Open Mic for the week of 12/2/2024
On this day in 1804, Napoleon was crowned Emperor of France
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.
Sadly, Sen. Van Hollen is right:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/02/van-hollen-biden-gaza-history/Report
I don’t feel tardy.Report
neither do I – I have said for quite some time that Biden was and is making a huge mistake because the Palestinians do have a point about Israeli action.Report
What happened on 10/7/23? Why did Hezbollah have to join the fray? The Palestinian leadership has made mistake after mistake in dealing with the Jews and later the Israelis since before any of us were born. It was always “one more glorious push and all the Jews will go away.” Meanwhile, they rejected the offers of both Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert without a serious counter offer and can’t/won’t control their dead enders. They then go wailing to the entire world after each and every “one last glorious push” fails and that their actions basically discredited the entire peace camp in Israel politically.
Meanwhile, 79% of American Jews voted for Harris because we recognize Trump is bad news. We did this despite the fact that most of us have no patience for the people wailing about Gaza after another “one more glorious push” failed and how the protestors harassed and menaced American Jews. American Muslims decided to play stupid political games and won stupid political prizes. The protestors found another reason not to vote Democratic this year.Report
The Palestinians as a people still have a point that Israel is the roadblock to a two state solution. They still have a point that protecting illegal settlements by ultra-rightwing Israeli’s is morally bad. They still have a point that their claim to that land is as valid as Israel’s.
And they have a point – expressed electorally here and supported by the Senator – that President Biden is in error by not using American military aid to Israel as a lever to force Israel back to the negotiating table.
That the Palestinians have ceded their internal political landscape to the worst possible actors does not diminish any of these points.Report
As recently as the Trump peace plan, we’ve had the Palestinians assert there can’t be peace without a right to return, which is also the right to destroy Israel.
The right wing of Israel is a serious problem, but they’re not the rate limiting step because the root issue is the Palestinians won’t accept any peace that doesn’t destroy Israel.
That total refusal creates a power vacuum that is filled by the Right Wing. For example when Hamas attacked those peace lovers on 10-7, they were proclaiming that peace isn’t an option.
They still have a point that their claim to that land is as valid as Israel’s.
These sorts of issues are normally resolved with wars. If we’re going to have wars but still insist that the issue is unresolved, then we’ll have more wars.Report
Everybody’s favorite Representative from Michigan had a very unhelpful tweet over Thanksgiving that was basically a woe on us real true indigenous Palestinians like the Native Americans. Well, it was unhelpful in forms of doing something to resolve the I/P conflict but it was helpful in demonstrating their cosmology.
The Palestinians basically see themselves as the real true inhabitants of the land. Some of them might reluctantly admit that Jews lived there as well but they were the political nation and had the total right of self-determination. The Jews had no political rights at all and certainly did not need to be including in the Palestinian nation. They still believe this and many of them see true justice as being the complete destruction of Israel no matter what. Their allies indulge them in this.Report
Come on, Dave, gimme a break.Report
One break… comin’ up!Report
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/youll-miss-pax-americana-when-gone-trump-postwar-international-system
Nick Grossman writes how people will miss Pax Americana when it is gone as imperfect as it is. Trump’s admin is going to embolden Putin, weaken NATO, weaken the EU, sell Ukraine down the river, not place any restraints on Bibi and the zealots, etc.
I think about this a lot with the burn it all down and start again brigade. Why do they think what replaces they hate will be better? It is likely to be much, much worse.Report
As the architects of the burning they believe they can control both the fire and the Phoenix which they will conjure from its ashes. Also do remember they mostly want internal-to-the-US regulatory control of businesses and the New Deal burnt down. The world of conflict it creates is just another business opportunity.Report
There are those people but also people who think burning down it all can lead to the creation of a real Northern European welfare state as opposed to it just being the Lochner Era/Gilded Age all over again but worse.Report
Sarcasm on.
“A return to the Lochner era will just lead to a heightening of the contradictions and cause the workers of the world to regain class consciousness and start a world revolution.”
Sarcasm off.Report
What did you think workers regaining class consciousness would look like?
Vibes? Papers? Essays?Report
I would think it would not include electing billionaire oligarchs with fascist tendencies.Report
Yeah, I don’t like reading history much either.Report
In prior case of class awakenings the oligarchs were already in power not actively elected to power by the newly awakened classes.
Nice try though.Report
The people doing the burning have no interest in a Northern European welfare state.Report
At this point, I think we have to call this sort of thinking Trump-doomerism, or something similar, because we have to admit that either the post-WWII order is so fragile that a half-senile old clown with a massive hair piece could destroy it, or admit that to the extent that it is at risk of collapsing, it is so because of a lot of things that have little to do with Trump, and at most electing Trump took our fingers out of some holes in the dam.
That said, American conservatism, which is dominant across its narrow and flat political spectrum, always leads to one form of doomerism or another, whether it’s Red Scares (that lead to multiple wars and massive destruction across the globe), or fear of global terrorism (that led to multiple wars and massive destruction across large swaths of the globe), or now fear of Chinese manufacturing and Russia’s imperial death throes (which threatens to lead us into regional and possibly even global wars), so at some point we have to admit that the Pax Americana is a largely Euro-American peace built on our violent reactions to a perpetual fear everywhere else, and maybe we should think about what “Pax” means, whether the “Americana” part is central, and whether there might be better, more robust ways of going about the “Pax” part, if not the “Americana” part. Obviously Trump is not going to lead us to that level of anti-doomerism, but if the world order really is at risk of collapsing, maybe Americans, or at least American liberals, can shed some of their conservatism and start thinking about what they would want the subsequent world order to look like, and how we can get there.Report
I hope you are right but I think your views on Trump-doomerism dismissiveness have more to do with not wanting to agree with liberals than anything else.
But my guess is that Trump is surrounded by people who are very giddy about bringing a wrecking ball to everything and Johnson is conspiring to get a conflict on Congressional recess so Trump can invoke Article II, section iii, ram through all his appointments on recess and then rule via executive action. Here is the latest on how he might gut Social Secuirty, Medicare, and Medicaid without Congressional approval.
https://www.vox.com/politics/388393/donald-trump-congress-impoundment-budget-supreme-courtReport
Both my attempts at posting this with links have been miserable failures, so:
Unlike a lot of conservatives, I am not motivated by an anti-liberal contrarianism. I’m happy to agree with them when they’re right.
I’m currently part of two reading groups formed from, let’s call it my extended grad school social circle (grad school friends, and friends they’ve made since we were in grad school), both groups focused on, er, “heterodox” political and economic views, though from different angles (one’s all leftists, one a weird mixture of political ideologies). Anyway, the leftist group has been reading a bunch about the post-WWII order and its inevitable collapse (it’s a matter of when, not if, but that’s just the way history works), and one of my favorite books we’ve read in that context is The Long 20th Century by Giovanni Arrighi, published in 1994, when Trump was still just a rich dude whose businesses regularly went bankrupt, and who showed up at high profile boxing matches (I can’t remember when he did the wrestling stuff, but it might have been around then too). While I don’t agree with everything Arrighi says, my views on the collapse of the post-WWII order are heavily shaped by that; my views on what might come after are shaped by other books I’ve read with that group, like The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World by Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Neither of these books are particularly worried about opposing liberals (though the latter has a lot to say about them). Throw in the excellent Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey by Anthony Brewer as another influence, along with many of the authors discussed therein.
Anyway, I recommend all of these, especially to liberals. It helps to have an actual framework for thinking about the world order, its positive and negative effects, its collapse, and what might potentially come after it, instead of just doomerism.Report
an actual framework
The problem with having an actual framework is that sometimes this framework will lead you to different conclusions about various members of the omnicause.Report
I’m not gonna lie, I tune out pretty much anytime anyone uses the word “omnicause,” so I’m not quite sure how that discourse looks, particularly since the people who use it seem just as likely to be upset about uni-causes(?) that they don’t like. So I’m not really sure what it’s doing here.
I do assume that part of the reason Saul is saying I am just disagreeing because I dislike liberals is because my framework means I frequently disagree with liberals, but I’m not sure if that’s what you’re saying or not.Report
Really? I loved learning the term “omnicause”.
“Oh *THAT* is the word for that phenomenon”, I thought. I saw it but I didn’t have a name for it.
What I’m saying is that if you’re not on board with every sub-cause in the omnicause, you’re going to be pigeonholed into Team Evil.
In this case, the assumption is that you disagree with a sub-cause because you dislike liberals rather than that you actually believe something.
And having an actual framework looks like conservativism (or, at the very least, “not wanting to agree with liberals”) because a good liberal is *ON BOARD*.
And, seriously, learning the term “omnicause” helped so much with this.
Next time Lee comes on here and complains that he hates that the left doesn’t appreciate how much of an ally Jewish folks have been over the decades but all of that means nothing, look at it through the lens of a guy who is on board with 90% of the omnicause and see if that lens illuminates rather than obfuscates.
(Seriously, It’s a useful tool.)Report
I don’t think the pigeonholing is the real issue. There’s with us or against us, cross issue fanaticism all over the place.
The issue with the omnicause is that it frustrates the use of state capacity the center left has traditionally championed. So you can subsidize construction of electric car charging stations. But you have to build them with union labor. And the materials have to come from MWBEs (or whatever the term is now). And there’s no exceptions on normal environmental review processes. And the builder has to show its dedication to DEI through various internal hiring and training initiatives. And on, and on. Until pretty soon no one is actually building an electric car charging station despite the theorerically generous subsidy.Report
I’ve definitely seen the stuff you’re talking about (hurray! Everything Bagels!) but the overwhelming majority of the people involved with the discourse aren’t part of building high speed rail in Northern California.
They’re 80% liberals who are scratching their heads at why they’re being considered 20% traitors.Report
Yea, I get that too. I’m on the receiving end of it here sometimes. And usually not even for the stuff you’d expect like my firearm enthusiasm, but like, not buying into the fierce moral urgency of telling school children punctuality is white supremacy or businesses engaging in convoluted forms of racial quota-ism while preening various vacuous absurdities at the office drones.Report
I think it’s easier to explain Lee’s, and probably most liberals’, hatred of the left without reference to “The Omnicause.” The base hatred doesn’t even come from agreement or disagreement, but from failure of the, er, near left (Berniecrats, Naderites, those sorts) to always fall in line electorally. According to the liberal narrative (which I find ridiculous), then, this is why we had Bush Jr and Trump the first time (there seem to be a handful of liberals putting Trump the second time on the near left as well).
Lee’s hatred is further strengthened by his belief that the left is antisemitic for opposing occupation, apartheid, and now genocide, but that’s not really an omnicause thing, that’s a very specific cause thing.
InMD’s version of “the omnicause” makes more sense to me, and I actually agree to some extent, but I suspect my solution and his are quite different.Report
Last I checked, there are something like 3x more people being born in Gaza than dying. If Israel is engaging in “genocide” then they aren’t doing a good job.
Gaza is a war. Mislabeling it as something else is not helpful. Further the desired solution seems to be that Hamas gets a pass for terrorism rather than they’re forced to surrender.Report
The House has released its AFTER ACTION REVIEW OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward report (warning: PDF).
Here’s from the first couple of pages:
The whole thing is, like, 500 pages.Report
Nothing there that wasn’t already in play, and mostly agreed to by both sides. The inflammatory stuff like Finding #6 about suspending the Constitution is red meat to the uninformed, mostly because the Constitution was never a suicide pact.Report
I was mostly interested by #1 in the top part and #1, #2, and #5 in the bottom part.Report
I’m wondering if we’re ever going to address the fact that we seemed not to care in the slightest about money fraudulently paid to business under the Paycheck Protection Program to keep them functional and employing people, with huge amount of money sent to people who just blatantly lied.
Or with the fact we probably should have structured that program completely differently. It’s not like it’s a _secret_ how many people that a companies employs. We could have just done: Oh, you have applied to this, our tax records show you have fifteen employees and pay them X, and you have shut down under the pandemic, we are going to transfer you 80% of this month’s paycheck for all of them, you need to pay them that money. All that money must go to your employees…it can go to different employees if you have cycled employees. If you have reduced staff and that is too much, hold on to it for now and contact us. We are also giving you some additional money to cover other expenses like rent.
Just the very basic ‘is this a legitimate existing businesses with actual employees?’, a thing that can trivially be done by looking at tax records of the previous year, and then looking at taxes _next_ year, where employees file taxes that report that income. How many employees a business has and how much they pay employees is not some opaque thing the government doesn’t know, it’s literally sitting in their tax records!
Instead, we had people just making up businesses and employees and buying Porsches with it. But, of course, we don’t care about that sort of fraud, because those grifters were mostly middle class…the only people we care if they are defrauding the government are the extremely poor.Report
For the record, I understand that the PPP was a helicopter dump of money and I have problems with it but they’re down the list.
In my weaker moments, I think “man, I should have started an LLC and put Maribou in charge of it and gotten a piece of that!” but… ah, well.
As it is, I was WFH for a couple of years and not visiting friends or family in person and doing the thing where I yell up to them from their driveway or yell down to them as they stood in mine.
You know what still chaps me? The whole “politicians not following their own mandates” thing.Report
Chaps me too – which is why elections matter.Report
I mean, the lab hypothesis is a conspiracy theory by definition, so #1 is a weird thing to say, regardless of whether it’s true (we’ll never know for sure, obviously, but the evidence seems pretty overwhelming that it is false).Report
Well, pages 1-57 of the report go through the evidence of it being a lab leak.
The evidence seems to be there that it’s a lab leak and folks were involved in initially covering up and then doubling down and then doubling down again.
But one person’s mountain is another person’s molehill.
And, of course, we’ll never know for sure.
Coverups work like that, I guess.Report
those 57 pages rehash a lot of conclusions of the sort of “can you understand how this might be true” based on motivated reasoning applied to a scarce fact environment.Report
So long as we avoid isolated demands for rigor, I’m good.Report
The expert consensus among virologists and epidemiologists is that the overwhelming evidence is for a zoonotic origin, and not a lab leak, but if a 57 page political report says otherwise, we should definitely go with that.Report
Eh… I have to admit, I’m less impressed with “expert consensus” than I was in 2019.
The whole SciAm thing and the whole pivot from “don’t socially distance at public beaches!” to “it’s okay to go to protests!” thing got me to see those folks as similar to the experts at the FDA.
Not saying that they’re necessarily *WRONG*, mind… but more that we don’t know where they’ve been captured.Report
A lab leak is certainly possible, and Chinese behavior is certainly suspicious, but, as you say, the expert consensus based on available evidence is to the contrary. The report reveals that there is a lot we don’t know, but the positive case for the lab leak isn’t impressive.Report
Almost everything in the bottom half is Republican conspiracy nonsense, BTW.
#1 is especially nonsense.Report
Trump apparently told Trudeau that Canada should become the 51st state if it dislikes Tariffs because at the very least government for the next two to four years will be of, by, and for people who don’t realize Scarface and Goodfellas were not meant to be exemplaryReport
Al Capone > Al JolsonReport
Jolson. a legendary entertainer, decent, charitable human being who entertained the troops and fought against the Broadway color bar. Capone? Well, he did open a soup kitchenReport
When you put it like that, I can see how someone might see Al Jolson as someone to be emulated.Report
If we make each province a separate state, maybe.Report
Aaaaand it looks like South Korea just declared Martial Law.Report
Presumably to make their youngs marry and make babies. Or corruption. Or both.Report
It appears to be mostly a corruption thing.Report
The President declared Martial Law because the National Assembly is controlled by the opposition.Report
Serious question, does anyone know how S. Korean government works with regards ‘checks and balances’?
That is, declaring an ‘Emergency’ to invoke what I assume are constitutional powers should have some grounding in Emergency status that might be challenged… somewhere?Report
The National Assembly (which appears to be their legislative body) apparently voted unanimously to rescind the declaration, and the Constitution says he’s supposed to honor that.Report
I’ve read somewhere that the Legislature has the power to reverse the Emergency declaration which is why the President is so intent on not letting them convene. What a sh*t show, let us hope it’s not prophetic.Report
We may want to revisit the Insurrection Act(s). They offer pretty broad powers, so long as the President doth “by proclamation, immediately order the insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their abodes within a limited time.”Report
Trump’s DEI Beria has an enemy list:
https://newrepublic.com/article/188946/kash-patel-fbi-enemies-listReport
Eh, you shouldn’t jump back and forth between Hitler and Stalin. The head of the Gestapo should be used instead! Lemme google… Mueller.
Oh.
Okay. Yeah, probably best to run with Beria.Report
Heinrich Müller did not have an enemies list. HItler did. Sometimes Müller executed that list, sometimes other people did, but it was not Müller’s list.
Müller is actually notable as one of the top Na.zis that does not appear to be any sort of true believer, liking neither Hilter or Na.zism particularly. He was motivated almost solely by ambition. He’s basically a career police officer who ended up being promoted into the position, and was perfectly willing to go after anyone his superiors said to, in any way they said. Wikipedia has a quote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_M%C3%BCller_(Gestapo)
This isn’t to defend him, only to point out how silly the comparison is. Kash Patel is a true believer. Heinrich Müller wasn’t, or at least he wasn’t in Na.zism, he just did the job handed to him by the Gerrman state, whether that was normal police work or executing Jewish scientists.Report
Dude, I already said that we should stick with Beria and not Mueller!Report
China announced Tuesday it is banning exports to the United States of gallium, germanium, antimony and other key high-tech materials with potential military applications, as a general principle, lashing back at U.S. limits on semiconductor-related exports.
https://apnews.com/article/china-us-tech-semiconductor-chip-gallium-6b4216551e200fb719caa6a6cc67e2a4Report