Cold November mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

21 - 27 minutes

Quick reminder that we’re having a third anniversary happy hour in DC on November 8, would love to see you if you’re free.

It’s suddenly chilly! And I will whine again about the fact that there is no school today for no clear reason.

Some positivity instead: The Covid vaccines saved over two million lives, generating about $6.5 trillion in value purely from reduced mortality. More investment is coming in to one of the new regional tech hubs that public policy is trying to create. I know the economy is terrible, but the United States has had (by far) the best inflation-adjusted GDP growth of any big economy. I’ve been enjoying watching Victor Wembanyama’s extremely long arms. An important victory achieved in the war on rats. The new Biden executive order on artificial intelligence seems pretty good, given realistic expectations. Worthwhile zoning reforms in British Columbia.

Question time.

BloopBloopBleepBleep: Did you hear Chris Ryan state that his Rewatchables white whale is “The Hunt for Red October”?

Yes, and I wanted to crawl inside my AirPods and yell “pick me, coach!”

Lost Future: So with the benefit of perfect hindsight — what should our Afghanistan policy have been immediately after 9/11? Just overthrow the Taliban, hang out for 6-12 months to at least try to transition the government- then peace out? I mean it would be pretty silly if we got rid of the Taliban only for them to reassert power as soon as we leave, right? But that's what would've happened, no?

To make it fun, let's pretend that on 9/18/01 the Bush cabinet has a meeting with scheduled with time traveler Matthew Yglesias from the year 2023. You'll be stepping through the wormhole to tell them what the ‘right’ Afghanistan policy should be. What is it?

The two biggest missteps don’t even require that much hindsight.

First off, on an operational military level, we tried to conduct the Battle of Tora Bora with a small number of American special forces (augmented by some British and German colleagues), plus a few thousand Afghan militia members. The top CIA guy on the scene asked for a battalion of Army Rangers to help out, the Bush administration said no, and Osama bin Laden got away. That then created a critical pivot point: Either Bush could admit he’d fucked up and let the most wanted man in the world escape, or else he could do what he did and pretend that killing or capturing bin Laden wasn’t really that big of a deal. Bush choosing option number two helped pave the way for an incredibly vague mission in Afghanistan. What you want to do is achieve your core objectives — get the bad guy, do enough damage to the Taliban to demonstrate deterrence — and then, you know, try your best to be helpful in the aftermath. But with no bin Laden, the “aftermath” part became the whole show and there was never a very plausible plan to turn Afghanistan into a wonderful country.

But even within those terms, we fucked it up by adopting a presidential system and then by using the single non-transferrable vote system for the parliament.

Those two things, but especially presidentialism, created a brittle electoral system. Afghanistan was a very diverse and decentralized society that needed a lot of coalition-building and brokerage to function. But because the presidential system lacked the capacity to negotiate those kind of coalitions in formal constitutional terms, the US government kept needing to do informal extra-constitutional brokerage. You get the bad guy, you set up a political system that is primed for success, and then you try to convene a meeting of the countries that are actually in the neighborhood — Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China — and tell them you have no intention of staying in Afghanistan for the long-term and understand that the United States has tense relations with some of those countries, but you hope the four of them can collaborate with each other on regional stability. Be generous with aid money.

Most of all, though, leave relatively quickly with your heads held eye and a threat to come back if people fuck with America again.

Alexander Elkholy: Noah has been saying a lot about China, impending war with them, and our relative military build up. Do you think war with them is inevitable? Do you think the US is in a bad position?

War is not inevitable. Deciding that war is inevitable is a good way to bring it about, so I reject that.

But a perception of weakness can also invite war, and it’s important to be prepared. One thing that I think we have seen in Ukraine is that Russia was surprised by how much money the United States and Europe have been willing to spend on Ukraine’s defense — which I think is in part because we surprised ourselves. If everyone had been readier earlier, it’s possible Russia would have been scared off. The best preparation, of course, is One Billion Americans. But the details of military spending also matter.

Chris Granner: I've been enjoying your slow-motion back & forth with Noah Smith about Andreesen's “Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto” — it's low-key pleasant to witness a measured debate on the merits of an idea. Today, in the column (“5 Interesting Things...”) where he continues that debate, he reiterates a point he's been on about for some time now: China’s military buildup. Here’s where I reveal that I know just enough about this stuff to be dangerous... So I wonder: leaving aside whether you agree with his basic position, it would be the opposite of what you’ve been calling for, fiscally, for us to follow Noah’s advice and crank up the DoD federal spending. But I had the thought that maybe military expenditures, especially those that are intended to build up depleted stockpiles, are the sort of manufactured goods that don't cause other knock-on inflationary effects (because those goods are either stored on a shelf or, literally, thrown “away” at an enemy target and the end result is...a hole where the target used to be). Does that make sense?

Mike J: It seems that a surprisingly urgent need for the US is to improve our Military Industrial Complex. I never thought I would hear myself say that, but it does appear to be quite weak and is straining to compete with the combined output of smaller and heavily sanctioned countries like Russia, Iran and North Korea. How can we incentivize our Merchants of Death to rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy?

I would love to gin up some theory whereby increased military expenditures don’t add to the macroeconomic pressures in the economy, but I don’t think it’s all that credible.

At this point, we are facing significant mechanical impacts of higher interest rates and adding more government borrowing onto the pile is damaging. I agree with the case for higher defense spending, but we also need higher taxes in America (and more changes to Medicare) to make that sustainable. Traditionally, wartimes —or at least times of concern about war — have been an opportunity for conservative political parties to rethink their opposition to taxation. New Speaker Mike Johnson making his first piece of legislation a bill to “pay for” $14 billion in aid to Israel by cutting IRS enforcement so the deficit goes up by $30 million instead of $14 billion is not promising in that regard. But it’s the challenge we have to face.

The other thing, though, is we urgently need to address the productivity in our defense sector.

Even the highest-end estimates of Chinese defense spending put it, at best, on a par with America’s. Nevertheless, they seem to be dramatically outbuilding us on a wide range of military hardware. This is partly that the United States is a richer country with structurally higher labor costs, and that’s just something we need to deal with. But I don’t think it fully explains the problem with American military contracting. IN the space field, we’ve made significant progress getting away from dysfunctional cost-plus contracts and instead using fixed-price contracts. This means a new entrant like Space X can increase its profits by figuring out how to do things for cheaper. Relatedly, the way the Pentagon managed the reduction in defense spending associated with the end of the Cold War was to advise defense contractors to consolidate. They had their reasons for that approach. But it means that all new spending now goes into a sector that is shrunken and uncompetitive relative to what it used to be.

The contracting issue and the lack of competition issue are linked since cost-plus contracts are hostile to new entrants.

So I think we do want to spend more money. But as we put that money out there, we also want to be writing contracts that tempt more companies that aren’t currently defense contractors into bidding for military work and that encourage investors to keep backing new defense tech startups. One bit of low-hanging fruit is to look at what’s happening in some friendly foreign countries. If you look at the world’s top shipbuilding companies, two are Chinese and one is Russian and zero are American. But four of them are Korean. Which means that Korean naval vessels are made by companies that are very successful in the civilian shipbuilding industry, which is naturally more competitive than anything related to military contracting. I think it is probably not a coincidence that Korea’s Sejong the Great class guided missile destroyers cost about half as much as America’s similarly-sized Arleigh Burke class. The Korean ships are built by Hyundai Heavy Industries, which is a successful company in civilian markets. The American ones are built by basically monoline defense contractors. I’m sure the Arleigh Burke has some bonus features that contribute to its costs, but unless it’s genuinely twice as good, it seems like we should be buying the Korean ships. Of course that would mean treating defense contracting as a serious national security effort and not a jobs program.

Last but not least, though, I think we should understand a productivity focus as a necessarily complement to spending more rather than as a way to spend less.

This is a point I’ve been making for years about mass transit. New York City is contemplating spending an ungodly sum of money on a short extension of the Second Avenue Subway. Seoul builds subways for less than a twelfth that cost on a per mile basis. If the MTA could figure out how to be as cost-effective as Korea, that would justify a massive expansion of the city’s mass transit system that would lead to higher rather than lower overall spending. By the same token, one big problem with the extraordinary cost of the Gerald Ford class of aircraft carriers is they are so expensive that the Navy isn’t actually going to build many of them. Ideally, we’d design things that are cheaper on a per unit basis, buy many more of them, and also sell them to close allies.

FrigidWind: Do you think that a central design bureau for infrastructure would help? The issue is that separate agencies such as the MTA, CTA, BART etc aren’t always designing new lines so when they do need a new one they have to contract the design to an EPC to complete it (and this leads to low internal capacity for technical evaluations). Let’s say that the federal government started up an agency who’s job was to design transit, roads, bridges, water treatment plants etc and conditioned infra funding on using this agency to develop designs before contracting out the construction. Do you think this would achieve some savings and avoid the “contractors monitoring contractors” problem that Alon Levy describes?

Yes. In fact, I think not only should the federal government try to set up an agency like this so, should two or three of the larger states.

But the key thing when setting up the new agencies is that the mandate should be to hire people who are not Americans. The United States has two great things going for it: we are a really rich country and can afford to overbid foreign labor markets, and lots of people around the world speak English. We should be hiring Swedish, Korean, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish experts to come over here and build new agencies. It would be good to incorporate a smattering of mid-career Americans who could share some wisdom about local conditions and, of course, plenty of young Americans to build a long-term civil service competency. But it’s not a coincidence that the most successful transit executive in recent history was non-American Andy Byford. The reality, though, is that the whole English-speaking world is terrible at this and we should be looking further afield

Swayze: In reference to your post last Monday (10/23), do you have an alt history take on the road not traveled in the 70s regarding nuclear power/decarbonization (e.g., where the US and global electrical grids would be today, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and the effects of global warming)?

Probably the best way to do this is to look at France, whose GDP per capita is very slightly above the EU-27 average but whose per capita CO2 emissions are about 25 percent lower. The basic story here is that France relied much more on oil for electricity generation (and less on coal), so their electricity sector was more directly hit by the oil embargo, leading them to double-down on nuclear during the decade when the United States abandoned it. And that makes a big difference.

Of course, emissions consistently being 25 percent lower starting in 1990 (and lower by a smaller amount from 1970-1990) does not solve the entire climate problem. But it is a three-fold help. One way it helps is that the planet would be cooler right now in 2023, so the threat of incremental warming would be lower. Another is that the stock of existing atmospheric carbon would be a lot lower, so there would be less future warming baked in. The third is that without the need to invest new dollars in decarbonizing electricity, we could invest very heavily in shifting to electric cars and heat pumps, and since the electricity grid would be cleaner, the impact of electrification of cars and home heating would be higher.

You would still be left with significant missing pieces — industry, maritime shipping, air travel, agriculture — but because of those factors above, addressing those other things would be dramatically less pressing. So I think the anti-nuclear turn was a huge, world-changing error.

James Schapiro: What are your thoughts on Quentin Tarantino’s body of work?

I am a big fan, but I will say that my favorite favorite of his movies is “Jackie Brown” which I think in some ways is precisely because it’s the least ~Tarantino~ of the Quentin Tarantino movies. Cinema is an inherently collaborative enterprise, and in a lot of ways I think the most skilled filmmakers end up going awry when they zip off into pure auteur land.

Race-swapping Jackie Burke (and turning her into Jackie Brown and casting Pam Grier to play her) is a significant change from “Rum Punch” but the screenplay basically just follows Elmore Leonard’s story. And it’s a great story! And then Tarantino uses his chops to turn that story into a great movie. I’ve been thinking about Martin Scorcese and his whole “one for them, one for me” philosophy and I think you’re supposed to think the “one for me” movies are better and have more artistic integrity. But I think his movies are better when he’s more disciplined and less single-handedly in charge. If you want to see the product of a single creative mind working alone, go read a novel.

THPacis: In your lifetime, what's the best call a president made that was considered controversial/brave/surprising at the time?

George W Bush going to bat for PEPFAR was really good, though I’m also not sure it was particularly brave or controversial — definitely somewhat surprising, but it’s not like he ran big political risks over it.

It’s a tough question, because I think doing the right thing is overrated. I recall a couple of bold stands that Obama took that I supported at the time, like pushing Netanyahu for a settlement freeze or doing the nuclear deal with Iran, where in retrospect what happened is Obama paid a political price and didn’t really achieve anything because it wasn’t politically sustainable. I think his effort to resist the pressure to intervene more forcefully in the Syrian Civil War probably qualifies.

But even though my (somewhat unfashionable on the left) view is that Obama was a better president than Joe Biden, all things considered (mostly because he took fewer political risks!), Biden did engage in a really sound and correct act of political courage in leaving Afghanistan. People will be pretending until the End Times that they are only saying he didn’t go about it the right way, but the fact of the matter is that the generals and the national security blob opposed Trump when he made the agreement to leave and they wanted Biden to find a pretext to back out of the agreement. The path of least-resistance would have been to do what they wanted, just as Trump never actually ended any of the troop deployments he promised to end. Biden paid a very very, very steep political cost for this. But if Biden had given in, we would now have a bunch of American soldiers in an incredibly precarious situation given the Russia-Ukraine War — Russia would be funneling assistance to the Taliban, and we would have incredibly precarious supply lines running through Pakistan.

The Bad Blog: What other problems do you think are like Israel/Palestine in that they should be covered less because they are simply very intractable?

To be clear, it’s not the intractability per se of Israel/Palestine that means it should be covered less. My issue is the actual scale. There are more displaced refugees in eastern Congo than the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza combined. But it’s not just that Israel gets more coverage than Congo (there are certainly valid reasons for that), it gets more than 1,000 times as much coverage. And that’s true in both directions: the deaths of Israelis get dramatically more coverage than similar death tolls would elsewhere and so do the deaths of Palestinians.

Tractability is the next phase of the analysis. Is all this attention-paying helping? That would be a good reason to pay attention to something. But it pretty clearly isn’t.

Andy: What’s your take on McCain-Feingold now that we’ve seen what it does in practice?

I was always against it and so, at the time, were my colleagues at The American Prospect, which is not a magazine that loves taking heterodox stands that contradict the liberal conventional wisdom. But it was a really dumb law and people should have listened.

Grigori Avrimidi: Will “a widely read online blogger/author/opinion writer turns out to be an AI” happen before or after 2030? For it to count, 90% of the writing would have to be machine generated.

I asked GPT-4 to give me a snappy, definitive answer to this question and it said: The rapid advancements in AI technology, particularly in natural language processing, suggest that we could very well see a widely read blogger or opinion writer powered primarily by AI before 2030. The key will be the public's acceptance and the ethical frameworks established to govern AI-generated content. While the technology is swiftly evolving, societal and regulatory factors will play a crucial role in determining the timeline. So, buckle up; the future of AI-driven journalism and opinion writing is just around the corner!

Jim: Just saw a live Rocky Horror Picture Show and all the very overt sexuality got me thinking about how incredibly prudish most mass entertainment is now. What happened? Growing up in the 80s I don’t think anyone would have predicted this.

A few different things are in the mix, but I think the biggest is technological and regulatory arbitrages.

It used to be that broadcast television was under a pretty strict regime of formal and informal censorship ,while the rules around movies were much laxer, so there was a lot of incentive to put racy material into movies — it was one of their big selling points. That’s why you used to have the “erotic thriller” as a major movie genre. Later, HBO became a network that would let you put sex on television and a lot of T&A started to migrate there. The Sopranos holds up almost perfectly today, but I would say that relative to modern sensibilities, there are a lot more shots of strippers at the Bing than are really necessary for the narrative. The early seasons of Game of Thrones were, likewise, notorious for their “sexposition” scenes in which semi-nude women would explain what was going on. Over time, though, actual pornography has become much more accessible, which I think has changed the cost/benefit calculus around this kind of thing and generated a more prudish mass culture.

Tomer Stone: I see humanities PhD types on twitter do a lot of complaining about their non-existent academic job market prospects and huge drops in students majoring in history. But I see very little arguing that students are overestimating the wage gap between majoring in STEM vs majoring in history, or what their departments are doing to boost the earnings of students who go through the history major.

Do you think that, deep down, they know they are not teaching skills valued by the labor market and are just mad that students, parents, and administrators expect them too?

There’s a complicated interplay between the very left-wing political commitments of humanities faculty and the shifting economics of higher education.

In terms of this dissonance, I think most of the historians who are vocal on Twitter are pretty sincere anti-capitalists who genuinely don’t think it’s appropriate to evaluate their work on that basis. They don’t think it’s the purpose of the university to serve some kind of instrumental need of the labor market; they think that they are producing social goods that deserve to be subsidized and supported. And on one level, that aligns with a very old-fashioned understanding of higher education. But at the same time, if you were to ask most people what kind of non-pecuniary values they think are important, I think they would come up with a list of values that was dramatically more conservative — more religious and dramatically more patriotic — than the ones that actually existing college professors uphold. I think if you wanted to say, look the world needs to pay us to explain the greatness of the American story to the youth of tomorrow, even if the labor market doesn’t care about that, then a lot of the public would say “yeah, that makes sense.” But historians don’t want to do that job, so they’re left in a difficult corner.

Mike Johnson symbolizes a new turn for the religious right. By ronald brownstein

Analysis by Ronald Brownstein, CNN

Updated 9:36 AM EDT, Tue October 31, 2023

edition.cnn.com

16 - 21 minutes

CNN — 

The arc of Rep. Mike Johnson’s career encapsulates the shifting priorities of the religious right in the era of Donald Trump.

During his first decades in political life, the newly elected House speaker was a vehement opponent of legal abortion and greater legal equality for LGBTQ people. That focus reflected the dominant public focus of religious conservatives on issues of sexuality and gender roles from the 1980s until Barack Obama’s presidency.

Without abandoning those views, Johnson in recent years has embraced key priorities of Trump’s MAGA movement, describing illegal immigration as “the true existential” threat to America’s future and leading congressional efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he claimed suffered from “credible allegations of fraud and irregularity.”

In his own journey, the Louisiana Republican embodies the merger between different generations of public priorities for the movement of conservative evangelical Christians in which he launched his career and still strongly identifies. Long identified with issues revolving around sexuality, religious conservatives have also become the bedrock supporters of a Trump movement rooted in hostility toward demographic and racial change.

Multiple polls now show that the White evangelicals, and other Republican voters, who express the most conservative views on issues relating to sexuality and gender roles also take the most conservative positions on immigration and racial equity – amalgamating all these concerns into one overarching cry of resistance to the changes remaking 21st century America.

Like Trump’s commanding lead in the 2024 GOP presidential race, Johnson’s rapid ascent to the speakership in just his fourth congressional term showcases how this multi-front resistance to an evolving America has become the most powerful force binding the modern GOP coalition.

Johnson’s rise reveals the religious roots of that shift much more clearly than Trump’s ascent. As a twice-divorced New Yorker with a history of affairs and public scandals, Trump has always been an unlikely champion for religious conservatives seeking to impose their definitions of morality on public policy.

But Johnson, an evangelical himself, has been a virulent warrior for conservative cultural causes throughout his career, and has closely identified with far-right Christian nationalists seeking to tear down the separation of church and state. Johnson himself has declared, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.” His rise to leadership underscores the links in the Trump-era GOP between hostility to social and cultural change and the belief that the founders intended America to operate as an explicitly Christian nation.

In the latest annual American Values Survey released last week by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, a 52% majority of Republican voters agreed with the statement that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” Only about two-in-ten Democrats and three-in-ten independents agreed. More than half of White evangelicals agreed with that statement as well – the only major religious denomination in which it found majority support.

Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the PRRI, sees the fear that America is straying from explicitly Christian roots as the unifying thread binding the concerns about sexual behavior and gender roles, which preoccupied the first generation of religious right leaders, with the more overt focus on racial and demographic change in the Trump era.

With his embrace of MAGA themes after years denouncing abortion and same-sex marriage, Johnson “is a good symbol of this amalgamation,” said Jones, author of the recent book “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy.”

“I should say it straight here: it really is this view of a country that is a White Christian country. That’s the vision that is being put forward. In many ways that is the vision that holds this whole thing together.”

As the PRRI’s surveys show, White Christians, after representing a majority of the US population for most of its history, now constitute only a little over two-fifths of the total, with White evangelicals slipping to only about one-in-seven. Yet both groups are much more influential inside the GOP coalition, with evangelicals representing nearly one-third of Republican voters and all White Christians about two-thirds. Mike Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, recently calculated in a Substack post that fully 70% of House Republicans represent districts that rank in the top two quintiles for the largest share of White evangelical residents. “A group that represents less than 15% of the US population commands 70% of the districts comprising the majority party in the House of Representatives,” Podhorzer wrote.

As Jones notes, racial issues were central to the “genesis story of the Christian Right.” Though it is often assumed that the 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing a nationwide right to abortion was the trigger for the emergence of the religious right in the 1970s, in fact it originally coalesced around opposition to efforts from the Jimmy Carter administration to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially segregated religious schools.

Over the next few decades, though, religious right leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson put much more public emphasis on the issues relating to changing sexual mores than on questions tied to race or identity. That changed, Jones and others believe, earlier in this century, amid the combined pressure of increasing diversity in the population and Barack Obama’s election as the first Black president.

“What is new about Republican leaders like Trump and Johnson is not that they reveal a new blend of sexual culture wars and racial grievance,” Jones said, “but rather a willingness to more fully articulate the long-suppressed key ingredient in that recipe.”

As an attorney for the Dobson-linked conservative Christian advocacy group the Alliance Defense Fund (known today as Alliance Defending Freedom) through the early 2000s, Johnson was an especially zealous advocate on the issues of changing sexual attitudes that dominated the religious right’s first generation.

Johnson not only opposed same-sex marriage, as many conservatives did in those years, but also supported the criminalizing of gay and lesbian sexual relationships, writing at one point that “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse,” as CNN’s KFile recently reported. Even by the standards of that era, Johnson was especially vitriolic in his denunciations, calling same-sex relations “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle,” and describing gay people as “a deviant group,” as KFile found.

As an elected official, Johnson has generally tempered his rhetoric, but he does not appear to have wavered from those beliefs. As a Louisiana state legislator, he proposed a bill in 2015 that would have prevented the state from applying any sanctions, such as loss of a professional license, on anyone who discriminated against LGBTQ people. In the House of Representatives, he’s proposed a bill to extend nationwide the ban on discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in early public school grades that Florida has imposed under Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Johnson’s bill would also affect public libraries and museums.)

Johnson has also co-sponsored legislation proposed by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor to extend nationwide the ban on gender-affirming care for minors – a version of which many Republican-controlled states have also approved. At a hearing on the issue this summer, Johnson expressed impassioned alarm about the large number of young people who identify as LGBTQ in recent surveys and alleged it was driven by conscious efforts to steer them toward that identity. “Whether it’s by scalpel or by social coercion from teachers, professors, administrators, and left-wing media, it’s an attempt to transition the young people of our country,” Johnson insisted.

Nor has Johnson slackened in his opposition to abortion. He’s been a co-sponsor of the so-called “Life at Conception Act,” which would declare a fetus as a person under the 14th amendment and create the legal framework for banning abortion nationwide. Johnson’s congressional votes on other abortion-related issues has consistently earned him an “A+” rating from groups that oppose legal abortion and a zero rating from groups that support it.

But in Congress, Johnson has also identified more with some of the party’s Trump-era priorities that revolve around demographic change. He’s described illegal immigration as “the true existential threat to the country” and insisted, “If you don’t have a border, you don’t have sovereignty, you don’t have a nation at all.”

While many Republicans and conservatives have expressed similar views, Johnson has been noteworthy in embracing one variation of the xenophobic and racist Great Replacement Theory. That theory, which originated in far-right White nationalist circles, argues that Democrats and liberals are deliberately importing undocumented immigrants to “replace” the White majority and diminish their political power. While Johnson has not framed that issue in overtly racial terms, he has repeatedly described illegal immigration as “an invasion” and insisted that Democrats are deliberately enabling it for partisan gain. “The Biden administration has done this intentionally,” Johnson declared in an interview on Newsmax earlier this year. “For what reason? Everybody asks me all the time. I think that ultimately they hope to turn all these illegals into voters for their side.”

Johnson, who’s a constitutional lawyer, also played a central role in organizing House Republicans behind Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those efforts were inextricably bound to conservative fears of racial change as well. The GOP claims of fraud, as I’ve written, were centered on the claims that Democrats were stealing votes in heavily minority large cities rather than the more predominantly White suburban areas where Trump’s performance actually deteriorated the most from 2016 to 2020. Though Johnson was not the most extravagant in his claims of fraud, he echoed some of the key assertions from Trump that the election had been “rigged” against the former president and provided the intellectual and legal arguments that underpin House Republican efforts to reject the results.

In the convergence of these views, Johnson represents the core of the modern GOP coalition. The PRRI provided CNN unpublished results from its new annual survey that show how the same voters most uneasy about changing social mores also express the most discomfort about demographic change.

PRRI found, for instance, that about two-thirds of both Republicans and evangelical Christians who want to ban abortion also agree with a harsh statement that echoes “great replacement theory” language: “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Likewise, over four-fifths of Republicans and evangelicals who oppose legal abortion said they support placing physical barriers, including razor wire, along the US-Mexico border to deter illegal immigration “even if they endanger or kill some people.” Among Americans who take liberal positions on abortion and same-sex marriage, there’s much less support for those ideas.

Tresa Undem, who polls for progressive groups, has found a similar correlation in multiple national surveys exploring attitudes toward race, gender and social change. In a national poll last year, she said, her firm found that among Republicans who oppose same-sex marriage or legal abortion, overwhelming proportions also agreed that illegal immigration is a big problem, discrimination against Whites is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities and that “these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.” The correlations were similarly powerful among White evangelical Christians: virtually all of them who oppose legal abortion or same-sex marriage also support building a wall at the US-Mexico border.

All of these views, Undem maintains, are the modern expressions of the perennial resistance through American history toward movements that challenge the preeminent societal role of White men, particularly Christians. “It’s a historical and ever-present crushing force against threats to White supremacy and patriarchy,” she argued. “So whether it’s Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, recognizing the humanity of transgender people, voting rights, ending slavery, anti-lynching legislation, women having control over their bodies, or a changing demographic population – the hammer strikes.”

The overwhelming support for exclusionary immigration policies marks a significant, and revealing, shift in evangelical politics over just the past few decades. Large segments of evangelical leadership supported efforts at comprehensive immigration reform that included a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the US under both Republican President George W. Bush and even Obama.

Pete Wehner, who served as a top White House adviser to Bush, said that in those years even many evangelical leaders who were deeply conservative on social issues still supported a welcoming posture toward immigrants. “There was definitely an openness to immigration reform that doesn’t exist today,” said Wehner, now a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. “It was informed, for a lot of Christians who were involved in politics, on a biblical interpretation of welcoming the stranger and the outsider.”

To Wehner, Jones and other analysts, the near universal turn against immigration reform among religious conservatives reflects that community’s increasing sense of alarm about a changing America. From the start, Trump has centered his political identity around the claim that Democrats and other liberal forces are uprooting the nation from its historic traditions and transforming it into something unrecognizable. Johnson also embodies that belief in his marriage of social conservative sentiments from the early 2000s with the anti-immigrant emphasis of the Trump years.

These fears of “losing” America are perhaps most deeply felt in the corners of the religious conservative movement that most explicitly view the US as a Christian nation and most directly seeks to undermine the traditional barriers between church and state. As NBC News recently reported, Johnson in 2021 spoke at a conference hosted by one of the leaders in that effort, a self-styled historian named David Barton. In arguments dismissed by a wide array of professional historians, Barton has contended for years that it is a myth the founders wanted a separation between church and state; Johnson, at that conference, declared that Barton’s work has had “a profound influence on me, and my work, and my life and everything I do.” (CNN has reached out to Johnson’s office for comment on his current relationship with Barton but did not receive a response before deadline.)

Wehner says the religious conservative circles that believe “America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation” were “the waters in which he [Johnson] swam.” And it is those circles, he notes, that have responded most viscerally to the heightened ferocity and apocalyptic framing of Trump-era Republican politics. “The most important change” in the political engagement of religious conservatives over the past few decades “has not been on the policy agenda, though that’s been important,” Wehner said. “It’s in the temperament and sensibility. There is a ferocity and a cruelty and a dishonesty that characterizes Christian engagement in politics today compared to a generation ago, or even 15 years ago.”

“It doesn’t mean those elements didn’t exist before – if you go through Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, those elements were there,” Wehner added. “But they are more pronounced now and the Trump ethic is one that have imbibed, and they have embraced.”

In his personal demeanor, Johnson is as mild-mannered as Trump is bombastic. But each man appears equally committed to a vision of America that elevates the moral and political preferences of conservative White Christians over any other group. In a podcast recorded immediately after Johnson’s elevation last week, Barton and two colleagues told their listeners not to let the new speaker’s soft-spoken affect confuse them.

“There’s an axiom back from cowboy days that said, ‘Hey, this guy, he’s tough but he’s nice,’” Barton said. “’He’ll make you smile before he hits you in the mouth so he won’t bloody your lips before he breaks your teeth.’”

Last Week in Discourse: 100% Pure Ghost Trends. By Jeremiah Johnson

www.infinitescroll.us

8 - 10 minutes

Welcome to another week, internet gremlins. Last week was so filled with social media nonsense that it was legitimately difficult to fit it all in. This post is less organized than usual because of the sheer volume of claptrap, hogwash, and baloney, but we’re gonna jump straight into it.

ghost using twitter

AI generated prompt - “Ghost using Twitter”

Something odd happened on Twitter last week that I haven’t seen get much mainstream attention. I spend a decent amount of time checking the ‘Trending’ tab on Twitter, because the nature of running this blog means I always want to know what’s popular or trending online. Over the last year as Elon’s been in control of Twitter, the amount of spam on popular trending topics and hashtags has increased. It usually looks like this: an unrelated post that spams a ton of popular hashtags in order to be seen by people searching those hashtags.

This video of ‘DJ Chicken’ is spammed with hashtags related to the TV show Big Brother, the Gaza conflict, BBC’s morning show and the stock market crash. This sort of spam has been making trending less useful for a while now.

But the #stockmarketcrash in there is particularly interesting. Normally these tags are stolen from real and popular topics like Gaza or fandoms. But #stockmarketcrash appears to have been an immaculate conception. There was no crash in the stock market. Nobody on Twitter was talking about a crash in the stock market. Somehow at least one or two of these spam accounts used #stockmarketcrash, and then a bunch of others noticed and also started including it in their list of spammy hashtags. Enough of them did this that #stockmarketcrash was actually trending. A pure, 100% spam, 0% content trending topic. Check it out for yourself.

I also saw ‘The End’ trend this week, which was just a series of completely unrelated posts using the banal phrase ‘the end’ in some way. Trending might be dying. Concerning! Looking into this. Might be time for me to seriously start using Threads and BlueSky more often.

Lots of tech commentators have been warning that the proliferation of AI content is going to spell trouble for search engines. And it looks like we’ve now had our first viral case of Google sucking up incorrect AI content and spitting out a stupid answer:

There’s more background on how this happened here. Essentially, it seems like the Kenya ‘fact’ was used as a popular example of how ChatGPT hallucinates and gets things wrong. It then spread around the web and became semi-popular and viral, at which point Google’s algorithm noticed it. Now it’s the first result for “African country that starts with K” because the algorithm is trained to put viral things with lots of links at the top, not trained to have any sense of whether the information is correct.

This is a bit of a niche case because the Kenya example was *intended* as an example of disinformation, but expect this sort of thing to happen more often in the future.

Shaun King, aka Martin Luther Cream, aka Thurgood Partial, aka Frauderick Douglas1 is more than just an activist slash scammer with a talent for stealing funds from Tamir Rice’s mother, falsely accusing people of shooting seven year-olds, and raising money and then absconding with it.2

He’s also, apparently, a hostage negotiator!

Last week Shaun attempted to take credit for Hamas releasing hostages, stating that he was ‘working frantically behind the scenes to make this happen’ and that he had been in contact with with some of the victims and their families. This was basically just a series of wild lies that he was immediately called out for. Including by the victims and their families! I don’t understand what he thought was going to happen.

King may be the single most shameless grifter I’ve ever encountered, and I say this as someone who’s run a podcast series devoted to grifters. Take a look at this post. This is such a shameless level of self-aggrandization I almost can’t help but respect it.

Shaun’s heroism doesn’t stop at staring moodily out of windows and pretending to be a hostage negotiator. He’s also now pretending to be a war crimes investigator!

He’s a vile human being who grifts donations from the absolute dumbest people on the planet, but on some level I respect his audacity. Can’t wait for 2024 when he’s going to return democracy to Hong Kong, solve cold fusion and save the rainforest.

If you want to see what mainstream outlets will be talking about two weeks from now, you need to be on Infinite Scroll. This week’s example - three weeks ago we talked about how All Wars are now Flame Wars, and now NYMag comes out with The War of the Statements about the same.

Real Wars are now Flame Wars

Elsewhere in ‘Westerners engage in flame wars about a conflict that has nothing to do with them’ - people are scraping LinkedIn and creating lists of who supports Palestine.

There are a lot of people writing stories about Elon Musk. Most of these people are quite skeptical or hostile to Musk, and therefore the stories often have the undertone of “Musk is a big stupid baby acting like an immature child”. But rarely do we actually get a headline where it’s just… spelled out.

This in response to a disastrous earnings call for Tesla where Musk appeared distraught and incoherent. Quoting Wall Street analyst Kevin Paffrath:

    Oh, my gosh, this was terrible. I feel bad for him. Look, he’s got a lot of things going on, legal battles, custody battles for his kids now, but it doesn’t justify acting like Trump on Twitter, stonewalling the SEC or the European Union, and quite frankly turning into a little baby on the earnings call.

    I mean, he was almost in tears. It showed a complete lack of leadership. Tesla’s a leadership-less company right now and it’s terrible. That’s why their CFO just left, I believe, as well.

Fun times in Elon World! It’s been one full year since Elon formally bought Twitter. Elsewhere:

    Elon started a feud with Wikipedia and offered them 1 billion dollars to change their name to ‘Dickipedia’.3

    Evidence continues to pile up that Twitter is bleeding users while other platforms gain, but at least it’s tilting to the right politically while it loses money.

    Musk apparently wants Twitter to replace your bank. Completely.4

    Twitter rolls out voice and video calls, for some reason.

    Almost all of Twitter’s metrics are down except for ‘volume of Elon Musk posts’

    Apparently (and I cannot fathom I am writing these words) there are pro-Palestine protests being organized in Roblox. I really need to write more about Roblox - it’s a MASSIVE game with a young player base and almost nobody over the age of 30 knows anything about it.

    There’s an interesting profile of Shams Charania, the NBA’s biggest reporter/insider. NBA reporting is no longer really about traditional journalism, analytical insight or writing ability. Shams is famously a terrible writer. Instead, Shams is king because he’s online 18 hours a day, has a massive network of informants and breaks news at lightning speed. Social media!

    ICE has apparently been operating a service that will search immigrants’ social media for ‘derogatory speech’ towards the US. I don’t have a lot of commentary here other than ICE sucks and this sucks.

    A new ‘data poisoning tool’ lets artists poison their digital art to prevent AI from using it. Essentially, the tool takes your art, changes a bunch of pixels in a way that are invisible to the human eye but legible to AI systems. Then the outputs of AI systems trained with that image are ruined.

    Nate Silver has an interesting post on what the ‘For You’ algorithm is like for people without much posting history

    Spotify is eating the music industry

    The most cursed influencer product yet

    It’s cancel culture

    It’s time to speak up

    The internet is filled with awful things. To make you feel better, here are some fun penguinos jumping down a staircase

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Trump is a Poster, Elon is a Reply Guy. By Jeremiah Johnson

www.infinitescroll.us

8 - 10 minutes

If you’re extremely online, you’ll often hear someone described as a ‘Poster’1. This is usually a compliment - Dril is a great poster. Donald Trump has the soul of a Poster. It’s someone whose posts and personality online are so distinctive as to merit recognition. It’s the peak compliment for an internet personality to be a recognized Poster, and it sits in the pantheon of very online internet terms with Hellsite, Reply Guy, and Doomscrolling.

The antithesis of a Poster is the Reply Guy. Calling someone a Reply Guy is never a compliment. If a Poster is filled with originality, verve and creativity, the Reply Guy has none of that. Reply Guys2 are seen as pathetic, sad weirdos. They’re objects of derision.

These two personas were largely developed on Twitter, which is unique among social media sites in that replies have equal visual weight to the original posts they’re responding to. Image/video based social media sites like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram shunt the comment section to the side or the bottom, and comments are visually marked as being of lesser importance than the main content. Nobody calls YouTube commenters Reply Guys, because YouTube comments don’t matter enough for anyone to call them anything at all. But Twitter grew up as a text-based site, first and foremost. A secondary reply is formatted in an almost identical way to the primary tweet. And discussion is the whole point of the website - part of the original appeal of early Twitter was that it was the site where you could reply to famous people and they’d actually see it.

And so it was on Twitter that the archetypes of Posters and Reply Guys developed. But what are they, precisely? What makes one famous internet personality a Poster and another famous internet personality a Reply Guy? Before we can describe exactly what they are, it’s important to clarify what they’re not.

It’s not all about replying. Let’s get this out of the way first. The stereotypical case of a reply guy is the person who replies to every post a more popular figure puts out. They might be critical or adoring, but they’re always in the comments and replies, adding low-value nonsense. This is a Reply Guy, but it’s not the only kind of Reply Guy. And it’s not the type we’re focused on in this post.

Being a reply guy is more than just being someone who replies all the time - it’s a vibe, a style of posting, a mindset. Reply Guys are correlated with annoying replies and responses to other people, but it’s not set in stone. Take the example of Ryan Radia. Ryan is well-known as a Guy Who Replies, but is also famous for the quality of his replies. He’s known to swoop in with facts, helpful statistics, and data about literally any subject. If you make an inaccurate claim about the average lifespan of Guatemalan nematodes, Ryan will helpfully swoop in to correct you with data he somehow sourced from the Guatemalan Nematode Association. You can be a fantastic Poster, even if you’re famous for replying to others.

Image

The scariest thing on Twitter is a notification that Ryan Radia replied to your post

It’s not about popularity. There are incredible posters with only small followings. There are reply guys with millions of followers and massive reach. Reply Guys can get tons of engagement. Given the state of social media, it’s actually not that hard to game the system and get a large following with a very formulaic approach to posting that maximizes engagement via algorithmic tricks.

It’s also not about importance. You can be an irrelevant nobody and be one of the most famous Posters in the world. You can be a billionaire or a Senator and still be a Reply Guy online. Real world influence and impact does not shield you from being a Reply Guy.

It’s not about partisanship. This isn’t going to be one of those articles where everyone who agrees with my politics is a Cool Kid and everyone who disagrees is a Big Online Dummy. There are iconic capital-P Posters on all sides of the political spectrum. It might make people angry, but Posting talent is distributed without regard to political opinions. It’s part of why the people with bad politics are able to win elections!

In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Stewart Potter defined pornography with a test of “I know it when I see it”. There are categories that defy easy description or black and white tests, but that we intuitively know are real. Poster vs Reply Guy is one of these categories - there is no clear and definable boundary between them, but we all know when we’re looking at a good Poster.

But what sorts of things define a Poster? A poster looks like this:

    Can start discourse out of nothing

    Is effortlessly funny or creative

    Sets trends rather than follows them

    People cannot help but respond, react and spread their posting.

A Poster is someone who either consciously or unconsciously gets social media. They understand the mob, the currents of popular opinion. They often have a distinctive rhetorical style, although it’s not mandatory. When others are zigging, they zag - and everyone else starts to zag soon after. They’re iconoclastic. With a true Poster, you get the sense that even if they got zero engagement they would keep posting in exactly the same way.

Donald Trump is an excellent example of what makes a Poster:

He’s effortlessly funny. Sometimes he’s trying to be funny, as in the Warren or Diet Coke jokes. Sometimes he’s not trying to be funny but it’s funny regardless, thanks to his all-caps-high-energy style. He has a cadence and style that is instantly recognizable. And he doesn’t react to trends, he sets them. Even before he entered politics, he was regularly dropping classic tweets. Whether you love or hate Trump, you can probably remember a half-dozen of his tweets that made you chuckle offhand. That’s the mark of a Poster.

A Reply Guy, on the other hand, is someone who:

    Responds to trends rather than sets them

    Lacks creativity and originality

    Predictable and unmemorable

    Often repeats stale memes/formats others have popularized

A Reply Guy is a bad poster’s attempt to imitate what a good poster is. They see talented posters and want to imitate them, but there’s always something a little bit forced about the posting that a Reply Guy does. You can feel them trying to be popular. It’s often cringe - sometimes in obvious ways, and sometimes in hard-to-place ways. If you can tell someone is striving for approval, they might have the soul of a Reply Guy.

Elon Musk is the quintessential Reply Guy, despite his massive following. In a literal sense he does a ton of replying, enough so that there are articles titled “Elon Musk’s Most Common Replies”. These are usually zero-value-add nothings such as ‘Concerning’, ‘Interesting’, ‘True’ or ‘🤣💯’. Elon has stretched the boundaries of cringe by quoting and responding to his own previous posts, and was even caught using burner account named after his 3-year-old son to make horny replies to his own tweets.

But beyond the literal replying, Musk is simply not a good poster. He’s infamous for stealing memes/jokes from other users and posting them as his own. He rarely has any original insight beyond sophomoric puns. This is a man who thought the height of comedy was removing the w in Twitter’s logo so it would read ‘Titter’. Because ‘tit’ means boob. Which is a funny naughty word. Hehe… Titter. This is a real thing the richest man in the world spent his time on.

Elon Musk Appears to Have Removed the 'W' in Twitter

You could make a long, long list of all the ways in which Elon is an unfunny tryhard - the constant 4/20 references, let that sink in, the 8 year-old’s level of potty jokes, etc. It’s damning that Elon changed Twitter’s algorithm to boost his tweets because he was jealous that Joe Biden’s “Go Eagles” tweet in the Super Bowl got more engagement than his.

Elon makes jokes without understanding their context, and it’s painful to watch:

It’s been remarked upon over and over, but it’s intensely ironic that the man who paid 44 billion dollars for Twitter is genuinely not good at Twitter. He knows that Twitter was ineffably hip and appealing,3 but he doesn’t understand what made it that way. He flails about, desperate for popularity. He references ‘dank memes’, 4/20, 69 and ‘Harry Bolz’. Elon is stuck as the ultimate Reply Guy in a sort of social media purgatory, owning the platform but still not able to master it, frantically trying to imitate the cool kids without understanding how.

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Reducing Hamas’s terrorism to a problem of ‘evil’ is a mistake. By Shadi Hamid

Read time: 5 minutes

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion Reducing Hamas’s terrorism to a problem of ‘evil’ is a mistake

Columnist and Editorial Board member

October 31, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

The sun sets over the Gaza Strip on Monday. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

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Terrorism doesn’t fall from the sky. Terror is a tactic. It is a choice. Hamas’s grisly assault on Israel must be analyzed with this in mind. If we ignore this, we make it more likely that other violent organizations will take Hamas’s place even if the group is neutralized or somehow eliminated.

This is already happening. In the West Bank, the stronghold of Hamas’s opponents, support for militancy appears to be deepening, including among Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s “moderate” Fatah faction. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. While the world looked away, something frightening was building. According to one July poll, 60 to 75 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had positive views of Islamic Jihad and the Lions’ Den — groups just as or even more radical than Hamas. And in a more recent September survey, 54 percent of Palestinians said they supported armed attacks against Israeli civilians.

There are two ways to look at this. One is to say that something is inherently wrong with Palestinians — a view often expressed by both the Israeli and American right — or even that Palestinians, by supporting groups that are evil, are complicit in that evil. This perspective has dangerous implications: It means downplaying distinctions between combatants and civilians (as many Israeli officials have repeatedly done) and seeing all Palestinians as enemies to be destroyed.

The other way to interpret the survey results is to acknowledge a truth about all people: They’re complicated. In the July poll, half of Gazans agreed that “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction and instead accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.” But it is possible for Palestinians to support a two-state solution that would allow Israel to exist as a Jewish state while also supporting armed attacks against and inside Israel.

It’s more useful to ask how Palestinian attitudes toward violence have evolved. As journalist Peter Beinart recently noted, at the height of the Oslo accords in 1996 — when a settlement seemed possible — Palestinian support for the peace process reached 80 percent while support for violence dropped to around 20 percent. Clearly, Palestinians, like any group, are capable of supporting both violence and nonviolence, depending on the circumstances.

Unfortunately, officials in the United States and Israel, and in European capitals, have either not been paying attention or simply haven’t cared enough. For instance, in the original version of a new Foreign Affairs article, published after Hamas’s attacks but written before them, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, wrote, “In the face of serious frictions, we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.” The Biden administration was effectively ignoring Gaza. But it was also ignoring the West Bank, doubling down instead on the Trump administration-brokered Abraham Accords between Israel and “pro-American” Arab dictators. Palestinians were not part of the equation.

The United States and Europe treated the plight of Gazans as a tragedy, while acting as if nothing could be done about it. Meanwhile, successive Israeli governments expanded settlements deep into what was meant to be a future Palestinian state. As a matter of policy, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked to prevent reconciliation efforts between the dueling authorities in Gaza and the West Bank. According to this “separation policy,” Netanyahu used Hamas’s dominance in Gaza to justify the claim that Israel had no “partner for peace.”

In 2018, as Gaza’s plight became frozen in place, Palestinian activists launched the Great Return March along the border with Israel — one of the largest unarmed mass mobilizations since the Gaza blockade began in 2007. Israeli forces responded with violence, including the firing of live ammunition and use of snipers. Over the course of the months-long protests, about 150 Palestinians were killed. The lesson that many Palestinians took from this — and from the apparent futility of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement — was that nonviolence doesn’t work.

This is not to say that Hamas wouldn’t have committed its gruesome killings had political circumstances turned out differently. There is no way of knowing. But it would also be a mistake to dismiss Hamas’s terrorism as mere “evil.” As the philosopher John Gray notes, “A campaign of mass murder is never simply an expression of psychopathic aggression.” To describe the things we can’t comprehend as evil is a cop-out. It allows us to believe something is wrong with “them” but not with us. And, paradoxically, it exposes an unwillingness to take terrorists seriously, reducing them to “crazy” or “irrational” adversaries. They usually aren’t.

As has been the case with groups as seemingly unhinged as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, there has been a method to the madness, one that we ignore at our peril. As my Post colleague Damir Marusic recently wrote of Hamas, “Creating a catastrophe … was an act of breathtaking cynicism. It was a hijacking of the Palestinian cause.” Through spectacular violence and brutality, Hamas seized the initiative and demonstrated its own relevance. In a context of dramatic upheaval — think of the French or Russian revolutions — moderation, proportion and restraint never win the day. It’s unclear why anyone would expect them to win the day in Palestine.

The good news is that evil, however banal, can be fought. Hamas does not equal the Palestinian people. To believe that would be to accept Hamas’s claims at face value. Palestinians have diverse and often conflicting perspectives, and they have agency. As powerful as they are, the United States and Israel have agency, too. Millions of Palestinians can and must be incentivized away from violence. They once believed in a two-state solution, and for good reason: They could see progress, however halting, in their own lives. In recent years, however, they have seen only a series of dead ends.

That same alarming September poll contained notes of hope. A plurality in both Gaza and the West Bank said Palestinians’ first goal should be “Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.” Right now, a growing number of Palestinians see revolutionary violence as the best way to achieve that goal — and they’re probably wrong about this.

When the fighting stops, the United States, Israel and the international community must give Palestinians reasons to think otherwise. A nonviolent path to an independent Palestinian state must be made unmistakably clear. If such a path doesn’t appear, then defeat of Hamas on the battlefield will be a Pyrrhic victory. Because its ideas — and its belief in the power of violence — will remain, perhaps more alive than ever.

Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza. By Eitay Mack

Nov 1, 2023 2:22 pm IST

The contention that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza in retribution for the Hamas massacres of October 7 is a false claim not founded in international law. It is a dangerous distraction that is more likely to lead to even more civilian deaths in Gaza, Israel and far beyond

Eitay Mack

If the massive death toll in both Israel and the Gaza Strip was not horrendous enough, the false claim continues to be spread that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza in retribution for the massacres carried out by Hamas October 7.

Among them are antisemites who believe Jews are the ultimate evil in the world, conspiracists, “influencers” who, in addition to caring about the Palestinians, have their eye on their social media clout, pro-Palestinian activists who support the Palestinians' right to "armed resistance" and who are trying to bridge the unbridgeable gap between their supposed concern for human rights and the atrocities committed by Hamas by shifting the focus to the “bigger atrocity” of genocide.

Also along for the ride are some cynical politicians, including Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan who said Israel’s assault “amounted” to genocide as well as some human rights activists, journalists, who may have honest intentions but are simply wrong.

There’s a very high bar set for defining genocide laid out in international conventions and law. These state that it is not enough to count the dead, but one must also prove "intent to destroy" in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

That's because there is no evidence for this special intent. Civilians in Gaza were killed not because Israel specifically targets them, but because of the extensive Hamas military infrastructures that are located near, inside civilian buildings and in the tunnels beneath them.

Israel called for the temporary evacuation of the local population in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, where the majority of Hamas military infrastructures are concentrated. Meanwhile Hamas uses civilians as human shields and refrains from commenting on how many of the dead and injured are its fighters.

If Israel wants to exterminate the civilians of Gaza, why would it call on them to evacuate to the south and limit its attacks there? According to the UN, a large number of civilians already have evacuated. Of course, this has created a serious humanitarian crisis in the south. Not all want or could leave their homes, and Israel must take this into account in its decisions regarding each and every target in the north.

One "smoking gun" cited by those charging genocide is supposed to be the bombing of Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City. Although this has been largely debunked, no investigation by a western government or media outlets would likely convince most on the “Palestinian side” that this was not an Israeli attack. But this event proved it is difficult to trust Hamas' announcements without independent examination.

Unfortunately adding fuel to the genocide charge are dangerous statements by some Israeli politicians like that of the Likud lawmaker Ariel Kallner who tweeted on October 7 "Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”

While such comments should be denounced, those making such statements are not in the circle of decision-making in the war, and in particular not in the special war cabinet that was formed together with the representatives of the Israeli opposition.

A key point lost in the genocide claim is that Israel has a right to defend itself within the limits set in the international conventions and law from the thousands of Hamas' missiles that have been fired continuously from within the civilian population in the Gaza Strip onto Israeli towns and cities since October 7.

Hamas and its partner terrorist organizations continue in their attempts to infiltrate Israel by air, sea and land, from both Gaza and Lebanon.

In view of the horrifying number of civilians and especially children killed in Gaza – the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reports over 8,000 Palestinians killed -- it’s understandable that there are those who question Israel's adherence to international law. How does one draw the line between legitimate self-defense and a disproportionate response? That is a fair question.

And that’s also why it’s essential to note the close supervision of the US and German governments on Israel's war plans, and also Israel coordination with France, Italy, Canada and the UK - none of these countries would greenlight a genocide of the people of Gaza, despite conspiracist claims that they would.

International humanitarian law does not prevent war or prohibit absolutely harm to civilians, but sadly only regulates how it is carried out and under what circumstances this is permitted.

While the UN is paralyzed and its special rapporteurs are busy publishing statements and tweets, those Western governments are the ones also involved in mediation efforts regarding the release of the abductees and the supplying of humanitarian aid to Gaza while verifying it will not reach Hamas.

Instead of seeing this as positive and critical to put checks and balances on Netanyahu's government, which indeed includes supporters of terror, genocide and full apartheid, those on the genocide bandwagon claim Western government conspired with Israel to commit genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.

This creates a situation where instead of all of us being focused on stopping the war through a diplomatic solution, there is instead this huge baseless distraction.

As long as it not based on facts, the genocide claim will not be useful for ending the war or the promotion of the freedom of the people in Gaza. It could also lead to deadly attacks on Israeli and Western countries citizens and embassies around the world.

It is true that international law is flawed in its protection of civilians, both in definitions and in practice. We need to make up for these flaws by upholding the morals and universal values that Hamas, its jihadist partners and also the Israeli far-right oppose –not by getting lost in the false claims of genocide.

Eitay Mack is a human rights lawyer and activist specializing in the issue of Israel’s arms trade. He is based in Jerusalem.

What happened with Covid NPIs? By Matthew Yglesias

— Read time: 11 minutes

MATTHEW YGLESIAS

NOV 1, 2023

What happened with Covid NPIs?

Learning the right lessons from 2020

I know there’s a lot going on, but I thought today would be a good time to debate the hottest policy topic of three years ago: how to fight the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic.

As Nate Silver wrote a month ago, after-action reports on the pandemic show a very clear pattern of blue states having lower mortality than red states. But examining this in more detail shows that the liberal Covid advantage accrues essentially entirely after the rollout of vaccines. While vaccination was highly effective at saving lives and conservative anti-vax sentiment seems to have cost a lot of lives, pre-vaccination variation in Covid policy appears to explain very little about Covid mortality.

In other words, the non-pharmaceutical interventions didn’t work.

Silver pitched this as a contrarian claim, but it strikes me as conventional wisdom. Either way, though, the inefficacy of NPIs in this case is important to note. We’re certain to see more pandemics in the future, and it’s essential to try to learn useful lessons from the one we just experienced. And my take (which, unlike Silver’s, may actually somewhat contrarian) is that we need to be more careful going forward about distinguishing between NPIs and NPI rules.

What was “social distancing”?

Armed with three years of retrospective knowledge, it’s fascinating to re-read this New York Times article by Eric Lipton and Jennifer Steinhauer titled “The Untold Story of the Birth of Social Distancing.”

The point of the story is that social distancing as a public health strategy is a newer concept than you might have thought, with very specific origins in recent American political history. It turns out that George W. Bush read John Barry’s book, “The Great Influenza” in 2005 and was very impressed. His interest in the book, along with the general post-9/11 climate of concern about bioterrorism, led him to ask the government to develop a plan for a future pandemic. They came up with the strategy of social distancing based on a mix of mathematical modeling and study of the 1918 flu pandemic. And these recommendations were initially very controversial among well-qualified people:

The concept of social distancing is now intimately familiar to almost everyone. But as it first made its way through the federal bureaucracy in 2006 and 2007, it was viewed as impractical, unnecessary and politically infeasible.

“There were two words between ‘shut’ and ‘up’” initially, said Dr. Howard Markel, who directs the University of Michigan’s Center for the History of Medicine and who played a role in shaping the policy as a member of the Pentagon research team. “It was really ugly.”

But in February 2007, the CDC adopted “Interim pre-pandemic planning guidance: community strategy for pandemic influenza mitigation in the United States: early, targeted, layered use of nonpharmaceutical interventions” as official policy and updated it in 2017.

These recommendations were largely based on a pair of papers that both studied city-to-city variation in NPI adoption during the Great Flu and concluded that the NPIs were effective.

It’s interesting, though, to look at the particular NPIs in question.

One of the studies, by Howard Markel et. al., finds that “School closure and public gathering bans activated concurrently represented the most common combination implemented in 34 cities (79%); this combination had a median duration of 4 weeks (range, 1-10 weeks) and was significantly associated with reductions in weekly [excess death rate].”

The other study (this one from Richard Hatchett, Carter Melcher, and Marc Lipstitch) found that “cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic had peak death rates 50% lower than those that did not and had less-steep epidemic curves.” But they also find that “few cities maintained NPIs longer than 6 weeks in 1918.” Across 17 cities, the most common interventions were bans on public gatherings (15 cities) and shutdowns of places like theaters (15), churches (15), and schools (14). Eight cities implemented “staggered business hours to reduce congestion in stores and on transit systems.” And just one city used “community-wide business closures.”

Note that in 2020, early reopening states like Georgia kept things shut down for about three weeks. And the Atlantic’s “Human Sacrifice” article depicted a masked man getting a haircut from a masked barber.

Which is just to say that even a lax state like Georgia was actually pretty strict relative to the sample that formed the basis of the recommendations. To the extent that people genuinely wanted to replicate the success stories of 1920, an early and intense adoption of bans on big crowds in public spaces that lasted for 3-6 weeks is basically what was on the menu.

Curve-flattening mostly worked

One slight quibble I had with Silver’s analysis that the blue states did no better, on average, than the red ones during the pre-vaccine phase is that it’s clear the New York City metro area did dramatically worse than average. Three of the 10 deadliest states — and two of the top two — during this early period are in the tri-state area.

That area was hit first and hardest in the United States and, critically, it was hit before NPIs were put into place. If you wave that away, the blue states in the aggregate did do slightly better.

This isn’t really to quibble with the red versus blue bits.

It’s just to note that the early wave that hit Greater New York was a scary exemplar of how bad things might have gotten. That was a situation in which the vulnerable were taking few countermeasures and the virus was truly spreading uncontrolled. Most of all, Greater New York had the pandemic nightmare scenario where there were so many patients in the hospitals that it wasn’t possible to treat them all. When that happens, medical professionals have to triage away the least-promising cases and the death rate soars.

The point of the pre-polarization rallying cry to “flatten the curve” was that we wanted to adopt enough NPIs to prevent what had happened in New York from recurring in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston. And while that didn’t work perfectly, it did work. Looking at the early devastation in New York, it was easy to think things would only get worse as multiple cities were hit simultaneously. But it didn’t get worse.

If you take the Great Flu model seriously, essentially every state did adopt meaningful NPIs. And if you judge their success by the curve-flattening criterion, it worked. So it’s arguably less that NPIs failed everywhere than that NPIs actually worked everywhere. At least relative to reasonable expectations.

Variation wasn’t that large

A related issue is that while Covid became a highly polarized issue, I don’t think the actual situation across jurisdictions was quite as different as the discourse would lead you to believe.

For starters, even in states that were “open,” lots of stuff that would normally happen wasn’t happening. Taylor Swift could have done a Lover tour exclusively in red states but she didn’t. Basically no major musician toured. The NBA played its games in “the bubble,” they didn’t try to play to packed arenas in Texas and Florida. Hollywood was basically not putting out movies, so even if your state’s policies weren’t formally forcing movie theaters to close, there just weren’t a ton of people out at the movies.

Many churches stayed voluntarily remote, even in places where they were allowed to open.

And plenty of blue states, meanwhile, did start opening stuff up well before vaccines were available.

I did not personally dine indoors until I was vaccinated, but indoor dining opened up in DC in June of 2020, a few weeks after it had already opened in Virginia and Maryland. My understanding is the west coast states kept that shut down way longer, but they generally have milder weather so people weren’t being driven indoors by the cold.

The really stark divide was over schools. But precisely what outraged some of us about prolonged school closures is that by September of 2020, in places like DC, they weren’t closed as part to a general lockdown. By that time, places that had lobbied to be allowed to reopen (because they needed the revenue) had largely been allowed to reopen. What was closed was schools — teachers and administrators were getting paid anyway and the interest group pressure from the Washington Teachers Union was to stay closed. I don’t know that it would have been better, all things considered, to have a European-style strong lockdown. But a school closure in that context would at least have been part of a coherent Covid policy. What we actually got was relatively soft policy paired with a socially costly disruption to education.

Weird rules, weak enforcement

A few months into the pandemic, a lot of the rules that were on the books were honestly kind of weird.

You had to wear a mask on an airplane, for example, but they were still serving drinks and snacks on the flights, so plenty of people were taking their masks off. Same deal for airports — mask mandate in place, but the bars and restaurants were open. I stayed in a hotel in Austin pre-vax to go on the Joe Rogan Experience, and the hotel had lots of signs up in the lobby about how you had to wear a mask. But the hotel bar was open.

One can understand how this happened.

It’s a compromise between the desire to have some public health rules in place and the demands of commerce. But while sometimes in life it’s good to have a simple horse trade, these rules didn’t have any underlying logic to them. And precisely because the rules had already been compromised to allow for commerce, they proved weirdly tolerable to keep in place. Air travel mask rules, first imposed by Donald Trump contrary to his stated views, lingered deep into the vaccine era only to be ended by a court decision that the administration didn’t bother to appeal.

That kind of public health theater ended up alienating a lot of people. But it’s of course not a huge surprise that poorly designed NPIs didn’t have benefits.

More broadly, even places that mandated masks didn’t mandate the use of good masks.

Realistically, though, they barely enforced the rules at all. Every time I took the metro or rode the bus, I’d see people who were maskless or chin-strapping. The view that it didn’t make sense to have cops arresting people for poor mask compliance made a decent amount of sense to me. But as Immannuel Kant wrote, “whoever wills the end also wills… the indispensably necessary means to it.”

If the goal of a mask mandate was to get people who were not Covid cautious personally to nonetheless act like they were Covid cautious, then you really would need strict enforcement. If you didn’t want strict enforcement, then what were you actually doing? Unlike in a real lockdown regime, nobody was stopping people from having house parties. To the extent that the point of NPIs is to get people to change actual behavior, it’s not clear to me how much of a difference the variation in policy meant.

The flip side of maskless metro riders in DC is that my mother-in-law in Texas was wearing high-quality masks without being required to do so. The various liberals I talked to in Austin weren’t actually behaving particularly differently from the liberals I know in DC, even though the rules were different, because the people I knew were personally cautious in their behavior regardless of the rules. Conversely, non-cautious people found ways to skirt the rules wherever they lived.

Lessons for next time

Rather than deciding that the NPI-based strategy totally flopped, I think it’s important to remember that the initial idea was that we were trying to replicate some relatively short-term NPIs adopted during the Great Flu.

On that relatively short 3-6 week time horizon, we really did replicate the strategy and it looks to me like it probably worked pretty well.

It would be bad to conclude from the lack of state-to-state variation that the whole thing was a mistake, because the most crucial part really didn’t feature that much state-to-state variation. Looking back on it, though, the great Known Unknown about the evidence is how long we could really sustain those NPIs. Here I think the important takeaway is that even the states that did nominally try to sustain them for months and months in practice mostly gave up.

Covid Zero did work in a number of places, but it required strong external controls on travel (which we didn’t really implement at any point anywhere in America) and really draconian enforcement.

At the same time, basically everyplace, including the dovish states, did dramatically curtail big events, whether or not they explicitly “wanted” to. It would be nice to have clearer evidence on how much that mattered since those large scale events (rather than restaurant meals) were really a huge point of emphasis of the historical NPIs.

I think the public health community adopted a basically unsound philosophy of “ask for as many restrictions as possible, and accept what we can get after political pushback.” That led to bizarre situations like bars being open (since there was pushback) while schools were closed (since the push was in both directions). You need to try to come up with a principled hierarchy of which things it makes sense to restrict, and then urge politicians to select a point on the spectrum that they think is workable, all things considered. You could be laxer or stricter, in other words, but you should try to pick something that is broadly coherent.

But most of all, we should keep in mind questions about enforcement and the reality that the ultimate target is people’s behavior. In practice, the biggest question in most cases is going to be what people feel like voluntarily complying with. And basic information about best practices for harm reduction and questions like “which air filters actually work?” or “how can you get a mask that isn’t counterfeit?” are going to have a lot more value that saying everyone has to wear a mask, then letting some people get away with wearing crappy masks and drinking at the hotel bar.

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