Middle East
Jihad
It’s impossible to make a moral error when you’re a jihadist. If you die, it’s good; if your family dies, it’s good; if the infidel dies, it’s good. [Hamas] is a death cult.
Sam Harris via Andrew Sullivan.
Ceasefire = Hamas Victory
[P]rogressives calling for a cease-fire in Gaza threaten to hand Hamas the greatest victory of its existence. If Hamas can wound Israel so deeply and yet live to fight again, it will have accomplished what ISIS could not — commit acts of the most brutal terror and then survive as an intact organization against a military that possesses the power to crush it outright. I agree with Dennis Ross, a former U.S. envoy to the Middle East: Any outcome that leaves Hamas in control in Gaza “will doom not just Gaza but also much of the rest of the Middle East.”
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it is hard to watch a large-scale bombing campaign in Gaza that kills civilians, no matter the precision of each individual strike. Much like ISIS in Mosul, Hamas has embedded itself in the civilian population. It is impossible to defeat Hamas without harming civilians, and each new civilian death is a profound tragedy, one that unfolds in front of a watching world. It’s a testament to our shared humanity that one of our first instincts when we see such violence is to say, “Please, just stop.”
This instinct is magnified when the combination of the fog of war and Hamas disinformation can cause exaggerated or even outright false claims of Israeli atrocities to race across the nation and the world before the full truth is known. The sheer scale of the Israeli response is difficult to grasp, and there is no way for decent people to see the death and destruction and not feel anguish for the plight of the innocent.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally rejected calls for a ceasefire. “Calls for a ceasefire are a call for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terror, to surrender to barbarism,” Netanyahu wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. “Just as the U.S. wouldn’t have agreed to a cease-fire after the bombing of Pearl Harbor or after the terrorist attack on 9/11, Israel will not agree to a cessation of hostilities with Hamas after the horrific attacks of Oct. 7.”
Order versus the Jungle
Order is a garden to be tended, but the jungle is the norm … The jungle is growing back. And we naive civilized folks, we couldn’t even start a fire without matches, much less feed or defend ourselves in the wilderness.
Damir Marusic at Wisdom of Crowds, quoting Robert Kagan.
A tacit elite bargain’s tacit limits
This item is from an October 12 column that I saved and only recently read:
The First Amendment, in its majesty, unambiguously protects the right of the best and brightest fringe-left Nazis on American college campuses to fantasize about Final Solution 2.0.
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Nothing says “banality of evil” like having your enthusiasm for Jewish bloodletting cost you a cushy job at a white-shoe law firm.
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Most graduates of schools like Swarthmore, UVA, NYU Law, and especially Harvard have a tacit bargain with corporate America. They get to be radically chic during their stay in the university playpen, and their future employers agree not to hold it against them provided that they leave it behind upon ascending to the very comfortable precincts of America’s professional elite. Screeching about the dispossessed can be forgiven as just another form of campus “experimentation,” but once you put on a tie and cash your paycheck, your priorities are expected to shift accordingly.
So imagine the surprise of the students who signed this week’s statements upon finding out that their bargain has an outer moral bound after all and that overt enthusiasm for war crimes crosses it. And imagine their outright shock upon realizing that “cancellation” isn’t a punishment American businesses reserve exclusively for right-wing thought criminals. Big Law, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the media industry may lean left on cultural issues, it turns out, but beheading infants is where they’re apt to get squeamish.
Which leads us to a possible bright-line rule on canceling Hamas apologists. If you’re cheering on mass murder, you’re fair game for cancellation.
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So why do I find myself preferring—God forgive me—a balancing test instead?
Nick Cattogio, who actually has some good reasons for not categorically damning to hell every snot-nosed idiot who raises stupid and obnoxious to the Nth power.
Culture & Economics
Shrewd question
I read a NYT profile on Mike Johnson, which described the ADF as an “anti-gay rights organization.” Does the NYT refer to David French as a former employee of an “anti-gay rights organization” or would they refer to him as a former religious liberty attorney?
Hunter Baker on whatever-the-heck they’re calling it these days.
Blue checks
And whatever-the-heck they’re calling it these days, the poo-bahs with blue checks are not covering themselves in glory:
According to a NewsGuard analysis, Twitter’s ‘verified’ users, who now pay to have a blue check, pushed 74% of the platform’s most viral false Israel-Hamas war-related claims.
(Via Dense Discovery)
Where’s my zero-hour work week?!
If we were to believe all the clichéd marketing lingo about time-saving, our lives would now consist largely of uninterrupted leisure time.
In a recent post, Brett Scott argues persuasively that, far from making our lives easier, technology is making them faster and more discombobulated. To understand how this shift happens, Scott tells us to look at the issue from a systemic perspective:
We don’t just live in any economy. We live in a mega-scale corporate capitalist economy, and in such a setting technology is never used to save time. It’s used to speed up production and consumption in order to expand the system. The basic rule is this: technology doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff.
Trade-offs, people. No free lunches.
Shamelessly stealing?
Masimo argues that Apple’s reputation for innovation is undeserved and that the company has made a practice of “efficient infringement” — using other companies’ technologies without permission and dealing with the legal fallout as necessary. The company points to something that Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, said in 1996: “Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal.’ And we have, you know, always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Peter Coy, on the successful patent infringement (Masimo’s pulse oximeter technology) case against Apple — a lawsuit that could take all but one (old) Apple Watch off the market come December 26.
Political
The antics of the contemporary GOP
Jonah Goldberg has spelled out a useful heuristic for getting one’s head around the antics of the contemporary GOP. To understand modern Republicans, he says, ask yourself: What would they do if they were trying to be a minority party? Nine times out of 10, that’s what they will do. It is as though they are trying to force moderates, “normies,” ordinary sensible people, and—if it comes to it—more or less up-and-down-the-line conservatives who just happen to have an aversion to coups to either stay on the sidelines or support Democrats.
Prophetic
And so, goodbye, Donald J. Trump, the man who wanted to be Conrad Hilton but turned out to be Paris Hilton. Au revoir, Ivanka and Jared, Uday and Qusay — there’s a table for four reserved for you at Dorsia. So long, Melania — it’s still not entirely clear what you got out of this, but I hope it was worth it. A fond farewell to Ted Cruz’s reputation and Mike Pence’s self-respect, Lindsey Graham’s manhood and Fox News’s business model. In with “Dr.” Jill Biden, out with “Dr.” Sebastian Gorka.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
I’m sure we’ll all meet again. But I’d really rather we didn’t.
Kevin D. Williamson, Witless Ape Rides Helicopter, January 20, 2021 (emphasis added)
GOP Spam
Words cannot express how — ummmm — impressed I am at the ingenuity of the GOP (or someone pretending to be the GOP, but I doubt that, based on long experience) in coming up with a seemingly endless waves of spam email addresses to inundate me with praises of Speaker Mike Johnson, so that they can “honor” each of my reflexive unsubscribe requests without ever actually ceasing to flood my zone with shit.
Shorts
America is proof that populations can continue to “be religious” long after they have lost all conception of the sacred.
Trump Says Pence Should Endorse Him After Former VP Suspends 2024 Campaign
Axios. Of course he does.
Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.
Joe Biden in 2012 making the case for re-electing Barack Obama (via David French)
A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.