Inquisitive Bird on America as a homicide outlier; Shelby and Eli Steele on the need to feel innocent; my review of Andrew McAfee; Russ Roberts and Daniel Gordis on Israel
“How powerful it is to certain people to believe in the ideology that gets them that innocence.”
Too many people think that being a good person means having good intentions and the right beliefs rather than doing the right things. Thought, not action.
It's an odd cultural phenomenon how Western countries post-WW2 focus on historical guilt as a key element of national identity. Meanwhile, East Asian countries (Japan, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Phillipines, etc) just decide that it's simpler for national cohesion to ignore, deny, whitewash, or distort the recent past. That seems like a generalization but just look at the fervor with which Denazification remains an important and legally enforced element of German society. Meanwhile, the Japanese government has consistently enforced revisionist nationalism with the same vehemency (firing teachers for not standing during the national anthem and altering public school textbooks).
I don't think there's any great mystery about the whole innocence thing. It's really just the same inclination you see when two cars collide in an intersection and both drivers claim they had the green light. "It's not *my* fault."
There’s no great mystery, but it goes to the heart of the human tendency to avoid shame, blame and humiliation. We want to see ourselves in high regard; to be respected within our community and family. The simple act of admitting wrong and apologizing is surprisingly difficult and uncommon.
The mystery is why people have such difficulty admitting their mistakes and apologizing. In my neighborhood I’m surrounded by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Say Saints. They have some cultish beliefs such as their refrain that “The Church is true,” but they also have many helpful poems and hymns they teach their children. Many of them are quite apropos. I like Kevin Kelly’s aphorisms just as much as their metaphorical narratives. Here’s Kevin:
“How to apologize: quickly, specifically, sincerely. Don’t ruin an apology with an excuse.
A proper apology consists of conveying the 3 Rs: regret (genuine empathy with the other) responsibility (not blaming someone else) and remedy (your willingness to fix it).”
The benefit of having a church is that it gives a community a place to come together to discuss, ponder and be introspective.
I don’t see much introspection on the progressive left. They have no norm of repentance. Through “innocence” they seek power, but this is a fragile strategy. They cling to “innocence” because they have a great deal to lose from being exposed to truth.
Look at Claudine Gay. Still no repentance. No sign of introspection. No admitting that she made mistakes about antisemitism and calls for genocide. No apology.
Many suffer from the same disease though.
Everyone is vulnerable to pride and arrogance. Being humble, and admitting our mistakes requires vigilance.
That vigilance is missing in many families and communities. The great mystery to me is how to bring people together to work on self-improvement. I suppose I could invite my Mormon neighbors to read Kevin Kelly aphorisms, but they might see me as being influenced by Satan.
“Innocence,” that is false innocence, only works until the truth comes.
False innocence is fragility. False innocence leads to cancel culture and censorship.
The burden on the truth-seeking American is a great one. The weapon of truth has exposed those who had seen themselves and their tribes as innocent, to America’s wicked past and present, and to the horrors of socialism and antisemitism.
The patriotic American, the progressive, the conservative and even the libertarian are exposed to harsh truths when studying America’s War on Terror, War on Drugs, anti-immigration policies, persecution of Mormons, slavery, Jim Crow, racism, socialism, Vietnam War, Civil War, antisemitism, eugenicism, CIA black sites, censorship complex, and Indian relocation.
A robust and stable power—the kind associated with self-worth and respect—come to those who practice anti-fragility and truth seeking. It comes to virtuous leaders - those that are personally accountable, humble, grateful, positive, creative, and respectful.
Yeah, I felt like I was leaving something off the list. I’ve gotten surprising push-back on that one before. One of my engineering bosses once argued (during a lunchtime conversation) that FDR’s Executive order (EO 9066) gave the Japanese the option of going to the camps, and allegedly, according to him, went voluntarily. I found that viewpoint striking. I couldn’t find much to back it up, but he said some Japanese Americans felt that they were going voluntarily for the good of the country and maybe out of respect or guilt, or for their own safety? Not sure exactly how the story goes. I think that narrative allowed him to feel innocent about his progressive views on government. I don’t know how true this narrative is, but it’s one for the truth seeker to grapple with. Would need to discuss it with a specialist.
Growing up in California, I figure most of my Japanese classmates in elementary and high school had parents and grandparents who had been interned in the camps, but I don't recall the issue ever being discussed in class. My brother's elderly Japanese neighbor in SoCal had been interned in the camps. Her family paid him to provide elder care, and we shared Thanksgiving dinner with the family one year, but again, the topic didn't come up. She died in her early 100s, like some of her siblings, so I doubt many of the victims are left. I guess they just went on with their lives and kept any resentment to themselves.
I’ve heard the same is true for European Jews that survived the Holocaust. They didn’t talk about it, and I’m not sure we can know why unless we had lived their experiences.
Which makes the remainder of my comment here weaker, but I’ll say it anyway. This emphasizes the importance of writing down our experiences and histories. Histories poorly documented— or histories well documented, but poorly studied—are more vulnerable to false narratives. All of this requires vigilance, time, and energy.
The elderly Japanese neighbor was a devout Christian, if that matters. And I have to disagree about the comparison with Jews and the Holocaust -- Holocaust remembrance is a big thing, and I have personally attended multiple events involving the testimony of Holocaust survivors, not to mention all the memorials, museums, archival research, films, and so forth. Despite this, polls taken in the aftermath of October 7 show that large percentages of certain age or other groups (I haven't paid attention to the details) don't believe it happened. So there you are.
So it looks like survivors are more open to talking about their experiences, than they once were. Her are three excerpts from the book Israel: A Concise History of a National Reborn. Far below is an excerpt from a different book y the same author describing more openness in survivors talking about their experiences.
Page 241
“Israel's young people had been raised in a society that had thus far avoided confronting the Holocaust. It was time for a public reckoning, the prime minister believed. "Israeli youth should learn the truth of what had happened to the Jews of Europe between 1933 and 1945."
Page 245
“By the mid-1950s, Israel had the world's fastest-growing economy, ahead even of Germany and Japan…For years, both Holocaust survivors and Israeli society had avoided speaking about what had happened in Europe in the 1940s. For the survivors, the memories were simply too painful.
“For Israeli society, the subject evoked both images of the Yishuv's inability to help, and the image of a European Jew-as-victim that Israel sought to transcend.
“Now, in the aftermath of the reparations, the Israeli refusal to engage the subject of the Holocaust had its first crack. And the man now associated with the role of safeguarding Israel's Jewish conscience was David Ben-Gurion's political adversary, Menachem Begin. The reparations debate had afforded Begin the opportunity to represent Israel's Jewish soul, the sanctity of Jewish memory, no matter how painful.
Page 254
“Just as world Jewry had huddled around radios in November 1947 to follow the vote on partition at the UN's General Assembly, Israelis were now glued to their radios, transfixed by the stories and horrors. Implicitly, the testimony of the witnesses gave the thousands of Israeli survivors "permission" to begin speaking about their experiences. That had not always been the case. Given the Israeli focus on the "new Jew" who could defend himself, these survivors with tattooed numbers on their arms, who seemed psychically and physically broken, had represented precisely the Jews that Israelis wanted to forget and to transcend. They often unfavorably compared Holocaust victims to the new, powerful Jews of the Yishuv who dislodged the British and fought off the Arabs with strength and military might. Tellingly, "[t]hose killed in the Holocaust were said to have 'perished,' while Jews who died fighting in Palestine had 'fallen.
“Tommy Lapid, a survivor of the Budapest ghetto and ultimately a well-known Israeli journalist and successful politician (and fatherof Yair Lapid, also a much admired journalist and founder of the political party Yesh Atid), recalled years later how veteran members of the Yishuv essentially accused the survivors for what they had endured. "Why didn't you fight back?' they would ask. "Why did you go like sheep to the slaughter?' They were First-Class Jews who took up arms and fought, while we were Second-Class Yids whom the Germans could annihilate without encountering re-sistance." Perhaps worse still, those who had been born in the Yishuv and come of age there made light of the horrific uses that Nazis had for the bodies of the murdered Jews. They knew, for example, that the Nazis had used the bodies of Jews to make soap. Lapid recalled:
“At the time, there was a cook ... who was a survivor of Auschwitz with a number tattooed in blue on his arm. The long-time staffers called him Soap, a twisted play on the famed Nazi plan to use Jewish body fat to make soap. "Hey, Soap," they would say. "What's for lunch today?" to which Soap would chuckle uncomfortably and fill their plates.
Page 175 of Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams? (Note, this is a different Gordis book than the one above).
“Slowly, perceptions began to change. At Israel's annual, deeply moving Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies, six survivors each light a torch, one for each million victims. Before they do, however, the focus of the ceremony is their horror, their survival, and the courage it took to rebuild their lives. Huge portions of Israeli society watch the proceedings each year in what has become a national ritual—another example of Israel's abiding highly scripted mamlachti-yut. In one widespread commemoration, known as Zikaron Ba-Salon ("Memory in the Living Room"), synagogues, restaurants, gyms, and bars convert their spaces into "living rooms" and invite survivors to share their stories. In addition, high school trips to Poland, both to death camps but also to learn about the richness of Jewish life before the war, have become de rigueur.
“Still, the stigma has hardly disappeared. Perhaps because they are a small and ever-diminishing population, and because Israel cut stipends to Holocaust survivors decades ago, and perhaps because many are too broken to assert the rights that they do have, many Holocaust survivors in Israel live in poverty, often alone. Aviv for Holocaust Survivors, an organization based in Tel Aviv founded to inform survivors about their rights, estimates that there are 200,000 elderly survivors still alive in Israel. Aviv claims that some 50,000 of them live in poverty. Each year, around Holocaust Memorial Day, the issue surfaces in the press, and then it goes away.
“Passion for the "new Jew" built the state. But survivors are virtual shut-ins who cannot afford their medications and who barely eke out an existence because a state of "new Jews" had no place for them and saw them as a badge of shame. The passion that fueled Israel's success at fashioning a "new Jew" has tragically come with horrific costs for those who did not fit the image of what the founders were trying to create.
According to my reading, Daniel Gordis tells a different story in his book Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. I’ll bring the specific passages here later today or tomorrow so we can read them together.
It seems to me if one puts the Japanese or German (no NP yet lol) internment camps in the same category as the Nazi camps or the Soviet camps - well, then there is no need to write anything down. You are not trying to remember history, you are trying to create it.
Yeah, I was being facetious. I am sure they would have preferred to stay where they were, living their lives, and especially if they could do so without fearing for their lives. But the war disrupted everyone's lives. Their experience does not seem to me to be singular. I think there's a continuum on these things obviously, and the subject has been over-mined and exaggerated to the point that it long ago crossed into farce.
This reminds me; I should do a family road trip to the Japanese internment camps. They’re not far. Maybe I’ll bring my camera and post photos on Substack.
If I'm bitter, it's because they've turned the things into national parks, which is part of the ongoing degradation of the idea of national park. One I could see, maybe. Five? No. Not when Republicans are holding up legislation adding to the actual national parks with the ridiculous demand that an equal amount of federal land be gotten rid of. Not when the only parks we seem to be getting are a schoolhouse for migrant children in Marfa (another historical horror! They educated the children of migrants for a couple decades!), more Harriet Tubman, and every possible thing to do with Emmett Till.
Have fun on the road trip, kids! Don't forget your Junior Ranger badges!
I suppose the dream of fixing, or better yet, re-imagining National Parks is on the back-burner.
I do like Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress as an effective model for teaching history. And the animatronic Lincoln is pretty darn inspiring. Increase the accuracy of its narrative and I say we have a winner.
"A common misconception is that American high incarceration rate is driven by mass incarceration of drug criminals or other minor offenses."
That's a rather ambiguous if not entirely misleading statement. It is true that most people incarcerated at any point in time are there for violent crime. But most people sent to prison go for nonviolent crimes. A substantial percentage are incarcerated without conviction because they can't afford bail and then take a plea deal so they can get out. Try restarting your life after losing your job because you couldn't go to work and you have to get a new job with a felony conviction.
“And we see the enemies of the Jews as enemies of Western values everywhere.”
It’s an interesting statement (and I’m not entirely clear what “everywhere” modified there): Before October 7th, I’m not sure I would have said Israel maps one-to-one with “Western values,” even as compared to say the U.S., the Anglosphere or even Western Europe, although certainly far greater than the surrounding region. In that respect, the recent Israeli high court’s ruling on Netanyahu’s legislation suggests that fight over Western values even in Israel is still just under the surface.
Also, the set of enemies of Western values everywhere is much larger, much more dangerous, and has been on the march longer than the set of enemies of Israel.
I’m largely supportive of Israel’s current actions (what follows is not that kind of “but”), but I find what Russia has been doing to Ukraine and what China has been doing in Asia and further afield to be far more important challenges to Western values than the barbarism that occurred against Israel.
“How powerful it is to certain people to believe in the ideology that gets them that innocence.”
Too many people think that being a good person means having good intentions and the right beliefs rather than doing the right things. Thought, not action.
Russ Roberts is really putting out some good stuff. More people need to hear what life is like in Israel in terms that Americans can understand.
It's an odd cultural phenomenon how Western countries post-WW2 focus on historical guilt as a key element of national identity. Meanwhile, East Asian countries (Japan, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Phillipines, etc) just decide that it's simpler for national cohesion to ignore, deny, whitewash, or distort the recent past. That seems like a generalization but just look at the fervor with which Denazification remains an important and legally enforced element of German society. Meanwhile, the Japanese government has consistently enforced revisionist nationalism with the same vehemency (firing teachers for not standing during the national anthem and altering public school textbooks).
I don't think there's any great mystery about the whole innocence thing. It's really just the same inclination you see when two cars collide in an intersection and both drivers claim they had the green light. "It's not *my* fault."
I think you hit closest to the mark. It's not innocence per se but being able to blame somebody else for problems that currently exist.
There’s no great mystery, but it goes to the heart of the human tendency to avoid shame, blame and humiliation. We want to see ourselves in high regard; to be respected within our community and family. The simple act of admitting wrong and apologizing is surprisingly difficult and uncommon.
The mystery is why people have such difficulty admitting their mistakes and apologizing. In my neighborhood I’m surrounded by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Say Saints. They have some cultish beliefs such as their refrain that “The Church is true,” but they also have many helpful poems and hymns they teach their children. Many of them are quite apropos. I like Kevin Kelly’s aphorisms just as much as their metaphorical narratives. Here’s Kevin:
“How to apologize: quickly, specifically, sincerely. Don’t ruin an apology with an excuse.
A proper apology consists of conveying the 3 Rs: regret (genuine empathy with the other) responsibility (not blaming someone else) and remedy (your willingness to fix it).”
The benefit of having a church is that it gives a community a place to come together to discuss, ponder and be introspective.
I don’t see much introspection on the progressive left. They have no norm of repentance. Through “innocence” they seek power, but this is a fragile strategy. They cling to “innocence” because they have a great deal to lose from being exposed to truth.
Look at Claudine Gay. Still no repentance. No sign of introspection. No admitting that she made mistakes about antisemitism and calls for genocide. No apology.
Many suffer from the same disease though.
Everyone is vulnerable to pride and arrogance. Being humble, and admitting our mistakes requires vigilance.
That vigilance is missing in many families and communities. The great mystery to me is how to bring people together to work on self-improvement. I suppose I could invite my Mormon neighbors to read Kevin Kelly aphorisms, but they might see me as being influenced by Satan.
Innocence is power?
“Innocence,” that is false innocence, only works until the truth comes.
False innocence is fragility. False innocence leads to cancel culture and censorship.
The burden on the truth-seeking American is a great one. The weapon of truth has exposed those who had seen themselves and their tribes as innocent, to America’s wicked past and present, and to the horrors of socialism and antisemitism.
The patriotic American, the progressive, the conservative and even the libertarian are exposed to harsh truths when studying America’s War on Terror, War on Drugs, anti-immigration policies, persecution of Mormons, slavery, Jim Crow, racism, socialism, Vietnam War, Civil War, antisemitism, eugenicism, CIA black sites, censorship complex, and Indian relocation.
A robust and stable power—the kind associated with self-worth and respect—come to those who practice anti-fragility and truth seeking. It comes to virtuous leaders - those that are personally accountable, humble, grateful, positive, creative, and respectful.
You left out that time we rounded up the the Japanese folks and sent them off to garden and do arts and crafts! One of history's horrors.
Yeah, I felt like I was leaving something off the list. I’ve gotten surprising push-back on that one before. One of my engineering bosses once argued (during a lunchtime conversation) that FDR’s Executive order (EO 9066) gave the Japanese the option of going to the camps, and allegedly, according to him, went voluntarily. I found that viewpoint striking. I couldn’t find much to back it up, but he said some Japanese Americans felt that they were going voluntarily for the good of the country and maybe out of respect or guilt, or for their own safety? Not sure exactly how the story goes. I think that narrative allowed him to feel innocent about his progressive views on government. I don’t know how true this narrative is, but it’s one for the truth seeker to grapple with. Would need to discuss it with a specialist.
Growing up in California, I figure most of my Japanese classmates in elementary and high school had parents and grandparents who had been interned in the camps, but I don't recall the issue ever being discussed in class. My brother's elderly Japanese neighbor in SoCal had been interned in the camps. Her family paid him to provide elder care, and we shared Thanksgiving dinner with the family one year, but again, the topic didn't come up. She died in her early 100s, like some of her siblings, so I doubt many of the victims are left. I guess they just went on with their lives and kept any resentment to themselves.
I’ve heard the same is true for European Jews that survived the Holocaust. They didn’t talk about it, and I’m not sure we can know why unless we had lived their experiences.
Which makes the remainder of my comment here weaker, but I’ll say it anyway. This emphasizes the importance of writing down our experiences and histories. Histories poorly documented— or histories well documented, but poorly studied—are more vulnerable to false narratives. All of this requires vigilance, time, and energy.
The elderly Japanese neighbor was a devout Christian, if that matters. And I have to disagree about the comparison with Jews and the Holocaust -- Holocaust remembrance is a big thing, and I have personally attended multiple events involving the testimony of Holocaust survivors, not to mention all the memorials, museums, archival research, films, and so forth. Despite this, polls taken in the aftermath of October 7 show that large percentages of certain age or other groups (I haven't paid attention to the details) don't believe it happened. So there you are.
So it looks like survivors are more open to talking about their experiences, than they once were. Her are three excerpts from the book Israel: A Concise History of a National Reborn. Far below is an excerpt from a different book y the same author describing more openness in survivors talking about their experiences.
Page 241
“Israel's young people had been raised in a society that had thus far avoided confronting the Holocaust. It was time for a public reckoning, the prime minister believed. "Israeli youth should learn the truth of what had happened to the Jews of Europe between 1933 and 1945."
Page 245
“By the mid-1950s, Israel had the world's fastest-growing economy, ahead even of Germany and Japan…For years, both Holocaust survivors and Israeli society had avoided speaking about what had happened in Europe in the 1940s. For the survivors, the memories were simply too painful.
“For Israeli society, the subject evoked both images of the Yishuv's inability to help, and the image of a European Jew-as-victim that Israel sought to transcend.
“Now, in the aftermath of the reparations, the Israeli refusal to engage the subject of the Holocaust had its first crack. And the man now associated with the role of safeguarding Israel's Jewish conscience was David Ben-Gurion's political adversary, Menachem Begin. The reparations debate had afforded Begin the opportunity to represent Israel's Jewish soul, the sanctity of Jewish memory, no matter how painful.
Page 254
“Just as world Jewry had huddled around radios in November 1947 to follow the vote on partition at the UN's General Assembly, Israelis were now glued to their radios, transfixed by the stories and horrors. Implicitly, the testimony of the witnesses gave the thousands of Israeli survivors "permission" to begin speaking about their experiences. That had not always been the case. Given the Israeli focus on the "new Jew" who could defend himself, these survivors with tattooed numbers on their arms, who seemed psychically and physically broken, had represented precisely the Jews that Israelis wanted to forget and to transcend. They often unfavorably compared Holocaust victims to the new, powerful Jews of the Yishuv who dislodged the British and fought off the Arabs with strength and military might. Tellingly, "[t]hose killed in the Holocaust were said to have 'perished,' while Jews who died fighting in Palestine had 'fallen.
“Tommy Lapid, a survivor of the Budapest ghetto and ultimately a well-known Israeli journalist and successful politician (and fatherof Yair Lapid, also a much admired journalist and founder of the political party Yesh Atid), recalled years later how veteran members of the Yishuv essentially accused the survivors for what they had endured. "Why didn't you fight back?' they would ask. "Why did you go like sheep to the slaughter?' They were First-Class Jews who took up arms and fought, while we were Second-Class Yids whom the Germans could annihilate without encountering re-sistance." Perhaps worse still, those who had been born in the Yishuv and come of age there made light of the horrific uses that Nazis had for the bodies of the murdered Jews. They knew, for example, that the Nazis had used the bodies of Jews to make soap. Lapid recalled:
“At the time, there was a cook ... who was a survivor of Auschwitz with a number tattooed in blue on his arm. The long-time staffers called him Soap, a twisted play on the famed Nazi plan to use Jewish body fat to make soap. "Hey, Soap," they would say. "What's for lunch today?" to which Soap would chuckle uncomfortably and fill their plates.
Page 175 of Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams? (Note, this is a different Gordis book than the one above).
“Slowly, perceptions began to change. At Israel's annual, deeply moving Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies, six survivors each light a torch, one for each million victims. Before they do, however, the focus of the ceremony is their horror, their survival, and the courage it took to rebuild their lives. Huge portions of Israeli society watch the proceedings each year in what has become a national ritual—another example of Israel's abiding highly scripted mamlachti-yut. In one widespread commemoration, known as Zikaron Ba-Salon ("Memory in the Living Room"), synagogues, restaurants, gyms, and bars convert their spaces into "living rooms" and invite survivors to share their stories. In addition, high school trips to Poland, both to death camps but also to learn about the richness of Jewish life before the war, have become de rigueur.
“Still, the stigma has hardly disappeared. Perhaps because they are a small and ever-diminishing population, and because Israel cut stipends to Holocaust survivors decades ago, and perhaps because many are too broken to assert the rights that they do have, many Holocaust survivors in Israel live in poverty, often alone. Aviv for Holocaust Survivors, an organization based in Tel Aviv founded to inform survivors about their rights, estimates that there are 200,000 elderly survivors still alive in Israel. Aviv claims that some 50,000 of them live in poverty. Each year, around Holocaust Memorial Day, the issue surfaces in the press, and then it goes away.
“Passion for the "new Jew" built the state. But survivors are virtual shut-ins who cannot afford their medications and who barely eke out an existence because a state of "new Jews" had no place for them and saw them as a badge of shame. The passion that fueled Israel's success at fashioning a "new Jew" has tragically come with horrific costs for those who did not fit the image of what the founders were trying to create.
According to my reading, Daniel Gordis tells a different story in his book Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. I’ll bring the specific passages here later today or tomorrow so we can read them together.
It seems to me if one puts the Japanese or German (no NP yet lol) internment camps in the same category as the Nazi camps or the Soviet camps - well, then there is no need to write anything down. You are not trying to remember history, you are trying to create it.
(Sorry, I don't mean you specifically.)
Yes, completely different categories. I finally get your National Park point/joke now. Sorry, a little slow sometimes.
Yeah, I was being facetious. I am sure they would have preferred to stay where they were, living their lives, and especially if they could do so without fearing for their lives. But the war disrupted everyone's lives. Their experience does not seem to me to be singular. I think there's a continuum on these things obviously, and the subject has been over-mined and exaggerated to the point that it long ago crossed into farce.
They did create some beautiful objects though.
This reminds me; I should do a family road trip to the Japanese internment camps. They’re not far. Maybe I’ll bring my camera and post photos on Substack.
If I'm bitter, it's because they've turned the things into national parks, which is part of the ongoing degradation of the idea of national park. One I could see, maybe. Five? No. Not when Republicans are holding up legislation adding to the actual national parks with the ridiculous demand that an equal amount of federal land be gotten rid of. Not when the only parks we seem to be getting are a schoolhouse for migrant children in Marfa (another historical horror! They educated the children of migrants for a couple decades!), more Harriet Tubman, and every possible thing to do with Emmett Till.
Have fun on the road trip, kids! Don't forget your Junior Ranger badges!
I suppose the dream of fixing, or better yet, re-imagining National Parks is on the back-burner.
I do like Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress as an effective model for teaching history. And the animatronic Lincoln is pretty darn inspiring. Increase the accuracy of its narrative and I say we have a winner.
Haha, I like your relentless optimism and cheerful commenting mien - I really do!
But if you and I ever tried to occupy the same space, the result would be annihilation!
Good thing we have these boxes to type in ;-).
Maybe a discussion at Disneyworld would take some of the bite out? Until then finger pecking on this iPhone.
"A common misconception is that American high incarceration rate is driven by mass incarceration of drug criminals or other minor offenses."
That's a rather ambiguous if not entirely misleading statement. It is true that most people incarcerated at any point in time are there for violent crime. But most people sent to prison go for nonviolent crimes. A substantial percentage are incarcerated without conviction because they can't afford bail and then take a plea deal so they can get out. Try restarting your life after losing your job because you couldn't go to work and you have to get a new job with a felony conviction.
“And we see the enemies of the Jews as enemies of Western values everywhere.”
It’s an interesting statement (and I’m not entirely clear what “everywhere” modified there): Before October 7th, I’m not sure I would have said Israel maps one-to-one with “Western values,” even as compared to say the U.S., the Anglosphere or even Western Europe, although certainly far greater than the surrounding region. In that respect, the recent Israeli high court’s ruling on Netanyahu’s legislation suggests that fight over Western values even in Israel is still just under the surface.
Also, the set of enemies of Western values everywhere is much larger, much more dangerous, and has been on the march longer than the set of enemies of Israel.
I’m largely supportive of Israel’s current actions (what follows is not that kind of “but”), but I find what Russia has been doing to Ukraine and what China has been doing in Asia and further afield to be far more important challenges to Western values than the barbarism that occurred against Israel.