What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?
- Thomas Friedman,
"Israel has never needed to be smarter than in this moment"
This week's featured post is "My 9-11 Flashbacks".
This week everybody was talking about war
The featured post is only tangentially about Israel, Hamas, and Gaza. It's more about how memories of all the mistakes we made after 9-11 keep getting in the way as I try to process what's happening in Israel and Gaza.
As usual, I'm not trying to cover breaking news. Israeli troops are massing outside of Gaza, but if you want to know what exactly they're doing, you'll have to look somewhere else.
One thing that I don't think the mainstream news sources are explaining very well is why Egypt isn't letting in Gazan refugees. There are probably a bunch of reasons, but one is the fear that anyone who leaves Gaza won't be allowed back in after the conflict subsides. By letting refugees in, Egypt fears it will be assisting in an ethnic cleansing.
Palestinians and Arab nations are marked by the experience of the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation when Palestinians were expelled or fled to neighboring countries and have not been allowed to return since, a major sticking point in the long defunct peace process.
This is the first major war since Elon Musk destroyed Twitter as a reliable source of raw news reports. As a result, misinformation and disinformation are rampant.
The extremists on both sides are hard to understand. For example: the various people and groups who are standing with Hamas. I suspect there aren't many such people, but they've made themselves hard to ignore.
Liberal economist Noah Smith explains like this:
It’s one thing to believe that Israel is an apartheid regime and that war against it is justified; it’s another to believe that massacring random festival goers is an acceptable way to prosecute that war. ... People always have a choice whether to cheer for atrocities or to refuse to cheer for them. When your rallies end up with swastikas and “Gas the Jews” and people making fun of dead innocents, well, you made the wrong choice.
He notes a split between Democratic Socialist leaders and the left-wing grass roots:
Bernie Sanders strongly condemned Hamas’ attack, as did AOC. The “Squad” called for Israel not to take military action in response, which is highly unrealistic, but which doesn’t constitute an endorsement of Hamas in the slightest. Elizabeth Warren, who has been consistently pro-Palestinian over the years, broke down in tears at the reports of Hamas’ violence and said “I'm here today to say unequivocally there is no justification for terrorism ever.” And so on. A number of New York leaders from the Democratic party have scolded the DSA rally; AOC denounced the rally’s “bigotry and callousness”.
As an explanation of support for Hamas among the grass-roots leftists, Smith points to the failure of 20th-century leftist projects: Communism fell, decolonization happened largely without revolution, and democratic (i.e., non-revolutionary) socialism has been pretty successful in Europe.
Swedish workers are not going to start a revolution, because Swedish social democracy is pretty damn nice.
Palestine was one of the few places where the old models seemed to fit, so Western leftists have invested much of their identity in it.
So when their chosen heroes — the freedom fighters in whom they invested so much moral cachet — showed up at a concert and started beheading raver kids and Asian workers and abducting grandmas and God knows what else, what were Western leftists supposed to do? In situations like that there are really only two things you can do, without switching your whole ideology — you either tell yourself that your team’s inhumanity is justified in the name of higher goals, and march shoulder to shoulder in the streets with the most belligerent elements, or you pull back and call on both sides to avoid killing civilians. Left-leaning leaders chose the latter, but many on the grassroots chose the former.
And then there's the other extreme, the one rooting for ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
Often in the last few months I've linked to Kat Abu's tweets. Her home page claims "I watch Fox News so you don't have to." Her summaries of what goes on on Fox in a typical week are often both accurate and hilarious.
I had never paid attention to her ethnicity, which turns out to be Palestinian. It wasn't something she focused on much, at least not enough to draw the notice of a casual observer like me. Since the recent conflict started, though, she hasn't been shying away from it.
I've been seeing straight-up calls for Palestinian genocide on my [timeline] for the past 48 hours. If you're someone who carries this view, join me on a livestream so you can describe exactly how my family and I should be annihilated to my face.
I’ve got two takers for the “Tell Kat How You Would Exterminate Her And Her Loved Ones” livestream, which I’m aiming to do Friday afternoon. Anyone rooting for Palestinian extermination can be a guest, so long as (1) you stay on topic (pro-genocide) and (2) your camera stays on.
But the event didn't come off:
Both volunteers for this livestream have backed down — one called me a cunt and the other pretended a day later that he was *actually* just talking about Hamas.
and the House
Steve Scalise's candidacy for speaker has come and gone, but little else has changed this week. Republicans are still unable to unite behind a leader and unwilling to make a deal with Democrats. And so there is no speaker and the House is not functioning.
This has real-world consequences. The most obvious ones are that Israel and Ukraine are going to run out of key munitions if Congress doesn't authorize sending them more, and that the government is on track to shut down on November 17.
The NYT summarizes the state of the House. Last week I noted how unlikely a bipartisan deal seemed, but that it might become the only way out. A week later, that possibility is still unlikely, but its odds are rising as other possible escapes fizzle.
and democracy
Results won't be official for another day or two, but it looks like the Law and Justice Party is going to lose control of Poland. If so, this is huge. Law and Justice is a right-wing populist party that has been undermining democracy since it took power in 2015. Wikipedia says:
The party has caused what constitutional law scholar Wojciech Sadurski termed a "constitutional breakdown" by packing the Constitutional Court with its supporters, undermining parliamentary procedure, and reducing the president's and prime minister's offices in favour of power being wielded extra-constitutionally by party leader Jarosław Kaczyński. After eliminating constitutional checks, the government then moved to curtail the activities of NGOs and independent media, restrict freedom of speech and assembly, and reduce the qualifications required for civil service jobs in order to fill these positions with party loyalists. The media law was changed to give the governing party control of the state media, which was turned into a partisan outlet, with dissenting journalists fired from their jobs. Due to these political changes, Poland has been termed an "illiberal democracy", "plebiscitarian authoritarianism", or "velvet dictatorship with a façade of democracy".
That the voters retain enough power to toss L&J out is amazing, and it bodes well for other illiberal countries like Hungary.
Meanwhile New Zealand is moving rightward. At the moment, though, this looks like the normal back-and-forth of democratic politics, rather than the more fundamental kind of change Poland might be having.
Speaking of places trying to restore democracy, it looks like Wisconsin Republicans won't go through with their plan to impeach newly elected Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz. Protasiewicz' election tipped the court's majority to the liberals, and in particular threatened the heavily gerrymandered district maps that have given Republicans supermajorities in the legistlature, in a state where their party has been narrowly losing statewide races lately.
What better use for a supermajority than to remove a judge who might find that those maps violate the state constitution? But when the Assembly's speaker, Robin Vos, consulted two retired WSC justices on the plan, both poured cold water on it.
Maybe the voters of Wisconsin will once again get a chance to choose the legislature.
and health care
Once in a while, one person's story really captures the insanity of the American health care system. Tuesday, that person was Mary Lou Retton, the gymnast who won five gold medals in the 1984 Olympics, and whose exuberant smile graced Wheaties boxes and other commercial products for years afterward.
Retton is 55 now, and according to her daughter's Instagram post, is in a Texas ICU fighting for her life against a rare form of pneumonia. She has no health insurance, so her daughter is asking for donations to cover her mother's bills.
What do you have to do in this country to be worthy of medical care?
Another example of our national dysfunction turned up two weeks ago in John Oliver's piece on prison health care, which he kicked off with clips of local news anchors trying to get their viewers upset about paying for inmates' medical conditions.
It is just wild to point out that the only place Americans are guaranteed health care is jail, and make it sound like somehow the problem is prisoners, and not our deeply broken system.
This is a standard feature of right-wing framing, which you can also see in this quote from CPAC:
Why, while we have veterans in the street, we have homeless people all over the place, we have inflation going crazy, are we going to send billions and billions and billions of dollars [to Ukraine]?
The constant refrain is that if you find (or imagine) an example of unfairness, the solution is to level down rather than level up: Rather than do something to help veterans in the street or other homeless people, cut off Ukraine aid. Don't provide more people with health care, take it away from prisoners. In the name of fairness, everybody should suffer.
Three Alabama hospitals will soon stop delivering babies, leaving two entire counties without a birthing hospital. This is in a state that already has high rates of maternal and infant mortality. The hospitals attribute the closings to staffing shortages and funding problems. None of the articles I read made a connection between the difficulty getting ob-gyn doctors to come to Alabama and the state's draconian abortion laws. But I have to think it plays a role.
and you also might be interested in ...
George Santos and Bob Menendez both got superceding indictments. The charges are that Santos conned his contributors by abusing their credit card information, and that Menendez was an agent of Egypt.
Moms for Liberty is a dark-money-funded astroturf movement to move public schools in a conservative direction by banning books and introducing right-wing curricula. Salon highlights a group of parents in Bucks County, Pennsylvania that is trying to fight back.
When RFK Jr. was running as a Democrat against Biden, Sean Hannity promoted him hard, giving him an hour-long interview with softball questions. But then Kennedy announced he was running as an independent, and polls showed him potentially pulling votes away from Trump. So Hannity turned on a dime and became a hostile interviewer.
Fox News hosts don't work for their viewers, they work on them.
and let's close with something rare
I didn't see the ring-of-fire eclipse Saturday, which was better in the western states. The photo above is from Panama.
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