs who have ties to the Jewish community (CEO and chief editor). Why would the NYT be particularly critical of Israel? I think because the truth actually compels them here. There’s no financial, status, or political reason for them to criticize Israel. Now in this particular article, there is also an element of objective reporting, not pure subjective storymaking. No, it’s not perfectly objective, but polling a good sample of doctors is better than your usual Israel-Gaza coverage.
Re: your point that the doctors are forced to testify like this, they can simply abstain from answering if that were so, or they could answer anonymously. Is Hamas forcing them to answer with a gun to their head? I don’t recall reading this from previous medical workers. One of them is bound to spill the beans.
See: “Israel’s army, for much of its seven decades the country’s pre-eminent secular institution, is increasingly coming under the sway of a national religious movement that has made bold moves across Israeli society in recent years. About 40% of those graduating from the army’s infantry officer schools now come from a national religious community that accounts for 12 to 14% of Jewish Israeli society and is politically more aligned with Israel’s right and far-right political parties and the settler movement. Critics charge that its growing influence – including from the more orthodox portion known as Hardalim – is pursuing its own agenda within the army. Two-fifths of infantry graduate officer cadets now come from section of Israeli society aligned with far-right parties and settler movement” […] “In 1990, 2.5% of the graduate officer cadets of the infantry came form the national religious,” Shaul said. “By 2014 it is 40%. That is three times the representation of the national religious in Jewish Israeli society.” […] “Already we have seen discipline issues [related to national religious ideology] become almost unenforceable, and that has consequences elsewhere, including on issues like the rules of engagement.”
No, it is sufficient to show that there is an extremist section of Jewish Israeli society which is so radical that it would kill enemy children. And that such a section serves in the military at a higher rate. I think I proved this. I also made a general point about how this is a unique vulnerability of the Jewish religion.
Strong disagree. The NYT is emblematic of where the Democrats will be in the future, and the future of the Democrats is a consistently expanding Hamas caucus.
This is why Hamas and Hezbollah felt emboldened to do 10/7 and the expanded rocket attacks, and also why Israel feels pressure to deal with both problems NOW in a significant matter. The Democrats are signaling that within a few cycles sanctions on Israel akin to South Africa or Rhodesia are on the table.
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I know you have not missed the last year of media coverage, therefore I do not believe your conviction that the NYT would not criticize Israel unless they really had the goods and were compelled by a sense of commitment to accuracy to report it.
The NYT does have a wealthy Jewish constituency. It also has a very large and very woke constituency that has been criticizing Israel and signal-boosting the Palestinian narrative since October 8. (Well before that, actually.)
You know this. The NYT is not some bastion of Jewiness that was suddenly forced to admit to Israeli atrocities because they had no choice. Now to be clear, I doubt any NYT reporters are deliberately reporting falsehoods. They might or might not really believe that Israeli soldiers are now routinely and intentionally shooting 5-year-olds. Maybe they think the doctors in Gaza who are claiming this believe it and deserve to be reported, because it's "close enough" to the truth. But they are certainly being as willingly credulous as you in accepting a narrative at face value that tells a story they want to tell.
This isn't what I said, and you know this isn't what I said.
I don't suggest Hamas is holding guns to doctors' heads to force them to make up stories. The NYT clearly did not interview every doctor in Gaza. Do you think any doctor in Gaza would say "No, that definitely isn't happening"? At most, they might say "I haven't seen this."
I do expect at some point we'll hear stories from people who were in Gaza who will be more honest about the Hamas militants in hospitals (I mean, these stories have already gotten out), but (a) they will have to have left Gaza, as will their families; (b) they will have to be people who don't want to cover for Hamas. Which is not a lot of people.
Most medical workers in Gaza, asked "Have you heard of the IDF shooting children?" will probably say "Yes, I've heard that's happening." Some will also have seen children brought to the hospital who've been shot.Were they shot deliberately? The family might say so. Is the medical worker going to disbelieve them?
Take a handful of actual incidents, a large proportion of sympathetic and biased medical workers, and a heavily censored reporting environment, and unsurprisingly it's easy to get a story like "Yes, everyone agrees the IDF is sniping children." Every war produces these kinds of atrocity stories; many turn out to be untrue. We already have a lot of conflicting narratives about October 7, and about what has happened in Gaza so far.
I cannot resist pointing out the obvious: the evidence for the Holocaust is far more voluminous and convincing, and yet strangely your skepticism comes out in full force on that subject. Why, one wonders, are stories of atrocities committed by Jews so believable, and stories of atrocities committed against Jews so hard to believe? Could you possibly suffer from bias?
That's still 40% and it's their infantry officer schools - a subset of a subset. So you tried to quietly move the goalposts from "Most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists" to "40% of infantry officers are from right-leaning religious communities." While this might be cause for concern within Israel, it still does not follow that even these 40% believe the things you claim, that murdering children is totally moral.
This is not sufficient when your claim is that the IDF is now routinely sniping children and Israelis are okay with it. There is an extremist section of every society radical enough to say "Kill the enemy, including their children." We have no shortage of them here in the US, and they come in right, left, secular and religious, woke and Dissident Right.
The number of people in the Israeli military who believe it's fine to shoot children is greater than the number of people in the general Israeli population? Yes, I am confident you could say the same thing about the US military (or nearly any military) as well.
Yes, and your point was weak and poorly argued; it amounted to "Jews are awful and they are different from Christians, therefore it's easy to believe awful things about what they believe." There are plenty of Christian extremists with awful views and some of them join the military. A while ago there was a spate of stories about white nationalists infiltrating the Special Forces. I suspect you would be both more skeptical about the threat and protest about the unfair characterization of so-called white nationalists.
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I think a lot of this is down to history. Jewish history is full of “we thought we were safe, then the gentiles started forming mobs — again,” and recent Israeli history has been one filled with terror attacks, suicide bombings, shootings, etc. with a history like that, paranoia, and thus extreme reaction to threats is just part of the deal. From the point of view of Israel, if the country fails, it’s only a matter of time before they’re back in Nazi camps. And the only thing standing between Jews and Nazi camps is the Israeli security apparatus. So, unlike the USA where military forces are generally only used abroad and we haven’t had a mainland invasion since 1812, Israel has a history of exile and being victimized all the time, finally getting a state, having the surrounding countries try to kill them, nearly daily terror strikes. There’s no sense that letting up will do any good here. The US military can follow international law because it’s not at risk nor are its civilians. If we decided to fight a war with silly string instead of guns, the state still isn’t at risk. If Israel doesn’t go full bore, they risk being destroyed. So while the US military wouldn’t shoot preteens, it’s never been in the same position. They never had to think about whether the kid will grow up to try to kill them.
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Found more information. Posting it as a reply instead of editing the already-long OP. The NYT issued a reply to critics today:
This is related to some of the issues brought up ITT as well. Eg, regarding the quality and legitimacy of the photos (@netstack , @jeroboam , @The_Nybbler, @NelsonRushton).
Regarding the point by @sarker that the doctors were brought to Israel by PAMA, the author of the piece writes on Twitter that
This also answers the criticism by @Quantumfreakonomics that anyone who would help Gazans medically must be a Hamas supporter. The Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Health Organization are top authorities who disagree with that.
No, I still don't believe them. What was the question asked of the experts? "Is this plausibly a child wounded by a bullet", or "Is this plausibly a child shot at close range with an assault rifle"? I have already said that I thought the photo I linked was a child hit with a nearly-spent bullet; that does not fit the narrative of this opinion piece.
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Point taken. I’m willing to believe that the images are real per Media Rarely Lying.
My arguments about selection bias and lack of statistical evidence stand.
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They do? Good to know! Next time I go volunteering to Gaza, I'll make sure to trust those top authorities and not the Hamas militants next to me.
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The large scale deliberate killing of civilians (including children) during wartime was a feature of practically every major conflict until quite recently. If it’s a question of (western) Christianity versus Judaism, why did countless Christian armies behave in the same way until the second half of the 20th century? Overall, civilian casualties in Gaza remain within reasonable bounds for an intense war against an entrenched guerrilla force that doesn’t wear uniforms in an extremely dense urban environment. If there are Israelis who wish they could genocide the Palestinians (and there surely are), they’re nowhere near starting to do so.
Most importantly, the Palestinians have an extra option that most of our tribal ancestors (whether Jewish or gentile, Muslim or Christian, European or Arab) did not have: they can surrender and live a comfortable second-world developing country lifestyle and have four kids and enjoy much of what life has to offer. Sure, they’ll be second class citizens in a state they don’t really control and have little say in the politics of, but so have countless people throughout history.
For most of the past thousand years, in most of the Muslim world, Jews had a much worse deal than the worst reasonable outcome of a Total Palestinian Surrender. The life Arabs in Israeli-controlled territory are essentially being offered is, after all, not substantially worse than the life Arabs in most non-petrostate Middle Eastern countries already live. No Jew should feel guilt about this when in truth the Palestinians have already been treated far more generously and with far greater concern for their wellbeing than it would be if (and was when) the situation was reversed.
Edit: Having read the other comments, especially the discussion of military rounds that fail to penetrate a kid's skull and are thus conveniently visible on x-ray, my money is on the NYT falling for fakes created by motivated people. The doctors would not even have to be die-hard Hamas supporters bent on the destruction of Israel. If I had had the misfortune of spending months working in a wartime hospital, I might also consider telling a 'little white lie' about the fraction of dead kids who were shot to the head, if I thought that this is the best way to stop the killing.
Shame on me for believing that the NYT would consult with experts to check the plausibility of their reporting and thereby ruin a great story.
End of edit.
The claim by the NYT is not that deliberately targeted kids amount to a large fraction of war victims, the claim is that such targeting happens and is tolerated to some degree.
I have previously defended the IDF against people comparing the civilian death tolls of their war against Hamas to the death toll of Oct 7. My argument was that the Hamas attacks were worse not in their death tolls, but in their malicious intent. Everyone fighting a war accepts some civilian casualties. Israel went further than most belligerents regarding the amount of collateral deaths they would stomach, especially when targeting senior commanders, but I would still argue that blowing up 50 Palestinians in a refugee camp to get one bad guy is different from Hamas executing civilians one by one.
People, states and causes are in part not judged by their median action, but by their worst action. As the joke goes, "But just one little sheep!". A doctor who saves the life a thousand patients and murders and eats three others would not be judged by his average or median impact, but by his worst deeds. Likewise, anyone arguing that the Nazis were not as evil as generally depicted because only 0.9% of the German population was Jewish would totally fail to convince any audience. The reason that Abu Ghraib turned into a scandal was because it was the median case.
Headshot six-year-olds are both unmistakably non-combatants and also unmistakably the results of deliberate targeting. I would expect dead six-year-olds, and perhaps headshot 15-yo (unless Hamas happens to abide by the conventions against child soldiers, which seems unlikely). Perhaps a hand full of headshot 6-yo could be attributed to bad luck but any more than that would suggest deliberate targeting of kids.
While I did not much care for the IDF's tactics before, I was willing to cut them some slack as their goal to wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth seemed worthy. If further evidence confirms that parts of the IDF were able to conspire to shoot small kids, then I would become indifferent between them and Hamas, as in 'they are both evil and I hope they both succeed in destroying the other, too bad about the decent people caught in their fight'.
At the moment, I am noticing that I am confused. Even if the IDF was full of people who thought that killing Palestinian kids was virtuous, neither the rank and file nor especially the command would be oblivious about the fact that the rest of the world does not share that value judgement. An IDF sniper killing a small child would bring the destruction if Israel closer in a second than a hundred Hamas fighters could do in their lifetime. Nor do I find it plausible that the command would remain unaware of unauthorized past-times of their sniper teams, we are talking about a digital age state known for its intelligence services here. On the other hand, if large parts of the IDF had a collective fetish for child murder, why would they not pick a more deniable way to accomplish that? They could just bomb a school (or wherever kids gather in wars) and claim that it was used as a base to shoot missiles into Israel, the NYT would be very unlikely to prove them wrong.
Another explanation would be that it is some kind of Hamas op. While Hamas path to victory is paved with the murders of Palestinian kids (because Israel can not be defeated while it is backed by the US, and the best way to turn the US from Israel are dead kids for which IDF can be blamed), it very much does not sound like their usual MO. "Climb on some rooftop and shoot some random kids in Gazan streets" does not seem like an order the median Hamas member would follow.
Slightly more plausible would be that they shot kids who had just of whatever 'natural causes' will kill you in a warzone post mortem, and then carried them to the hospital. Still does not seem very likely.
If IDF is targeting small kids, the obvious move on Hamas part would be to smuggle out their corpses and pass them to governments for forensic analysis. If ten different countries go 'yup, they died because of wounds inflicted with calibers used by IDF' that would likely be the beginning of the end of Israel as Harris and Trump race to the microphones to promise and end of all weapon shipments.
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How many of those doctors saw the same kids? How many heard each others’ stories, or were interviewed based specifically on their involvement?
There are also some credibility issues—the number of kids who made it to the ER with fatal wounds, the quality of the x-rays—but overall, I don’t think this is a statistical argument. It’s a vibes-based argument dressed up with a survey. That’s fertile ground for all the usual confirmation biases, group consensus, etc. I’m not buying it.
And look. I know that you’ve got this weird conviction that Jews are rule-obeying golems, but it’s not realistic. It doesn’t make useful predictions, and it’s less defensible than just accusing them of religious fanaticism. Making your criticism strangely specific doesn’t always make it stronger.
Also, I was under the impression the most fanatically religious Jews were exempt from conscription, or at least try very hard to avoid military service.
These are two different groups of fanatically religious Jews. The Haredim rely on divine providence and prefer to pray the problems away, while the Srugim don't expect G-d to do all the work. They are the ones that would start building the Third Temple as soon as they knew they had enough nukes to glass all resistance in the Muslim word. For now, they want everything from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River.
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You are proposing an interesting metric, and I would like to see comparisons to other conflict zones before spinning explanations about how Israelis are uniquely predisposed to targeting children.
This opinion poll is a reasonable source of anecdotes based on a snowball sample:
This is not a representative sample--even of "American health care workers who have served in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023"--nor does the author pretend it to be such. As for the rest of the methodology, I have found none in the article, except:
What were these questions? What was the structure of the interview? Times Opinion isn't exactly known for conducting unbiased research, qualitative or quantitative. In particular, this gives me pause:
Confidentiality is a keystone feature in social science research; without it, a participant must consider how their response will reflect on them from the broader audience. Here, however, the vast majority agreed to have their full name, age, and city of residence displayed next to their responses in the New York Times, in an Opinion piece decrying the Israeli violence in Gaza. So not only are these responders not representative, they are advocates.
Now, it's still possible that a healthcare professional who is passionate for the cause still report the truth. I am not discounting out of hand their specific anecdotes, though I do question their veracity or interpretation more than I would a more neutral observer. Because these anecdotes are coming from advocates for a cause, I give more weight to objections like the kind raised by @The_Nybbler when analyzing the X-ray photographs.
So to summarize my point: This particular Opinion piece's evidence does not extend beyond the anecdotes the specific medical professionals who chose to go to Gaza during wartime and have demonstrated willingness for advocacy on behalf of Gazans. However, I agree that the metric (# pre-teens shot in the head with single bullet) / (# pre-teens shot overall) could be a valuable indicator, so long as there is a reasonable attempt at meaningful comparison.
P.S. As an intuition pump, if we take one year in US and looked at, say, teenage boys, I would expect that metric to be high (more than 50%) due to suicides.
P.P.S. The metric (# healthcare professionals who saw preteens with a bullet wound to the head) / (# healthcare professionals), on the other hand, is not as useful, except maybe for those who consider healthcare profession in that region as an occupation.
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The Israeli military is a universal institution with recruitment based on conscription. My understanding is that secular Jewish Israelis are actually over represented in the high status combat units and they lean a bit more liberal than the country as a whole. This is not the US where the combats are 100% on the right.
Speaking of the US, the combats have done things to ragheads that are a violation of the laws of war during the GWOT, and prosecuting them for it was, uh, at least opposed by some even if it was generally done. More than likely the Israeli command structure just doesn’t care enough to seriously clamp down on this stuff.
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Is this the same nytimes that blew out of proportion the story about the kids buried in Canada schoolyards?
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I have always found certain aspects of Judaism to be rather appealing, including the rule-following. It tickles my autism.
(- Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles)
In some ways, Judaism is the Kant to Christianity's Hegel. God and his Law as absolute Other, the thing-in-itself imposed from the outside, an inscrutable and uncognizable limit to pure reason, vs. contradiction introduced into the heart of the logos, the thing-in-itself shattered: a God who can be mortal, a God who can die.
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That is only meaningful if (a) (as jeroboam said) they are telling the truth, and (b) you compare to a control group consisting of the number of children shot in the head or chest in other war zones.
A priori, it is = easier to believe that you could find several doctors to make up this story, than it is to believe that Israeli soldiers are doing it intentionally on a regular basis. So the evidence needs to be pretty solid in my book.
Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors? The Times Opinion team oversaw the whole questionnaire and polling process. Are Nina Ng and Dr. Mark Perlmutter die-hard anti-Israel extremists? Even if we ignore the bias that would lead one to conclude that every Arab and Muslim working as a doctor is a sympathizer to Hamas (of course, we would never say this about Jews who have associations to Israel), this conclusion doesn’t make sense in light of the testimony from the Vietnamese American and the white midwesterner. Due to language barriers, most doctors working or volunteering in Gaza are going to Arabic speakers.
According to this random article, the interviewed doctors were sent there by the Palestinian American Medical Association. I haven't done the legwork to fact check this myself.
However I do find the arguments against the x-rays to be convincing. Are there any counterarguments for those?
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If they interviewed doctors in Gaza, they interviewed pro-Hamas doctors. No one would voluntarily put themselves under the jurisdiction of Hamas unless they were okay with what that implied. If someone from a foreign country volunteered to work in German hospitals during WWII, one would assume that they were a Nazi sympathizer.
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It's very easy for me to believe that some Americans are to some extent pro-Hamas. It's even easier for me to believe that the Americans who ended up volunteering in Gaza are pro-Hamas.
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I'll be honest about my biases here.
I don't believe the doctors. I think they value the cause higher than their word. And it's been my understanding that some of the viral X-ray images were obviously faked.
Based on your post history, you are obviously a strident opponent of Israel, or maybe Jews in general.
I guess I just wonder what high quality evidence would even look like. What would make me trust you? What would make me trust the doctors? I honestly don't know how to answer that question. But I think the shortest distance to peace is through Israeli victory so that's where I am. War is hell.
And I do believe the damage inflicted on Lebanon and Gaza is nothing compared to what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. When your ideology explicitly calls for genocide (Hamas/Hezbollah), then you've vacated the moral high ground.
I do feel for the people in Lebanon who are caught up in this. It's awful. But the truth still means something.
Wasn't one of these types of doctors killed recently because he was holding one of the hostages and was killed in the retrieval? Could be misremembering, but I suspect that's what we are working with. And I say that as an ardent doctor defender.
That was a Palestinian doctor, not a foreign volunteer doctor like most interviewed here.
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It sounds familiar but even apart from that the level of supposed sanctity that we're supposed to treat doctors' testimonies with is kind of dumb. The idea that being a doctor automatically confers on someone the kind of supreme ethical status that means they would never lie, be biased, or really hate Jews, has the sort of intuitive logic that I probably accepted as a child but shouldn't be convincing to any adult who tries to think critically.
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I don't know about doctors, but I believe there was an Al Jazeera journalist that met that fate.
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High quality evidence would look like what the NYT did. They polled an assortment of doctors working in Gaza and asked them how often they saw children killed in such a way that would indicate intent. 80% said yes. Some said that it was a daily occurrence. This is high quality evidence. Perhaps 80% of the doctors are liars and the NYT team is lying. Or perhaps extremists who promote and condone war crimes are doing war crimes. Which is more likely?
Oh. You find this a credible source of information? People who volunteer to be governed by terrorists?
A hilarious way to phrase it, but of course. Normal, mainstream, reputable medical organizations issued calls for doctors to volunteer in Gaza. Some accepted. That’s because they care about innocent human lives. Innocent life is not devalued because of the hegemonic political force in power.
Sure it is, if you define value innocence. If you value innocence, then coercing non-innocent actions devalues it by decreasing the degree of innocence.
This includes, for example, compromising information integrity as a condition for access. If you want to assist people in gaza under the administrative control of Hamas, your access to Gaza depends on your public statements aligning with their interests. If they do not like your position, then depending on who you are you may lose access, or people may lose their lives. Therefore, there is a systemic bias at play, and all participants who play to it (speaking only within the bounds Hamas presents) are complicit, and thus less innocent, and thus less valued.
This is why arguments to the value of humanity rarely want to focus on innocence per see. Innocence is too easily compromised.
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Yes, they are probably either lying or have no idea what the hell they're talking about. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
Probably not
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IMO if even part of the IDF evidence of Hamas operating semi-openly out of hospitals is accurate, it seems likely to me that doctors willing to continue working in that environment might be heavily selected to have an axe to grind against the IDF. For example, I know what I'd expect if I started polling Catholic doctors at Catholic hospitals about the ethics of abortion.
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Ah, yes, the children shot in the head point-blank range with assault rifles, where the bullet remained IN the skull, yet whose head was pretty much intact. Obvious Hamas propaganda. These children (if indeed they are children) were either hit by nearly-spent bullets (e.g. at long range, or fired in the air) or the bullet was simply placed under them when the X-ray was taken.
If you shoot someone in the head at close range with an assault rifle, the bullet goes through and leaves an enormous exit wound, plus a wide path of damage through the brain due to hydrostatic shock.
If they use some underpowered subsonic assassin setup, then it's possible it could be slow enough to just make a hole an embed in the skull at close range. Most of the bullets in the images look like 5.56 (?), and it's really not the tool for the job. It'd likely not work reliably in the IDF issued rifles (are they mostly using Tavor's still?) as this kind of ammo usually requires a special setup or tinkering beyond what infantryman has in the field.
If there's death squads going around giving Moscow neckties to Palestinian children, then they would probably choose something else. Mossad used to like those nifty .22's. They also probably wouldn't let the kids they just shot in the head get carted off to the hospital. On the other hand, if a child catches a strays, ricochet, or misidentification there's less reason to prevent them from going to the hospital.
Soldiers blasting kid's skulls for fun with their issued rifles on a regular basis seems unlikely given the details in the article if only for the fact there are so many kids going to the hospital after getting blasted in the skull with a rifle cartridge. "44 doctors, nurses and paramedics saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza" with a couple X-ray's doesn't sell me on death squad or even misconduct. It shows me kids have been shot in the head according to some doctors.
I think this paragraph tells me enough about the journalist's sympathies and where her biases lay. Doesn't mean the IDF hasn't had misconduct or committed war crimes. I suspect they have just based on what I've seen make it online. Especially in the early months of the war. But, probably not to the degree, frequency, or relevancy (genocide) that this writer believes.
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Amen. No damn way a 7.62x51 rifle round (what the Israeli's use, comparable to a .308 Winchester) fails to exit a human skull.
The Israelis use 5.56 NATO, mostly. Hamas uses 7.62. There's not enough information in the X-rays to distinguish (because they don't tell you the size of the head), though I think some (including the one I linked) probably are bigger than 5.56 -- I suspect that one was a round from an AK-47 or similar either at long range or (more likely) fired not quite straight up.
The 7.62x39 round used in an AK is different than the 7.62x51 NATO. Or the Mosin’s 7.62x54R, for that matter. They’ve all got the same bullet diameter, but different bullet lengths/weights and cases.
Maybe @NelsonRushton was thinking of the IMI Galil, which had a 7.62x51 version. But as you noted, Israel used and uses 5.56x45 for its infantrymen.
He also could have been referring to rifles like the SR-25 or M24. Those would fit the “sniper” narrative. But news outlets can’t decide if the Israelis are shooting children crossing the street, or executing them point blank, so who knows?
Doesn't really matter, though. Any of those rounds fired from point blank range or really any range at which you can see the target without optics, or indeed any reasonable sniper range even with optics, is going to do a lot more damage to the head than shown in those X-rays. Nobody's sniping children from a mile away.
I concur. I think that photo, at least, is obviously fake.
Ed: or the bullet only killed a child after expending its energy in four or five Hamas bodies. That could also explain how they were so close to a hospital!
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they use 7.62 NATO for snipers and machine guns, IIRC, and .50 for HMGs. that bullet looks like a .50.
A 7.62x51 or .50 BMG at close range doing that little damage is even LESS likely than a 7.62x39 or 5.56 NATO doing it, of course. But if I'm doing my measuring correctly, if that bullet is a .50BMG with 13mm diameter, the head has a front-to-back size of 266mm, which is too big (99th percentile for men is is 217mm) If it's 7.8mm (7.62mm nominal), it's 159mm; too small for an adult, and we don't know the age of the victim. But of course this is an X-ray and sizes can be distorted.
your measurement definitely beats my eyeballing. and yeah, I'd be mystified at how either one could end up in that position in a kid's head, on purpose. Like, you need the bullet to have lost 80-90% of its velocity before it's going to stop like that, so we're probably talking high-angle fire at long ranges.
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You're assuming that's a 7.62x51 projectile. It looks like a .50 BMG to me, given the relative scale to the head, unless that's a newborn.
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Do you remember when in December 2023, Poland finally voted out the the far-right PiS party and moderate Europeans rejoiced to see Tusk become the prime minister?
Well, it seems that this joy might have been a bit premature. You see, Poland is currently being flooded by migrants from Belarus. Per the BBC:
Dozens a day might add up to ten or twenty thousand over a year. Of course, most of them don't want to stay in Poland in the first place:
The population of Poland is around 38M, and there a about 1M refugees from Ukraine in Poland without civilization ending, but the migrants via Belarus seem to tax the Polish state beyond the breaking limit.
Thus, the ultima ratio of a state fighting for its survival:
There are some things a government or legislature can suspend at will. If Tusk decides to suspend a civil servant or a subsidiary for farmers, that is his prerogative.
The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will. I mean, if you are in the middle of a zombie virus apocalypse, a case might be made, but Poland is very much not on the brink of collapse.
Obviously, I am not suggesting that all the refugees entering via Belarus should get asylum. Likely, almost none of them qualify. But they should have a right to make their request and get a speedy rejection, followed by an appeal speedily denied by a judge and a plane ticket back to their country of origin.
Yes, this will mean that for every plane ticket that Belarus buys (or makes some migrant pay for), the EU will also need to pay for a plane ticket, but realistically that is the only way out of the situation. We do not want to compete with Belarus in "who is better at terrorizing delusional migrants", because that game can only be won by shooting more unarmed civilians than Belarus is willing to shoot.
This is feasible because the GDP of the EU is much higher than that of Russia (which also likes to spent its income on other stuff, such as killing Ukrainians). We can match them plane ticket for plane ticket. There are places where the number of migrants/refugees/asylum seekers reaches numbers where one might discuss how one can handle all the people. The border between Poland and Belarus is not such a place.
Barely a year ago Agnieszka Holland, in her movie, was chastizing Poles for their backward preference for a secure border. The elite camp currently in power enthusiastically nodded along, plebs chafed. Somehow I don't buy this change of tune.
In any case, it comes down to our inept attempts at destabilizing Belarus regime. Maybe we're getting enough results to justify the costs of this border issue, I doubt it, I think the window of opportunity is gone.
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I thought that we are beyond this point already. At least since COVID, everybody knows that rights, including human rights can be suspended at will, sometimes based on unilateral decision of governing bodies for what constitutes a crisis. We now hype everything ranging from climate change through mental health or obesity or anything else as crisis, this is the feature and not a bug. It was actually one of my direct examples to many people during COVID - what prevents government to declare some arbitrary crisis and act with heavy hand?
Also this is nothing new, human rights were undermined constantly. Look at declaration of human rights and let's use Article 5
Waterboarding is widely deemed as torture and yet it was used by CIA in their War on Terror and to my knowledge nobody was punished for it.
Another one is of course article 12
This one is dead, governments routinely spy on peoples electronic correspondence and ignore their privacy. And it seems that nobody gives a shit.
Of course Article 14 is also very sketchy:
This is my favorite one when I am talking with progressives who are supposedly staunch defenders of human rights. It is interesting to watch how many people are then using legalese to weasel out of this one.
Asylum is part of Article 14:
Again, many people may bog this down into legal battles of who is asylum seeker, if Belarus is not safe country for many such people trying to cross Polish borders etc. Call me cynical, but I do not see how this should be some barrier nobody will cross.
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For a moment I thought Poland was being flooded by Belarusian citizens fleeing Lukashenko's government and was wondering why they were complaining about what was clearly some divine plan to make Poland great again by heaping ruin on its neighbors one by one and rejuvenating the Polish population with millions of their Slavic brethren, but I see now that these are in fact the usual migrants.
The way I see it, we can group people who want to move to a new country into three main categories: highly-skilled individuals that basically everyone agrees should be let in, people fleeing active warzones that a majority (albeit a smaller one) agrees should be let in for humanitarian reasons, and then economic migrants who are neither highly-skilled nor in imminent danger but just happen to live in poor places and would rather move someplace better (you probably want a few of these people around to do certain low-skill jobs). The latter group is by far the largest and is what causes the most problems, since if allowed to move freely with open borders they will demographically swamp your population in a way the first two groups will not.
Since any reasonable immigration policy would be able to distinguish between "real" and "fake" refugees, I support maintaining a list of "ongoing conflicts from which people fleeing may claim asylum" (most likely at the national level, allowing for variation depending on financial ability and local tolerances) and deporting anyone who can't prove they are from one of those places, ideally in an interview with some other former refugee from that area hired to screen them and who would be justifiably mad at e.g. some Nigerian trying to pass themselves off as a Syrian. Perhaps some version of this has been tried locally in the past, but clearly not at a scale commensurate with the challenges we face nowadays.
It looks like this is actually a fourth category: people Belarus has lured into making the attempt?? I’m left with a lot of questions.
I’m not sure they fit the usual categories. Maybe 2 if they really are persecuted Kurds. Maybe 3 otherwise. But I have to wonder how many would be there if Belarus wasn’t subsidizing them.
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I'm modestly surprised I haven't seen the trolls of 4chan and similar try to sell this as "Zionism". It seems like it'd be effective because the term is very negatively regarded in (far-)left circles, but also kinda applies if you squint just a little bit: these are outsiders with no recent history coming unrequested to this "Promised Land" -- the American (immigration) Dream has a pretty heavy religious component between "City on a Hill" and "Streets of Gold" -- without regard to how this impacts the current residents or their long-term self-determination.
I'm not really that far right or fond of trolling, but it seems in-line with It's-Okay-to-be-White-posters.
That…doesn’t make any sense. “Zion” has a specific meaning: it’s a hill where David built the original kingdom of Israel. What’s the equivalent to an economic migrant?
The idea of a mythic "promised land" is broader than a specific hill in Israel. Lots of (early) American narrative references biblical history around the concept, from the place names ("Bethlehem, Pennsylvania", and even more obvious in heavily-Mormon Utah, which features Zion National Park and a Jordan River) to the idea of fleeing persecution to practice religion safely. And it's not just White Americans -- even MLK referenced the (more or less abstract idea) in one of his most famous speeches:
I don't think it's hard to see parallels with the American immigrant narrative -- consider "The New Colossus" inscription on the Statue of Liberty, although perhaps the Jewish tradition of interpreting the history and text there varies substantially.
Okay, but for a random Muslim sneaking from Belarus to Poland to Germany, or a random Nicaraguan looking for a job in SoCal, there’s nothing religious about it. Is there?
Not strictly, I suppose. Although the acceptance of "life will be better if I can move myself over there" without necessary direct evidence strikes me as at least a bit of a cargo cult mentality, it's probably not religion per se.
Mmhmm.
Looking a little further…it might actually be mostly Iraqi Kurds? That’s not a terrible fit, and I can see the irony,
But I suppose drawing attention to the fact that Belarus is apparently encouraging the problem wouldn’t be as funny to channers.
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What if they are from two different sides of the civil war? What if one of the sides fractures into opposing factions? You would have to implement a tracking system to ensure your willing helpers are not lying to you.
Setting up a protocol to verify which language an asylum seeker can understand does not seem so difficult. Tape recorders should be a sufficient tech level for that.
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“Glory to Arstotzka.”
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The right to asylum has already been suspended in the EU, the catch is that it is suspended in favor of the refugees. They get all the protections of the asylum laws, they follow none of the obligations.
The laws say "you must apply in the first safe country" - doesn't happen.
The laws say the asylum seeker must be fleeing persecution or serious harm in their country of origin - almost none of them are.
The laws say that asylum seekers must be returned to the first safe EU country they arrived in for said country to decide asylum - this never happens.
The laws say asylum seekers must return when their case is denied - almost none of them do.
If others can selectively apply the asylum laws why can't Poland? What justification does the EU have for enforcing this law when the EU itself doesn't follow it?
This is a false dichotomy between "give migrants more money" and "shoot migrants". Might I humbly suggest a third option, which is to simply not offer rights and money to outsiders in the first place?
Governments are vastly more powerful than most humans. This is why we limit what governments can do to people, even in contexts where the individuals often don't play by the rules. For example, even if most criminal defendants are guilty, we still want trials to follow due process.
Of course a lot of people claiming asylum in European countries are in fact economic migrants. And of course many of them will not be swiftly deported. But none of that affects the rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum.
As an analogy, taxes are a legal way for a government to get funds from its citizens. Suppose that one European country refuses to collect taxes from someone. Should this give another EU country the licence to just confiscate property of some other party at gunpoint, because 'taxes are already suspended in the EU'? Clearly not.
I was not saying 'give money to migrants'. I was saying 'spend money on migrants', which is different. At the end of the day, the migrants in Belarus were shipped there with the explicit goal of annoying the EU. Given the general regard for human rights in Belarus, it seems safe to assume that these migrants can be put under enough pressure that they believe that their lives will depend on reaching the EU, and risk their lives in the process. Under such circumstances, push-backs are ugly affairs.
I think a better analogy would be if the EU agreed to set a minimum tax rate for the EU budget and all signed a treaty that said as much. What happens when, say, Germany decides to not enforce the minimum tax? What gave Germany license to suspend their treaty obligations to pay tax? Why should Poland listen to the EU when the EU tries to selectively enforce the tax treaty? Ok now what gives Germany the right to not ensure fair asylum claims (a fair asylum claim means actually getting them kicked out when they do not qualify)? What gives the EU the right to selectively enforce a migration treaty on Poland?
I will also point out that the EU, and every country, already has a license to just confiscate property at gunpoint. It is called taxes. What happens to those who do not pay taxes? Men with guns come to confiscate their property. Yes the payee generally gets a good deal (civilization) out of this. But force or threat of force is the driver behind the transfer. Confiscating property at gunpoint is what taxes are, EU countries already have this license.
The migrants all made a conscious and free choice to go to Belarus, and then to either sneak in or lie to the EU about what danger they are in back in their origin country. If any danger to the migrants exists in Belarus it is because they choose to put themselves in danger. The migrants put themselves in this situation, if the EU wants to tell itself it has a legal obligation to fly them back then fine. But I think how it is now is a bad system because those that stand to benefit from abuse of the system (illegal migrants) do not currently pay the full costs for that abuse (getting back home), so they should change the law. It would seem ideal to me (and Poland) by scrapping the right of asylum entirely.
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I figure that a lot of people on the anti-refugee side do not actually recognise any "rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum", and think of asylum as a privilege rather than a right. An acceptance regime that produces false negatives is therefore not perceived as anything like robbing people of their rights.
To be clear - I do recognize "rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum". I just think that right is legitimate when applied to Olga and her kids from Ukraine, and illegitimate when applied to Mohamad and his cousin/wife from Pakistan.
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That's not the issue. I recognize that some claims to asylum are legit, but I don't think these claims should enable mass population transfers. I also think such a mass-transfer is a greater violation of rights than a denial of a valid asylum claim.
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Where? Governments assert broad rights to deploy mass surveillance, control speech, terrorize people with the police for political disagreement, even arrest people on completely arbitrary grounds if they're deemed to be enough trouble.
There's nothing in the constitutions and refugee conventions you keep citing, that would prevent a European government from refusing entry to African "refugees", while following due process.
All taxes are "confiscating property at gunpoint", and countries clearly can decide their tax policy.
This complaint seems a bit incoherent. I'm constantly being told that immigration is a benefit to the host country, how can that be annoying?
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Slightly oddly, the Refugee Convention doesn't say anything about applying for asylum at all - it assumes that everyone already knows who the refugees are and that they are already in their destination countries. This makes sense given the historical context, which is that the Refugee Convention was written to cover the specific situation of post-WW2 refugees who couldn't be repatriated for various reasons. The Refugee Convention was never fit for purpose as the a forward-looking instrument and the body of refugee law that has built up around it is incoherent as a result. I have an effortpost planned on this point once my sons stop bringing viruses into the house.
The idea that refugees have to apply for asylum in the first safe country comes from a misreading of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which says that refugees can't be penalised for illegally entering a country if they are crossing from a dangerous country to the first safe country. But a refugee doesn't cease to be a refugee just because they illegally cross from one safe country to another - the second safe country can prosecute them for illegal immigration but this doesn't solve the problem that you can't (without violating the Refugee Convention) get rid of them without finding another safe country willing to take them.
So it was written for the world wars specifically, by countries which were only beginning to establish a “rules based international order,” when the technological gulf between the first and third worlds was at its peak. And then expanded to everyone by the 1967 amendment. That explains a lot.
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Looking forward to the post, and best of luck with building up that immune system!
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So declaring these people to by blanket not be real refugees is totally possible?
Of course it is. We can declare anyone to be anything. We could declare them to be attack helicopters and ship them off to the front lines in Ukraine. But we would be lying if we did that.
Under both the ordinary English and the technical legal meaning of "refugee", a refugee does not cease to be a refugee if they illegally cross a border from one safe country to another - they just become a refugee who has committed the crime of illegal immigration. The countries that ratified the Refugee Convention said that we were taking "deportation to a dangerous country" off the list of possible punishments for refugees who commit ordinary crimes. (The Refugee Convention includes an exception for refugees guilty of a "particularly serious crime", although judicial interpretations of ECHR Article 3 and, as far as I am aware, the US Constitution don't).
You can declare that you are not going to grant any kind of legal long-term residence to refugees who illegally enter your country from another safe country (and the UK tried to do this) but it won't be effective unless you can find another safe country to deport them to (as the UK tried and failed to do with Rwanda), or violate the Refugee Convention by deporting them to an unsafe country.
I mean, refugee doesn’t have an actual definition, declaring Kurds crossing the border from Belarus to not be real refugees isn’t a lie.
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As much as I don't like it at a very visceral level, a state unwilling to enforce it's rules by force has, in practice, no rules at all. In modern times we seem to have acquired a very Banksian view on enforcing laws in ways that I don't think we have the material wealth to back up, or even that such a level of wealth is necessarily possible. We like fining people who can't (and won't) pay anyway and feeling good that we've phased out "cruel" punishments that might dissuade anyone not at least middle class.
Interestingly, even Banks doesn't see mass migration as a feature of the Culture.
It's always fun to see just what a person given free reign to create their personal utopia leaves out or insists on. Banks stacks the deck with basically infinite material wealth but then goes back and insists that certain cultural traits (also including sex-swapping and universal promiscuity) are apparently necessary
A Few Notes on the Culture
YMMV on whether Banks is letting himself off the hook with "it's colonialism". And why.
Well, that’s the tension, isn’t it? The Culture wants to spread its memes, but one of those memes says they shouldn’t. All their material excuses are gone. Contact is their way to either resolve or dodge the contradiction, depending on how cynical Banks was feeling about America that year.
So “it’s too much like colonialism” is precisely in character. Any intervention has to be laundered through appeals to principles, plausible deniability, and maybe a historical study.
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If you are referring to the Culture series by Ian Banks I have not read it, so the reference goes over my head.
If you are unsatisfied with his view on laws, might I suggest Heinlein? I find it more realistic.
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aren't the pushbacks justified, as they're not trying to enter legally via the border crossing, but run through the woods to cross illegally, without getting involved in the asylum process? they don't want to make any requests, they want to pass over to germany or wherever. why should any country let them in? I agree with ppl emphasizing, that securing the borders is one of the basic reasons for the state to even exist. migrants are used as a weapon by belarus and exploited by smugglers. by accepting them we just encourage more to come.
Ideally, people could just apply for asylum in EU embassies worldwide, and would be sheltered in there until their claim is processed, with a plane ticket to EU for anyone whose application has been granted. In that case, entering illegally would be frowned upon.
Realistically, we don't do that because it would make it too easy to apply for asylum. Most asylum seekers can not simply board a plane to EU and make their request at the passport control, because we explicitly penalize airlines who transport such passengers. I am quite sure that if the migrants under discussion were walking to a border station on the Polish/Belarusian border and made their request for asylum there, they would not be let on EU soil.
If we close all legal pathways to the EU, and also say that people who have entered the EU illegally do not have a right to claim asylum, then we have de facto abolished asylum in the EU.
@MadMonzer referred to article 31 of the 1951 refugee convention:
Granted, making the case that your life was in danger due to your protected status in Belarus will be a hard case to make, but it is not impossible.
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Then your state is not sovereign. Most people want to, and believe that, they live in a sovereign state, and the cynical abuse of asylum is one thing that will force the issue. Either they can, and will, suspend asylum because Poland is in fact sovereign over its territory and borders, or they simply cannot, in which case they are ruled from Brussels. Poles, naturally, don't want that.
The sooner the system of asylum breaks somewhere, the sooner it breaks everywhere, and I hope to see it this year or next, not this decade or next.
Your view of a sovereign state is antiquated, it seems to stem from the days of Lois XIV.
Modern states are very much limited in what they can do. Internally by these pesky little things called constitutions (some of which give rights even to non-citizens!), and externally by international laws and treaties.
If Poland wants to exit the EU and renounce the 1951 refugee convention along with all other international laws, there is a process for that.
The reason modern states are so limited is that they aren't sovereign, they are clients of an empire.
There is no such thing as international law, because law can only exist with a monopoly on force that grants the monopolist sovereignty. Sovereign states are in anarchy, and if they have normalized processes of interacting with each other there is an ultimate authority in those matters who actually is sovereign over them and itself lives in anarchy.
In practice, the British Empire (who invented the concept of "international law") routinely broke its own norms when convenient, and so does its successor in the United States. This should tell you that they aren't confederal norms formed by spontaneous consensus, but imperial commandments that aren't opposable.
The process doesn't matter, sovereign is he who can decide the exception to that process. Just because Western propagandists have decided to rebrand the concept of sovereignty with something that isn't it doesn't make the concept spontaneously vanish.
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I disagree. The asylum system is a farce and experience has shown that giving every nobody who shows up a case by case analysis of merit is completely impractical.
Nations should be able to act in their own self interest and sovereignty. And it should be the natural right of any nation to categorically reject any prospective immigrants who won't benefit the country.
This is absurd. Thinking that putting an illegal on a plane is as simple as firing an artillery shell. It's true that enemy covert ops spend money orchestrating hordes of illegals invaders. But the horde of invaders was coming either way because you invited the over with heaps of free stuff, no deportation, and benefits over your own native population. The covert ops just helped them along a little bit.
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There is, of course, a third solution- deport them to some third country which is such a shithole that it can’t stop it, and publicize this fact widely. South Sudan is a much much worse place to live than Iraq which is a worse place to live than Belarus which is a worse place to live than the EU. Even if the south Sudanese government has to be bought off, they’re so poor it’s cheap.
Australia does this with Nauru and Papua New Guinea. There's a policy where no asylum seeker who arrives by boat will be resettled in Australia. Europe however is short on unpleasant pseudo-colonies these days, there's no politically reliable, nearby, unpleasant place they could be sent. Maybe France could set up a facility in French Guyana?
There's a lot of poor, cheap to buy off countries in sub saharan Africa, and Europe can afford a lot more plane tickets than Belarus.
Just look at the Rwanda solution, Britain's laughable attempt to emulate Australian policies. Subsaharan African countries are quite proficient at exploiting European aid providers and the British ran the project in a clownish and unserious way, the whole thing collapsed in a heap of scandal and delays.
This isn't a matter of cash, it's a political issue. The reason Belarus is using these tactics is because they have structural political advantages and know it. Belarusian human rights lawyers either operate outside the country or sleep with both eyes open.
In Europe, human rights lawyers and NGOs run wild. The EU coats everything in a suffocating layer of law. It is possible to break through like Denmark has. But the question is fundamentally about willpower and organization, about the internal conflicts within the Union and within individual countries. Belarus isn't outspending Europe, they're inducing division.
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There has been yet another assassination attempt against President Donald Trump. A man was apprehended at Trump’s rally in Coachella California. The man was carrying multiple firearms, and a fake VIP pass to allow him to pass through into the central rally area where President Trump was speaking. The man was also carrying multiple passports showing various different names and identities. The man connected to the Ukrainian foreign legion who attempted to assassinate President Trump in Florida also had a similar collection of fake passports.
This is horrifying. Can anyone compare this to previous elections? I hadn't seen any news coverage but I imagine it would be a bigger deal.
When is the last time there was even an assassination attempt against someone? Obama?
The fact that we've had four in a handful of months should be deeply concerning to anyone wanting to keep America free from bloodshed. Look at how the Roman empire fell if you want an example. Trump needs massively beefed security, immediately, whether you like him or not.
Four? By my count, this would be number three. The bomb and/or dog thing didn’t pan out.
Though apparently there were two attempts years ago! One by an autistic UK tourist who didn’t know about retention holsters. Another by a forklift thief.
A Canadian lady apparently tried Ricin.
For this incident, my current understanding is that the only evidence that he intended an assassination attempt is a loaded weapon in his trunk, while he denies any such intention, and appears to be an enthusiastic Trump supporter. My bet is that he was not actually an assassin.
Against: his political advocacy, the official statement from Trump’s campaign.
For: fake ID, fake plates, multiple weapons, bringing all these things into a security checkpoint??
I dunno, it’s hard to apply normal logic to a guy who thinks this was a good idea. Only time will tell.
Don't forget he's also a Sovereign Citizen -- he probably just told the FBI that they can't touch him because he's a Free Man on the Land, and they knew that they had to cover the whole thing up if they didn't want to face an Admiralty Tribunal!
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concur that time will tell, and if there's any solid evidence of intent, I'm open to hearing it.
My understanding is that the fake ID and fake plates is standard sovereign citizen behavior. they make their own license plates and IDs routinely (or use novelty reproductions) because it's part of the sovereign citizen memplex; they believe they're the "real" united states government, so they issue themselves "official" ID. I've heard he claims not to be a sovereign citizen, but I'm not sure if that's just a permutation of the meme, where he'd claim to actually be a "free citizen traveling" or whatever not-actually-a-distinction.
Multiple weapons isn't that weird. When I travel with guns, I usually travel with more than one.
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The good news is that after the first attempt, they seem to be catching the would-be assassins before they get a chance to do anything.
True but every attempt needs another OOM of security imo.
Trump getting assassinated is the only real doomsday event for the republic I see at the moment. At least the largest probability one. Once the spiral of political violence starts it's nigh impossible to stop.
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…but it is 100% worth discussing.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-14/la-me-no-assassination-trump-coachella
On one hand, the perpetrator is an outspoken Trump supporter, running an advocacy org to expose the Deep State.
On the other, he runs an advocacy org to expose the Deep State. I don’t think that selects for the most stable individuals.
On the gripping hand, the guy is taking fake IDs and fake weapons into a restricted area with his fake license plate. He’s lucky to be alive.
Trump and his lackeys have fed conspiracy theories for a full decade, which are now coming back to bite them in the ass.
It's a familiar story. The radicalization of Bangladesh and the Maldives are examples from the last two years. You can't give ammunition to the crazies and then be surprised when the crazies start shooting (figuratively and literally).
The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring. However, Trump's rendition of the deep state is akin to a singular eldritch horror that seeks to destroy all that we hold dear. In this narrative, the deep state is held responsible for all of America's problems, and Trump is heralded as the savior.
Of course the crazies ate it up. And given Trump's recent behavior, of course they're turning against him.
It's a uniquely American problem. High trust is usually synonymous with the first world. High trust and civic sense drive efficiencies that help the first world stay ahead. First-world Europeans and East Asians do not have this deep-rooted suspicion towards authority. Even functioning third-world nations have sweeping rations and welfare (low quality as it may be) to help with survival. So, the citizenry retains a base level of goodwill towards institutions.
America, since its inception, may be the only first-world country that's remained low-trust. The Second Amendment and the union-of-states structure start things off with suspicion between smaller organizations and national organizations. As time went on, you got the Wild West, stranger danger, dilapidated inner cities, and more recently, drug addiction-driven homelessness. Can't trust anyone. Usually, this would be unstable. But America has so much money that it brute forces its inefficiencies away. The entire American debt and insurance industry is propped up as a band-aid solution for all the missing trust.
In such a zeitgeist, violent conspiracy nuts become a unique failure mode for American society. Somewhere along the way, these kinds of conspiracy nuts are beaten down into compliant citizens. But not here. The country feeds this distrust, through its scriptures and decentralization. Now the nuts are crazier than ever, they have guns, and they're pointing to the source of their distrust: national leaders. With the disempowerment of pacifying institutions such as mainstream media and traditional churches, the nuts continue spiraling. America is dry tinder, and Trump is a whole-ass blowtorch. For the sake of this nation, I hope he loses and quietly fucks off to Mar-a-Lago for good.
America has not been high trust in the modern era. We’re a Latin American country which is so wealthy it can brute force its way past most of the usual Latin American social ills, or at least mitigate them. We’re not a bigger wealthier first world country. This isn’t England or Japan in the new world. It’s Brazil with seven times the GDP per capita.
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Low trust in government but not in fellow man. And look where Europe is now dirt poor compared to USA, flooded with millions of African invaders, and economic growth and opportunity choked by taxes and regulation.
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The concept of "Deep State" is one of the only exports of Turkish political discourse to the wider Western world (you are welcome).
While some Americans such as you came up with explanations as to how it "actually" denotes something else more inline with your own worldview, no the actual concept of Deep State very much describes an inner polity that actually runs the country while staying embedded deep inside the visible state.
This makes a lot of sense in the local context of Turkey and similar shakier Western-aligned countries (Greece, Egypt etc but even for example Italy). These countries often had a core of NATO aligned bureaucrats and military/intelligence officers who coordinated with each other to manipulate or bypass the wider political process for important decisions. These structures were on hyperdrive during the Cold War but they did not disappear overnight afterwards and usually morphed into different shapes.
As the world nears a new era where there is genuine competition and danger for the US Empire, and the politicians and regular bureaucrats cannot be trusted with certain decisions, it is not a coincidence that some of these groups are reactivating and flexing their muscles.
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I feel like "Yes, Minister" should be required watching in Civics classes.
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This doesn't make any sense... if this were true you'd expect to see the opposite. You're going to blame Trump for stirring up the crazies with wild conspiracy theories, then say that HE is the one to blame for it when he gets attempted assassinations?
If this were attempts against Joe or Kamala, I could maybe see this. In fact I'd probably agree to some extent. But the idea that Trump is the one who is going to get assassination attempts when he has been 'stirring up the crazies' against the other party, yet the other party has 0, is farcical.
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The Maldives have been trending more Islamist for 30 years, but I wouldn’t call the events of the last couple of years further or more rapid radicalization. In fact the middle class youth seem less radical, fewer hijabs, less modesty in general than they did ten years ago, tempted more by new money consumerist Dubai culture than anything else. They’re watching Dubai Bling on Netflix (though who isn’t?).
What’s changed is that anti-India animus has grown, but that was always inevitable under a Hindu nationalist government. Most of the anti-Indian insults on Maldivian Twitter also weren’t / aren’t Islamist in character, they’re more the same stuff you find on /pol/.
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America has remained low trust? There are a multitude of economic counter arguments one can make. The simplest is that few people would invest in a low-trust society, and yet the American economy remains the envy of the world. The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. The US routinely runs current account deficits, as foreigners just seem to love holding US-denominated assets. The legal system has its foundations in common law, which requires a great deal more trust than civil law. American industries operate quite profitably based on trust such as banking, and anything that relies on brands.
What I think you’ve identified, quite appropriately, is the mistrust that reasonable Americans now have toward the people and institutions who have betrayed them. Technology has made it harder for politicians and journalists to lie. Television showed Americans what was going on during e.g. the Vietnam War. The Internet gave Americans more perspectives that were censored or ignored by the mainstream press. Social media allowed Americans to communicate with each other without needing a propagandist to soft chew their ideas for them. And it turns out that many conspiracy theories turned out to be conspiracy facts, and Americans realized that the faceless bureaucracy supposed to represent the better angels of our nature actually had its own self-serving motives. So maybe the ‘conspiracy nuts’ were previously the ‘compliant citizens’ who woke up to a nation that—somewhere along the line—stopped being theirs. Is it any wonder, then, why some of those people might resort to taking their nation back by force?
It’s not nefarious no, but it’s also completely absurd that people aren’t allowed to distrust the organs of state that rarely serve their purposes, and quite often serve to stymie peasant attempts to better themselves economically. The organs of the deep state are finely tuned to follow procedures that protect themselves from scrutiny, and provide deniability to anyone that might be blamed if something goes wrong. It is not geared to serving its purpose and regulating without being destructive.
OSHA is supposed to protect workers, but quite often the opposite happens as rules that do little to prevent serious injury often make it difficult to impossible to run a business. Which makes it a much cheaper and often better idea to have things made in China or India so they aren’t fined because of some cosmetic problems that have nothing to do with safety.
FEMA is so regulation heavy that it’s more a hinderance than a help in a disaster. Much of the aid in Helene is getting through despite FEMA, not because of it. And because of this the people no longer want FEMA around. I can’t blame them when a bunch of construction workers with heavy equipment can rescue more people in a couple of hours than FEMA and those they contract with can manage in a week.
It’s poor customer service. The people are not getting better transportation from the department of transportation, better education from the department of education, and so on.
They’re not necessarily “crazy”. I think they’re wrong in the sense that these groups don’t wish them to suffer. But at the same time the deep state serves the deep state and is mostly a jobs program for elites who are otherwise unemployable who have no idea how to get things done. They follow procedures off cliffs because they are not skilled enough to know how things actually work so they can’t or won’t bend the rules to get things moving in the right direction.
Whether you admit that, people do believe it is nefarious, or at least speak as if they genuinely believe it. And that it is organized.
Agencies are built to be standardized, both due to logistics of coordinating between agencies and at scale, and to try to prevent both actual and perceived bribery or kickbacks.
I would apply that term to a Trump supporter that tries to assassinate Trump. Unless it was some 4D chess move to pretend to try to assassinate Trump to give Trump a polling boost.
I've found myself in a lower managerial position of a large corporation. I've had my share of processes that are meant to add traceability to both the tasks themselves and my workload, and the incremental increase in the number of steps added. I hate it, but I'm not throwing away my job over it.
I’m not going to deny that at least some people think it’s nefarious. It’s just that it’s much more likely that FEMA is bean counting supplies gathered by other charities before letting them through to satisfy a process that’s in their handbook. Standardizing is generally okay. But then again this is a situation where time loss means dead bodies and everybody knows it. It’s not exactly the same as managing accounts in an office. The time spent adding traceability to a process in an office job and even using that to trace that information isn’t going to cause much of a problem because you have the luxury of as much time as you need to do that. If the cost of traceability is death, then I think honestly it’s a bit more critical to push back and say “why is it important to have a complete inventory of what First Baptist Church of Asheville is distributing when that will delay aid by a whole day and people will die without food?” Sure, there are some bits that you need to hold the line on, but trying to follow a checklist to the letter in a disaster zone just adds delay where none was needed.
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The American people and American institutions are distinct. I agree that the world's institutions trust American institutions. The modern world order has been sculpted by post-WW2 America. It is less so trust, than the world being a vassal state to America.
To be clear, I don't say this with resentment. I consider US to be history's most benevolent global superpower. I'll take Pax Americana 100 times over the superpowers it replaced.
For my previous comment, I meant interpersonal trust and citizen-domestic institution trust.
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This is like…the third time you’ve announced some Trump situation via a one-paragraph press release. Where are you getting this stuff?
https://nypost.com/2024/10/13/us-news/third-trump-assassination-attempt-thwarted-when-armed-man-arrested-outside-coachella-rally-sheriff-says/
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There’s dozens of news articles about it on multiple mainstream media outlets including the New York Post, Time Magazine, and the LA Times.
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It's been doing the rounds on Twitter for like a day. I actually wanted to correct this post earlier today, but I couldn't be arsed to dig out the source.
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To set the stage: apparently David French is a progressive liberal, now? I had heard he endorsed Kamala Harris based on his own personal cafeteria Christianity. But on Thursday he also wrote a flagrantly false-consensus-building article for the New York Times, arguing that the Supreme Court needs "reform" in the form of term limits--and furthermore, that this could even be done through legislation without being blatantly unconstitutional.
Dan McLaughlin then took him to task over at National Review, in one of the better discussions I've seen on this issue.
Sorry for the length of that quote, by the way, I'm trying to not just cut-and-past the whole article, but it's really, really great. In particular, something he doesn't say outright but which I noted recently is that Democrats are "doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance."
Are Republicans doing the same, in reverse? I think I see as much at the state level; state legislatures, (R) and (D), seem to do their damnedest to gerrymander permanent majorities while flying just beneath the radar of watchdog authorities. But something that does not get discussed often enough, concerning the Supreme Court, is that while the Supreme Court has been dominated by progressive justices for almost a hundred years, it has also been overwhelmingly controlled by Republican-appointed justices since Nixon was in office. But for some reason, moving to Washington D.C. and taking a lifetime sinecure tends to shift people's politics leftward. Or, stated a little differently--these people are highly prone to losing what Rudyard Kipling once called "the common touch."
So here's my wonkish take for the morning: The United States of America is drowning in historically unprecedented wealth. This makes governance too easy. Keeping people happy enough to not revolt ("bread and circuses") is trivially achievable. Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level. Party politics is approaching 100% meta--which could help to explain how a turn-of-the-century Democrat became the darling of Republican populism circa 2024. Politicians no longer offer competing visions from which voters can select--indeed, too clear a vision can be a liability to "big tent" rhetoric! The goal is not to demonstrate one's merits as a leader, a visionary, or an intellect; it is all pure meta.
Here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it. I think that, throughout American history, we have had a fair number of politicians of vision and intellect, who established their merit and provided real leadership. Televised debates were probably the beginning of the end of that, but maybe just "mass media generally." We have become a nation in which politics has become the practice of demanding consensus on issues of real disagreement, even when that consensus is flatly contradictory with some other portion of the consensus.
Fake "term limits" where a lifetime appointment becomes "de jure" but not "de facto" justices is not a legitimate Constitutional approach; I suspect it is only being floated because the Constitutional approaches are politically unpopular. While Court packing (or, even more aggressively, Court impeachments) is a legitimate Constitutional approach to reforming the Supreme Court, doing do for nakedly political reasons is politically risky. People may in general be okay with politics at the meta, but if you make it too obvious, people demanding object-level politics start to look less crazy, which threatens to upend the apple cart.
So in an attempt to be the change I wish to see in the world here's an object-level take: I feel bad for David French. I would say he has lost the common touch. I definitely don't go out of my way to read his essays the way I have sometimes done in the past. I think circa 2015 I enjoyed most of what he had to say. His criticism of Trump in 2016 was not unwarranted. But the right-wing meta reacted very strongly against him, and he also gained some wealth and notoriety; he has been on a steady leftward trajectory ever since (not unlike the trajectory of some Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices)--though he maintains that it is others who have changed, not him.
Well, it's possible for two things to be true at the same time.
Is it that? Or is it that for decades, there were tremendously few years where Republicans controlled the Senate, and therefore any candidates nominated by a Republican president had to be those that would appeal to the Democratic senators?
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There's something kind of funny to me about accusing French of losing "The Common Touch" because of a disagreement on what is ultimately a pretty arcane constitutional provision. Seriously, I'm anti-term limits, but if some future Gibbon wrote the history of the decline and fall of the American empire, I can already feel the bored teenagers of some future century, their eyes glazing over trying to understand why this obscure fight over the appointment for certain bureaucrats was so pivotal to world history. It would be like trying to explain the intricacies of doctrinal disputes in medieval Christianity, the kind of thing that just seems monumentally obscure.
This isn't to say that liberals haven't lost The Common Touch, it takes a real galaxy brain to explain why the people burning down a Target are fighting for equality or something, you just can't explain that to a peasant. But it sorta feels like The Common Touch as you use it just means "agrees with me." The American common men are definitionally Conservative, and if they aren't then they aren't really American common men. The common touch is talking about immigration and inflation. It's talking about the constitutional right to bear arms. It ain't term limits.
This feels off to me. Term limit proposals for SCOTUS were a debate in my AP US Gov textbook in 2008. They were picked up as a major policy proposal in 2020. But there's a long history of proposals for reform of SCOTUS terms.
I'm glad you acknowledged that Republican appointees have held the majority since 1970. Once again, a Conservative majority is defined by McLaughlin as "agrees with me." Particularly, agrees with McLaughlin on social issues to the extent he'd like them too. Ignoring the various other rulings made on a thousand other issues. As you note, Republican justices have historically drifted over time...which would be a really good argument for term limits? It would allow Republicans to refresh their appointees with fresh blood, rather than allowing a Kennedy to remain on the Court making mushy-headed legislation until he dies.
But at what point does ideological drift become a skill issue for the other major party? When you say:
Why are you granting the Democrats hyper-agency and turning the GOP into NPCs? The GOP held the Governor's mansion in California as recently as 2011. They've held the presidency for the majority of the last 70 years. Fox News, their partisan outlet, has been the top rated cable news channel for 22 consecutive years, and the top basic cable channel period for 8. And yet, let's rephrase your question:
Somehow, in a two party system, your opponents can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population while you continue to lose every election. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.
Why is the GOP so incompetent that they can't get wins out of the supposed rank incompetence of Democrats? Is that Mr. McLaughlin and the National Review's fault, or are they just helpless passengers over at one of the major ideological organs of one of the two major political parties?
Then again, the NR folks have sure seemed to be helpless passengers against a certain short fingered vulgarian, so perhaps when they talk about conservatives finding themselves helpless against the least dirty trick from Dems, they're just describing themselves.
This seems like a pretty aggressive way to miscast what I wrote in that paragraph, which concerned the arc of French's ideological evolution over the last decade. I guess I don't really associate "New York Times Columnist" with "the Common Touch," but I suppose YMMV. Ditching your congregation over political disagreements and then later publicly shaming them for ditching you over political disagreements is also pretty lofty stuff. His bad take on the Supreme Court is in this context just the latest capitulation to his new social group, for whom he seems to serve as a highly convenient "token conservative."
Not at all. Very roughly, I'd say it means that the grounding of your beliefs is noticeably more substantial than "whatever the Cathedral is saying today." As far as I have been able to determine, French--who has a lot of published positions!--has somehow never thought to endorse term limits on SCOTUS justices until it became a talking point for the Democrats in this election cycle. Even if term limits for SCOTUS justices is a fantastic idea, getting conspicuously behind it now seems like a pretty clear (and potentially even costly) signal, not that you believe anything in particular about the structure of our government, but that you are Team Blue.
Indeed. And yet even though it would have been politically beneficial for them to do so, conservative presidents and legislators declined to exercise any authority, Constitutional or otherwise, to undermine the Court. They continued to accept their defeats, eventually won some control of the Court through the usual means (and a whole lot of luck), and then it became a good idea to reform the judiciary? I feel like you have to be giving McLaughlin a shockingly uncharitable read to characterize his problem as merely "these people don't agree with me."
I didn't do that at all. If I wanted to attribute a lack of agency to the GOP, I would have said so. My point was precisely that political competition isn't happening at the object level, and your flipping of the hypothetical to "GOP electoral incompetence" instead of "Democrat managerial incompetence" only illustrates the same point in a different way: political battles are no longer about governance, or at least they are less about governance than they once were (and ought more to be). They are about the meta, they are about tribes, they are about picking a winner and ensuring that the loser never gets a chance to make a comeback. And I think that all of these criticisms apply very well to a great many Republicans, too, such that your closing paragraphs are, at best, ill-targeted rhetoric.
Fair enough, that's not at all how I'd read that Kipling line. I would read The Common Touch as referring to the ability to speak and relate to the common man, the ordinary sort of citizen, the "crowds" referenced in the prior line. After all, it makes little sense to oppose retaining the common touch to
If the common touch is the ability to keep your virtue when the crowd is going the other way.
Properly, I'd probably contend that French (and most conservative justices) didn't lose the common touch recently, he was never in the same zip code as the common touch. Writers for the National Review are no closer to the common man than is the NYT editorial page.
Which I think is where we're at cross understandings.
Yes, exactly. People who take their cues from the Cathedral cannot do that, because "the ordinary sort of citizen" has their views grounded in a mix of practical reality and community ingroup signalling, rather than taking their cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites.
For starters, "never" can't possibly be right. The first particularly stand-out thing French ever accomplished was to attend Harvard Law School, and even after that he did a lot more public interest work than most Harvard grads deign to undertake. I never got the impression, in 2015, that French was taking his cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites. Today, he is clearly taking his cues from the Cathedral, as McLaughlin articulates.
That may have been true in the era of William F. Buckley, Jr. but I don't think it has been true for, oh, three decades? By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer. Fittingly, I think that becomes less the case around 2016, for much the same reasons that French goes off the reservation.
Thanks for picking that year, as that is the earliest Press Kit I can find for NR easily available online. It gives a breakdown of what their readership looks like* for the purposes of selling advertising. The NR audience is nearly three quarters men. 5% of their subscribers live in DC, less than a fifith of one percent of Americans do. The median NR reader is 66 years old, and 82% of them are over 55, as compared to numbers for America of 38 and ~30%. A little under 40% of Americans have college degrees, while 80% of NR Online readers have one. 43% of NR readers have a net worth over $1mm, only 5% of Americans meet that number. The NR represents a group that is vastly richer, older, more educated, more politically active than the Common American.
And that's what has made the NR an important publication! They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral. But the common man? They are not and haven't been. There are multiple ideological alternatives to taking orders from The Cathedral. A Catholic bishop does not represent "The Common Touch," and he doesn't take orders from that Cathedral; rather he follows his own intellectual tradition. Following any intellectual tradition ("If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue") in the face of popular opposition is admirable, and important for a publication to maintain intellectual integrity. But imagining that the National Review represents the common man's viewpoint is a very common error in assumptions that will produce bad conclusions.
To imagine that the Common Man looks like an NR reader requires excluding from your definition the vast majority of actual Americans, it makes "salt of the earth" an honorific rather than a description.
*I found a similar breakdown for the NYT here. Unfortunately, they don't use the same numbers in their statistics, so I'm not sure how to parse the comparison accurately. They list the number of 18-34 print subscribers (29% as compared to 20% nationally) and the median net worth for all subscribers ($508k, 54th percentile nationally). The gaps in the data are such that I'm not sure the two groups couldn't look more or less identical but reported differently, so I don't want to push the contrast analysis too far. It's reasonable to assume that both groups are wealthier, more educated than the median American, though the NYT numbers look much closer to "normal" there is some portion of their subscriber base that is looking for local NYC news, one can even imagine a guy who buys it primarily for the sports page, where the NR is essentially just the NYT Sunday magazine.
That seems like a nicely succinct way of saying it talks with crowds but keeps its virtue, and walks with kings but keeps the common touch.
Retaining the "common touch" doesn't mean "to be the modal person." It means retaining an ability to relate to, and communicate with, people of no particular importance. Some examples of having lost the "common touch" in policy debates might be, say, pushing new identity terms on people who don't want them, or pretending that student loan forgiveness isn't a handout to the wealthy.
I don't know what I said to inspire such tenacious contrarianism in you, but like... at minimum, you could try disagreeing with me without putting words in my mouth.
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You probably could have saved yourself some time, if you agreed on this metric ahead of time. Personally, it seems like a pretty bad approach to measuring who's more in touch of the common man.
Huh?
I might be misunderstanding the intentions in your previous comment, but I was under the impression you're trying to come up with some objective measure to see if this statement from Naraburns is true:
If that's what you're going for, looking at the demographics of each paper seems like a pretty bad approach.
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I think the partisanship and the entrenched powers points in the other direction— hypernormalization. The hyper-normalizing simply means that most people have simply accepted that this is how it is and ever will be because the people in charge simply have no solutions to the issues at hand. This goes for democrats and republicans, and I think it explains the Cult around MAGA and Trump. Trump is popular because he’s giving hope of a world actually better than what we have now, and doing so in a way that’s very concrete. Not “slow the growth of inflation by X% over the next Y months” but “I want you to be able to afford groceries and gasoline again.” Not “we’re going to deal with the root causes of X,” but “we’re going to actually fix this.” Not “well, we should give illegals a court date,” but “we’re throwing them out.” It’s a similar appeal to other populist candidates— they’re addressing the real needs of real people with a promise that they can actually fix it, and of course they get very popular with ordinary people who want things to be more like the past where one income would feed and house a family (in an actual house even if it was small), where social deviance was not taught as normal to elementary school kids, where walking down the streets in major cities was not an open invitation to be assaulted and robbed, and where you didn’t see drug dealers selling openly on the streets.
I don’t think any party can actually deliver on getting us back to the turn of the last century where such things were possible. It’s the slow decline of the western world into moral decadence, sloth, corruption and decay. Such has been the way of every other civilization to exist. We’re in the late empire stages of decline. And unless we right the ship, she’s going to sink into darkness until some other civilization pulls up from the ashes of the Rules Based International Order to create something brand new.
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Although it's true that the USA is "drowning in historically unprecedented wealth", I think there's more to it than that, I'm not sure that is even the main reason. As someone coming from a nation (Brazil) in the opposite situation, that is, "drowning in poverty", the polarization is still very similar to what's happening in the USA. The current left-wing president Lula was one decade ago (after operation car wash exposed massive corruption schemes) considered by the vast majority of the population as unredeemable scum (I don't have time to link sources but I would anedoctally put it in upwards of 80%), the idea that he would come back to compete in elections was laughable and many of his current supporters were criticizing him (incluiding Alexandre de Moraes for example).
What really changed from then to now was the mass adoption of internet social media and the posture of big media (TV, Journals, etc) that began to increasingly villanize right-wing candidates. I think what we're really presencing is how absolutely powerless the average person's mind is to propaganda. The level of groupthink by the average member of both political sides is extremely high, you can usually tell what they think about everything with 1 to 3 statements (I think it's more severe in the leftwing sphere but you can call me biased).
To summarize it, I think social media created spaces where people can consume propaganda 24/7 (not to mention be recommended even MORE propaganda therefore creating an isolated bubble of content to be consumed), and as internet threatened the monopoly of information from old big media, they escalated their levels of partisanship.
The way our voting systems works also helps polarization, cardinal voting is of utmost importance to help fixing this in my opinion.
I feel like Brazil has some odd similarities to the US that go underrated. Both are very large nations, by far the largest (in population) in our respective continents. Both rather spread out, with large chunks of wilderness. And we are both former slave-owning, plantation socities, which imported huge amounts of slaves and had a weird legal code for hundreds of years regarding race. That kind of thing leaves an impact. I feel like Brazilian politics are more similar to the US than Canada is.
Yeah, I do personally think of Brazil as sort of a "Tropical USA", other than the weird fact we once had a monarchy the other big difference is demographics/ethnicity which as a consequence reflects in each respective nation's economy. Outside of the rest of LATAM I would pick USA as the most similar when it comes to politics, we even had our own "Trump" (Bolsonaro) and the idea of "government interference on the rest of society should be minimal" seems to be increasingly unpopular with young american voters (it was never popular in Brazil I think).
I almost consider American problems as part of my problems because I know whatever ideas becomes popular there will eventually be imported here, if you look up the first flag of the Brazilian Republic it's basically the USA flag with green/yellow.
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I don't think it has "always been" like this.
I am usually the one who contradicts the catastrophizers, the doomers, and accelerationists by bringing up whatever American history book I have most recently read to point out that we had extremely hot culture wars in the past, with politicians literally assaulting each other on the floor of Congress, with ideological camps deriding each others' partisan cures for epidemics, with very real, widespread and sometimes laughably blatant voter fraud, etc.
But at least in my lifetime, we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas, but nobody actually wanted to delegitimize and disenfranchise the other side. If you lost an election, that sucked and you could be unhappy about it, but you set about trying to win the next one.
The Motte being the place it is, most people perceive the Democrats to be the villains here, and right now, they are, because they are in power and because the left has the upper hand in the culture wars. But it was during the Clinton years when I first noticed a radical shift amongst right wingers; Clinton was not just a bad president, he was illegitimate. He was a monstrous, degenerate, nation-ending catastrophe. Liberals were traitors. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter rose to prominence on the strength of their invective.
This wasn't a particularly unique period in American history and I am not (quite) saying "Republicans started it," but I am saying that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together. I know for certain that Congress was a more congenial and bipartisan body (and a lot of people criticized it for that, arguing that bipartisanship was bad because it meant making compromises and concessions with the enemy - well, those critics got what they wanted).
So I feel what you are saying, and what your National Review article is saying. I feel it every time I talk to my liberal friends. I feel it when I visit my hobby boards which have become essentially a chorus of daily agreement about leftist talking points. That someone could be a good person and still vote Republican is basically unthinkable. That you could be a liberal and remain friends with a Trump supporter is considered a logical contradiction, like saying you're a Jew who's friends with a Nazi.
I have seen liberals arguing that packing the court is a perfectly legitimate measure, that controlling free speech on the Internet is essential to combat disinformation, that the Constitution is fake and gay, and it's very clear that:
This makes me sad and frustrated and gloomy, but while I am not going to say Republicans started it, I'm not not saying that either.
No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.
On one hand, there's a fun discussion about how this stuff does genuinely seem to ebb and flow, both at large scale and at small ones, such that people can point to different cruxes and changes and be genuinely correct.
On the other hand, there's a certain tendency for this to be... hard to discuss. It's easy to fall prey to a Great Man of History argument -- you yourself jump from "delegitimize and disenfranchise" in general to Clinton specifically -- in ways that obfuscate the comparisons you're making (eg, for gunnies, Clinton opened his Presidency with Ruby Ridge and the Waco Siege, then jumped over a controversial and painful assault weapons ban, all while ). That's true even where it limits your own political aisle! (eg, the early 90s gay politics were Not Great Bob)
On the gripping hand, it's worth discussing the extent political power has grown from this sort of delegitimization. In the Dubya and early Obama era, there were long and compelling arguments about the tradeoffs between helpful persuasion -- hoping for political change by providing the best arguments and understanding and respecting opponents -- against change as churn -- where political success comes from emphasis on recruiting incoming players while the opponents age out.
And the answer pretty resoundingly has become neither, to such a point that the question is an obvious Morton's Fork and false dilemma today: whether gay marriage, trans rights (from the right and left!), public education (ditto!), college debt, the Affordable Care Act, statues, public protests (ditto again!), it's not just possible but obvious that victory could and did come by persuading people not that your cause was correct, but that opposition or even caution to it was so evil that it could not be tolerated in even hushed whispers. Whatever concern backlash might once have had, it's wrapped up around situations like BLM or school vouchers where the 'backlash' to (sometimes literal) arson was at worst not maximizing territorial gains, or matters like the rise of Trump or Coates that justified only more and harder.
It's Dan Savage's world -- bullying kids as part of your anti-bullying campaign, smearing your opponent's name in literal shit, and all. We're just stuck living in it.
((On the other gripping hand... this is a post where it's really hard for me to resist pulling quotes from the past. Really, Clinton?))
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I think the information age is what hypercharged it. Kojima_was_right.tiff
Thanks to the internet, people found out for the first time what others really talk like, think about, and do, and the conclusion was that this is intolerable. It's trivially easy to find the lizardman's constant online. Here's a guy who believes we should have sex with toasters. Here's a woman who thinks that left-handed people are instruments of the devil. Here's an engineer who doesn't believe in melting points. Here's a teenager who thinks everyone who isn't him should die, etc. And people are wireheading this, mainlining it, sipping this crackhead energy direct from the source. A million howling voices screaming to be heard...
...and what follows is curation. You have to do it in order to remain sane in 2024, if you are connected to the internet in any way at all. You have to pick and choose. People build their own bubbles.
Within the bubble, everyone outside looks fucking crazy or evil or both. Gas 'em all, shoot em, whatever. If they were worthwhile, they'd already be in the bubble, where the Good People are. If you were Good, you'd be in the bubble, which means you're not Good if you're outside it. Of course, the alternative explanation for this phenomenon is that you are simply bad at curation and you can't tell, or your bubble has become sufficiently isolated that you've actually managed to push away reality.
We can hang reality, it's alright.
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Of course, it wasn't a particularly long period; families were at daggers drawn over culture war and political activism in the 60's and 70's (famously, thanks to Bryan Burroughs' Days of Rage, with actual bombings and shootings), and even Reagan had quite a lot of dedicated haters in the more progressive parts of the country.
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Rush Limbaugh came to prominence by imbuing his show with the concept that the Democrats were not just eroding the bedrock of America, but using civility itself as a mask to hide their deeds in plain sight.
Thus, we right-wingers were to investigate any calls for civility as if they were cover for nefarious deeds being planned. Trump took this to the next level in his Tweets from 2012 onward. And here we are.
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Where are your hobby boards though? Reddit?
Nice try. ;)
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Where by "we" you mean the first world, anyway. I saved this pamphlet excerpt explaining the idea as soon as I read it for the first time:
Great lesson to teach the democratizing developing world, but we might want to start printing up extra copies to hand out to other Americans too.
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I like to think of it in terms of a multi-generational cultural-economic debt model:
Greatest Generation: Inherits the economic memory of the depression and prosecutes WW2. Their just reward is the American economy 1958-1968. 20 years of "it's raining money". They also inherit the traditional culture of their parents - WW1 veterans and earlier - who grew up in a highly localized and federated political system mostly because technology and communication meant that Washington D.C. injecting itself into the daily concerns of say, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was impossible.
Baby Boomers - Inherits amazing economy, prosecutes Vietnam - but this is the start of "War is for the poors" and objecting to military service (unthinkable in all previous generations) is hailed. They inherit just enough of their parent's traditional cultural norms that monogamy and family-as-center-of-political life maintains, but, combined with the sexual revolution and the pill, that starts to fade in strength considerably. The top 20% of them end up getting a bonus 30 years of economic prosperity (being a white collar worker 1968-1998 was like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer).
Gen X / Elder millenials - Problems start. They don't inherit much of the economy prosperity of their parents because the 1970s inflation makes it difficult and the aforementioned top 20% of baby boomers capture a lot of the wealth generation as Gen X / Elder-M begin their careers. Culturally, there is no Big War - Gulf War 1? That was like, one summer, right? The last frayed stands of traditional family are exploded by 1970s welfare programs etc. Feminization of the culture is in full swing.
Mainline Millenials - They come into their teens / early adulthood with 2008. 8 Years later, half of them sincerely believe Trump is Hitler. Economically, it's not just that the top 20% capture some of the wealth being generated, it's that they're capturing all of it. There are no more families, there's a decent change you grew up in a divorced household. Religious and community based institutions are non-existent. The babyboomers are now retiring and their built up national debt is now your concern.
So, no, there isn't a single "starting point" but you can see the accumulation of degeneration economically and culturally. Do I blame this on the baby boomers? You bet your ass. Winning World War 2 created such an advantageous structural position for the US on a planetary scale that not engaging in decadent behavior was close to impossible. It wasn't winning the lottery - It was the Super Bowl champion quarterback being made president of the world's biggest company with an unlimited credit line from the rest of the human species.
The failure mode began in the 1960s but really compounded in the 1970s. I don't know what was in the water, but there seems to have been so many concurrent social, political, and economic moments of "what the actual fuck?" in those 10 years. 1990s Republicans (Newt, in particular) based a lot of their macro-strategy on trying to roll back 1968-1978.
This is ridiculous. Being a white collar worker from 1968 to 1998 was nothing like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer, and I speak as someone who was in both positions (though not for 30 years). And the boomers only "prosecute[d]" Vietnam in the sense that they got sent there to kill and to die; they weren't running the country at the time. The 1970s inflation hit the boomers more than the Xers, who were children at the time. The earliest Gen Xers in fact graduated into the start of the Reagan Boom; later Xers weren't so lucky.
You're right - it was probably better. You still had company provided pensions for tenure of service. Company cars, relocation assistance, mortgage assistance was somewhat common.
This is correct. But @jeroboam and @hydroacetylene did a much better job of highlighting my shortcomings to this point.
Children don't experience inflation?
Much like their millennial counterparts 20 years later, Gen Xers walking into the workforce in the Reagan years found obstinate Boomers hogging all of the upward mobility. Again, the economic miracle of the 1980s and 1990s went disproportionately into the pockets and accounts of boomers, often in indirect ways; real estate prices going up for ever, the wealth transfer scheme of subsidized college loans.
This makes me feel bad. And I feel like it's on purpose. You and I don't get a long much. Sometimes you are right. Sometimes I am right. Please be cordial.
Did you miss the part where I did both? It wasn't. Company-provided defined benefit plans were on their way out already, and 401ks from FAANG are superior. Company cars were a workaround for super-high taxes and the concomittant low salary. Relocation assistance exists in FAANG companies if you move for them. Mortgage assistance was another workaround for super-high taxes.
It generally does not affect their career progression.
The oldest Boomer was 42 at the end of the Reagan presidency and 44 when the 1990 recession hit. It's "obstinate" for people of that age to stay in the workforce? All those Boomers moving up were replaced by younger people. It's true that the Boomers got more benefit in dollars from the Reagan expansion, since they were in later, more lucrative parts of their careers, but it was still pretty good for the younger Xers. Real estate values did not go up forever in this time; there was a slight drop, then a boom, followed by a bust.
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Previous iterations of the draft were widely dodged, to the point that wealthy men weren’t expected to serve at all. There were often explicit wealth disqualifications- the civil war, for example, granted exemptions to men who could pay for a substitute. Being an officer was often high status but joining the army as a private is more common and accepted for middle class boys now than in 1900. The difference is that before ~1960 everybody was poor.
Yeah, it's not so much that today's situation is uniquely bad as the previous era (say 1900–1950) was uniquely good in a lot of ways.
In WWI and WWII, the upper classes participated in the dying just as much as the lower classes.
That is rare (although not unprecedented) in history. Nevertheless, we are retreating from the high water mark of class unity. And, when it comes to perceptions, it's the direction of change not the absolute level that matters.
People are absolutely right to be concerned that elites avoid military service while still supporting wars abroad. Dick Cheney (he of five deferments) exemplifies that trend.
@jeroboam @hydroacetylene
Fair points! I didn't know some facts, and also didn't understand context. Thanks!
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Yeah, I suspect that which "starting point" people lean to will be a combination of their ideology and their age. I tend to reflexively regard the Bork hearing as the major inflection point in today's political partisanship, but that couldn't have happened without the Warren Court, and that couldn't have happened without... (on ad infinitum) There are not really events, only points along a process continuum. "Nothing ever happens."
But I agree! It didn't used to be like this. One suspicion I have is that our values pluralism has gotten the best of us. "Values pluralism" for most of our country's history has meant "you can live out any flavor of the European Christian good life imaginable!" When most of the nation shares fundamental values--even the people who opt to live differently, in an "I know I'm a bad person but I just can't help myself" sort of a way--then political parties aren't existential threats, they're just competing visions for implementation. Somewhat boring, really--"we're all welfare statists arguing about the optimal balance between taxation and redistribution." The retreat from values-oriented politics to identity-oriented politics did not happen all at once, but I think it has certainly happened, and the rise of the "alt-right" was just the inevitable result of certain "conservatives" finally getting the message that the time for discussion and compromise was over, and that a new age of tribalism was upon us.
I would like to find a way to reverse that trend, but the Motte is one of the few places I can even discuss it without encountering an outright refusal to engage on the merits.
One thing I noticed about politics Now vs 2000 is that basically politics itself has become much more of a lifestyle than it used to be. There are entirely different default activities, and different fashion sense and different music and so on. And now there are political themed shopping — bulletproof coffee and the like. And I think that’s making polarization worse, as it makes almost every decision made at least potentially political. I find it kind of exhausting tbh to have so much be political when it doesn’t matter that much.
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You can't really win. Once your side starts winning, the people interested in only power and status switch sides. They then morph and corrupt your "principles" into excuses to pursue their power and status. They may fly the same flag and use the same phrases and words to justify their actions, but none of the symbols or words mean the same thing for them. But this process of curruption takes time, and for a while it can seem like your winning. Eventually, you're going to have to switch to another team and begin the whole thing over again, but once your new side starts winning, well ...
Power in general is like a bug zapper lamp to flies.
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Can’t we purge these entryists? Do they belong to an identifiable demographic?
To add to @faceh's point, entryists can sometimes even do a switcheroo and use a purge originally intended for them to get rid of newcomers that are loyal to the old ideals. It's not impossible to wrangle them, but it's often much safer to stay under their radar and not allow them to get a hold in the first place.
Imo something like this has happened in science as well, where we enjoyed a few decades of science/scientists having a good reputation, but nowadays it's gotten so bad that "the science says" is just run-of-the-mill partisanship.
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They look and sound just like you!
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By their nature they tend to be those who are exceptionally good at blending in, at 'hypnotizing' the masses, at deflecting blame, and navigating social environments to favorable ends.
So just because you manage to identify them doesn't mean you can rally enough support/power to keep them out or to oust them. They're the ones who will sacrifice virtually every other value to maintain power, and you, as a normal person, have people and things you value which can be attacked or threatened to get you to back off.
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Yeah. “Humans.”
I really want to contradict you and drop a lizardman joke, but even at my tinfoiliest I have to admit you're right on this one.
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There's something at the core of this all, from progressives, that I fundamentally have a hard time wrapping my head around.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s in the South in a conservative religious family in a conservative community. The view of the Supreme Court was overwhelmingly that it had behaved as an unelected, anti-democratic, civilization wrecking dictatorship for half a century. If you valued freedom of religion and freedom of association in a more traditional, de Tocqueville-ian sense (with a strong emphasis on the ability of people to form and police their own communities with their own values and their own norms and their own boundaries), the Supreme Court had behaved as a wrecking ball. And particularly if you were sensitive, as most smarter conservatives I knew were, to the ubiquity of second order effects in society, the Supreme Court came across constantly as a body that was totally indifferent to, and totally insulated from, the disastrous second order effects of its dictates and airy social engineering.
BUT... well, Reagan won in a landslide, and the country had turned back to the right, and with that level of political domination, at some point the Supreme Court was going to have to reflect that political reality... or so we thought. And besides, conservatives value authority and institutions and fear chaos. There's a very deep awareness of Chesterton's Fence on a gut level. So despite those wide spread, deeply held beliefs about the Supreme Court, we just marched ahead, accepted their rulings, and tried to steer our lives around the damage they inflicted. (Also, the federal government had made it clear earlier that they would send in Federal troops from time to time to enforce Supreme Court rulings at gun point, and most people were ready just to move on with their lives)
But of course, over time, all the pipeline issues about the judiciary did become more apparent - the political domination of Reagan conservatives really SHOULD have resulted in a much more conservative judiciary than actually resulted, with much, MUCH more radically conservative rulings on all sorts of things like abortion and affirmative action and disparate impact back in the 80s and early 90s, if you were going by the feelings of voters at the time. But it took too long for conservatives to recognize the problems about where you get those judges from, and by that point, the country had moved on... or so it seemed until Mitch McConnell played the hardest of hard ball, fate intervened, and former Democrat Donald Trump got 3 supreme court picks after not winning the popular vote.
Anyway, that's my baseline for how people I grew up around viewed the Supreme Court.
And so when I see enraged public progressives and fellow travelers like David French railing against the current Supreme Court and its legitimacy, the thing I keep thinking is, the progressives I'm thinking of have built their ENTIRE moral universe around other citizens respecting all sorts of previous (as their opponents see it) destructive Supreme Court rulings from roughly the 1940s to the 2010s. Much of their moral progress stories require other citizens to simply bow down and accept and actively prop up those other rulings. They gain from the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in a way that the traditionalists I grew up around absolutely don't. Given that, it's very difficult for me to imagine a future where people upset by the current Supreme Court manage to publicly delegitimize it and mess with it AND also their opponents still accept the legitimacy of previous generations rulings. And if I'm right about that, it seems like progressives have vastly more to lose by having a much more weakened Supreme Court.
I've noted before that I often get a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" vibe from progressives when it comes to the institutions they've inherited, and their overwhelming sense that it's just natural for different institutions to lean their way - and the Supreme Court is absolutely a place where I think that is true.
Another way of putting is is that for more than a century, the Supreme Court has been the primary instrument of transforming the federal government and its sphere of influence following the progressive program. Conservatives only in our lifetimes wised up enough to set up the pipeline, as you put it, and it has only just borne any fruit in the form of walking back a bare handful of the most extreme points of that program.
We shouldn't be surprised that progressives would turn on it so quickly, because it has always been a question of what means would achieve the necessary end of transforming America and being on the right side of history. The Supreme Court was their darling because it was the most effective tool, not because of any underlying principles about the primacy of the judiciary over other branches of government.
Pre-Reagan, there was no conservative pipeline to set up. Not a lot of libertarian lawyers, after all.
It was the aftereffects of Roe that gave the federalist society ammo. When Catholics broke with the democrats there was suddenly a source of lawyers who had gone to the kinds of law schools judges go to. Before all this, there simply weren’t strongly conservative lawyers to appoint as judges.
It's a great point that the conservative judicial pipeline is almost exclusively Catholic and that Roe v Wade had a huge role in motivating intellectual Catholics to rethink their progressive association.
In Latin America, where abortion was simply off the table until quite recently, the Catholic Church tended to be associated with either the authoritarian right or center left.
This is largely because the center right is a ‘free markets first’ phenomenon, which jives poorly with Catholic teaching. Both authoritarian right wing priorities and the broad centrist center left do much better. In the USCCB there’s a division between bishops that align themselves as extremely moderate democrats and the currently dominant wing which is basically eccentric right wing republicans. Neither are particularly libertarian.
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Let's talk about this.
Thomas and Alito don't seem to be on a leftward trajectory. Roberts, of course, seems to love being the middle, or the counterbalance to the right. Kavanaugh seems cut from the same mold, thus far. Barrett I expect to swing leftward on everything and anything not abortion, and in particular I expect her to undermine any anti-immigration or tough-on-crime policies that come before the court, especially given the makeup of her family.
And then there's Gorsuch. Neil "We will abide by the treaties" Gorsuch. Neil "Butt-for Bostock" Gorsuch. Is he shifting to the left as he moves from Colorado to DC? Or is he simply ornery and stubborn in his own interpretation of the laws? To me, it comes down to his rulings on gun rights. There's no way you can read the Civil Rights Act as guaranteeing protections for transsexuals, but not read "Shall not be infringed" as forbidding pretty much every gun law in the land.
Of course, none of them have tried to take an axe to the FISA courts or curtail the massive surveillance state on third or fourth amendment grounds, so I'm not actually hopeful that I'll see a constitutionalist on the court in my lifetime.
Speaking as a left-leaning social democrat who dislikes all the Republican judges for obvious reaosns, Gorsuch is the only one who actually seemingly has an identifiable philosophy ala Scalia (except actually better) that I can at least respect, even though I think it's personally terrible. Maybe Thomas did 20 years ago, but he's fallen into a FOX News brained duo alongside Alito for basically the entirety of the Trump era.
Man, I've been a Thomas fan since Law School, and I think what we're seeing now is a guy who has almost all the same convictions he did 30 years ago, but he's finally gotten to implement them rather than just writing terse and pithy dissents.
There HAS been an uptick in reporters and other platforms attempting to make Alito and Thomas' conduct off the bench out to seem somehow abberrant and worthy of removal, though.
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Gorsuch hates the administrative state. There he is quite strident.
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That article is not very beleivable. I am thoroughly reminded of the many many 'hate crime' hoaxes that turn out to be just that. Those anecdotes of continuos in-person racism sound so incredibly made up, and exactly what an echo-chambered yankee would think sounded real about 'southern racists'.
I guarantee this never happened.
I notice that the accusastions of racism serve as a convenient reason not to engage with actually well made disagreements with him as a panelest. It reads like he's got a victim complex, and a huge sore spot about not being accepted and praised for his wisdom, and he's using made up or exaggerated stories about racism as a shield for his ego.
I don't know, there are a lot of people in the world who say a lot of things. This sounds like a really weird thing to say so maybe in context it made more sense? I tend to believe it, I just don't think it actually matters, doubt there was any animus behind it, and overall think that hypersensitivity to microagressions tends to make racial relations worse.
David French's current views overall are garbage, though.
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