Mini-Posts on Many Topics #1
Israel and Palestine, Russia and Ukraine, institutions, activists, and a certain district attorney
I have had a bunch of ideas rattling around in my brain for a while now that I might as well post miniature versions of as I don’t think many or likely any would have ever made them into posts. It may recur.
Israel and Palestine
I don’t think there’s much to say. Israel illegally annexes Palestinian land,1 and in response Palestinians illegally murder Israeli civilians. Which is worse, but, still, it sure feels like a lot of trouble could be avoided if Israel simply abandoned its attempts to annex the land.
As for what to do about it, I agree with Yglesias that The two-state solution is still best, and add that the people chanting “from the river to the sea” are morons without skin in the game adopting a position more extreme than that which is in the Hamas charter itself.
Russia and Ukraine
At this point there’s a very good chance the front lines won’t move anymore as it turns out assaulting fixed fortifications when both sides possess an immense amount of artillery is quite hard. Nevertheless as long as the Ukrainians are willing it’s generally good for the Russia’s finest to keep bleeding out on the front, not just because Russia is an abysmally shitty state, but because the basic principles of the UN Charter wholly proscribe aggressive war for the conquest of territory.
It would have been nice if the United States itself hadn’t systematically undermined the principles of absolutely inviolable territorial integrity via legally questionable moves like recognizing the independence of Kosovo and more recently the annexation of the Golan Heights, but at the end of the day it’s not clear it actually mattered because despite all of Putin’s rather good speechmaking about American hypocrisy vis-a-vis international law, he never once actually cared for the contents of those speeches except insofar as it gave him rhetorical cover to invade his neighbors.
The March Through the Institutions
There is something cute wherein liberals have managed to capture almost every elite intellectual institution in America and yet Trump is still managing to annihilate Biden in public opinion polls. Institutions used to focus generally on a singular professional mission, as Friedersdorf highlighted in a somewhat unsubtle push poll regarding institutional responsibilities. It turns out when an institution you don’t really care about endorses someone you don’t like, it doesn’t actually cause you to like that candidate any better, but does lower your opinion of that institution. Imagine you are a liberal and the (supposed) American Institute of Historians endorsed Trump for President. This would in zero way affect your opinion of Trump but would lead you to conclude that the American Institute of Historians is composed of hacks.
The most prominent study of this by Nature showed that Nature’s endorsement for Biden had no statistically significant effects on whether people actually supported Biden but did lead to significant decreases in trust in science and Nature at large. Rinse and repeat for journalists, public health officials, universities, and anyone else putting the fingers on the scales. Good job, morons: congratulations on raiding the pool of public trust to get, well, nothing.
Progressive Protesters
Most progressive protesters are worse than useless. Recently I saw a Tweet where the example of Rosa Parks was used to smashingly dunk on someone who said that protests should be nondisruptive to be successful. But Rosa Parks herself was part of a protest that was calculated by the NAACP for the purpose of winning over the public eye and for that matter was a voluntary and legal boycott of a service that didn’t illegally disrupt the service for anyone else. Protests are literally worthless except as personal performance theater unless they can convince the public of anything. MLK’s entire strategy was to convince the public via the moral dignity of civil disobedience.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law.
People are quick to argue that it was really the Black Panthers and the implicit threat of violence that caused MLK to nominally succeed at his cause, but no amount of hand-wringing and explaining will disguise the fact that modern protests don’t cleave to this principle in the slightest. Disrespect for the law and opposition to any penalty for violating said laws has become a bedrock principle of modern progressive protest.
Somehow along the way the idea of getting the public on board became subsumed for protest for the sake of being heard, without regard for what the actual public might think (which is now maligned as respectability politics, as Shor experienced in 2020 when he had the temerity to point out people don’t like riots). That’s cool, I guess. Keep being heard while the people who hear you end up being alienated from your cause.2 Though I suppose, the way that the left is structured — which allows anyone to be torn down by morally unimpeachable criticism from the left — progressives will be allowed to continue raiding the pool of liberal trust for as long as they like.
The Pathetic Showing of Trump “Resisters”
I’m sure I could lump many more people into this category, but standing out to me are the sheer worthlessness of arrogant institutional liberals in stopping Trump in any way, including among them James Comey, Alvin Bragg, and, for that matter, Hillary Clinton, and the associated liberal celebration of the absolute morons on the team. General McClellan might have been a much better person than Lee, but the first thing you would want to do is have him kicked off the team before he can lose you the war. A poor ally in your fight is worse than useless. Enough has been said about the poor showings of Comey and Hillary, some of which was traded by the other. But Bragg stands out as having been exceptionally worthless and downright harmful to the Democratic cause. His entire contribution to the Trump indictment mess was to dash out the gate to be first to indict with what looks in every way like a politically motivated prosecution, which tainted the subsequent vastly more important and solid indictments for things that actually matter like mishandling of classified documents and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
tl;dr: Every day I must resist the notion that we will all be consumed by idiots. As you were.
Israel, under it’s responsibilities in the UN Charter, must either grant the Palestinians Israeli nationality (the “one-state solution” that they obviously won’t do); or, under Article 73, administer the Palestinian territories while “promot[ing] to the utmost, within the system of international peace and security established by the present Charter, the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories.” Which of course they are not doing.
I think we’ve come to a point where common sense like “people don’t like it when traffic is disrupted” needs an actual citation, so I might as well: Feinberg, M., Willer, R., & Kovacheff, C. (2020). The activist’s dilemma: Extreme protest actions reduce popular support for social movements. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(5), 1086–1111.