Open Mic for the week of 4/1/2024
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
On this day in history, Barack Obama’s impeachment proceedings were scuttled in committee before being brought to the floor of the House.
Trump decides it is okay to attack a judge’s daughter, this time with photos: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-another-attack-judge-merchan-daughter-1234997020/Report
By the normal rules he’d be locked up for this.Report
Yes well no one seems to want that headache just yet.Report
Holding Trump accountable is unprecedented territory. The man has been getting away with felonies and misdemeanors his entire life.Report
The AP is reporting “An Israeli airstrike has destroyed the consular section of Iran’s embassy in Damascus, killing or wounding everyone inside, Syrian state media said.”
Game on.Report
If the Israelis really did clip Mohammed Reza Zahedi, as is being reported, that’s the biggest IRGC head since Soleimani to roll. Big, big deal…he’s been the Iranian point man in Syrian for a while.Report
(googles)
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? Okay.
I find myself wondering “what the heck?”
Does Israel think that it doesn’t have quite enough on its plate?Report
Iran is the big backer of the group it’s fighting and is also the big backer of the various cat-pawns that are also creating problems.
Israel is seriously spun up over 10/7 and the hostages. From it’s point of view it already has Iran on it’s plate.
There is something to be said for “If Iran isn’t going to obey the rules then it shouldn’t be protected by them”.Report
As many allies as Israel has, it’s not getting *MORE* as the days pass.
There were very important reasons that the US and Russia both pretended that they never saw each other during the Vietnam incident…
Well, that’s by the wayside now. Maybe Israel has allies to spare.Report
They blew up a group of people whose jobs are to plan terror attacks on Israel. Those people were inside an embassy of a state that is hostile to them in a state who is also hostile to them.
I’m really struggling to see why this should be viewed as a bad thing.
There were very important reasons that the US and Russia both pretended that they never saw each other during the Vietnam incident…
If Russia were blowing up (much less raping and torturing) random American civilians in America, then we would not be ignoring them.Report
Dropping bombs on an embassy is the same as dropping bombs on the country itself. I’m sure we ignore plenty of other bad stuff in many embassies around the world. This is a terrible precedent.Report
Dropping bombs on an embassy is the same as dropping bombs on the country itself.
Yes it is.
Murdering a thousand civilians inside of your country is also an act of war.
Iran is paying for this and organizing it. They’re also paying for and organizing other things.
What Israel did was more recognizing that fact than expanding the war.Report
There is this weird sort of thing that people go through that roughly goes like this:
Israel critics: I can’t believe that the people who suffered the Holocaust can be so brutal and aren’t treating the Palestinians better.
Also Israel critics: Israelis and Jews need to take extremist and genocidal rhetoric against them less seriously. Chanting “Death to Israel” and “Curse to the Jews” is merely a poetic flourish of Arabic and Persian and doesn’t need to be taken that literally.
This comes up a lot when gentiles deal with the Jews. On one hand, they want us to support their cause because of our history of persecution or do things a certain way because of our history. At the same time, they also want us to be treated as privileged wypipo who don’t have legitimate concerns over potential harm from hundreds of millions of people world wide. Absolute demand and complete denial.
There is a meme from the Joker movie of some middle aged white guy complaining about how hard is life in a rather extravagant matter while the Joker looks on in frustration. The point of the meme is that the white guy complaining doesn’t realize how easy he has it and that the Joker represents the people with a real tough time at it. I think this is how a lot of anti-Semites see Jews. The Jews are the privileged complainers while they the Right or Left anti-Semites are the Joker.Report
People outside of Israel really don’t realize that the average Israeli is watching a very different war than the one people outside are watching. Israelis basically want Hamas gone now rather than the slow plan of getting rid of Hamas by really improving things in Gaza and the West Bank and creating an independent Palestinian state.
I get the argument that you can’t get rid of Hamas through conventional military means but I don’t see how the long plan will work anymore than it works with the Iranian clerical regime. By all accounts, a decent proportion or even the majority of Iranians are sick and tired of the Iranian clerical regime and want a secular republic but the Iranian clerical regime has just enough popular support, a will to power, and control of the military and security apparatus. Hamas is the same. They are emeshed, have the will to power, and aren’t going anywhere.Report
Eh, like Jaybird said elsewhere, the Israeli’s clearly think they have too much sympathy and too many allies right now so they want to run those number down a bit.Report
I don’t think the Israelis believe they have any sympathy at all. They are simply tired of what they see as a lot of permitted bull shit against them, have experienced a very traumatic event on a national level that was the equivalent of 9/11 if Al-Qaeda was hosted by Canada, and are basically taking matters into their own hand.
I’m part of the Diaspora Jewry that is heavily inclined to be sympathetic towards this argument. I’m also tired of a lot of the shit and antics and double standards that the Jews get. The appeals to help because of our history on one hand and being told that we just be a bunch of boring wypipo on the other hand and that our accomplishments are merely parochial while similarly parochial acts from other minorities are considered great acts of universal human liberation (TM).
On the other blog, some of the commentators like to note that Jews have always been great champions of pluralism and multiculturalism. I guess that is true but then the forces of multiculturalism create a new definition that excludes Jews from it. Why on earth should we care about anything anymore?Report
I don’t think Israeli’s believe they have any sympathy at all at this point. I’ve seen Israeli social media and is basically an aggressive fish you to the rest of the world. They just don’t care what other people think and want Hamas gone.
The usual suspects are arguing that “Israel’s hardline actions are ensuring that Hamas or its successors will grow in popularity while Israel will become a pariah state.” It is funny how nobody ever makes this argument about the Palestinians and says things like “The Palestinian suicide bombers and Hamas terrorism is ensuring the popularity of Likud because Labor’s arguments about land for peace wrong.”Report
Well, let’s look at the score board. Lined up in steady alliance with Israel now in Group A we have… let’s see: The President of the United States, all but a tiny handful of Senators of the United States, all but a tiny handful of congressfolks of the United States. Looking around internationally we see pretty much every country in the developed west openly trading with, supporting and being generally sympathetic to Israel. Oh, also pretty much every major commercial business entity. From these figures Israel is receiving billions in trade, billions in aid and, from the US, virtually endless streams of ammunition and tech along with substantive blanket voting support at all international fora.
Lined up in the vocal critics of Israel corner we have, in Group B, a grab bag of powerless left-wing university, social media and entertainment figures, a grab bag of deranged right wing “the Jews will not replace us” figures and a scattering of non-governmental organizations and institutions all of whom are committed to issue a lot of jaw-jaw about Israels’ behavior but have little to no substantive actions they can take against the Israeli state. It is true they have many nice things to say about the hapless, inept and incapable Palestinians who they generally treat as agency-less children who must be coddled and protected.
And then group C which are material enemies of Israel is Hamas and similar military groups, some luke warm MENA nations, arguably China, Russia and Iran.
Now, it can be readily admitted that Group A, which generally treats Israel and the Israeli’s as a capable people with agency who are expected to make decisions and accept tradeoffs; have been saying to the Israeli’s “Hey Netanyahu and your collective gambit to just pack the Palestinians away in Gaza and ignore them has obviously, bloodily, failed and you need to tell us what the plan is going forward and, no, ethnically cleansing the territories isn’t going to fly nor is slow motion ethnically cleansing Gaza.” It is also true that Group B says on various social media and journalist venues something roughly like “Argle bargle *social justice speak* Palestinians are precious marshmallows who are the original intersectional post-capitalist feminist icons who can do no wrong mwargle!”
Now I look at the Israeli’s, being lavished with treasure, substantive privilege and being treated like adults and I listen to them complain that they’re not being treated like the international equivalent of a diaper crapping infant left to freeze on a door stoop and my sympathy level is… well… not high. I mean, how dare Israel’s friends tell it that it’s not allowed to have it’s cake and eat it too? How. Dare. They?!?!?Report
I understand the numbers argument about Israel having less than pure freedom of action. If this is a numbers argument people should say so. I really think that people are underestimating how much the Simchat Torah massacre acted as the straw that broke the camel’s back and the average Israeli needs some suasion that Hamas isn’t going to Hamas again.
Recent political events have certainly broke my back. I am not so sure that Group B is as weak as you make it out to be. They might not have direct power but as my link shows above, they are very well present as educators and activists and are deliberately pushing a version of multiculturalism that to quote David Baddiel removes us from “the Sacred Circle of Oppression.”Report
Perhaps that’d carry more weight if Hamas had sprung wholly formed from the forehead of Athena but it didn’t and the Israeli right was very much one of their boosters right up until Hamas got off their leash and made the Israeli right look like schmucks on October 7th.
But even if one thinks that group B is a threat, and in the long term “forming young minds” arena they are not completely powerless, then that makes taking substantive steps to defang them even more imperative. If the Israeli’s weren’t physically in control of the Palestinians as a day-to-day matter, then Group B’s strongest argument would be gone. But the Israeli’s don’t want to do it. Even you don’t want to admit it. I’ve seen you, occasionally, grudgingly, admit the settlements have to go but you, and most Israeli’s continue to try and imagine you can trade that policy for some kind of concession from people who despise you. Israel’s enemies can read the global room too and they want ill for you- why would they EVER make that deal?!?! It is 2024, not 1830 and Israel doesn’t have the option of just purging the Palestinians out of those territories- not if it wants to remain itself.Report
Globally, the anti-Semites of all stripes have figured out that they not only out number us by tens or even hundreds of millions but that more people would find it easier not to do anything about them. They will come up with excuses like “Well, there aren’t really that many Jews in these places so it doesn’t matter if Imams in the remote valleys of Pakistan or Afghanistan rail constantly against the Jews, so we can just let it be”, etc. There has to be some point where the anti-Semites are told that they are being ridiculous and all their bones get crushed but there might not be any point where this happens.Report
I just dont’ see an end game here for Israel. What the most militant members of Group C have learned from Ariel Sharon’s Gaza withdrawal is that they can just raise their fists in defiance forever and say how they are still under Occupation despite their being no IDF or any Jews there at all and Group B is never going to tell them that they are being ridiculous. Now Group A might not like Group B but if Group B is big enough and powerful enough domestically than Group A is eventually going to follow along with Group B so they don’t lose elections.
My fear is that a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank will be the same. Group C will still raise their fist in defiance and use the unilateral withdrawal in a very unproductive matter. Group B will still be going on about the Occupation no matter and even if the Palestinians have embassies across the world and do everything a country should. This is because Group C really seems to believe that if they raise their fists in defiance long enough than the world will come and destroy Israel and take all the Jews away just to create peace and quiet. They might not even be wrong.
There has to be some point where people say to both Groups B and C to shut up because they are being ridiculous, the Palestinians got what they allegedly wanted and it is time for them to do something productive. But I don’t think we will ever reach that time because Groups B and C alone outnumber all the Jews in the world by a considerable margin and Group C will always hide behind Group B’s banner of multiculturalism despite not being multicultural.Report
Sharon’s withdrawal sent the anti-Israeli left into a tailspin that left them in confusion for the better part of half a decade. It was only, really, the West Bank issues and the rise of Bibi that let them get their feet back under then at all.
The Israeli’s have tried hanging on to the occupation, it bears noting again and again that the occupation of the West Bank doesn’t -DO- anything for Israel, and they keep getting the same result with the Palestinians continuing to be unhappy because, (reasonably) they’re still occupied and (unreasonably) because Israel exists and with the anti-Israeli left international continuing to steadily gain ground. The only thing you keep suggesting is to continue the occupation, continue to shriek about how antisemitic the Arabs and the intersectional left are and continue to go round and round with the Palestinians which can only be expected to yield the exact same result.
If your worst fear was true then Israel would not be particularly worse off tactically than before and it’d have secured its demographic and moral future for the foreseeable future. And that is assuming the absolutely worst-case scenario. The far more likely outcome would be you’d have a sullen Palestinian statelet as your neighbor which would present no substantive threat to Israel. And if Israel were no longer in Gaza and the West Bank then the intersectional left would be cut off at the knees. Screaming about past history is all well and good for them but it’s not the same kind of outrage generator that the occupation and the settler movement is.
“There has to be some point where people say to both Groups B and C to shut up because they are being ridiculous, the Palestinians got what they allegedly wanted and it is time for them to do something productive.”
Yes! That point is when they have no substantive reasonable claims to prosecute. Sharon got Israel half way there when he pulled out of Gaza. If Israel had washed its hands of the West Bank as well then this supportated sore would finally have been lanced. You insist on treating the Palestinians as a group- the West Bank is responsible for the actions of the Gazans etc… but that goes the other way too. If you unoccupy Gaza and remain in occupation in the West Bank then YOU’RE STILL OCCUPYING THE PALESTINIANS.Report
Biden and his admin have recently shifted a bit on Israel and Schumer (correctly) noted that Bibi has to go and some of this has to come from pressure in the base. Now it likely comes from Black Ministers instead of Campus and TikTok radicals but that is another story.
That being said, I do think the demographics are shifting in the Democratic Party and the younger cohort (anyone born after 1985 lets say) do not see Israel as anything more than a dominant power player. Also a lot of them are quite lacking in Jewish history and seem to think Jewishness is just a weirdo variant of white people.
So you might be correct on the ground today but I can see it shifting.Report
Quite so, Saul, these are just foreshocks of the building tectonic electoral pressure but the Israeli’s ignore them at their peril. There are a lot of countries that can blaisely ignore the opinion that the electorates of other nations hold of them- Israel simply is not one of them.
Absolutely the pressures we’re seeing on Biden are from identarians, african americans and many young voters. But a couple decades ago there were fewer of all of them and now there are more. The current trajectory is a recipe for disaster without even talking about what ruin Israel’s flirtation with Bibi’s brand of politics has done to Israel domestically.Report
I am much more uncharitable than you are to young people who just see Jews as a weirdo variant of white people. I believe a lot of this is intentionally not getting this because they have the power through numbers not to get it and they know it hurts the feelings of many Jews. We can come across with all facts and they just have the power to raise their fists and see we are at best weird white people.
I also notice that there is much more quickness to hold every Israeli Jew accountable for the actions of the Israeli government while denying the Palestinians as a group any agency at all. Many seem to want to put all Israeli Jews on trial for war crimes while letting Hamas go free.Report
Like when on earth should Jews in general and Israeli Jews in particular care what people think about us. We have been doing that pluralistic recommendation forever and all it got us was centuries or thousands of years of Jewish work destroyed over night in the name of Communism and anti-Colonialism.
The people moaning and moaning about the Palestinians also think that the expulsion of the Algerian Jews along with the Pied Noirs was worth it in the name of anti-colonialism. Same with the destruction of the Jews of Iran. Even if there was no Israel, the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa would have been sent packing and it would have been seen worthwhile in the name of anti-colonialism.Report
An entertaining side bar but irrelevant. Jews in general probably shouldn’t care about what group B says about them, but they DO- a lot- you certainly do!
But group A? That group providing all the commerce, ammunition and other things that makes Israel the thriving little superstar country in the Middle East it is? At the bare minimum the Israeli’s should care a heck of a lot what those people think of her. Once upon a time the Israeli’s very wisely cared a lot about what those people thought about them. Now? Seems like they’re not caring as much. I keep pointing out that Group A is substantive and important but you keep going right on back to the intersectional dimwits on the internet in Group B. It’s odd.Report
I replied above why Group B is a lot more worrying than you think.Report
Group B will continue to grow as long as innocent Palestinian’s die by the hundreds, and the response from even ‘liberal’ Zionists is that it’s all Hamas fault, and oh yeah, aid workers who don’t make sure any person they help isn’t anti-Semitic or whatever your line of a “good” aid worker is deserves to get hit by missiles like you did, Lee.
It’s not 1998 – the Israeli’s can’t do a little light bombing of the Muslim’s, push another few thousand settles into the West Bank, and have nobody notice.
90% of under 30 Michigan voters want an immediate cease fire – that’s not all pro-Hamas radicals, but lots of people who were at worst, didn’t care about the issue who think that no, revenge isn’t turning Gaza into rubble, along with 10,000- 20,000 (whatever number the IDF claims is the real civilian death toll today) civilian deaths in exchange for likely dead hostages and the dead from 10/7.
Now, I know what you return fire will be – America got to do it, etc. Well yeah, it’s 2024. Sorry, new rules, buddy. Ukraine doesn’t get to drop bombs on Moscow in revenge if they had the ability too either, with people cheering it on. Welcome to war in the social media age, where the parents of dead children can show it all on Instagram, along with the IDF soldiers doing TikTok’s as they ransack homes.
Also, here’s the thing, if the response from Israel was on 10/9, “we give Qatar 72 hours to hand over the leaders of Hamas who are currently in their gilded cages blah blah blah or we will push for economic and social sanctions at the UN,” every politician of note would’ve supported Israel, and guess what, that’s the real issue for Israel, not some 15 year old whose been supposedly been taught extremist thought in Gaza, even if that 15 year old, ironically, probably scares the median Israeli more.Report
The Palestinians and their allies have never described what it means for the Occupation to be over. They only speak in generalities and when pressed for specifics on what they mean get very tight lipped in indecisive. There has to be something that the Palestinians and their allies will accept as the end of Occupation but I have no idea what it is.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that the Palestinians and their allies will accept nothing but the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of the Jews. You do not see us as a real people with real needs but wypipo with a fake culture and identity. You just raise your fists in defiance forever and say that the Occupation continues no matter what.
What do you want? What would you come up with if we gave you a bunch of maps, charts, papers, and pens to come up with a concrete definition of what the Occupation is and what will mean.
That is because the Palestinians and their allies don’t know for themselves. They let the absolute hardliners be in control. The use of Hebrew as a living langauge? That’s an occupation. Tax funded schools teaching Jewish culture, history, and literature. That’s an occupation. Jewish holidays being public holidays rather than Muslim holidays. That’s an occupation.
What do the Palestinians and their allies want in particular rather than in generalities. Come out and say it. Give us concrete definitions to work with and then maybe we can come to some sort of conclusion. But you never do because you don’t know yourselves whether the Occupation means Gaza and the West Bank, the entire thing, or maybe even an active Jewish presence not subjected to Islam from Morocco to Iran itself.Report
The time for that kind of deal making is long past Lee. The Palestinians flopped out at the turn of the millenium on that. If Israel dragged her settlers, kicking and screaming, out of the West Bank like they did in Gaza and said “We’re done, no more occupation” then the majority of group B and the overwhelming majority of group A would be generally satisfied. Without the occupation everything else just becomes theory. Refugees, the history of Israel’s founding, everything.Report
I am replaying to your two points here. I agree that Sharon’s withdrawal sent the anti-Israel forces into a tail spin but it wasn’t for as long as I think it was. Once Hamas took over Gaza and started being Hamas, the anti-Israel forces started protesting once Israel gave occasional reminders to knock it off to Hamas and Hizbollah. I remember Iron Dome being laughed at immensely by these people. Plus Gaza was still under Occupation because of the blockade to make sure Hamas doesn’t get that many weapons.
So I am in basic agreement that Israel needs to withdraw from the West Bank, and the kicking and screaming of the West Bank settlers will make Gaza look like a game of capture the flag, but I don’t think it will satisfy Group B at all. Group B has basically decided that all of Israel, including Haifa, Ramat Gan, and Be’er Sheva, is a settler-colonial society and must be destroyed. They won’t be able to achieve this but they will always find reasons to have their fists up in defiance forever.Report
Sure, but it will entirely satisfy Group A which, remember, is the group that actually matters to Israel’s survival and prosperity. It will also badly undercut Group B’s ability to win recruits and influence future generations of voters. As Jesse observes, it’s pretty easy to complain about Israel phsyically controlling Palestinian lives and expropriating Palestinian territories the way Likud has been doing more or less overtly in the West Bank ever since Sharon was felled by that most unfortunate stroke. It’s a whole ‘nother thing if you remove those factors. Most young people and voters won’t care about Israels’ origins or even the plight of Palestinian refugee descendants if the Palestinian question within Israel is answered concretely.
Nothing, note, is gonna shut up the identarians on the internets of course. For them you’re going to just have to touch grass.Report
Every Muslim majority country from the tip of Morocco to the tip of Indonesia is designed to be by Muslims, of Muslims, and for Muslims. Not one has anything close to the alleged human rights standards. Dozens have apostasy laws and blasphemy laws that are very politically popular. But it is the Jewish state that the Intersectional Left rallies against and they want to destroy and replace it with while destroying what we built. Centuries and thousands of years of Jewish work destroyed so the Western Left can cast about their anti-imperial purity.Report
I am tired of the Western Left wailing and wailing about the Palestinians but dancing about with glee when Hamas kills innocent Jews.Report
Lee, I’m going to be blunt here – if your actual view is the vast majority of now Democrat’s all now don’t care about Jews and want them to be killed by Muslim’s, or whatever you think will happen the day Israel doesn’t have free reign to kill as many Muslim’s as they want, whenever they want, then yeah, you better start listening to the Commentary podcast, where you’ll get a episode after episode about how terrible the Left is and if the US just let Israel do what it wanted, this problem would be fixed.
I’d also point out good polls from Jewish orgs in America show a lot more Jews in America under 30 disagree with what Israel is doing, probably because the urban, culturally liberal American Jew under 30 doesn’t have much of an actual connection with the hard-right reactionaries that make up the current Israeli population, and are drifting away from Israel if “right-wing super militarily aggressive country” is what it becomes basically known as, the same way y’know, a lot of prior immigrants just treated the country they’re ancestors were from as a place, instead of something special they had to defend no matter what.
Now, I know, those younger Jews aren’t really Jews or they care more about their secular or *gasp* Muslim friends and their views than hard-right settlers who are using the current military action as an opening to commit violence, the same way, I as somebody with a half-Polish background from a few generations, didn’t see any reason to defend all the actions of the right-wing Polish government.
As it stands, it appears the actions of the Israeli gov’t and it’s supporters is doing a pretty good job at destroying thousands of years of Jewish work, or at least it’s connection with a generation of secular Jews who have zero connection what what they see as the zealots from their ancestor’s country.Report
My opinion is that a decently large section of thinkers on the Left have no idea where to place Jews in their cosmology, have no real romance for anything Jewish, and easily decided to put us in the White suppressor category in order to keep their world view very orderly.
I don’t think this is a majority position among rank and file Democratic voters. I do think it is an opinion among an unfortunate number of educators, activists, and ideologues as per my link below demonstrates. Rather than deal with Zionism in the context of which it arose, European anti-Semitism and nationalism, it is just declared to be a form of settler-colonialism. When pressed on these questions, the ideologues double down.Report
This is seriously coming across as “you guys are making good arguments, we should be on your side helping fight against wipipo!”
Which, lemme tell ya, isn’t going to end up where you want it to because the fundamental problem is that if they are making good arguments, then Israel is, in fact, acting like wipipo in how it is treating Gaza.
You’re conceding that they have moral authority and the arguments are good.
You’re just upset that they’re not making exceptions for you despite all of the solidarity you’ve shown them in the past.Report
Well, how would you recommend Jews deal with this issue?Report
Well, as a wiperpo, I think that the criticisms levied against wipepo are not particularly good criticisms and come across as Nietzschean ressentiment.
So my suggestion would be to reframe the arguments made about wipepo (just temporarily) and look at them as if they were made about, say, any given middle class family of Jews in the middle of Berkeley.
I mean… you *DO* understand how much privilege you have compared to an undocumented female visitor who doesn’t speak English, right?Report
I was using wypipo very sarcastically in this case. I don’t agree with the Intersectional beliefs about wypipo at all.Report
The problem with the CEASEFIRE NOW crowd is not their desire per se but the fact that they are so utterly clueless as to how to get a ceasefire in terms of international relationship and diplomacy.
A lot of them seem to subscribe to the President as Bronze Age God Emperor theory and think all Biden has to do is call for a CEASEFIRE NOW and it will happen like he instituted a magic spell.
They don’t seem to have an answer to what happens if Biden calls for a CEASEFIRE NOW and Bibi and Hamas tell him to stuff it.
Biden and Co. are doing what they can and probably facing resistance from Israeli right-wingers and Hamas. This is a long and complicated ethnic hatred and remember it took decades to get a ceasefire/peace agreement in Northern Ireland. But these kinds of details are not satisfying to most people who just want the pony now.Report
As an example of the cluelessness of Ceasefire Now, a Facebook friend posted how Gantz called for early elections in Israel. Some other person remarked he has no faith in the new elections because Gantz did not mention the dead in Gaza.
No Israeli politician who could realistically get an elected to the Prime Minister’s office is going to come out and do a leftist style flagellation over the Israel-Hamas War but the Ceasefire Now crowd wants that to take place because they need it for their souls.Report
Part of this is because they really do see Israel as a mere colony of the United States and believe that the President just needs to call the Israeli PM and the Israeli PM will do it. They do not see Israel as a “real” country. They often intentionally misspell Israel as “Isreal.” Sometimes they let this go to their heads and become literal.
I also find that many Pro-Palestinian activists and supporters are much more into hurting Israel and Israelis than helping the Palestinians. A lot of them seem to believe that Israel needs to be punished in an extreme sort of way for what they see as the crime of Israel, existing.Report
I mean, Biden could heed words noted anti-Israel radical pro-hamas leftist *checks my notes* former head of the Council of Foreign relations under Bush II and close advisor to Colin Powell Richard Haas, and call for sanctions on Israel –
https://twitter.com/_waleedshahid/status/1775644438942859445Report
And sanctions on Israel would get Netanyahu to stop how? Should Hamas get away with its crime because they started a war that could not possibly win? Does Hamas and the Palestinians have no agency? Can they not surrender to Israel and admit that they have murdered the remaining hostages?
I am utterly sick and tired of the hypocrisy of the human righters towards the Jewish state and the Jewish people. They talk about self-determination and respect for human rights but it is all trash. They keep shitting on the Jews and would gladly destroy all our schools and over our holy places because they do not see jus a real people but they utterly allow an entire Muslim world to exist.
I don not trust the world when it comes to the rights and needs of the Jewish people at all. They will gladly betray us when it is opportune to do so while seeking our help because of our history.Report
Does Hamas have no agency? They can always surrender for committing an act of war that they know they couldn’t win.Report
And there you go.
“Cease fire now!” means… what?
Israel leaves and waits for the next 10/7?
Hamas surrenders?
Lots of civilians are dying because neither Hamas nor Israel care to make them a priority.
Israel isn’t willing to leave and Hamas isn’t willing to stop trying to kill them if they’re there.
Yes, what Israel is trying to do is impossible. But this is showcasing why what Hamas did was a bad idea. Hamas will end up with a “victory” that they hopefully won’t want to repeat.Report
From what I gather, many people basically see whatever the Palestinians do on Israel as being basically a minor cut compared to what Israel can dish out in return. This is true but it always essentially boils down to “Oh Israel and/or Jews, why can’t you take it like a man.” It is disgusting. So for many people it means Israel stops and waits for the next Simchat Torah massacre.
I’ve been told bluntly that Israel needs to accept full Palestinian self-determination and that includes Palestinians elected completely anti-Israel people to lead them. When I ask what happens when the Palestinians decide to make a dunderhead decision and attempt to retake Jaffa I get assurance that this time would be different because the Palestinians will be making their decision as a sovereign country. I am not so sure about this.
It just feels like all the anti-Semites of the world whether they be white or of color, on the left or on the right, religious or secular have realized that they out number us by hundreds of millions. They can just raise their firsts in defiance at Jews forever and nobody will tell them that they are being ridiculous or make them bend, crack, and yield.
Based on certain comments and decisions made by other Jews, I don’t think I’m alone in this observation. It feels time to retreat to defensive communalism for all Jews. Anti-Zionist Jews are fooling themselves. They are going to get killed even though they see themselves as the “good ones” who have the “correct” opinion on Israel.Report
Anti-Zionist Jews are fooling themselves. They are going to get killed…
No they won’t. Their personal asses aren’t on the line.
what happens when the Palestinians decide to make a dunderhead decision
What happens is 100 Palestinians die for every Jew. That is the counter argument. And the people saying they want a Palestinian state need to be cool with the implications.
What passes for the government of Gaza decided to kill a thousand Jews so they’re going to lose 100k Palestinians. We’re about a third of the way there.Report
From what I can tell, people are willing to go through all sorts of arguments on why the Palestinians shouldn’t be held accountable for their bad decisions. They tend to be at loss when you flip these arguments from the Israeli perspective. I really believe that the Palestinians have been indulged by their so-called allies in their most unrealistic fantasies for decades and this basically corrupted the entire movement beyond sensibility. At best, just like within Israel, the hardliners have more power than they should. I don’t know if having a country would change this.
For the first part, I meant that the anti-Zionist Jews are going to eventually be on the receiving end of anti-Semitsim once their usefulness has been depleted. They might not be literally dead but they are going to learn that their allies don’t like Jews that agree with them either beyond use as a prop.Report
“Scientific Journal Publishes AI-Generated Rat with Gigantic Penis In Worrying Incident”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy3jbz/scientific-journal-frontiers-publishes-ai-generated-rat-with-gigantic-penis-in-worrying-incident
“It’s unclear how this all got through the editing, peer review, and publishing process. Motherboard contacted the paper’s U.S.-based reviewer, Jingbo Dai of Northwestern University, who said that it was not his responsibility to vet the obviously incorrect images. (The second reviewer is based in India.)”Report
Worrying? Or embarrassing?Report
It’s a cargo cult.
Just build the planes and clear the runways and the planes will return.
We’re doing editing! We’re going through peer review! We’re publishing!
SCIENCEReport
My daughter is in a Ph.D. program and recently got a “revise and re-submit” response for a journal submission, which she was pretty excited about. But when she went through the peer reviewer feedback, Reviewer #2 was quite negative. At first she wondered why the editor response was positive, but as she read the details, she realized that reviewer #2 must have been responding to a completely different submission. So she pointed this out to the editor, who said to just ignore it and concentrate on the feedback of the other two.
Obviously the editor didn’t want to go through the effort of clearing up the confusion. My daughter’s advisor explained to her that being a journal editor is kind of a thankless job, a lot of extra work and dealing with demanding/unhappy fellow academics for low pay (mainly done just for putting on one’s CV), so it’s not exactly rare that one sees less than ideal effort or results.Report
And the reviewers themselves are unpaid, and likely reviewing an absurd number of articles given their already large teaching and research loads.
There are obvious solutions to the issues in peer review, and I think some fields are moving towards some of those solutions (e.g., the effectively crowd-sourced review process of posting drafts on the subject-specific paper archives), but others will cut into publisher profits (e.g., paying reviewers, hiring full-time editors, etc.), so they probably won’t be implemented anytime soon.Report
Maybe they should run it like a business.
I bet they could hire some consultants from Boeing.Report
Maybe they could save time by outsourcing it to India.Report
I saw recently (on Twitter, take it for what it’s worth) that studies have found that ChatGPT and such have a distinctive word choice pattern, and so people are leveraging this to spot where they’re being used in the wild — peer reviews are apparently one of the high-use spots.Report
Law review has students do it and the professors take the credit for everything. This is why nearly 90% of American legal scholarship is a joke regardless of the politics of the article.Report
As a former law review editor, I agree that having students select things (they’re pretty OK at editing and similar scut work) is stupid, though I think the main problem is not their lack of expertise but their criteria of selection. Too much of a “what 20-somethings who haven’t practiced find interesting” docket and too little awareness of what the profession needs or wants.
That said, they are not responsible for the low quality or lack of relevance of the initial submissions. That is on the authors.Report
Actually, I think both. The people involved had the attitude of “that’s not my problem”, You’d think enlightened self interest would kick in since this paper is being published and YOUR name is on it.Report
there’s enough of a “it won’t get caught” mentality, or a “my campus won’t care” mentality. Possibly some of the folks doing it are perceived as “superstars” on their campus and so they can do no wrong.
I don’t know. I am at a teaching-heavy university (3 to 4 different classes per semester, and in the lab sciences, the profs teach their own labs – so this semester I’m in the classroom close to 20 hours a week on top of the prepwork, grading, trying to do my own research, committeework, and other assorted duties like advisement and keeping up with the “required safety trainings” and doing recruitment events. . Getting “enough” publications not to get dinged on post-tenure review is difficult (saints be praised, I got an R and R on a paper this week I thought had been desk rejected).
I can see the temptation to try to sneak something through. Not that I would, because I couldn’t live with myself and I KNOW I am not a superstar so I’d be fired if I tried it and was caught
But some days I feel like “We need to shut down most academic publishing for a while and figure some stuff out” given the reproducibility crisis, and the whole issue with unpaid reviewers (who apparently now outsource a lot of their work to either students or AI) and also the sheer cost in grant money or to campuses to get a paper out.Report
Judge denies all 8 of Hunter Biden’s motions to dismiss his tax indictment
https://abc7news.com/judge-denies-all-8-of-hunter-bidens-motions-to-dismiss-his-tax-ind/14606192/Report
My reply to North is in moderation for some reason.Report
Released. Tripped the editors’ four-letter word filter.Report
Thanks Michael, you’re aces.Report
California’s ethnic study program is running head fast into the Israel-Palestine conflict with it being accused of being used as a way to teach a very anti-Israel version of the I/P conflict and ignoring the root causes of Zionism and how Mizrahi Jews were treated by the Arab nationalists:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/15/us/california-ethnic-studies-israel-gaza-war.htmlReport
Maybe they should take more Humanities classes.Report
Like I mentioned to my brother in the Algebra thread, one reason why many countries focus a lot on STEM is because it avoids contentious issues like the Israel/Palestine conflict. We might debate whether Zionism is settler-colonialism or Jewish self-determination but we can all agree that one plus one equals two maybe. Many of the most engaged parents really hate this education as a moral crusade and want something more nuts and bolts.Report
We focus on STEM because it’s the foundation for (most of) the top jobs.
At a country level, without STEM a lot of stuff just doesn’t happen.Report
This article basically explains why Jews everywhere feel politically homeless at this time. We understand the threat of the White Supremacists and Christian Nationalists that they don’t see Jews as white. At the same time, we aren’t idiots. There is clearly a big and politically active group on the Left that wants to firmly place Jews in the white oppressor category. This is North’s Group B. Being able to influence the public school curriculum of the largest state in the nation is not nothing in terms of power.Report
It’s not nothing, but it’s not a lot.Report
Sure, turn academics over to your opponents for thirty years, what can go wrong.Report
Hey, I’ve already said that the Israeli’s should take material steps to cut the legs out from under the social justice left’s anti-Israeli program- but they don’t want to.Report
Everyone here knows my priors on the… issues with hyper politicized public education. But my guess is North is right, and that current events are going to leave a much more lasting impression than anything in some school curriculum.Report
In the comments section, one person made a comment about how when he was a teen in the 1990s he didn’t know any of the personal beliefs of his teachers but when he goes into his daughter’s classroom, the beliefs of the teachers are very clear. I wouldn’t say his experience matched my experience one on one but I remember teachers hinting about their opinions rather than directly saying them. The new teachers for whatever reason feel free to be more openly ideological than previous generations. I am not sure why or when this changed occurred.
It reminds me about one of Foer’s points in his recent article about the golden age of the American Jews ending. He noted that the Jewish American ideal was a culture neutral disinterested state that protected the civil liberties of everybody. The modern ideal is for much more open confrontation with things that are considered bad. Rather than just seeing the Evangelicals as annoying old-fashioned busybodies, they must be treated as an active threat to be confronted.Report
I suspect, strongly, that this is an internet thing. If you looked at the things you looked at in the 90’s: the classroom, the teachers desk, what the teacher said around parents (and likely around students) in school; you’d know about what you could know back in the 90’s about what the teacher thinks about any given subject of the day.
What has changed is that teachers have social media sites where they can talk to peers and others about what they believe. Moreover there’re now third parties who find it very useful to seek out examples of those teachers saying such things and then blow it up on a giant national billboard. Those things generally didn’t exist in the 90’s.Report
The commentator in section wasn’t talking about things on the Internet. He was mentioning the signs and posters the class room was decorated with rather than his 1990s class rooms where the teacher didn’t display anything that openly political. Obviously the Internet is a big part of this.Report
Yeah drill down and I suspect you’d still find the internet behind it.Report
Teachers might be more willing to express their beliefs in public because they are already findable online. Liberalism and leftism also stopped being in retreat mode during the 2000s and 2010s because of many different factors. During the 1990s, liberalism was still in retreat mode.Report
Sure, and it’s the internet both ways. Both because outsiders can look in on what individual teachers are up to and also because individual teachers can earn widespread affirmation from their ingroups by demonstrating what they’re up to (if it’s fashionable).Report
I think it is quite a lot. Jews aren’t dummies. We know that the Right represents a threat because of their Christian nationalism and white supremacist beliefs. They chant Jews will not replace us. At the same time, there is a big section of the Diversity Coalition that doesn’t like Jews at all and doesn’t want us in it. The rest of the Diversity Coaltion keeps strategically quiet about this because they don’t want to break up the coalition by having the Jews or the anti-Semites in the coalition leave.Report
Gosh, maybe they should do something to defang the only substantial complaints of the intersectional left then!Report
The Intersectional Left has seemed to decide that the entirety of Israel is a settler-colonial country that needs to be disbanded and potentially have all the Jews sent “home.” I suspect that this is because they would fall into a civil war otherwise and “No Israel, No Jews” is the only thing they can agree upon.
The reason why many Jews care about Group B is you put is that I guess many liberal Diaspora Jews see the heavy anti-Zionism leaning on anti-Semitism as a sort of grain betrayal. American Jews were among the earliest fighters for pluralism and multiculturalism in the United States and now the multiculturalists have developed a new theory of multiculturalism that puts Jews in the “evil and borin wypipo” roll internationally.Report
Sure, I understand why Jewish people, secular and semi secular, would view it that way. Since I’m not particularly fond of the intersectional left that doesn’t bother me since it’s a self defeating prospect for them. As they draw their tent smaller and smaller it’ll soon encompass little more than the faculty lounge of the institutions the intersectional left is hijacking and then, after a little while, not even that.Report
I am not necessarily as optimistic that this is a self-defeating prospect for them. There aren’t so many of us but a quarter to a third of the Diversity Coalition would leave if Jews are fully included. So adopting a strategic ambiguity as a way to kind of include Jews while keeping the Diversity Coalition together.Report
Most of it depends on real life events. Israel has been trending in a pretty illiberal direction for a while now. That’s putting a lot of strain on pro-Israeli liberals. It used to be really easy to defend Israel in the Aughts. Things have gotten a lot harder.Report
This is again something I am not sure of. The Palestinians or Muslim majority countries in general have not grown more liberal since the Aughts, if anything they have gotten more reactionary. Hamas is not using liberal and multicultural language in describing what they want Palestine to be even though some people in the West hear it as such. Israel has grown more to the right but this is because of the inability of Palestinians to do anything productive and Hamas being Hamas. The world seems to expect Israel just to deal with a certain amount of terrorism. Jews are also expected to deal with a certain amount of anti-Semitism.
What I think is happening is that the anti-Semites of all stripes have realized that they vastly outnumber the world’s Jewish population. Most Diaspora Jews know how to deal with anti-Semitism from the Right but they are really unprepared for anti-Semitism from the Left or even Muslims. To a large extent, many of us are falling into the education trap where we make false assumptions that all we have to do is explain outselves to the anti-Semites on the Left or non-White anti-Semites and all the hate will go away.
The Intersectionalist anti-Semites or the Muslim anti-Semites are just as bad faith as the traditional Right anti-Semites. Jews can explain themselves all we want and they can just raise their fist in defiance because of their numbers.
The worst of us are the anti-Zionist Jews like Judith Butler who believe that they will be safe because they hold “correct” anti-Zionist opinions. This is so dumb and they are basically selling out their own people to sooth their radical consciousness.
I really don’t get how the Palestinians can use clear and exclusivist language but it goes in the ears of Western radicals and comes out as “the Palestinians want multicultural secular Palestine.” Not one of them as said this.Report
Ethnostates, man.
They fell out of favor years ago.
Keep up with the fashion.Report
It seems that Israel is the only ethnostate that people want to destroy. Meanwhile explicitly Muslim states or indirect ethnostates are fine.Report
Is Israel an “ethnostate”?
What ethnic group would that be?Report
People refer to it as such and Israel does present itself as the Jewish State. The ethnicity in this case would be Jews. Whether Israel is categorically worse or just the same as other ethno-states or religious like South Korea or Japan or Iran is debated with a lot of heat and little light.
I bring this up but I am generally confused at the thought process of many of the more stridently anti-Israel people during these debates. Every Muslim majority state from Morocco to Indonesia sets it up to have theocratic elements. Important leadership factions among the Palestinians are also explicit about wanting to set up a theocracy. They say so rather openly. Even the more secular factions aren’t exactly speaking in terms of civil liberties, human rights, and multiculturalism.
Yet, what at least some Palestinian leaders are saying about what they want for Palestine seems to go in one year of the Activist set and come out the other ear as “Hamas wants multicultural rainbow Palestine.” Or when you press Westerners on what the Palestinians say they want, they case their eyes about and say “nobody is saying that it will be a Muslim theocracy” despite Hamas saying this and the activists not being the ones who will decide what Palestine is. I don’t understand this at all.
There is a similar thing with Israel wanting Hamas gone. During the entirety of the Israel-Hamas War, people have frequently told me that “Israel’s actions will encourage even more radicalization among the Palestinians and their Palestinians will be even more loyal to Hamas or it’s successor.” They really don’t seem to have an answer when you point out that you can also say “By committing the Simchat Torah massacre, Hamas ensured that the Israeli peace camp would remain dead because the promise of land for peace has turned out to be a lie.”
From what I can tell, people basically expect Israel to be the adults in the room and that Hamas or really any Palestinian leadership group is going to be de facto terrible but you can’t point that out because reasons. Like okay, Hamas isn’t going to do the right things because they are psychos. World politicians can at least say that openly rather than beat around the bush about it. It might make Israelis happy to hear world politicians refer to Hamas as dips who can’t and won’t do the right thing.
I think that basically the burden in good relationships between Jews and Muslims is placed on the Jews for the same reason.Report
That’s different.
They’re poor and people don’t want to move there. Besides, the people who do move there are colonialists.Report
That is what it seems to boil down to. Jews are too connected to things that the Activist set hates in their headspace, these connections might not necessarily be based on reality, and they don’t have any real romantic reverence for the Jews. So we get to be a support source and that’s it.Report
It is really difficult for me to express how angry I am at how the Intersectional Left treats the Jewish people and how the rest of the Diversity Coalition just ignores it in order to keep everybody together. This is outrageously sick and they would not do it with any other group. But with Jews, they just go to the bathrooom on us and everybody else looks away. When we build villages, towns, cities, schools, and cultural institutions of our own it isn’t considered a great act of human liberation but wypipo doing wypipo things. Yet at the same time they demand our support because of our history while simultaneously saying that Jews don’t count and that we are outside the Sacred Circle of Oppression (TM). They need to be taught a lesson and pay their penalties.Report
When we build villages, towns, cities, schools, and cultural institutions of our own it isn’t considered a great act of human liberation but wypipo doing wypipo things.
When wypipo build villages, towns, cities, schools, and cultural institutions, is that a bad thing?
I ask as a wyperpo.Report
According to the Intersectional Left it is.Report
It may be time to reassess how often they tell the truth about people they don’t like.
If you feel that they lie about people like you… maybe they lie about other people as well.
Worth considering.Report
When the secular nation of Israel does it on lands not belonging to Israeli’s, in violation of agreements pre piously signed by that government – yes it’s a bad thing.Report
Far as I am aware, Israel doesn’t have defined boarders. The two sides should resolve them with a peace treaty but the Right of Return keeps getting in the way.Report
To be fair, Israel doesn’t always want defined boarders.
Big picture this land has two indigenous peoples and they don’t agree on what should be done. Thus the attraction to the two state solution.Report
The easiest way out of this for Israel for the last 20 years has been to draw a border generally approximating the green line but also encompassing the big close in settlements, heavily fortify that line, then withdrawal behind it and renounce the claims to anything outside of it. IIRC North had a really good comment a few months back where he referred to this as the ‘Moral Conservative Option.’ That would end the entire thing for all intents and purposes, maybe not for certain Palestinians and certain Israelis, but as a matter of international concern it would be over.Report
Maybe. We’re in “how do we force the Palestinians to set up a state” territory.
Say the Palestinians don’t accept it. Thus the conflict continues, they don’t set up a state, and Israeli armed forces need to be there.
What happens when future Israeli politicians don’t except it and move the line?Report
My own impression is that Israel is trying to force the rest of the world to evacuate Gaza, or watch the Palestinians die. The problem, of course, is there’s no one else that wants to absorb a couple million Palestinians.Report
I doubt Israel has a plan at all.
I see short term thinking, anger, and total focus on the war. They are somewhere between “punish the Palestinians” and “prevent the next holocaust”.
They’re acting like Hamas is an existential threat. Like every Hamas solider is a potential nuclear terrorist.
That raises the stakes really high for every truck of food and every civilian they run into.Report
Most people sympathetic to Israel realize that Israel is watching a very different war than the rest of the world. Some people understand this on an emotional level but the power mismatch between Israel and Hamas is so great is that it seems ridiculous to a lot of people. They see it as at best an overreaction to a tragedy.Report
At the end of the day the world can’t force the Palestinians to do anything (at least not at a price anyone is willing to pay). What it would do is put the decision solely in the hands of the Palestinians. There’s no world where the Israelis need to be there, and the only reason they are in the West Bank now is to defend settlers. If they’re attacked they can retaliate but as long as they don’t try to occupy no one would care.Report
Again, I’m not sure about this. Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005 and took away all the settlers. After Hamas took over and started using it the base, any action in Gaza caused by Hamas being Hamas would get the usual suspects screaming bloody murder and the world trying to calm things down. People also maintained that Gaza is still under occupation despite no settlers because of the blockage Israel has to prevent Hamas from smuggling in weapons, building an army, etc.
Look how the current Israel-Hamas War is going. Hamas performed a definite act of war with the Simchat Torah massacre and the usual suspects are screaming bloody murder and engaging in Simchat Torah massacre truthism that it never happened and Israel got up and decided to smash Gaza for no reason. A withdrawal from the West Bank would be the same, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen though, the Palestinian leadership would decide to turn the West Bank into an armed camp and do something really dumb. Israel would respond particularly and the usual suspects would scream bloody murder because the Palestinians are supposed to have immunity from their own stupidity.Report
The usual suspects will always scream about it. The difference is no mainstream political leader would feel like they had to take it at least a little bit seriously. All the discussion here has focused on implications for Democrats but even Donald Trump has openly made noises about Israel needing to ‘get this over with.’Report
Israel is going to kill 100 Palestinians for every Jew. Hamas is going to occasionally commit a mass murder.
No one will care.
There is a lot more international pressure to prevent Israel from killing Palestinians than there is to prevent Hamas from killing Jews.
The argument for the Palestinians having a state is their political leaders will understand just how bad an idea 10/7 is, and out of self interest prevent it.Report
You keep talking about a Palestinian state as if one is just going to materialize the second settlers and occupation forces are gone. I take it as a granted that it may not and may never. What’s important if Israel truly wants out of this situation is to remove itself and wash its hands of that territory.
It’s also not factually accurate that 10/7 and events like it is some kind of inevitability. The really horrific damage was done by poorly trained militia with small arms, civilian vehicles, and construction equipment. There were situations where Israeli civilians fought them off. In a conventional fight the IDF easily destroys them. The reason they didn’t 10/7 is because they were all off focused on the West Bank. It’s a circular logic that points to the security situation as the reason for continued occupation when it’s the occupation that’s exponentially exacerbating the security situation.
Better to just say God gave the land to Israel, they won a war for it, and they can do what they want with the territory and the people on it.Report
Under this theory no mainstream political leader should be taking the usual suspects in the Israel-Hamas War seriously and yet they are.Report
The lack of voices calling for Hamas to surrender is the dispositive part.Report
The entire western world designates Hamas as a terrorist organization. The important countries that don’t barely want anything to do with them. The only ones they get audience with are other ME regional rivals that see them as a useful proxy for larger geopolitical aims. In short, what are you even talking about?Report
Israel is treated as a state.
Hamas is treated as a terror organization.
Hamas killing people is expected.
Israel killing civilians is not.
So we end up in this weird situation where Israel is expected to not kill the civilians Hamas is hiding behind.
It’s like Israel is expected to not go to war because Hamas isn’t a state. Or that civilians shouldn’t get killed in war.
We have “laws” on how wars are supposed to be conducted but if Hamas is inside a hospital then it’s supposed to be fine if Israel attacks it. If Hamas is dressed up as civilians then it’s expected that civilians will occasionally be treated as militants.
And I don’t hear anyone to the Left of Ben Shapiro calling for Hamas to surrender and saying the war can be expected to go on until they do.Report
I don’t see how a theory about what happens if Israel leaves the occupied territories is proven one way or the other as long as Israel is still occupying most of the territory at issue. This is like sticking only one leg outside of the shower and being baffled as to why you are still getting wet.Report
Yes. We’d be moving over the edge of the universe. We might get Jordan 2, or Gaza 2, or something else.
That range means it’s easy to argue for or against.Report
Chip, I’d like to hear your opinion about this because it seems it doesn’t make sense that Jews should be particularly happy about the current direction in multiculturalism.Report
Intersectional Left: It is important to listen to the lived experience of minorities.
Elderly Mizrahi Jews: This is what it was like living as a Jew in a Muslim…
Intersectional Left: Shut up you.Report
Intersectional Left: Zionism was the wrong response to the Holocaust and the long history of persecution that the Jews experienced. Rather the correct response was multicultural secular democracy where every culture has freedom.
Also Intersectional Left: The Jews are bunch of wypipo and aren’t a real true persecuted group and don’t have a real true culture that deserves preserving like the ones we care about. They are merely a religion and boring one that doesn’t speak noble universal truths at that.Report
intersectional left: we all know what you mean when you show a Confederate flag
also intersectional left: “from the river to the sea” is just a statement of general solidarity with oppressed people everywhere and if you think I mean anything else by it then you’re intentionally misreading my statement because you’re a racist bigot and if you think anyone might be concerned by me saying it then that’s their problem and maybe we should explore why they get so touchy about the suggestion that maybe they’re not good people, hmmmmm?Report
Current twitter discourse involves a recent painting of a swastika on a synagogue.
The discussion was over whether this was a threat or whether the painter was accusing Israel of acting like Nazis. It devolved into whether the swastika can credibly be said to have a multivariate meaning in the current year.Report
As always, twitter is the mind killer.
But I still don’t see this meta discourse as all that vexing. People that want to defend putting swastikas on synagogues or repeat slogans used during the worst anti-Semitic episodes in history discredit themselves and whatever cause they associate with. This isn’t a hard thing to say or to believe. Those that have trouble with it aren’t worth taking seriously, and, well they’re also just a-holes. The appeal of social justice social media to most of its participants is obviously that they think it is a permission slip to be vicious and it’s why they are so quickly on their way back to marginalization where they belong.
But none of that has any bearing on what the right policy of the US should be, or what one should think about the conflict and America’s involvement in it.Report
Well, to do that, we’re stuck in a place where we’re going to talk about stuff like “The World Central Kitchen…” erm. Some call it a “massacre”. Some refer to it as an “incident”.
I have seen framings like “murders of innocents like this is why we should have always opposed Israel” and framings like “stuff like this happens in war WHICH IS WHY IT’S BAD TO START THEM! HAMAS!!!”
Like, should we tell more people in the government that we need to send Israel less aid? Should we give the Palestinians more aid? Some Palestinians were killed by falling crates of aid, parachuting into the region. This has made it into a handful of sets of stand-up comedians.
I don’t even know what the rules of the discussion would be.
I’m mostly remembering something George F. Will said a million years ago:
There is one main rule for getting involved in a Civil War:
1. Don’t.
And then he went through and started talking about “okay, so you’ve decided to ignore the rule… so there are rules about that too. The main one is “pick a side” and the secondary one is “help your side win”.”
So thinking about that, I’m thinking about what helping Israel “win” would look like.
At what point will we be able to say that they have been as successful in Gaza as we were in Afghanistan and now they can declare victory and go home?
“All of the Hostages freed”?
Let’s say that that’s not on the table.
Then what?Report
The only way to help the Israelis is for us to get out. The only way for us to help the Palestinians is to get out. That is the only way the conflict will end, when neither side is shielded from the consequences of its actions. Which to be clear, doesn’t preclude a really ugly end but there would then at least be an end, and those left can start to move on.
To me this is obvious and has been for some time.Report
Yeah, genocide strikes me as the only way this is really going to end too.
But that’s going to result in some serious reframings of claims to regional moral authority. To put it mildly.Report
That’s what we need to stop living in fear of. And who knows. Maybe when that’s really what those with the power to change direction are faced with they will say ‘you, know, of all the ways to be remembered, I’d rather it not be in the neighborhood of Slobodan Milosevic.’ But then if they want to do it anyway, well it’s their bed and no one can stop them from making it.Report
I think that the whole “well what about the normal regular Palestinians” counter-argument starts to have some serious bite at that point.
They stop being “collateral damage”.
But, hey, maybe “Never Again” was just sort of supposed to be aspirational.Report
It absolutely gets a lot more real, but it does so for everyone. If the US is now just abstaining at the UN, the UN has to also get serious about whether it needs to do something other than pass absurd non binding resolutions, up to and including a peace keeping force. Israel needs to get serious about how it would handle such an intervention. The neighboring Arab states are suddenly under real pressure to both accept refugees but also put an end to the kinds of permanent refugee statuses that descendants of Palestinians driven out in the past still have.
Now maybe Israel doesn’t care and says we will shoot through everyone and everything for this territory but even if that happens all the force is going to be in the direction of finality instead of endless maneuvering for some other kind of settlement that everyone knows was abandoned years ago.Report
Nobody knows what neither side being shielded from it’s actions would look like. The Pro-Palestinian side beleives that the Simchat Torah massacre was something Israel deserved because of conditions in Gaza due to the blockade and the sense of desperation among young Palestinians. Pro-Israel people see that Hamas committed an act of war and are getting war in return, a war that Hamas knew they could not win conventionally.
Going global, many persistent international problems are because the traditional solutions have been seen as barbaric and inappropriate since at least the end of World War II but nobody has come up with a good solution for them yet. Nobody knows what to do with failed states, conflicts over a country where neither ethnicity wants multicultural secular democracy, or a bunch of other scenarios where the traditional solution was conquest by the strong.Report
Do you want to put it up to a democratic vote?
Maybe we could ask the UN for its take.Report
Jews in general and Israeli Jews in particular want Hamas gone.Report
Yeah, so do I. The difference is that I think that bombing Iran and killing World Central Kitchen workers is something that I wouldn’t want to defend in the comments on a blog (when bombing, say, a building housing Hamas members and human shields is something that I might do, had I eaten my Wheaties that morning).
You want me to defend Israel attacking Gaza after October 7th? Sure, I can do that.
You want me to defend Israel attacking Iran and the World Central Kitchen?
The best I’d be able to do is change the subject back to Hamas.Report
Hizbollah has been launching rockets into northern Israel at Iran’s behalf during the Israel-Hamas War.Report
I understand that, Lee. They were even targeting members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
And if the argument is that they were legit war targets, then we may have to open up whether we’re in a legit war.
I’m not sure that I’m a fan of being in a legit war. I am pretty sure that I don’t want a part of it.Report
“The discussion was over whether this was a threat or whether the painter was accusing Israel of acting like Nazis.”
Which isn’t even a new idea, Monty Python was suggesting it back in 1979…Report
If the only tool you have is a swastika…Report
“From the River to the Sea” is a loved phrase because it is ambiguous. Their slogans and arguments have a big motte they can retreat to when pressed on their more outrageous bailey.Report
Intersectional Left: It is incredibly racist for Muslims to have to live under an officially Jewish state with Jewish symbols stamped on everything and Jewish culture, history, and literature promoted by the state.
Also Intersectional Left: Jews should have no problems being part of an officially Muslim country that is part of a larger collection of officially Muslim countries with the stamp of Islam on everything and blasphemy rules to punish those that insult Islam.
The utter hypocrisy of these people is outstanding.Report
It is but they escape that hypocrisy trap because we do not treat the state of Israel the way we treat all those Muslim majority/supremist states. And neither you, Lee, nor Israel wants us to treat the state of Israel the way we treat all those Muslim majority/supremist states. So this is a fruitless complaint.Report
I think a lot of the Intersectional Left is much more comfortable with Muslim supremacist states and would call bloody murder otherwise. I do not understand their theory of when, why, and how the Muslim world is supposed to be modernize and join with the rest of us.
Since 9/11, there have been a lot of discussions about when is Islam’s equivalent of the Reformation coming. What people really mean by this is when do we get Liberal Islam. That is an Islam comfortable with separation of religion and state even in Muslim majority countries, that is actual respectful rather than grudgingly respectful of other religions, and doesn’t have a thin skin and could stand some ribbing and parody plus female Imams, congregations with mixed praying, etc. From what I can tell, the Intersectional theory of Muslim liberalization is that the world just is that we shouldn’t do anything to force it but it will happen. Eventually, in a few hundred years. Other groups are put under immediate pressure to liberalize right now.
It seems like a lot of indulgence.Report
Sure, but it’s -easy- indulgence because we are -not- responsible for those Islamic states. We just aren’t. We don’t fund them, we don’t cover for them, we don’t give them particularly good trade terms, we don’t fight for them and generally we can’t find them on a map. Those Islamic failure states are just magical islamics floating out there in the gauzy minds of intersectionalists- perpetually infantilized and paid little mind.
Israel is not treated that way. It gets much from the liberal international order of which it is part and of those to whom much is given, much is expected.Report
Let us say that I find that the way Jews are treated in intersectional circles rather infuriating at best and want it confronted.Report
By all means, go for it. It’ll do worse than bounce off their titanium self regard- it’ll reinforce it but, so long as it’s cathartic, go for it.Report
I don’t know if it’s bad faith on my part, but I always assumed that the intersectional left was deliberate in only attacking people they knew wouldn’t fight back.Report
I suppose that it depends on what you mean by fighting back. In the New York Times article I posted, Jewish parents have called the materials out and are fighting against it.
There are a distressingly high number of Jews willing to give them too much good faith benefit of the doubt or are siding with them though. They also seem rather blind to the situation of the Jewish people and think that they will be safe if they hold the “correct” opinions. They are one of the good ones.Report
It really is surreal reading your comments.
Might I suggest that the intersectional left actually has a much larger problem with the ‘seizing land from Muslims by force, removing them at gunpoint, and extending the officially Jewish state into these settlements, where Muslims are forbidden’?Report
Possible Fragment From ISS Battery Pallet May Have Crashed Through Florida Home
https://gizmodo.com/iss-battery-pallet-fragment-hit-florida-home-1851381481
“Afterwards, NASA collected the debris from Otero and is currently analyzing it to determine its origin. The time and location is consistent with the space station’s pallet of old batteries, but its origin and nature have yet to be confirmed.”
Smooth guys.Report
It’s kind of wild that it took 3 years for the orbit to degrade.Report
Now imagine the whole ISS tumbling down. NASA is asking for an initial billion dollars to develop a “space tug” with the intent of using it to crash the most durable parts of the ISS into an isolated part of the South Pacific Ocean. In early 2031, I believe. Somehow I have to think that the cheapest proposal they’ll get will be SpaceX bidding a one-off modification of Starship, then handing the job over to Gwynne Shotwell to get it built. They’re not ever going to let Gwynne retire.Report
New Details Emerge of Afghanistan Chaos
https://tennesseestar.com/world/new-details-emerge-of-afghanistan-chaos/realclearwire/2024/04/03/
“In a transcribed interview before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, former Foreign Service officer Samuel Aronson said the very opposite in living, harrowing color. “Let me be clear,” he told lawmakers behind closed doors, “I cannot call this evacuation a success.””
“Aronson recalled hotwiring buses to ferry the massive crush of humanity that descended on the airport and the sometimes impossible task of determining who should and should not be allowed inside the gates. He rejected the characterization later offered by State that the Taliban, whom the U.S. relied on at times to facilitate the departure of American citizens, was “businesslike and professional.””
“Managing the situation on the ground fell to Wilson, acting ambassador to Afghanistan…….Wilson told lawmakers, however, that he was not directly involved in planning the operation. He also appeared unaware more than two years later that, per Department of Defense policy, he bore ultimate responsibility for the evacuation. “I believe that it was the responsibility of the chief of mission to call for an evacuation,” he testified, adding later that the operation itself would be carried out by “combatant command personnel who were not going to take orders from me.”
Christ, what a shitshow.Report
Reading over that looks like we got out very cheap indeed. Thank goodness we did.Report
If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!Report
The graveyard of empires retains its title.Report
Afghanistan like Trump provides an endless problem to all small l-liberals because it shows that maybe a lot of small-l liberalism is based on false premises. This is mainly that the easy going ways of small-l liberalism and modernity are so attractive to the majority of humans that nobody in their right could reject but a small number of malcontents who we really don’t have to take seriously. In Afghanistan you have an entire society that has rejected modernism in total.Report
So why, again, would Kipling be one of the “wrong” books?Report
Because:
Report
I don’t care. Kipling could write.Report
Seconded, holy fish could he write!Report
I recommend Orwell’s essay on Kipling. Two writers that some folks unaccountably think are on their side.Report
Oh, I’m familiar.
I’m also, apparently, familiar with the folks who think that Orwell and Kipling are both someone toxic to the point where they should not be taught in classrooms.
Which might not be a big deal except for the fact that those people include those who decide what is taught in classrooms.Report
Orwell still gets plenty of classroom play. Kipling, famously described as a “good bad poet,” is hardly a no-brainer on the merits. Does he deserve classroom time over, say, Hardy or Houseman or Hopkins? Reasonable minds can differ.Report
Are we talking about how good these guys are?
Because I thought the question was “So why, again, would Kipling be one of the “wrong” books?”
I agree that Orwell and Kipling are good authors!
But I’m also one of the guys who thought that “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” should have remained in print.Report
I was prepared to argue that no one is banning Orwell, but I admit it is happening.
https://www.businessinsider.com/banned-books-schools-2018-11Report
Did you see that pivot there? To “banning”?
The original question was “So why, again, would Kipling be one of the “wrong” books?” and the answer was a New Yorker article that explained that he was politically toxic.
When it comes to George Orwell, the explanation for how he was “problematic” discussed how he was “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent and also brilliant“.
If we are inching back to a place where we can tell the people who say such things to sod off, that’s absolutely delightful. We should have a much more vigorous defense of even problematic art and have much less of a hair trigger when it comes to wanting the bad stuff hidden.
I mean… if you give an inch on that, you’ll quickly find that you’re surrounded by people who want to remove a hell of a lot more “offensive” books from the library than you do.
And what argument will you give? “But he’s a really good writer!”?Report
If we are inching back to a place where we can tell the people who say such things to sod off, that’s absolutely delightful.
But…these people are moms. MOMS, you understand?
I remember people telling me how hard it would be to argue against parental rights to control what their children read, and how toxic it is to be the people who want to put hard core pornography in the hands of children.
But I agree with you, if we can tell these censorious parents to shut up and let the teachers decide what books to teach, that would be fine by me.Report
Well, I suppose I’ll let you argue for how you have to put hard core pornography in the hands of children (due to freedom of the press, or whatever) while you call for the importance of making sure that children are protected from ethnic stereotyping in Doctor Seuss books.
Then you can find yourself surprised that Kipling and Orwell are considered “toxic”.Report
Lets agree then, that parent’s shouldn’t be allowed to ban books, and teachers and educators can be trusted to decide what is age-appropriate.Report
I’m not sure that teachers and educators *CAN* be trusted to decide what is age appropriate.
I mean… we’re talking right now about how Kipling and Orwell are problematic.
Did you forget that?Report
It all depends on the ethos of the educators. If they are humble public servants, there to fulfill a mission to regular taxpayers, particularly those families using the services, they can probably be fine. If on the other hand they are activists advancing the interests of communities so marginalized they may not even exist outside the warped minds of people in SLAC faculty lounges, then no, they probably can’t and should find different careers.Report
The whole “what is the purpose of lower education?” question, in practice, seems to have “teach students” lower and lower on it with every passing year.Report
You put your finger on the whole “censorship” issue.
We DO want curriculum decided by people who [insert good ethos here] but we DON’T want curriculum decided by [insert bad ethos here].
Our disagreements aren’t about what books to include or exclude; They are about which ethos is appropriate.Report
The truth is that there is never going to be a consensus about what the proper ethos is even in a country less riven by culture wars. It really just amounts to power. Does your group have the power or does it not to impose itself on the body politic.Report
This is wrong. There are right ways to do things and wrong ways to do things, better ways and worse. Don’t concede to this ‘everything is really about power’ crap. It’s a total cop out, and comes from a place of the laziest type of thinking.
Not to thread cross but that’s the exact mentality that’s got you so riled up on the Israel subject.Report
I don’t know about that exactly. I think characterizing curation of curricula and school libraries as censorship or book banning isn’t accurate, at least not in 21st century America.
But I also think a public service ethos is just on the merits right for the mission of the institution and the activist ethos on the merits wrong. That’s not about exercise of power, it’s about what’s conducive to fulfilling the mission and what isn’t (to say nothing of what is almost certainly counterproductive).Report
I agree, but our opinion on this is itself an ethos, the small l liberalism.
What we are facing with the rising tide of authoritarianism is a group which rejects even that premise.
A new law proposed in Louisiana proposes to put librarians in jail if they go to a conference of the American Librarians Association.Report
These debates always run around in circles because our side is divided on what is the best response to the rising tide of authoritarianism and also what is in it and what is out it.
InMD and others on this blog clearly think that the activist antics of some teachers hurts a lot more than it helps. They might even think it is authoritarian in it’s own way. You are more sympathetic towards them. I have some big doubts on how the Intersectionalists in general see the Jewish people and find them rather doctrinaire in their own way.Report
Who is banning Kipling and Orwell?
Educators or conservatives?Report
I think the “official” left-liberal position on Kipling was that he was an imperialist and the Jungle Books promote some really questionable and violent values rather than cooperative team work. When the “live action” Jungle Book came out several years ago, Slate praised it for updating the value system towards cooperation or some such.Report
Never underestimate censorious stupidity. There’s always someone somewhere doing something stupid.Report
Ask DD. He’s the one who made the claim. I simply marvel at the eagerness with which some folks seize on authors like Orwell and Kipling in the belief that they’re on their side.Report
But you’re the one who asked the question.Report
Then he should answer it.Report
I find that I have a different philosophy when it comes to having questions.Report
That the people who ask what other people mean or think should answer their own questions? I guess it would save time, but it wouldn’t be very informative.Report
The question wasn’t “what do you mean?” or “why do you think that?” but “So why, again, would Kipling be one of the “wrong” books?”
And I provided an article from the New Yorker explaining why Kipling was toxic in the current year.
Which, I’d hope, would provide you with a perspective that it seems you were unaware of.Report
Is English not your native language?Report
It absolutely is. So when someone asks why Kipling would be considered “wrong”, I immediately found an article explaining why he was problematic.
Despite being a really good writer who, presumably, would disagree with people like me.Report
Except I asked the person who said they were wrong why they were wrong. I’m perfectly well aware of why some people think that, and even alluded to sources explaining it. But I can’t speak for the person who brought it up. Well, maybe I could, or could at least make a good guess, but it’s more polite to ask.Report
I guess Chip will have to answer your question, then.Report
DD doesn’t think it was Chip. And he would know.Report
You didn’t ask the question of DD.
You asked the question of Chip.Report
(I think maybe he forgot what post he was commenting on and what thread he was replying to.)Report
Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you; ask someone else.Report
Proposed: Kipling was the Frank Miller of his day.Report
I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?Report
That’s like saying “if there were people out there on the road as drunk as I was, I’m lucky I made it home safe”.Report
Hey, ya want the right to campaign on “we shoulda stayed in Afghanistan” go right ahead! Yell “we shoulda stayed in Iraq too!” Wrap W’s mantle snug and tight around your shoulders! That’ll own those libs.Report
That’s irrelevant to your initial comment though. Damon posted that the US government did a bad job coordinating our exit, and you replied that it’s a good thing we got out. That’s a non sequitur right there. Adding a discussion of public opinion is just a further non sequitur, doubly so in that it’s unrelated to either original point.Report
The real problem with Afghanistan was we went there and didn’t see out the societal change, if it was even possible. You need 30 years or more, to essentially let those of the old guard die off. So it was a mistake to go, or to go and not stay long enough to effect the change we wanted.
The pullout WAS always going to be a fiasco. When has it not been? Vietnam, Afghanistan for the Soviets, etc. The data posted only serves to highlight that our administration (regardless of who’s leading it) is not capable of being an empire that holds physical land, unlike the brits who used to.Report
‘
Besides not seeing this as a 30 year task, the United States government was not willing to be as ruthless as necessary to do societal change in Afghanistan. Like if we really wanted to prevent a Taliban come back, every Islamic madrasas would be closed and replaced with a co-educational and strictly secular school. There were good reasons not to be this ruthless but it also prevented culture change.Report
The amount of resources needed to win and do full reform is extremely high. The place to start is with the Afghan government’s habit of corruption.Report
The US set itself up to do a bad job in exiting Afghanistan the moment W invaded and crapped the bed so thoroughly in every element of operation. The US deepened its predicament when Obama allowed himself to be talked into staying in Afghanistan longer by the highly motivated blob and by his own decision to campaign on Afghanistan as the ‘good” war. The odds of anything but this outcome diminished, again, when Trump made his deals with the Taliban basically broadcasting to the Afghans that the US would be leaving in the next couple of years whereupon the Taliban set about subverting and coopting everyone who would have opposed their take over (and could do it because those targets had a pretty good idea they’d be on their own against the Taliban in short order thus were highly motivated to cut a deal).
That the DoD and the assorted idiots up to their elbows in Afghanistan didn’t even know that the whole house of cards wouldn’t last even the bare few months the Admin hoped it would was is just typical of the clusterfish Afghanistan has been from the get go. Everything Damons’ link talks about is simply downstream of the fact that those actors got blind sided. But EVEN IF THEY KNEW and started preparing to mass evacuate in advance those preparations, in of themselves, would have precipitated an even earlier collapse.
Which leaves us with my original comment which is fundamentally correct: It is good we left when we did; it is a pity we didn’t leave earlier; and considering the clusterfish that got dumped in Bidens’ lap- he got us out cheap; thank goodness for that.Report
Gantz calls for early elections in Israel. Things are moving against Netanyahu and his government.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/gantz-calls-for-early-elections-in-september-to-renew-trust-in-government/Report
Final-fishing-ly. Though six months is waaay too long out.Report
I assume there are strategic reasons for this.Report
While I try and keep abreast of Israel’s domestic politics I’m not that abreast.Report
Certainly not an expert but I seem to recall reading somewhere that there is a minimum length of time for campaigning required by the constitution.Report
I have heard the theory that Putin staying in power is relatively good insofar as every single reasonable alternative is worse.
Is Netanyahu likely to be replaced by a more dovish hawk?Report
I’d be content if he just got replaced by a hawk who is interested in Israel’s welfare more than their own.Report
Israel’s parliamentary democracy has some unique features. For instance if Netanyahu or any PM were to suffer a vote of no confidence rather than immediate elections, he would be given time to attempt to form another government. If he could then no new elections. The soonest elections could be held after a vote of no confidence is three months. There is no vote of no confidence in this case, so I assume that using September 2024 was basically the earliest Gantz thinks he can force the issue.
Netanyahu was about the worst possible PM who could be in charge at this time but Israel is pissed off enough at Hamas that some of the stricter actions against Gaza was also inevitable.Report
Thanks for those deets Lee, I actually have little to nothing to quibble with on this.Report
I know “two Jews, three opinions” but I am sincerely confused by the Jews who seemingly don’t get the Intersectional Left’s apathy towards the Jewish people. It seems obvious to me that it goes beyond just not liking Israel or Zionism and being sympathetic to the Palestinians and they don’t really see Jews as having a culture or identity the way the groups they care about do. Yet, they either seem not get this or worse willingly sacrifice their own people so they can cast about their consciousness and maintain their radical creed. Do they believe that they will be safe because they are one of the good ones?Report
Well, Israel better figure it out, because you’ve got even former heads of the Council of Foreign Relations under Bush II and close advisors to Colin Powell talking like those people in Oakland you hate – https://twitter.com/_waleedshahid/status/1775644438942859445Report
You posted this above and I responded to it I ask you this, why should Jews trust the vision of the humaan righters? It seems completely inapplicable to me. I am just old enough to remember the struggle to free Soviet Jews. It was basically an entirely Jewish cause and no links were made by the human righters to any other cause at the time at all. It was seen as unimportant. I don’t trust any world out of the mouth of a human righter or multiculturalist in regard to the Jews because they don’t regard as humans and they don’t see us as a culture. They will sacrifice us to keep things quiet even if that means a Jew free Jerusalem.Report
I think the point is that a Jewish neocon under Bush II think Israel’s current actions are a bridge too far. He is not an antifa anarchist from Oakland. And Israel really is caught in a mania that it can’t calm down from quite yet.Report
I agree that Israel is caught in a mania that it can’t calm down from yet. Many people don’t seem to recognize this in a way that they would recognize it in groups that they are more sympathetic too. What we can call outside agitation and inability of large parts of the world to say anything bad about Hamas and the growing semi-permissible anti-Semitism, if expressed correctly, is not helping the matter. Basically people want Jews in general and Israeli Jews in particular to be absolute vulcans and cold on this and just live with it. We shouldn’t. I want to hear the plot and the plan to deal with rising global anti-Semitism.Report
I thought of one thing that international politicians can do to potentially calm Israel down. They can go on TV and public say that they are well aware that Hamas started this war and bit off more than they can chew but Hamas are a bunch of psychos who would never do the right thing and the Israelis are not psychos so they need to do the right thing.
Nobody is ever going to do this because it goes against a lot of diplomatic protocol and apparently calling out Hamas is racist and Islamophobic but signaling out Hamas as bad guys will make Israelis feel better.Report
Another day ending in y, another day ending with Trump violating a gag order, and another day with all the judges tasked with holding Trump accountable asking can someone else do it?: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b9514fdd11cd56dc6746bd1fb1197428146ad37e3b83071ca73e4554275f44b8.jpgReport
The Seattle Times has an article explaining: Why Seattle Public Schools is closing its highly capable cohort program
From the middle:
In a seemingly completely unrelated story on the other coast, the New Yorker has a story called “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?”
Here’s from the middle:
Report
Parents will push pressure on the schools until they fix this, or we’ll see private schools take over.Report
From The National Alliance of Charter Schools (not exactly an unbiased source but I’m willing to accept measurable numbers until I have reason to not accept them):
Report
I am increasingly not sure if these debates are new. If you read the New Yorker story, they note that the conservative promotion of traditional classical learning can go back to Dorothy Sayers and other people rallying against Dewey’s beliefs about education even though neither talked about decolonialization, race, or LGBT issues. There has always been heavy debates on whether the most intelligent kids should be in separate programs or schools even when not dealing with issues of racial equality.
Most parents who generally care about their kids education basically want their kids to get the nuts and bolts and don’t really like education as a moral crusade from any political direction. They also generally prefer the classroom to be more orderly than not. During the mid-20th century, it was the conservatives who were perceived to be on the moral crusade. In fact, Cold War conservatives were deeply mistrustful of how liberals placed a lot of emphasis on STEM to defeat the Soviets in the Space Race because they saw STEM as going against Christianity. I guess during the present, it is the liberals that are generally seen as treating education as a moral crusade and the conservatives are not.Report
Quite honestly, I think that if the kids are able to read, write, and do some light Algebra, the schools could get away with murder.
(Or, in the case of the gifted ones, AP reading, AP writing, and AP Calc.)Report
But that’s the thing, no one on the conservative side is promoting any sort of solution.
Not “classical learning” not anything.
The conservative solution for universal education is…wait for it…ready? Here it is-
The conservative proposal for how to deliver universal education is…*drumroll*
Do Nothing.
Thank you, tip your waitress and don’t forget to Vote Quimby.Report
The school had a T&G program and then dropped the T&G program.
“Conservatives” are saying “DON’T DROP THE T&G PROGRAM!”
And your complaint is that they aren’t offering a solution? Here’s your solution: “Have a T&G program instead of *NOT* having one.”Report
Are conservatives saying that a T&G program will provide universal education?
Ha ha, of course not.
Look, we’ve discussed this many times; The only conservative proposal for underperforming kids is to let them fail.
You can dress it up or obfuscate it all you want, but that’s what it is.Report
“Let’s get rid of T&G programs.”
“No!”
“YOU DON’T HAVE ANY SOLUTIONS FOR UNDERPERFORMING KIDS!!!”
How’s this? We set up a school district like the one in Baltimore. Send underperforming kids to that one. That way they can be around their peers and receive proper socialization without being bullied by the T&G kids.Report
I don’t think it is only conservative whose solution is to allow underperforming kids to fail. Plenty of not very conservative people have the same sink or swim beliefs, especially if their kid is in some type of honor’s program that seems under siege.
I honestly do not see that many liberal or progressive solutions to underperforming kids as well. A lot of the proposed progressive solutions seem to amount more to playing with the deck chairs as the ship is sinking or getting rid of honor’s programs in hopes that something will happen and similar stuff.Report
Underperforming children are in the same set as homelessness where there are solutions but they are wildly expensive and not immediately gratifying and so the status quo is by default the only choice.
This is because I have been saying the biggest variable on education has nothing to do with politics.
If parents are engaged and invested in their children’s education, almost any system works. If they aren’t, almost no system works.
For those who aren’t, the societal policy choices are to how to best mitigate the future of the underperformers.
Tracking and vocational school can work, but again those require investment and resources which don’t have easy payoffs and are politically difficult.Report
Part of the problem is that when people are talking about the solutions in education, they aren’t both talking about the same problem.
Here’s a direct quotation from Chip: “But that’s the thing, no one on the conservative side is promoting any sort of solution.”
My immediate thought was “what in the hell does getting rid of T&G programs solve?”
But I was not thinking of the problem of there not being enough non-AAPI BIPOCs in the T&G program.
Once you realize that not having enough non-AAPI BIPOCs in the T&G program is a problem in and of itself, suddenly solutions materialize.
“Let’s get rid of the T&G program.”
“Yeah… that would solve the problem.”
And then when a “conservative” pipes up with “Don’t get rid of the T&G program!”, you can hit them with “No one on the conservative side is promoting any sort of solution!”Report
When I Google “conservative proposals for education” the first hit I get is from Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-next-conservative-education-agenda
Here is what he has to say:
When it comes to education, conservatives have been far better at explaining what we are against than what we favor. Everyone knows we broadly oppose federal overreach, reckless spending, free college, and teachers’ unions. But what are we for?
It often seems that the list begins and ends with “school choice,” “free speech,” and “keeping Washington out of education.” This dearth of ideas poses a problem because it means that conservative talk about equal opportunity can ring hollow — especially for office-seekers who need to say more than “Washington should keep its hands off” to govern effectively. This has particularly large ramifications at the state and local levels, where education runs high on voters’ lists of concerns.
Wow. Wish I’d said that.Report
“You don’t have any positive proposals!”
“School choice!”
“You need more positive proposals than that!”
“Do I?”
From The National Alliance of Charter Schools (not exactly an unbiased source but I’m willing to accept measurable numbers until I have reason to not accept them):
Report
School choice is literally just the Lifeboat Theory.
Not figuratively, but literally the entire concept is to scramble aboard a lifeboat and let the others fail.
We covered this a million times. The best you’ve ever come up with is phonics, which is fine but still doesn’t move the needle.Report
Yeah, I got into that when I said “Part of the problem is that when people are talking about the solutions in education, they aren’t both talking about the same problem.”
You see getting rid of T&G programs as a solution.
But I do not see it as a solution.
Because I see a different problem than you are seeing.
And that’s okay.
There are lifeboats, after all.
Maybe framing it as “White Flight” will work. Try it.Report
Right, and your solution for the problem is to let the slow kids fail.
I don’t know why you spend so much energy denying it. Just own it.Report
My solution for the problem is “tracking”. We have argued this before. You should instead be upset that I think that the slow kids shouldn’t get a college prep education but instead get something more like what would have been taught in shop class or automotive.Report
Like I said, tracking is fine but if you look at your own examples you will see that it requires investment and resources, an educational bureaucracy not much different than the one we have.
Because the people we are talking about are the people who consume a lot more resources than they generate.
And it remains true that the conservative movement, AKA the Republican Party hasn’t embraced this idea. Youngkin, DeSantis, Trump, Abbot- I’m not seeing any of the conservative brain trust proposing this.Report
it requires investment and resources
The schools in Baltimore are in the top quintile of the country.
There’s a point at which the question “is any amount of resources sufficient?” might be asked.
NOT TODAY! NOT BY ME! OH NO! But I’m just saying that someone out there might ask it.
I’m not going to think about whether the question is answerable and, if it is answerable, what the answer might be, though.Report
There’s a point at which the question “is any amount of resources sufficient?” might be asked.
We’re not supplying the correct resources. We’re deep into diminishing returns if we’re going to just fund schools.
The kids in Baltimore need to be surrounded by functional adults.Report
My solution isn’t “to let the slow kids fail”.
My solution is to let the disruptive kids fail.
Without the disruptive kids we have enough resources to let the slow kids learn and they won’t have negative role models.
We also have fewer people like me voting with their feet and starving the system of resources.
Killing useful-to-my-caste programs because they’re not “inclusive” makes highly functional parents to leave the system. People like that run various enrichment programs. Everything from the PTO to various sports activities to robotics.
The only way we know how to have everyone succeed at the same rate is to lower the bar so everyone is below average.Report
So then we can look at historical or contemporary examples of what this looks like, and decide if we want to emulate them.
Got any to offer?Report
The contemporary example is called “tracking”. The “honors” track and the “normal” track.
There’s also the “above honors” track who doesn’t have a name because we’re supposed to pretend it doesn’t exist.
This is the opposite of “inclusion” or “one classroom” which the link talked about.
The purpose of education is education, not inclusion.
We can allow self selection at a school level or at a school system level. If it’s the former then parents who are super focused on their kid’s education don’t need to move and the system as a whole can benefit from them being around.Report
Like I said, I’m very open to the idea of tracking.
Can we cite an example of someplace where it is in use, and see how it is working?Report
It’s still in use in many parts of Germany.
One of the criticisms is that, apparently, a disproportionate amount of non-indigenous Germans are ending up in Hauptschule.
So they are having discussions about getting rid of the T&G program that is Gymnasium.
Ironic, really.Report
I don’t know why that should be a problem.
Elijah Calderon, after a yearlong training program at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, is poised to earn about $105,000 annually as a power lineman. Once he becomes a journeyman in three to four years, he stands to make about $165,000 — and potentially much more with overtime.
He had to let go of his high school dream of attending a four-year university because of family finances. But his chosen field in the community college system will propel him to the top 5% of wage earners among recent California college graduates — outearning many who attended the most prestigious universities in the state and the nation.
A Stanford University student graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political science makes a median annual income of $75,500 four years after graduation. A UC Berkeley sociology major earns about $64,000 at that four-year snapshot and a UCLA graduate in history, about $47,900, according to a new analysis of federal data by the HEA Group, a research and consulting agency focused on college access.
I know from my visits to jobsites that many of the construction tradespeople earn well into six figures, especially the unionized high rise trades.Report
Well, there’s a wikipedia page with information. Apparently, it’s not enough to make money. There’s some positional stuff going on culturally.Report
I think the usual fears about tracking in the United States, despite the fact it strikes many Americans wrong on an emotional level, is that Black and Hispanic kids are going to end up on the trades tract disproportionately and that the lack of a welfare state would mean they would do less well. Sure some people in trades earn six figures but not the majority.Report
So if a society is plagued with racism and class bigotry, it tends to warp and poison almost every institution, from policing to education to housing?Report
What we need to be is more like the societies that are not plagued with racism or class bigotry.
Like… um…Report
“A certain amount of disorder is something we just have to put up with” doesn’t sound any better in conservativ-ese than it does in progressive-ese.Report
Maybe we could look to Progressive cities as a standard, then. “Be more like San Francisco!”, you could say. “Look at Portland and then be ashamed at how backwards you are!”
Man, I can’t help but think that the example you’d point us to would make us feel really bad about what is achievable if only one lived in a progressive city!
Anyway, here’s a report on segregation in San Francisco from 2022.Report
Yes.Report
“Like I said, I’m very open to the idea of tracking.”
That’s because you’re racist and think brown/black students shouldn’t be allowed to go to college.
Oh, no you’re not? Well, why do you think we got rid of tracking in the first place?Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)Report
There is a certain amount of dodging in your answers to Jaybird I think. Do you think that ending programs for gifted students will do things to help or is it just deck chair arranging? What about some of the active politics that cause a lot of division like I posted to above with California ethnic studies describing Israel as a settler-colonialist state is helping the students lagging behind?
I mean two things could be true. It could be that conservatives have no idea how to help lagging students besides let them fail and our side isn’t doing that great on this either.Report
I don’t have much of an opinion one way or another about programs for gifted students.
By definition, they aren’t even germane to the subject of how to deal with low performing students.
If someone wants to put all the high performers in an advanced class, great, I don’t have a problem with that.
The question I keep asking and never get an answer to is, “What do you do with the rest?”
Its the problem with almost all education discussions. There are a million proposals of changing classroom size, staggering hours, doing this or doing that but they all start with the same premise: That the student body consists of families which are engaged and eager to have their kids learn.
But, with families like that, anything works, its almost hard to prevent them from doing too badly.
Whenever someone posts a “school horror story” its always about the same set of people, the troubled and damaged bottom rung families that no one wants to talk about, but everyone wants to get away from.Report
There are lots of things that people don’t want to talk about. Part of it is because there might not be any solutions or the proposed solutions are worse than the problem.
Like with the bottom rung or the people who are basically proudly dysfunctional. During a big part of the 20th century, including past World War II, euthanasia was seen as a way to deal with the proudly dysfunctional and we all know how that turned out. The counter-veiling theory from the Left was to provide them with services but many rejected those services. The centrist position was institutionalization. That also had issues because of the horrible abuse their. So maybe the only way to deal with the proudly dysfunctional is to let them be and eke out an existence from whatever as long as they don’t do crimes. It isn’t great but doesn’t involve an egregious abuse of civil liberties or human rights.
There might just be a decent portion of the population that is dumb, resistant to being educated, and either we take them away from their parents and put them in boarding schools or impose order in some probably not great way while providing services. I pure carrot and a pure stick approach isn’t going to work.Report
Since the Obama era reform movement came apart the progressive side of this equation has fallen short by both being radical in all the wrong ways while also failing to be remotely radical enough. So we get nonsensical inclusion stuff that no one can really measure or has any realistic chance of doing anything beyond appealing to a certain kind of sensibility. Best case scenario it does nothing, worst case it becomes a war on merit and a means of cooking the books to hide the problems instead of solve them. But no one is thinking about looking at those terrible schools and seeing if there is some alternative to traditional education for those students that might give them a chance at a reasonable life and standard of living. Recognizing this doesn’t require buying into conservative schemes to turn education into a luxury good so they can cut taxes or try to funnel public money to religious institutions as a backdoor culture war subsidy.Report
I think this is basically correct and I might even be inclined to go further. There seems to be a crop of liberal and progressive teachers who think that their primary role is essentially political education. The never ending culture war from the Right doesnt’ help but that doesn’t mean our side needs to respond in kind totally.Report
I don’t think this needs to be the case.
First, America really does seem to have solved our crime problem. Sounds funny know what with all the hysteria, but the fact remains that crime is lower than in anyone’s lifetime.
And a civil society, even in the most idealized state, will have a certain percentage of failure: businesses which go bankrupt, marriages ending in divorce, people turning to addiction of some kind or another, and people who are just dysfunctional for whatever reason.
This is just normal. Everyone reading these words has, somewhere in their family tree, a failure. But so long as the percentage doesn’t rise above some rate, the family/ society can still function well.
I like the idea of tracking/ trade school, for the same reason I like the idea of forcibly institutionalizing the mentally ill.
What I don’t support is the mentality that sees this as a way to just dispose of them out of sight.Report
I guess I agree.Report
The question I keep asking and never get an answer to is, “What do you do with the rest?”
No, you get the answer. It’s something like “hauptschule”. Want an example? Here and here.
Then you point out that, no, you’re not talking about people in comments you’re talking about professional politicians in charge of finding solutions.
You get answers each time you ask. Then you change your question.Report
You are answering for Jaybird.
I’m asking the “conservatives”.Report
Well, keep asking. Maybe someday you’ll get an answer.Report
By definition, they aren’t even germane to the subject of how to deal with low performing students.
Are they germane to the subject of getting rid of T&G programs?
Because if someone brings up getting rid of T&G programs and your complaint is that they’re not talking about the.. what’s the euphemism this week? “Low Performers”, your complaint seems to be that they brought up something other than what you would have brought up if you had brought up something.Report
No, it isn’t, any more than “grocery store choice,” “doctor choice,” or “automobile choice” is. The whole idea is that when people are free to choose, the higher-quality schools will get more students, and the lower-quality schools will either go out of business and be replaced by new entrants, or learn to emulate the higher-quality schools, thus raising the average quality of schools. That’s how markets work.
This is also why “You don’t have any ideas beyond school choice” isn’t the slam dunk you think it is. Yes, if you’re going to run the school system with a centrally planned government monopoly, you’d better have a good plan for exactly how you’re going to do that. For school choice, the plan is to reward other people for figuring it out. This is how something like 80% of the economy works, and the US economy is working a lot better than economies in which the government has a plan for everything.
As is strangely common when you make these kinds of accusations, it’s actually your side that’s guilty: It’s the public school system that runs on lifeboat theory. High-income families already have school choice, because they can just buy or rent a home in a neighborhood that has good schools. The people who get left behind are the ones who can’t afford to do that.
I think that the strongest argument against school choice is that student characteristics explain almost all of the variation in educational achievement, and that low-performing schools are just the ones that get a high percentage of low-potential students. I don’t know, though. Certainly student characteristics explain considerably more of the variation in educational achievement than school characteristics, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that better schools could produce meaningful improvements for many students.Report
The argument against it is that as proposed it can devolve into a means of giving public money to unscrupulous private sector actors that exploit the shell game to say they’ve solved a problem they haven’t. That and to siphon government funding to institutions more invested in instilling religious crackpottery than providing quality education. This is why the most important things public school supporters can do is to take a hard line against leftist crackpottery in the pedagogy and entrenched constituencies like teachers unions when their interests diverge from the public at large (but I digress).
As long as all schools are operating from something in spitting distance of the traditional k-12 model, which even the charters and private or religious schools are, there is no actual competition of methodology in play, just competition for students.* In short it becomes its own flavor of boondoggle that doesn’t improve anything.
*I think it’s clear that all material variation in achievement under the traditional model arises from students and the families they come from. Maybe the worst performers could benefit from a true alternative to the traditional model but school choice has zero record of trying anything like that and there’s no inherent reason traditional public school systems couldn’t experiment with it.Report
My move from being a liberal to whatever I am now was primarily due to realizing that my baseline “government is for helping the people, private orgs are for enriching themselves” assumption was not only ridiculously oversimplified but actively wrong. People are people, and good and bad and selfish and selfless actors can be found in both places. A government monopoly doesn’t magically avoid all the downsides that private monopolies have.
So I think if we’re stuck with collecting taxes to have government-funded public education, it’s still better overall to give that money to individuals than directly to school administrations — even if a portion of that money ends up in the hands of con artists or whatever, at least it was given freely by individual choices based on the available options. There are greedy or scummy or incompetent government adminstrators too, and it’s harder to get rid of them relying only on the voting booth.Report
Look, I’m a complete hypocrite in a certain way about all of this. We do Catholic school at my house. Criticism of me personally acknowledged and accepted.
But I think analyzing the issue based on a sort of abstract theory about the human condition isn’t a very useful way of looking at it. Public schools are a public service, like any other. The vast majority of them in the US are fine at their basic purposes, which break down to some combination of establish basic literacy and numeracy in the populace, identify those capable of higher academic achievement, and plain ol’ daycare while mom and dad are at work. From a pure Chesterton’s Fence perspective it is far from obvious that blowing it up is going to be a net improvement for the average user of the service. Which doesn’t mean there aren’t some real accountability and other problems, the most significant one being a lot of ossified thinking and bureaucracy. But the school choice movement doesn’t offer to do a whole lot about that. Where it had a level of bipartisan support the results were at best a wash and any proponent of taking it a step further needs to explain why it will work better this time. Currently they offer criticisms, some of which are valid and that I even agree with but there’s no vision of a better system or evidence to support that the undertaking is worth while. Just a demand to be catered to personally.Report
This probably makes me sound more against school choice than I actually am. The TLDR is there is a burden of proof that the school choice movement seems more inclined to dodge than to try to meet.Report
I think the issue is, when you say “work better”, we can’t all even agree on what “better” means. We might disagree on how best to fund and distribute health care but at least we all are more or less on the same page on what “health” is — but what people want out of education is all over the map, even before you get to how it should be conducted.
So IMHO, school choice should be the default, and the burden of proof ought to be on someone who says that actually we have to coercively collect taxes from everyone to create monolithic systems with very little choice, and where the only power to change them is political power (so you get tyranny of the majority, or of the vocal minority, or the deep pocketed campaign contributors, etc).
Obviously in the real world, the one who wants to change the system is the one with the burden to convince, but if we were starting from scratch, does anyone think we would basically want to build what we have today? Well, maybe so just because that’s what people know.Report
The existing system did have a burden of proof, and it won the debate in the late 19th through early 20th century. This is what I mean about the Chesterton’s Fence thing. We have to know why it’s there and exists the way it does before we decide to start from scratch.
What you’re talking about (I think) seems like it has less to do with the concept of state employed educators and state run facilities than the lack of flexibility and willingness to evolve. I agree wholeheartedly that is a major problem, it may be getting worse, and eventually could in fact be the demise of public schools. But like I said to Brandon, school choice doesn’t inherently address it and the schemes deployed to date as far as I know don’t try in any way. The closest its come was the charter school movement and the result of that was that an A student stayed an A student and a C student stayed a C student they just got shuffled around to different physical locations.
Now, without making the discussion overly personal, I can say I opted out of a nationally very well regarded public school system for certain value based reasons, which I don’t expect everyone to share, and that’s fine. But, while I think I am making the right choice for myself and my family, I wouldn’t in a million years ask for or expect a subsidy for it. That’s not the way public services work, but that’s exactly what I think the modern movement comes down to- a subsidy for sensibilities. But even if implemented to the fullest extent its advocates would like I think the A students will probably still be A students wherever they are and likewise the C students. And it also isn’t like the structure of the existing school system can’t be changed, including in radical ways; it can be through the democratic process. Which brings us back to the burden of proof on why exactly we are going to knock down this fence, and whether the value would actually be higher than the cost.Report
I think that part of the problem is that we’re dealing with the fence of Theseus.
I have questions about what, exactly, I am being asked to preserve.
Because the fence didn’t used to be HERE.Report
You’re being asked to preserve those portions that aren’t broke. I believe you’ve acknowledged that many public schools (like the ones you went to) operate at least to minimally acceptable or better standards. My point isn’t that they are so good they are impossible to improve on, though the best of our best students compare well against the best of the best internationally. It’s that things can always be made worse and, where things are at least minimally acceptable, you want to be careful about not making things worse.
Second you’re being asked to consider whether proposed means are likely to result in desired ends. Turning one of the well functioning or minimally acceptable public systems into a school choice system doesn’t necessarily improve it. I’d bet best case scenario is it’s a lot of work to achieve a wash. It also doesn’t even begin to address the issues in districts where things are disastrous.
Bottom line is school choice needs to define its goal and explain why its means will achieve it. Given the way education is done in this country it also needs to explain how it works and why it’s the right move for a particular district. Not saying the case can’t be made, just saying general criticisms and discussions the status quo in the abstract don’t in themselves make it.Report
Your experience is what I am talking about.
There isn’t any school system anywhere in which your kids were gong to fail.
You are engaged and highly motivated to participate in your kid’s education, and even if they attended the worst school, and even if you had no option for exit, you would have worked yourself to remedy the situation with more parental coaching, possibly some outside tutoring, or whatever.
In the previous school your kids might have gotten a “B” level education and now they may get an “A” level, but they were never going to end up as the horror cases.
And you are like most parents, which is why the vast majority of public schools kids do alright.
The students Jaybird is always talking about have the parents I’m always talking about, who will always be struggling no matter what system is provided.
Private schools and charters deal with these students by rejecting them, as to any other school except public schools.
And no one has yet demonstrated any method or pedagogy or system which will perform much differently with these students than the public system.
Its not to say that improvement can’t be made; But the troubled performers will always consume a lot of attention and resources, and that’s what’s a very difficult sell.Report
To create a solution one has to accurately assess the problem. I’m in a ‘bad’ district in a good jurisdiction. It’s ‘bad’ primarily because it has a very high immigrant population. The performance is a result of the fact that many of the students being taught at the schools do not speak English well and some don’t speak it at all, which is then exacerbated by other factors related to the immigration status of them and their parents. If instead of the public school, they all got stipends and could apply it to something like the public school but run by an NPO, a Catholic school, StartUp Scam School, LLC, Jesus Rode Dinosaurs Evangelical academy, or Hoity Toity Prep school, all of which follow something like a traditional structure of education, you’ve probably solved nothing. Because the students still don’t speak English due to factors outside of the school’s control.
Now, if someone proposed hardcore assimilationist English immersion school for children below a certain proficiency rate, that might get my attention. But there’s no inherent reason the county or state couldn’t create that, the same way it has created magnet type programs within my ‘bad’ district that I assume my kids would probably find their way into if they were going to public school.Report
Right, and a hard core anything, would require resources to implement and track and to deal with the ones who fail.
And we would be hearing stories about how shocking it was that HardCore Assimilation Academy spends a gazillion dollars per student and how few of them are proficient.
Because that’s what it always comes down to.
Your kids don’t need much in the way or resources because of your engagement and motivation.
Those kids in Baltimore need a lot of resources, will always need a lot of resources, and charters/ private schools, as currently constituted, can’t help them.Report
Assuming you are still in MD, I looked into this a bit. Here’s what I found…
1.) In the last 10 years, Maryland has seen a near-doubling of its ELL (English Language Learner… what we tended to call ESL or English as a Second Language) population, from 47K in 2011 to 93K in 93K in 2020. The population is overwhelmingly Spanish speaking and concentrated primarily in PG and MoCo.
More data here: https://marylandpublicschools.org/programs/Documents/English-Learners/ELGlance/2019-2020_ELData.pdf
(See #2 below due to links)Report
2.) In 2021, Maryland adopted something call “The Blueprint”, which they summarize thusly:
“The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 2021 to transform public education in the state into a world-class education system. The Blueprint will increase education funding by $3.8 billion each year over the next 10 years, enrich student experiences and accelerate student outcomes, as well as improve the quality of education for all children in Maryland, especially those who have been historically underserved.”
More info here: https://blueprint.marylandpublicschools.org/Report
3.) The Blueprint specifically addresses ELLs: https://marylandeducators.org/english-language-learners/
Now, writing on a website ain’t worth sh*t, so I’d be curious how implementation has gone and what early results are. I’d be particularly interested if you’ve seen/heard anything about this on the ground level. If not, I’d be curious to hear your take on what is written here and if it would capture your interest as something somewhere the previous status quo and “hardcore assimilationist English immersion school for children below a certain proficiency rate.”Report
I haven’t heard anything about it. With the legislation only passing in 2021, meaning any movement to implement probably wouldn’t be in motion until 2022 (MD legislative session is in the spring) my guess is that we are firmly in too early to tell territory.
My gut reaction to the website is skepticism for a bunch of reasons that reinforce my priors about lack of seriousness that contributed to me opting out of the public school system. I also worry that setting the whole thing up as a combination of ‘equity’ and ‘racial justice’ with priority on hiring Spanish speakers could send it in exactly the wrong direction. The best thing for them is to assimilate and become fluent English speakers, not reinforce some kind of identity based separation from the rest of society. But to your point it’s a website and the branding may not reflect anything.
I can say that the people in my neighborhood that use the public school say they are generally happy with it, though plenty like me also send their children elsewhere. The principal lives nearby, is well liked, and does seem like a genuinely good guy. However my immediate neighborhood, while having lots of immigrants, are the types with children more likely to be outperforming their peers with American born parents than struggling.
All of that said, it does reinforce my point that the public schools can implement initiatives to allow for variety and to meet different challenges if they want to. But also a lot of words to say I have no special insight on the program.Report
Devil is in the details, naturally. I know there is lots of research on how to best support ELLs specifically and non-native speakers more generally. Of course, like anything else related to education, there are lots of variables involved (e.g., the similarities/differences between the native language and target language; age of the child; exposure elsewhere to the language; and that is before you get into individual student differences).
I haven’t dug into it a ton but I think the most recent research I saw showed that full immersion is not a particularly effective method (this is speaking only to language development, not cultural or other factors). But I would defer to the experts on that.
To your points here and elsewhere, the “branding” is really interesting. At its core, this strikes me as a pretty well-developed plan to address the needs of ELLs in Maryland, recognizing that the growth of that population has put major strains on the education system and it can’t just be ignored. Folks like yourself who cited that as one reason they left the system may see this as an eventual reason to return or stay (depending on results, obviously). But framing it as they did may also turn off those very same people, because it could easily get labeled as more DEIB wokeness or whatever.
Ultimately, what will matter is what are the outcomes for these kids and the system as a whole as a result of this plan. Time will tell. The legislation was passed but there may still be some resistance because of the branding. Or it may be less effective than it ought to be if the goals get muddled by the branding.
It sounds like phase one was primarily a data collection time, hence the availability of the data in that slideshow.Report
I think that you’re right that the proof will really be in the pudding, and if it works the methodology they used will speak for itself. I would also generally defer to the language experts. That said I do have the anecdata of my mom walking into 1st grade barely speaking English and now speaking it fluently and without any accent. Of course what worked for a 6 year old in the 60s may not scale, and certainly the older the children the harder I can imagine it is.
Also I do want to clarify that this is only tangentially related to my issues with wokeness. Even before all of that stuff, plus the covid issues became salient, I had concerns about whether sending my kids to a school dominated by EASL was the right move. Specifically I want my children to get some age-appropriate but very solid kicks in the ass. My guess is that in a public school where all of the administrative priority and efforts are (quite understandably!) focused on dealing with a very different sort of student that mine would, and would be allowed to, skate by with total ease. Without even getting into grades and metrics or whatever that is completely counter to the kind of character that I want them to develop.
Anyway I am open to reconsidering the public schools once they reach HS. However I’d only do it if I think they are personally able to navigate a situation where they will be designated by the system as white native English speakers and given the absolute lowest priority. No one will ever care about them or ask if they are pushing themselves so I would need to feel good about their ability to take the initiative and contribute to their own causes.Report
The discourse in education research and policy now is about immersion vs submersion (the latter of which is what I think most people think of as immersion). The way the latter works, non-English speaking students are basically thrown into English-only classrooms with English-speaking students and teachers who may or may not be bilingual. This method, as you might expect, leaves a lot of kids behind. That is, they might learn English eventually, but in addition to being behind in language, they’ll be behind on everything else.
The other method is “immersion,” which means the teacher mostly speaks English, but with primarily or entirely other non-English speakers. There are well-researched methods for doing immersion, and good schools will have immersion teachers. The problem is, even in a place like Texas, where there have long been a lot of ESL students, getting immersion teachers, and especially good immersion teachers, is tough. There are more ESL classrooms here than there are teachers who can competently teach ESL. I imagine Maryland has this problem as well.Report
Maybe such methods exist but even with competent people that’s only a small part of the game. What typically happens with these kinds of things even where well intended is a version of what I have seen out in the Discourse referred to as ‘everything bagel liberalism.’ So it becomes not just about the best way to teach English to non native speakers. It’s also a jobs program. And a grab bag of goodies for obscure but influential activist organizations and interests. And a set of bizarro social justice curriculum concepts. And a zillion other things that may or may not have anything to do with teaching the children to read and speak English well and that may in some way or another actually undermine that goal.
Maybe this program is the exception but experience is that, until proven otherwise, skepticism is warranted.Report
Not gonna lie, I have no idea what you’re talking about. In states like Texas, ESL at every level of primary and secondary education, from pre-K through 12th, is just a standard part of the way kids are educated, because there have always been a lot of non-English speakers in the schools (especially Spanish, obviously, but Austin schools have reasonably-sized ESL populations in other languages as well, e.g., Vietnamese). While I think educating kids regardless of what language they speak is a part of any conception of social justice, obviously, ESL is tracks are a necessity here, and have been since the people most likely to use the phrase “social justice” were Thomists.
That means there are decades of good research on how to do it well, and decades-old programs in colleges of education for teaching teachers how to do it well.
Granted, I’m not as worried about “wokeness” as you may be for whatever reason, and I will admit that, having now spent the last couple years immersed in education research, there are very serious problems with the, er, education industry these days (cough: non-profits), but I don’t think the immersion vs. submersion debate is affected by those, and I don’t think anyone in education, woke or un-woke, really doubts that immersion (in the form of ESL programs with dedicated classrooms and teachers) is the way to go.
Granted, I’ve never lived in a place where ESL programs, at least at scale, were just now being developed, so it’s possible there’s a lot of weirdness and grifting (cough: non-profits) going on, and maybe there are political agendas that get mixed up in the creation of such programs these days, but down here, I don’t see it, and I don’t see it in the research either (except, cough: non-profits).Report
I’m not talking about the merits of what you describe as immersion versus submersion. I’m talking about the political situation and the way things are operationalized on the ground.
I can’t speak to the Texas experience generally but I can say I am doubtful it is apples to apples. Maryland has always as far as I know had programs for EASL students but those were for exceptional situations and not scaled for anything remotely like what exists today in certain parts of the state. This is at most a 15-20 year old issue that’s only become truly acute in the last 10ish, so at the speed of government it’s brand new. The program we are talking about only got its legislative mandate in 2021.
Now, imagine a situation where at the implementation level the people making the decisions are leaning heavily on NPOs and activists to determine how they run it, and there isn’t even a token opposition anywhere to keep anyone honest about anything. Maybe they will get it right despite that. All I am saying is it is not obvious that they will.Report
I’d be surprised if “activists” were involved in the implementation in any meaningful way, except perhaps at the policy level well above school districts. Non-profits, on the other hand, are almost certainly involved, and while I’m sure “wokeness” or whatever other right wing bugaboo you’re worried about is not absent from non-profits, their agenda is mostly trying to sell something. If “wokeness” sells, they’ll probably use that, but the goal is to sell, not to awaken.Report
See, now you’re just being smug about a situation you already admitted you know nothing about. You’re the one emphasizing the wokeness stuff not me. In the comment you responded to I said my doubts about that type of politics are purely tangential to the topic, and, as I said to Kazzy, they are.
Maryland isn’t Texas and it’s definitely not in the two big counties Kazzy mentioned that were cited in the links as having the biggest challenges. In this part of the country progressive NPOs are activists and the progressive activists all have NPOs. A lot of them are significant players in state and local Democrat intra-coalition politics. None of this is some kind of conspiracy, just the reality of a part of the country where partisan politics are not competitive. If this was a deep red jurisdiction I’m sure we’d have all kinds of relict neoliberal grifters and Christian conservative advocacy organizations and God knows what else getting a seat at the table regardless of their competence. However it’s deep blue so on a subject like this we have radical illegal immigrant lobby groups and DEI consulting grift, neither of which is likely to have any special expertise, knowledge, or competence on how to effectively teach the students in question.
It’s entirely consistent with governance around here that the people hired to implement these programs would be selected from the head of some activist NPO’s rolodex, and/or that such NPO(s) would be treated as authorities on the subject by overly credulous local officials on things like best practices for language immersion.
As I keep saying maybe I’m wrong and they get it right anyway. However a big reason they wouldn’t has a lot less to do with what flavor of stupid, incompetent, and agenda driven these organizations are than the fact that a lot of the thinking is likely to be outsourced to stupid, incompetent people, with an agenda other than teaching the children to read and speak English.Report
Perhaps you can give me an example of your concerns, then. What sorts of “social justice” activism do you think will influence implementation, and how?
Now, it’s true I don’t know anything about the situation up there, but I happen to know a couple researchers from BCPS, and some folks at the College of Ed at Bowie State, so when I see them later this month, I’ll be sure to ask over beers in Boston.
However, just based on the content of your comments here, it sure sounds to me like you’re just worried about right wing bugaboos: “social justice” pretty much always means such when uttered by anyone as though it were a bad thing. And given the way you use the label “activist,” also as though it were a bad thing, it sure as hell looks like you mean it in the right wing bugaboo sense.
I mean, I’m open to the idea that you’re using “social justice” in a way that I, someone who’s not a reactionary, should find concerning; I’m just skeptical, because I’ve never seen it used in a way that I should be concerned about.Report
As I keep reiterating I am not concerned about anything. I am skeptical that a specific policy initiative that I was asked about will succeed. That is because I think there is a high likelihood that a lot of the thinking will be outsourced to idiots and/or undermined by other tangential goals at the expense of the desired result. Time will tell.Report
Ah, not concerned, just skeptical, got ya.
I assume that anyone you consider an “activist” or who is interested in “social justice” in education is an “idiot” and/or concerned about “tangential goals at the expense of the desired result.” What are some examples of such “tangential goals” you think might affect the implementation of education for non-English speakers?Report
For something like this? The most likely thing to happen will be that they hire a bunch of people for reasons other than a track record of success then shield them from accountability. Another is that they’ll spend a lot of money and effort on pantomimes of progress on everything except that which is measurable and call it a victory while the same old problems persist (or better yet say they just need more money). Scandals involving nepotism and incompetence in the local school systems are an ever present feature of the area.
But even if it fails there will be jobs and contracts awarded and feel good fluff.Report
And what percentage of these kids end up in the T&G program?Report
Heh, would it surprise you if I told you that 6 or 7 years ago there was a huge scandal about one of the big jurisdictions cooking books to get the graduation rates they wanted to see?
But in all seriousness, and my examination for thought crimes against the people notwithstanding, I am not so cynical I can’t appreciate what they’re trying to do. If the state and big counties succeed in actual, objective improvement of the students in question they will have done something unambiguously good. These are children and they aren’t responsible for the larger policy problems and political failures. It’s in all of our interests to want well for them.Report
Full immersion without special aid seemed to have worked well enough during the Ellis Island period.Report
I don’t think it’s sensible to just dismiss the argument that there are better ways of doing this. The world has also changed as have the expectations. What was good enough then very likely isn’t now.Report
Full immersion without special aid seemed to have worked well enough during the Ellis Island period.
You should go back and look at the Ellis Island period, man. There are lots of novels and memoirs and such that talk about this. Kids were just thrown into classrooms, often (though not always) at the very start of primary education regardless of their age. Dropout rates were sky high for immigrant children, a fact that affected the U.S. labor force and economy for decades.
As early as the 1910s, the NY City schools realized this wasn’t working, and started putting Italian, Greek, Polish, Czech, etc. and some schools started putting immigrant kids in language-specific classrooms. Learning English was still emphasized, but that only happened on a fairly small scale. Many thousands of children were effectively just discarded, in the name of assimilation.
If you were lucky, as an immigrant kids, you moved to an enclave where everyone, or almost everyone, spoke your language, and you could go to school in effectively a dual language program. You saw this in the mid-19th century with Germans in the South, the late 19th century in New York City with Yiddish, in mining communities in places like Western PA in the first couple decades of the 20th century with Italian, Polish, Czech, Greek, etc. Those kids might have learned English slower, and definitely assimilated more slowly and to a lesser extent than their kids
— growing up, when we’d visit my grandmother’s family in such a community, everyone over 50 was very Italian or Polish, despite the fact that they’d moved here in the 10s, 20s, and 30s, but their children, almost all of whom left that community, are completely assimilated (except maybe for their preferred dinner cuisines — but they got better educations, dropped out at lower rates, and were more likely to go to college.
One thing that post-2015 or so OT really misses is people who’ve read books, man.Report
A student stayed an A student and a C student stayed a C student they just got shuffled around to different physical locations.
When we went charter my “D” student became an “A” student. That stayed with her the rest of her academic career.
Holding her back a grade did the heavy lifting, but there were a lot of attractions to charter. One teacher per 10 (or less) students (meaning classrooms of 17 to 20 have two teachers).
They didn’t have sports (no gym) or buses so there is that.Report
Hey I am glad it worked. I think the case for allowing significant operational autonomy within the public school system is pretty high. But the results were what they were in the aughts and early teens, that whatever individual benefits charters gave in some cases weren’t scalable across a student population or populations.
It was also different from what I understand the modern school choice movement to be seeking, which is more of an opt out and ability to take public money (mostly) wherever they want.Report
the results were what they were in the aughts and early teens,
There was a VAST difference in quality between the charters. You had con men running charters and you also had serious players.
And we grouped them together and got an average, and the average was no better than public.
That implies (but does not prove) if we remove the con men charters are better.
To be fair, that wasn’t true in my local area because the local schools were so good. However that’s a good problem to have.Report
That’s not how the marketplace works.
There IS a market for crappy low quality anything. Groceries, cars, clothes, schools.
With the people I’m talking about, families that are not highly engaged and eager to have their children learn, there is a large pool of low quality schools to meet this need.
We know this because prior to the advent of compulsory public schooling, thats exactly what existed, where some students got good education and some didn’t.
And the reason compulsory public education was founded was because the outcome of school choice led to awful conditions.Report
the strongest argument against school choice is that student characteristics explain almost all of the variation in educational achievement
The problem with a lack of choice is we instantly end up with an unresponsive bureaucracy in charge of major life aspects.
My 3rd kid had to be held back a year (she was young for her grade), and I caught no end of flak because her needs didn’t line up with the bureaucracy.
Put the school in charge of that and her education suffers because actually meeting her needs and leaving the school would negatively affect their budget.
This wasn’t the school’s fault, they were very good otherwise. This also wasn’t my kid’s fault, she was the youngest in the class.
School choice is a club parents use to beat up the school administration until they do right by their kid.Report
“If you read the New Yorker story, they note that the conservative promotion of traditional classical learning can go back to Dorothy Sayers and other people rallying against Dewey’s beliefs about education…”
Considering that Dewey’s beliefs were that the Prussian Method’s emphasis on drill-and-memorize was the future of education, maybe those “other people” had a point.Report
The interesting thing in the New York article is about the Emet Jewish school. There was a similar article from earlier this year or late last year about Jews fleeing the Oakland public schools because of the impromptu teach ins from after the Simchat Torah massacre. What I am getting is that many American Jews, and the women quoted by the New Yorker are probably around my age, feel that they are increasingly isolated and under siege. This is very much under reported and a lot of people seem in denial about this.
So we get:
Anti-Israel people: Anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism
Also anti-Israel people: We have a right to go hard on Diaspora Jews to make sure they hold the “correct” opinions on Israel/Palestine.Report
If you set it up so that the classroom runs at the rate of the slowest kid in the room so that no child is left behind, you’re going to find a bunch of parents looking for classrooms where the slowest kid in the room is a lot faster. (Hell, the slowest kid is *THEIR* kid and NO SLOWER.)
And if some weirdo culture war stuff gets in the classroom, you may find that the kids are suddenly in the new charter school that didn’t used to be there.Report
Remember all the talk about how cuts at SI and ESPN was because they went woke or forgot their audience or whatever?
How does the NFL Network making cuts fit into that narrative?
https://theathletic.com/5390846/2024/04/04/nfl-network-hosts-out-changes/
“The trimming at NFL Network continues as on-air personalities Melissa Stark, Andrew Siciliano, James Palmer and Will Selva are all out, an executive with direct knowledge of the moves told The Athletic.
“As is normal course of business this time of year, we are evaluating our talent roster for the upcoming 2024 season and beyond,” NFL Network spokesperson Alex Riethmiller told The Athletic. “That process results in renewals, non-renewals and additions to our talent lineup depending on programming needs. To those departing talent, we give our sincere thanks and appreciation for their hard work and contributions to NFL Media.””
SNIP
“The NFL has been in talks about selling the network and other NFL Media assets to ESPN in an equity swap. A resolution, either way, is expected in the coming months.”Report
From a 10 second google: League announces enhancements, updates to diversity, equity, inclusion effortsReport
That’s the league. This is a television channel. These rules apply to teams.
But, hey, shoehorn into that narrative baby!
Is it maybe just maybe possible that the entire sports media industry… like the entire media industry… is different now than it was ten, twenty, fifty years ago?
Also, did you see the part about selling to ESPN? ESPN must have gone back to sleep if they have the money to pull that off!
Sincere question:
What do you think is the more likely of these two explanations for these cuts:
1.) Go woke, go broke.
2.) The complex changes to how people consume entertainment, including live sports and sports media, combined with the changes to how sports and sports media is broadcast (e.g., live sports on streaming, massive changes to college sports infrastructure)Report
According to wikipedia:
It’s not limited to teams.
And allow me to copy/paste the question you asked: “How does the NFL Network making cuts fit into that narrative?”
I imagine that that’s how it fits into that narrative.
Also, did you see the part about selling to ESPN? ESPN must have gone back to sleep if they have the money to pull that off!
I had a post back in 2019 that talked about how ESPN was changing how it would approach things.
So… maybe they didn’t go back to sleep but they definitely hit “snooze”. Their ratings went up, at the time, if the links posted back then were to be believed.Report
If the problem is wokeness in the NFL, why are NFL ratings higher than ever?Report
Americans to football: I just can’t quit you…..Report
If NFL ratings are higher than ever, why are they cutting the staff that is, presumably, doing such a great job serving content to the screaming crowd?Report
Because maybe these things are… really complex…Report
Woomp Woomp:
No labels was not able to find a candidate to herald their banner of please please please let it be the Clinton 90s: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/02/opinion/thepoint#nolabels-candidateReport
Eff that, Clintonism doesn’t deserve the blame for the No Labels mess. That whole clusterfish is nakedly 3 parts grift and one part right wingers trying to rat fish the election.Report
This is where you do that thing where you pretend one thing is another thing.
The first link you provided outlines their policies as they relate to teams and the league office.
Relevant quote: “During the meeting, the league reported progress made in diversity across all 32 clubs and the league office. The Diversity Advisory Committee (DAC) also met with ownership during the meetings to discuss their consistent, ongoing work with the clubs and the league office.”
It discusses hiring practices and a whole bunch more.
The second link you provide is about affinity groups available to all employees, which, yes, would presumably include those at NFLN and other NFL Media arms.
Now, if you want to try to draw a line between “The NFL offers affinity groups” and “The NFL had to fire people” and also connect to the line that says, “ESPN GOT WOKE AND WENT BROKE!” and also a line that says, “Maybe EPSN isn’t so woke and now they’re in position to possibly by the NFLN.”
Sure, keep squinting at the stars and insisting the gods put pictures there only you can see.
And that is all I will say until you answer my clear and sincere question.Report
Kazzy, you asked, and I’m copy/pasting this: “Also, did you see the part about selling to ESPN? ESPN must have gone back to sleep if they have the money to pull that off!”
And I pointed out that we had a discussion about ESPN coming out and saying “yeah, we’re going to cater to sports fans… all sports fans” a few years back.
As for your question, I think that your question of “however will people explain *THIS*?” had an answer of however they’d explain it after a 10 second session with the google.
If you don’t agree that the DEI program has measurably leaked into the NFL Network, sure. I also tend to think that those programs don’t do anything really.
But if you disagree that that’s how they’d explain the NFL Network making cuts… well, maybe you’re right. But that’s what I was able to come up with after less than a couple of seconds thinking about it. And if someone asked me “How would culture warriors explain the NFL Network experiencing layoffs?”, I’d do a quick google as to whether they loudly “got political” in the period between the NFL Network kicking off and the moment the question was asked.Report
“What do you think is the more likely of these two explanations for these cuts:
1.) Go woke, go broke.
2.) The complex changes to how people consume entertainment, including live sports and sports media, combined with the changes to how sports and sports media is broadcast (e.g., live sports on streaming, massive changes to college sports infrastructure)”
Here is the question I’m waiting for you to answer.Report
What do I think is the most likely reason they’re selling it off?
Well, there are a bunch of reasons. For one, I think that the overwhelming majority of football fans are watching one game per weekend. The one for their team. Sure, they’ll keep up with the other games due to how the WR is on their fantasy team or whatever but they’re just going to watch the Broncos play.
There are more and more of these fans every year and they look forward to watching their one game.
The transition from “watching one game” to big fans who are into “watching two games” is going to transition to either Monday Night Football or to Thursday Night Football.
Wanna watch three games? Well… now we’re down to a much smaller pool of Football Fanatics. These guys will catch all three. Heck. Maybe they’ll watch two games on Sunday as well. Don’t just catch the Lions game. Catch the Bears game too!
It is *THIS* much smaller pool of fans that is the target audience of the NFL network.
Most folks (the ones responsible for the huge ratings) are having their needs met by CBS. They want to watch their team play. They’re good with that. If they want to watch MNF or TNF, CBS (or whomever it is) is good enough.
The SUPERDUPERFANS who are, seriously, into football and, seriously, need to Get More Content are the ones who might get the NFLN.
*BUT*… who is going to be announcing on NFLN? Who will be creating the content for NFLN?
The people who want to target the casual viewer who shows up for one game a week. The DAC people wanted to make the NFLN suitable for *EVERYONE*. Women, Latinx, and 2SLGBTQ+ fans.
But, and here’s the weird thing, the Women, Latinx, and 2SLGBTQ+ folks weren’t purchasing the NFLN in any appreciable numbers and weren’t purchasing it in order to be catered to as a member of the groups of Women, Latinx, and 2SLGBTQ+ folks.
They were there because they were rabid consumers of NFL content and CBS just was not enough. They needed more. They wanted to hear Robert Goodell get booed. They wanted to boo him from their living room. They wanted their significant other to yell from the kitchen “Honey, what’s wrong?” so they could yell back “ROBERT GOODELL IS ON MY GODDAMN TELEVISION!”
They weren’t spending money in order to get a show that cared about Women, Latinx, and 2SLGBTQ+ folks. They were spending money in order to get a show that cared about football, football, and more football.
The Women, Latinx, and 2SLGBTQ+ folks who care about football that caters to Women, Latinx, and 2SLGBTQ+ folks? They have their needs met on Sunday afternoon.
The fan who is watching football on Wednesday?
They want what Pitaro at ESPN was talking about. They wanted content for sports fans. All sports fans.
And so the NFLN was catering to an audience that didn’t show up and the audience that did shrugged and said “welp, I might watch this for free but I’m not going to pay for it.”
And then the NFLN found itself in a place where it was going to make cuts despite record ratings. And it was looking to sell to ESPN. Which had, apparently, fallen back asleep.Report
Brother, I’ll happily go with “we can’t just post two news stories and claim they’re linked” so long as you accept that across the board.Report
That’s not the issue. He posted an NFL site discussing their rules and policies for hiring that apply to teams and the league office.
I pointed out that didn’t have anything to do with NFLN.
He then linked to a different NFL site discussing their affinity group policy and saying, “See? It does apply to NFLN.”
No. He’s wrong about that. The first link has nothing to do with the NFLN. And rather than say, “Oh crap you’re right… well, here’s something that does,” he does his thing where he insists up is down and down is up and actually I was the one arguing up is down before and he’s just reminding me that up is really up.
It’s tiresome.Report
No, I linked to Wikipedia that explained that the NFLN was owned by the NFL and so NFL policies are also NFLN policies.
The NFLN was under the umbrella of the NFL. Still is. Will be until it gets sold to ESPN.Report
Hey, do you guys like articles from The New Yorker? Golly, I sure do!
Speaking of education, here’s The Meltdown at a Middle School in a Liberal Town.
Here’s something from the middle of the beginning:
But the whole thing is good. Seriously. Check it out.Report
So in summation, two ‘trans identifying’ 7th graders demanding the world revolve around their ever changing identities and sensitivities get two hapless half wit diversity hires fired because they can’t effectively discipline alleged bullies, as the alleged bullies are minorities and doing so would be racist. Good God America is insufferable. I’m not sure South Park can even parody it anymore.Report
The Internet broke social change.Report
Different components of liberal thought are not interacting well together. My understanding is that since sometime after we were in elementary school, schools did start getting more serious about not tolerating bullying. When we were kids bullying might not have been per se tolerated but the idea that the faculty could totally get rid of it was also seen as ridiculous. If you were one of the official outcast students or belonged to an outgroup in the wrong area, good luck and hold down tight. The teachers would join in the bullying.*
Under current beliefs about bullying, encouraging kids to be sensitive about the transkids identities was the protocol. Now we also don’t like class and race privilege and certainly some non-white groups can come from communities that don’t fully embrace the liberal values of the professional class. And we are supposed to be sensitive about these power dynamics as well. Therefore, nobody wanted to do anything.
*I have an older friend who was basically one of the outcast kids when he went to high school in the 1980s in Idaho and he said that the teachers would encourage and join in the bullying of the kids deemed outsiders. These were mainly the kids of the egghead professors at the University of Idaho from what I remember. Nerds. Can’t imagine what it would be like to code as a sexual minority at the time.
**There seems to be a big failure mode creating by Vulgar Intersectional thought when different communities that are allegedly supposed to be on the same side turn out not to be in real life. I know people who were heartbroken when Muslim Americans in Michigan protested loudly against LGBT positive sex education. It was ruining their beautiful intersectionality. Sometimes I think anti-Semitism is something that is accepted on the Left because it can keep the groups together. They all agree they hate the Jews.Report
Well, let’s say that you punish the bullies. Sorry. Bullying gets you detention for a week. Hate Bullying gets you suspended.
This report comes out: Racial Inequality in Public School Discipline for Black Students in the United States.
Now what?
Um… get rid of T&G programs?Report
Obviously you do something like they did in the story. Create the perception of a culture of diversity and inclusion by finding a longstanding black teacher who you can celebrate with a series of impromptu award ceremonies. Her baffled reaction was probably my favorite part of the story. Right behind the implication that the reason for the alleged misgendering by the fired hispanic counselor wasn’t meanness, just that his English isn’t that great. I appreciated the comic relief.Report
That racial inequality link is interesting in what they don’t say. I found similar ones which do the same.
They don’t drill down into percentage of causes. That makes it impossible to tell if there is actually a racial bias issue here. They touch upon one group being more violent and then group it with the other group doing more alcohol and smoking.
Alcohol and smoking aren’t in the top 8 discipline problems. (Link below). Alcohol in there is because otherwise we’d end up with “group X commits more infractions and is punished for the same” but that wouldn’t fit the desired narrative.
The big discipline issues are, bullying, cyberbullying, verbal abuse of teachers, & disrespect for teachers (other). Even the other 4 most common issues were rarer.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a07/discipline-problemsReport
I dunno. When I read about the underlying theories people cite in support of these policies and attitudes I find myself asking if they’ve ever actually met a human being before. If we’re good at anything it’s finding convenient excuses to embrace totally self serving ideas and processes that enable our own selfishness. That’s what all of this is. Another treatise in what happens when public institutions discover the whole world can’t revolve around every single self absorbed person all at once but have abandoned the ability to say so as well as every tool necessary to mitigate against obvious and easily anticipated problems.Report
There is a lot of vanity among the theories people and also not quite getting that their arguments and ideas are going to turn out messy in real life rather than something neat because even people who generally agree aren’t going to perfectly follow them.Report
“Different components of liberal thought are not interacting well together.”
I think it’s more the insistence that Racism is Original Sin. That’s the basis for so many of these liberal self-destructions of the past twenty years. Occupy Wall Street fell apart because nobody could come up with a way for white women to tell black men that the whole thing wasn’t about them that didn’t look like racism. Internet Atheism fell apart because nobody could come up with a way for white men to criticize Islamic people that didn’t look like racism. A major element of the Kavanaugh hearings was the fact that a woman held her fingers in a way that people thought maybe was a reference to racist ideology. The commitment to Antiracism has done more to ruin the hopes of progressive liberals than anything those icky reactionary Republicans could ever have managed.Report
That could be part of it.Report
That’s also an answer to many of Lee’s questions about “why does this dynamic exist?”
It’s because Israel is white. And Palestine is Brown.
And no amount of “but we’re *NOT* white!” will change that.Report
The duplicity of the Activist Left towards the Jewish People is really pissing me off. I know I can’t do anything about this but they really want it both ways with us. On the one hand they love using our history of persecution as a way to garner our support and sympathy for their causes. On the other hand, they also want to say that we are at best weird white people and nothing more. That many, but thankfully a minority, of Jews fall for this is treachery.Report
Multiple Karens. Multiple protected classes that don’t play nice together and/or aren’t competent. Reality not behaving the way ideology claims it should.Report
More I/P stuff, yes I know. One thing that I’ve noticed on the Pro-Israel side is that there seems to be a big taboo about saying anything remotely critical about Palestinian choices on the Pro-Palestinian side. Like on the Pro-Israel side, you have lots of different advice from the Diaspora to a person who told 21 year old me that he doesn’t understand why Sharon doesn’t just flatten the Palestinians to “Israel must do all that is just and right for the Palestinians” plus some anti-Zionist Jews who I basically see as the types of who don’t understand why they are getting killed because they are one of the good ones not those icky Zionist Jews who love Israel.
On the Pro-Palestinian side, I’ve never seen anything that comes across as telling the Palestinians that they might be a tad counter-productive or that they need to be sensible at that the Jews aren’t going anywhere. Pro-Palestinian people might not come out and defend the Simchat Torah massacre or suicide bombings if they don’t want to look nuts but they argue the desperation theory without realizing how unconvincing it sounds to people. It never seems to occur to them that indulging the Palestinians in their most extremist demands for the past several decades hasn’t exactly helped them.
Does anybody have any idea why this taboo exists?Report
What about wage theft?Report
Either you are making fun of whataboutism or you are making an obscure point or joke that I’m not getting.Report
Maybe he wants a new square on the Jaybird Bingo Card.Report
Probably both.Report
Maybe being flippant should be use sparingly.Report
Eh, see if it shows up again from someone invested in giving a *REAL* answer to your question. Or, more precisely, a real response to it.Report
If you back a “robust right to return”, then you can’t also “be sensible that the Jews aren’t going anywhere”.
The line between where we are now and a “robust right to return” must go through “no Jews in the ME” at some point.Report
That is very plausible.Report
One of the issues that international politics had since World War II is that the traditional solutions to certain problems were no longer seen as acceptable but the so called replacements aren’t working. Take failed states. The traditional solution was that a non-failed state would either conquer it and get new territory or armed gangs would engage in a process of violent state formation. These seem barbaric. However, nobody has yet to figure out an alternative that works yet.Report
Hamas continues to be Hamas and absolutely horrible:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-to-send-team-to-cairo-talks-reiterates-demand-for-permanent-gaza-ceasefire/Report
Yeah yeah yeah. Lee, you’ve been beating this horse for what, at least 2-3 months now?
You’ve been supporting the Hamas party in America for your entire adult life and just now, you’ve figured out that you bought a pig in a poke.
I got a radical plan. How about you do something good for America once, figure out a way to meaningfully help the Republicans, to start making amends for everything you’d done before Oct 7?Report
What headspace do you occupy? Because we just had several discussions on whether “Genocide Joe” would lose many votes because of his support for Israel.Report
Frankly, the whole thing doesn’t seem very obscure for me. For Israel, it’s better to elect Trump, or Republicans in general, rather than have to carry a rabbit’s foot for Weathervane Joe and hope the wind is blowing in your direction today.
Beyond that, and at least as important to me, is that by supporting Republicans you make yourself a better person and America a better country.
The party that you have voted for your entire life is either terror-simp at the grassroots level, or is controlled by a noisy activist class who is terror-simp. Either way, you bought a pig in a poke. Instead of special pleading in the most useless way for the lib-nasties not to terror-simp, you should simply support the not-terror-simp party instead.Report
First the progressives came for the white people, and I cheered, because I thought they thought I wasn’t white…
Lee’s been slowly distancing himself from the left for months, but he’s taken no steps toward the right. He seems content to feel homeless while espousing the principles of a true liberal Scotsman. It took a lot of people a lot less time to figure this out after 9/11, and I’ve been nudging him every once in a while, but so far he hasn’t stepped up.Report
The real frustrating thing about this is that it pushes Israel in the position of having to do double duty and care for its own citizens and the Palestinians. Meanwhile, Hamas gets to be complete sociopaths totally dedicated to their own goal and not caring one thing about the people they are allegedly the leaders of. But it is taboo to point this out and also racist and Islamophobic.* Plus it would violate the diplomatic code and you just can’t do. that. Just fish that. Hamas has agency to. They committed an act of war that they can’t win and are now demanding absolute surrender despite losing. They just remain horribly arrogant beyond belief.
*On the other blog, posters get made fun of for demanding denunciations of Hamas and recognition that Hamas is horrible under the theory that Israel has more power or some such and Israel’s actions count more. Only Israel and Jews have agency I guess.Report
People really underestimate how comforting it would be for Jews in general and Israeli Jews in particular if Hamas could be actively called out in the same way that Israel is rather than the condemnation of Hamas treated as a terrible taboo that must never be.Report