Links to Consider, 3/4

Benny Morris on the NYT on Israel/Palestinians; Noah Smith is a tech/China doomer; William Galston on the Insurrection Act; Aaron Renn on vice

Benny Morris writes,

the underlying narrative in their magazine piece of 6 February 2024, “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Long Shadow of 1948,” is that the Palestinians have always lacked agency and have no responsibility for anything that has befallen them over the decades.

This is the moral dyad that pervades the social justice mindset. The robot (Israel, or “the privileged” in general) has agency but lacks feelings, and the baby (Palestinians, or the “marginalized” in general) has feelings but lacks agency.

Noah Smith writes,

the rise of smartphones and social media means that the internet is now a powerful centralizer of both personal information and public discussion, rather than the decentralizing force that the creators of the Web intended it to be. And centralization plays into the hands of those who seek to control every aspect of other people’s lives — i.e., totalitarians.

Most of China’s “sharp power” methods are fundamentally enabled by the smartphone-and-social-media internet — and/or by globalization itself.

William Galston writes,

[On January 20, 2025] protests break out from coast to coast. Protesters block streets, normal business grinds to a halt, and scattered instances of looting and violence take place. The president issues an order in his capacity as commander in chief to federalize and deploy the guards to quell disruptions.

Within hours, tens of thousands of troops are patrolling major cities. By morning, more than 100,000 Americans have been arrested, overwhelming local jails and forcing the military to detain them in barbed-wire encampments.

Many of those arrested hire lawyers, who say they’re powerless to intervene. The problem, the lawyers explain, is that Mr. Trump has acted legally under the provisions of the Insurrection Act of 1807. “What’s the Insurrection Act?” the detainees ask.

I continue to predict mass street protests following the election if Mr. Trump wins. If he responds, even if all he is trying to do is keep the country functioning, this will be condemned as fascism.

Aaron Renn writes,

What rejecting vice means to me is: no porn, no pot, no gambling, no video games, no tattoos, no profanity.

The point here is not to condemn other people for their choices - it’s a free country after all - or to argue that all of these things are objectively morally wrong. It is to say that’s not who we are and not how we choose to live. We are setting a different standard for ourselves.

He is laying down a challenge. As you may know, I agree with him about profanity. Refraining from certain “speech acts” shows that you respect the people to whom you are speaking. It shows self-restraint and civility. Among elite, many of the same people who freely toss around four-letter words would be in high dudgeon over a racist or sexist remark, so it’s not as if they are totally nonjudgmental when it comes to speech. Among the underclass, the use of profanity seems to me to correlate to a general disregard for the comfort and well-being of their friends and neighbors.

substacks referenced above:

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New technologies, new totalitarians

Reject Vice