Olive Tree

A new piece from the Lebanese-French artist Bachar Mar-Khalifé, set to a backdrop of slices of West Bank life without the ugliness of Western colonialists marring up the scenery, courtesy of historic footage from UNRWA.  

 

Child Sacrifice

JD Vance answering a question from a self-identified Pro-Life member of the audience at a Turning Points USA event at the University of Mississippi in October:

Somebody asked me earlier about my Christian values, and one of the points I made is that when the settlers came to the New World they found very widespread child sacrifice.  I imagine there are some people who don't agree with my view on the pro life issue let me just make an observation.  If you go to historical archeological sites where there were brothels and the two oldest businesses in the world are gambling and prostitution so there were brothels even in very ancient civilizations.  If you go back to ancient brothels and you dig up the bones of the women who were working in these places you will very often find a lot of children who were buried with them. And the answer is that whenever a society decides to discard innocent babies, they also don't treat their women very well.  And whenever a society mistreats its women it is very often its the babies who come right after that.  There is a reason why Christian civilization ended the practice of child sacrifice all over the world and it's one of the great accomplishments of Christian civilization.

If your first thought about what this has to do with White  House policy is, "Wait, whuuut..??!"  you're not wrong.  Strangely this was the second time in the evening that Vance raised the topic of child sacrifice in the New World leading me to believe he picked up something viral on the topic from the internet.  It's hard to know where to begin with it.  Certainly some instances of human sacrifice in the Americas, particularly Central and South America (as in many other parts of the planet including Europe and the Holy Land) have been documented by historians and archaeologists.  What put an end to them was not so much the insistence of the Christian European invaders who had come not to spread the good news of Christ (the Human Sacrifice to end all human sacrifices) but primarily to take the land of the indigenous people here, but rather the violent termination of those indigenous civilizations by the Europeans.  It had next to nothing to do with the European conquest of what came to be the United States.  In essence, child sacrifice is a post hoc rationalization for genocide.  What's more, give one moment of thought to it, and it's not at all hard to come up with a myriad ways that Christian civilization continues to sacrifice children.  Let's start with sending 18 year olds to die in foreign wars of choice.  How about the conservatively thousands of children killed by US bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of the potentially millions starved by US policies such as sanctions and Trump's own cessation of USAID's promised and earmarked shipments of grains to the third world.  Charlie Kirk, late Christian extraordinaire and the honoree of Vance's appearance famously said the victims of gun violence were perhaps a decent exchange for the freedom of their murderers to purchase weaponry.

This is not even to mention the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed or injured since October 7 2023 by US funded Israeli bombs, artillery and gunfire (and now starvation).  That was the unspoken subject of remarks-- instructive in their otherwise meticulous articulation-- given by former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz speaking in a plenary to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of America in Washington recently:

Today, we have social media which is a global medium.  Its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don't really love Jews and so while in the 1990's you know a young person probably wasn't going to find Al-Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them.  They find them on their phones.  It's also this increasingly post-literate media-- less and less text; more and more videos.  So you have TikTok just smashing our young people's brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza and this is why so many of us can't have a sane conversation with younger Jews because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene. 

But it isn't just foreign non-Zionist video journalism that's the problem, but ironically  the "smart bet" that Jewish cultural leaders made on "Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education" which "may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism":

,.. because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews and they think, "Oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people."  So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it's not surprising that they think, ''Oh, I know!  The lesson of the Holocaust is that you fight Israel.  You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people."  

The problem: 

That's not how the Holocaust happened.  We all know that.  We all know that it happened because the Germans insisted that the Jews-- 1% of the population-- were responsible for all their problems just like people insist that Israel-- the size of New Jersey-- is responsible for all the world's problems today.  But that's not really what you take away from Holocaust education.  You take away the images of Power - Powerless. And you also don't really learn about Islamist anti-Semitism and Soviet Anti-Zionism which is so much of what i'm seeing especially on campus with young people today.  

The origin of the problem according to Hurwitz  (besides apparently inadequate training in discerning who are the right kind of Nazis) is the vestiges of a 250 year old strategy of assimilation by relegating Jewishness to a "protestant style religion" to enable Jews to adopt the identity of the countries they found themselves in with the rise of Nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The once smart strategy has outlived its usefulness.

The problem is, we're not just a religion, right?  ... We are a nation, a civilization, a tribe, peoplehood, but most of all we're a family and so if you are a young person raised in America that thinks Judaism is a protestant style religion, then the 7 million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists so like if my co-religionists, I look at them and if they're not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them? 

That's a category error.  The 7 million people in Israel they are not my co-religionists.  They are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists it's very easy to slide into Anti-Zionism. You don't necessarily have that connection to them.  And you know I have to say, I think, to conclude it's becoming increasingly clear that the kind of contentless bagel and lox, Jewish mother joke identity that many American Jews have, it just doesn't cut it anymore.You know when your Jewish identity is a big empty void with a few ethnic jokes rattling around in it, it will be filled by what is around you.  And if what is around you is anti-Semitism you will be helpless to fight back.  

You will not be able to take advantage of the billions in financial and military aid bestowed on Israel by the government you pay taxes to.

Hurwitz concludes:

If someone tells you that the Jewish G-d is violent and vengeful and Judaism is a legalistic unloving religion and you know nothing about Jewish tradition then what will you say? Tikkun olam?  You know it's not a great answer.  If they say Israel is a genocidal racist state and you know nothing about Jewish history or Israel but are like 'I like Seinfeld?'  it doesn't work.  You know we need to know our Jewish story in a way that when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s I didn't really;  I could get away with that identity.  Young people who have that empty Jewish identity today, it is being filled by anti-Semitism and we need to give them the content to protect them.

I am not a Jew, but I am a 66 year old American (22 years older than Sarah Hurwitz) and I would call my position on Israel until 2 years ago Soft Zionism.   My views were formed not from a place of informed consideration, but by osmosis of the prevailing pro-Israel atmosphere of post-Holocaust America.*  Essentially I believed that Israel represented a legitimate reparation for the evils of the Hitler's Germany.  Never again forever.  Being essentially a softie and a natural sympathizer with the underdog, I was not a fan of what Israel had become under 16 years of on and off Benjamin Netanyahu leadership, but all of my presuppositions about Israel's right to existence and to a kind of legitimate special pleading regardless of its apartheid abuse of the Palestianians whose homeland Europe bestowed to Zionist Jews were called into question by Israel's egregious asymmetrical response to the October 7 attack by Hamas fighters who had breached Israel's Iron Dome.  I felt then and feel now that I was late to a proper understanding of Israel as the last imposition of Western European colonialism on the non-European world.  Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism.  I stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters who reject the claim of European Israeli supremacist Zionists on their Jewishness, especially as a means of implicating them in Israel's elective extermination of the Palestinian population-- not least of them, its women and children--  it is aiming to replace.

Thank you, Sarah Hurwitz for your eloquent, and JD Vance for your clumsy self-exposures. 

~~~~~

* Which Hurwitz's ideological sibling and recently appointed head of CBS News Bari Weiss has announced she is determined for CBS News to revive.

Uncanny Valley*

I have read fewer books this year but more pages.  Even so a higher proportion of my read this year has been consumed with AI and its place of origin Silicon Valley.

The first of these, Karen Hao's Empire of AI, is an astonishingly well reported chronicle of contemporary AI's rise in recent years, its origins as the non-profit enterprises of self-appointed guardians of humanity, Sam Altman and Elon Musk prominently among them who worried about what AI left to other less prescient and prudent hands could spell for humanity's future.   Could technology that potentially fashioned a superior competition to the human species be trusted in the hands of just anyone?  But as the original vision of AI as literal intelligence programmed by humans receded into the same space occupied by jet packs and space colonies, while the stakes for arriving first to the market increased, the space race for "compute", brute computation of massive amounts of data in the processing of simulation of thought  heated up, and schisms erupted in Silicon Valley and miraculously every altruistic non-profit morphed into for profit companies in search of dominance of the field.   Hao's meticulous reporting also includes the impact that AI's sudden explosion in "compute" has had on the environment, particularly in already ravaged territories of the most vulnerable populations around the world, and especially in the global south.  The manner in which a handful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have imposed themselves on the resources of indigenous peoples inspired Hao to liken AI's rise to Empire, reminding us that the greatest threat to humanity is not vaporware but certain elements of humanity itself.   

Adam Becker's More Everything Forever deals with the predilections and sci-fi fantasies of Tech billionaires that Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have summarized with the acronym TESCREAL (Transhumanism (the merging of the death of humanity with the rise of AI), Extropianism (a fancier name for Techno-Optimism or the belief that technology will solve all problems), Singularitarianism (belief in the inevitability of the Singularity), Cosmism (the ambition to spread human intelligence across the universe), Rationalism (Bayes Theorem supremacists),  Effective Altruism (belief that maximizing one's capacity to give charitably by maximizing one's own wealth is better for collective happiness than acting charitably or being subject to taxation for social programs) and Long-Termism (belief that one should behave now in ways that improve the conditions of the cosmically spread progeny that is yet to come even if it is at the expense of those now living).  Becker's book explains each proclivity indentifying the adherents and proponents and deftly debunking them along the way.

I knew Malcolm Harris was from Palo Alto and that his book of that name was a leftist critique of his hometown, but I wasn’t aware that it was basically making a case that Palo Alto was a (if not the) major hotbed for the worst ideas, tools and exponents of capitalism—largely through the auspices of Leland Stanford’s university and expecially as directed by one of its original class’s alumni, Herbert Hoover who lived long, long after his response to the Great Depression got him booted out of office after one term yet who remained as influential on the cadre of Stanford-affiliated capitalists as he ever was as President.  It was born out of the genocide of the Alta people who were unlucky enough to be at the terminus of the intercontinental railroad when the barons arrived.  It was the place where the most land  raping technology of the gold rush was devised and served as the prototype of exploitation of immigrants for the various projects of capital, especially in ways that assured the thievery of those immigrant’s rights as citizens and neighbors.  And when outcries against immigrant hordes were raised at various times by the temporary white majority, it invented outsourcing as a means of exploiting foreign non-whites on their own lands reducing the cost (and the bargaining power) of labor in the process.  It invented tools of war but more especially proponents of war (including those who urged the use of atomic weaponry and of anti-communist adventurism in Indochina under the pretext of the domino theory.  It was also the willful bastardizer of Binet’s theories of intelligence in devising and conquering the world with the Stanford Binet intelligences tests (literally devised to separate the cannon fodder from the officers in World War I and then adapted to promote pre-believed racist eugenicist policies and to mold the American public education system into a factory for the production of workers.  And it used all these historic means of exploitation and dominance to invent the silicon chip and the personal computer and the high tech bubble, and disruption and financialization and uberfication and surveillance capitalism and now AI.  

Harris’s book weaves the tale very adeptly, revisiting the threads that have been interwoven in the town's history decade after decade.   And in his conclusion he talks about the Muwekma Ohlone tribe that have been in Palo Alto from the beginning, and that survived the genocide, only to become unrecognized by the Federal Government due to anthropology out of Stanford.  According to the US, the tribe is extinct but there has been a continuous presence of activists, working to get recognition and reparation in the sense of return of their lands to their original state.  So Malcolm Harris in his final chapter raises the possibility of ceding Stanford’s land back to the Ohlone people.  And on first reading about it, my brain automatically goes, “Oh yeah, sure!   That could happen!”  But Harris makes a passionate case for the symbolism as well the justice of the act, the start of a healing of the planet by putting an end to the locus of so much of the origin of capitalism’s interminable soulless destruction in the sole pursuit of profit and you can’t help but be struck by the simplicity of giving Stanford back to a people who will tend it back to nature.  It’s the kind of idea that is unlikely to happen on the face of it, but just the notion of it increases the presence of beauty and justice in the world.

~~~~~

* I'm reminded that this year I have also read Anna Wiener's excellent Silicon Valley memoir, Uncanny Valley.

Did it happen?

 

Does it feel real yet?  I was watching his victory speech way after the fact last night and feeling both the kind of horror you sometimes feel in nightmares when you know something dreamy and unusual and good is an illusion that’s going to be snatched away from you by a demon (granted I was pretty close to stage 1 sleep while I was listening), but I was also involuntarily beaming at everything he said.  It got me to thinking.  I think Zohran Mamdani’s victory could well be the very best thing that’s ever happened on the political stage in my lifetime.  They owned the airwaves.  We owned the streets and the streets won.  I shouldn’t hedge or hesitate at all.  I can’t think of anything comparable.  Aside from some Bernie primaries, it's the only victory for any office in any election anywhere in my lifetime for which my gratitude at the outcome is not qualified.  He’s incredibly talented, but he also had phenomenal help from his volunteers.  Thank you for your service.  

I am also thinking that as personable and genuine and likeable as he is, he is something very special.  Not to idolize—it’s admiration that I feel for the qualities that brought him to victory but also I feel like I am witnessing a rare piece of seminal history in the making.  This is what I wish history was more like and what I hope for history for the future.

Judging from the clobbered over the head look that dem leadership and some of our most prominent dem leaning media personalities exhibited in the post mortem to the victory, it doesn't seem that everybody in our soulless clueless age is ready for a new one, but I hope the fascists are quaking.  I hope their days are numbered.

Waltz About Death

 Angela Autumn and Lockeland Strings prove that we are still making beauty.

I don't care what you think about Graham Platner

But these two would like to thank you.

I already liked Graham Platner, oyster farmer, harbormaster, democratic candidate for Senate from Maine who is aiming to defeat the evergreen Susan Collins-- seeking her record breaking sixth term next year as the reasonable republican who only votes against her party's oppressive public policy impositions when they are assured to win-- when details suddenly surfaced of a raucous internet past peppered with what Elie Mystal has characterized as "bigoted" language, and of a skull and bones tattoo that he and his drunk buddies on leave in Croatia thought looked cool that turns out to have a Nazi origin (he has replaced it).  With a voice that immediately reminds you against your will of John Fetterman's sonorousness and a deep, long Military past that involved stints in every American operation from Iraq to Afghanistan, followed by time as a diplomat's bodyguard as an employee of a company formerly known by its deservedly infamous name of Blackwater, there were hurdles that he had to get past to win my enthusiastic support, but he cleared them with his fresh, unapologetic expounding of policy positions revealing a favoring of government that serves the people that resonates with my own aspirations for government, and that earned him an endorsement from Bernie Sanders* (who stands by him) and a joint appearance with the Vermont Senator at an anti-oligarchy and endorsement rally in Portland attended by a crowd filling the Civic Center on a summer afternoon, massive for political events any time of the year even by Maine standards.

Much of the online left however has lost its mind.  The generally helpful Humanist Report has demonstrated a need for a vacation in professing a done-ness with Platner on account of the scandals. Elie Mystal usually excellent on the law at the Nation has a very bad take on the controversy.  The point of that Platner-defending Pod save America tweet that Mystal critiques is not that Woke is bad.   The point is that very few people, and certainly people ambitious enough to seek public office have lived perfectly woke lives.  Mystal links to a digest of the controversial Platner posts which is how I first set eyes on them.  I am not at all offended by Platners’s obviously over the top use of "gay" in his ancient reddit posts that he now as a mature therapized adult disavows (but I’m not gay, which is why I don’t argue with gay people about how much offense they take from people’s past overuse of the ubiquitous 90’s kid slang addiction to the word "gay" which shocked me when I first heard younger colleagues bandying it about like a beachball in the audience of a festival stage.  Platner's usage strikes me as being in this spirit.)   I truly don’t care about anything Platner wrote in the throes of PTSD as he was sorting out how he felt about how he had spent his adult life to that point.  What he says now about gay people and how he came around to regretting his language is what matters to me.

 

My take is people can decide for themselves (and they will—and the only ones who matter are the voters of Maine) how they feel about the past of a candidate who is strongly in favor of everything I’m in favor of as a candidate to replace the Republican who votes against every Republican bill as long as it’s guaranteed to win.  I happen to think they are wrong not to listen to Graham Platner now.  They are wrong to base their support on no longer in-context internet posts from the wildest west of sites.  (For that matter, though I may be blind, I don’t see anything really objectionable or Nazi or right wing about what he has said at heart. We’re tone policing here.  We’re up in arms about the over the top language of a passionate PTSD sufferer in the rough and tumble of internet shit-posting.    If you read the Wikipedia article for a good summary of what is "troublesome" in his reddit posts, you may be able to see through the fog that his posts pretty consistently show a staunch radical who is not opposed to radicals being as well armed as the other side.  I don’t see anything to apologize for that.

Oppo research is not presented as a service to everyone.   The targets of oppo research are not those who already agree with the funders of it.  They are precisely the terminally online leftists who might dutifully, reflexively, obligingly take up the oppo case for them in order to sow dissent among the ranks and weaken the opponent's base.  This is exactly what has happened in Graham Platner's case.  The left parodies itself when it demands that those who get to work to make life better for people must pass a purity test.  It's a parody of the left, and the dream of the right.  The operatives drooled over what is transpiring: the usual pile on of leftists falling over each other to be the first to cancel an easy target.  What Graham Platner should be is a challenge to the left to grow up, grow some shells and get some game for once for fuck's sake.

The whole mess has once again highlighted for me that the election of ambitious people with flaws that may color the dysfunction of their service, by voters with their own flaws that likewise are apt to contribute to the dysfunction of their choice is no way to pick those who represent us in government.  The answer for the 10,000th time is sortition: the scientifically random selection of our leaders from among ourselves -- all citizens, residents, subjects of the places we live-- for short, non-consecutive terms.  It is the only way to remove the types of partisan politics that in this day and age has come to mean battling opposition research, horrifying reveals of our candidate's mistakes and their humanity, and millions of dubiously come by dollars spent on hours of negative ads of performatively fake outrage rehashing those hard-won nibblets of scandal.   I will take sortition anyday.  But as long as we are stuck with our duopolistic system, can you imagine if one day sortition actually won and in an effort to undermine it and get back to oligarchy, billionaires (perhaps using AI) studiously dug up oppo research on every one selected randomly by sortition?   How would you do, comrade, under the censorious scrutiny of the oligarchic oppo machine?

If you want me to take your own false outrage seriously, try to come up with a better candidate than Graham Platner first-- good luck with that-- and if you succeed, let's see how long that candidate evades the oppo trap and your own acquiescence to it.

~~~~~

* There's a contingent of the left who in spite of everything Bernie has done in the Senate to try to end the funding of Israel's assault on Gaza (to say nothing of what he's done for left causes throughout his still very vital career) think he took too long to call what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide.  Good for you you fucking purists.  What has your purity actually accomplished for Gaza?

What it is

No comment