Judging from conversations I’ve had with Israeli Arabs, a lot of them would prefer living in an Arab state if it were run like the Jewish one (i.e., a democracy with rule of law, even if ours is flawed) — but would prefer living in a Jewish state over a typical Arab dictatorship and/or kleptocracy, let alone an Islamist fascist regime (which may be a kleptocracy at the same time). So unless they are fanatics, they realize what they want they can’t have, and what they have is better (or less bad) than the alternative.
Massad’s eyes were opened when he saw the brutality of his fellow “Palestinian freedom fighters” towards their own people. Ultimately he slipped across the border, worked odd jobs in Israel, then helped stop a terrorist and was rewarded by legalizing his status. He married an Arab Israeli woman and lives in Haifa now.
AFTERTHOUGHT: The irony is of course that Kachsuckers like Itamar Ben-Gvir and obscurantist corruptocrats like Goldknopf seem to be hell-bent on trying to turn the Jewish state into a Jewish version of the Arab states around us…
A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?
Read the whole long thing. But let me offer a few excerpts:
The comparison to the Soviet Union, you might argue, is nevertheless risible.
Take a closer look.
A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future, and to rise inexorably to 8.5 percent by 2054. The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.”
[…] We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker’s report—and I recommend you do the same—I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world.
On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?)
[…] Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.
[…] In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravdafrom 1990, for example, a reader decried the “ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR.” Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a “miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery.” By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie novosti felt that theirs was an “unjust society.”
Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.
He then continues to draw parallels between “deaths of despair” and fentanyl overdoses in today’s USA, and the massive mortality from alcoholism in the former USSR (and to a degree, today’s Russia).
The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries. The main explanations, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, are a striking increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide, and a rise in various diseases associated with obesity. To be precise, between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths—again of working-age Americans—over the same period. Metabolic and cardiac causes of death such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease also surged in tandem with obesity.
This reversal of life expectancy simply isn’t happening in other developed countries.
[…] Of course, the two healthcare systems look superficially quite different. The Soviet system was just under-resourced. At the heart of the American healthcare disaster, by contrast, is a huge mismatch between expenditure—which is internationally unrivaled relative to GDP—and outcomes, which are terrible. But, like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy, brilliantly parodied by South Park in a recent episode—is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.
Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in. […]
In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”
As for the current direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is not so much to help other countries defend themselves as to egg on others to fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning. This strategy—most visible in Ukraine—makes some sense for the United States, which discovered in the “global war on terror” that its much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. But believing American blandishments may ultimately doom Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to follow South Vietnam and Afghanistan into oblivion.
[…] To see the extent of the gulf that now separates the American nomenklatura from the workers and peasants, consider the findings of a Rasmussen poll from last September, which sought to distinguish the attitudes of the Ivy Leaguers from ordinary Americans. The poll defined the former as “those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile,” and having attended “Ivy League schools or other elite private schools, including Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.”
Asked if they would favor “rationing of gas, meat, and electricity” to fight climate change, 89 percent of Ivy Leaguers said yes, as against 28 percent of regular people. Asked if they would personally pay $500 more in taxes and higher costs to fight climate change, 75 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said yes, versus 25 percent of everyone else. “Teachers should decide what students are taught, as opposed to parents” was a statement with which 71 percent of the Ivy Leaguers agreed, nearly double the share of average citizens. “Does the U.S. provide too much individual freedom?” More than half of Ivy Leaguers said yes; just 15 percent of ordinary mortals did. The elite were roughly twice as fond as everyone else of members of Congress, journalists, union leaders, and lawyers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 88 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said their personal finances were improving, as opposed to one in five of the general population.
[…] A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.
[…] We can tell ourselves that our many contemporary pathologies are the results of outside forces waging a multi-decade campaign of subversion. They have undoubtedly tried, just as the CIA tried its best to subvert Soviet rule in the Cold War.
Yet we also need to contemplate the possibility that we have done this to ourselves—just as the Soviets did many of the same things to themselves. It was a common liberal worry during the Cold War that we might end up becoming as ruthless, secretive, and unaccountable as the Soviets because of the exigencies of the nuclear arms race. Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway.
ADDENDUM: via Instapundit, one of my other history gurus, Victor Davis Hanson:
Anatomy of a Full Leftwing Meltdown
The media is afire with warnings of the impending Trump “dictatorship”. Celebrities, the Squad, and Biden administration grandees vie to conjure up the most nightmarish things that Trump might do to them.
[Full tweet won’t embed, full text here:] Anatomy of a Full Leftwing Meltdown The media is afire with warnings of the impending Trump “dictatorship”. Celebrities, the Squad, and Biden administration grandees vie to conjure up the most nightmarish things that Trump might do to them. What drives their current mounting hysteria? 1) The Left feels it may be heading to an historic 1972 McGovern-like or 1980 Carteresque blowout. And it is terrified at this late date that it cannot do anything either about the escalating dementia of Joe Biden, or the terror instilled by the specter of either a President or continued Vice-President Kamala Harris. 2) It knows that a first-term novice Trump had a successful four years, and that he now is savvier four years later—and far more likely and able to overturn the entire four-year Biden catastrophe and thus enjoy an even more successful second term. 3) It fears that all it did to destroy democracy—the Russian collusion hoax, the Russian disinformation laptop farce, the two first-term impeachments the moment the Republicans lost the House, the Senate trial of ex-President Trump as a private citizen, the effort to remove Trump from state ballots, and the five criminal and civil show trials designed to bankrupt the leading presidential candidate and keep him off the campaign trail—might boomerang on the Left. So, it is in full panic that its unconstitutional efforts to destroy Trump will obviously be used against itself—given it knows that if it returned to power it would go after its enemies in precisely the same, any-means-necessary ways that it had sought to destroy Trump. That is, they have destroyed norms and have established dangerous new precedents that they just assume, given their Jacobin nature, must rebound against themselves. 4) The Left is terrified that growing voter repugnance now extends even to traditional Democratic constituencies—Latinos, Blacks, Asians, Jews, the young, and even the college educated. And the Left privately grasps that these defections are fueled not just by the obnoxiousness and dementia of Joe Biden, but due to his far-left agendas that left us with abhorrent inflation, wild unsustainable federal deficits, a lethal open border, 10-million unaudited and often dangerous illegal aliens, foreign policy catastrophes, woke racial and tribal disunity, spiraling urban crime, and cultural extremism. Leftists accept that while in secret they blame the cognitively challenged Joe for their dilemmas, deep-down they know that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”—that is, in their own failed revolution that has utterly repulsed Americans and nearly destroyed the country. 5) In the next five months, the Left and Democrats know that they must pander to try to save themselves. But the more Biden panders, the more obvious, repugnant, and counterproductive the pandering becomes. The public is growing sick of Biden’s 11th-hour groveling to save himself from his self-created oblivion. And the more in his last days as President he drains even more the strategic petroleum reserve, the more he cancels student loan debt, the more he abandons Israel to win a few thousand votes in Michigan, the more he pressures the Fed to lower interest rates, the more he flips on tariffs, and the more he grants blanket amnesties to illegal aliens—all the more the country at large becomes disgusted at the low effort to temporarily appease particular voting blocs at the expense of the general interest of the country. 6) As we watch the Left go through the proverbial cycles of “denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance”, it will increasingly deny the accuracy of supposedly inaccurate swing state polls, then angrily damn the supposedly clueless, deplorable electorate, then turn to all sorts of dreams of remedies (changing or violating more voting laws being the most prominent), then get sullen about the entire American project, and only finally accept the inevitable of what likely lies ahead.
Einat Wilf explains who is Constantin Zureiq, who first coined the term “nakba” (Arabic for catastrophe); and that, in context, “nakba” did not refer at all to the beginning of the “Palestinian refugee problem” but to the failure of a gaggle of Arab armies to push the nascent nation of Israel into the sea. [Screenshot at 2:05, Fair Use under Section 27 of the Israel Copyright Law]
Elsewhere, Einat recalls a quote by Ernest Bevin — hardly a Zionist or a friend of the Jewish people — who in a February 1947 report wrote: “For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the establishment of sovereignty in the land. For the Arabs, [it] is to prevent the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the land.”
Last week, 27 European nations voted for their representatives in the European Parliament.
If you were aware of this, did you happen to notice that there were no allegations of cheating in any European country? If you are on the left, you might respond that there were no such allegations because the right did better than the left, and it’s the right that makes these allegations.
But that response has little merit. For one thing, there were no such allegations, let alone demonstrations, during all the years left-wing parties won European Parliamentary elections or national elections. For another, in America, it is not only the right that has charged election fraud: Hillary Clinton, for example, still claims the 2016 election was stolen from her.
The fact is that, among democracies, America is essentially alone in having nearly half its population mistrust election results. So, either America is cursed with a paranoid population, or there are valid reasons for Americans to mistrust their elections’ results.
There is no question it is the latter. America is unique among democracies in having half its people mistrust election results because America is unique among democracies in the way it conducts its elections.
America is almost alone among democracies in not demanding that voters provide any identification when they vote. For some reason, the American left vehemently opposes voter ID. It claims voter ID is racist and that those who favor it are engaged in “voter suppression.” This is prima facie absurd: Are airports racist for demanding passenger identification? Does passenger ID result in “passenger suppression”? The most plausible reason the left opposes voter ID is to enable some degree of voter fraud. If that is not the reason, isn’t it enormously irresponsible to cultivate doubts about election integrity among half its country’s citizens — for no valid reason? Moreover, in no other country does its left oppose voter ID.
(b) on its LinkedIn page, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports that the percentage of people who “have great trust” in the higher education system has fallen to a historical low of 28%. Gee, I have absolutely no idea why? Next, you’re gonna tell me there’s gambling going on at Rick’s Café.
(a) A bunch of pro-HamaSS losers and zielige aftrekkers (possibly even on the taxpayer’s dime?!) have been bashing their bishops kettles at all hours at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)’s suburban DC home. (His main home is in Houston; many senators, for obvious reasons, have secondary residences in Washington, DC or its suburbs in the adjacent states of Virginia or Maryland.)
In addition to their cause being evil, they’re also just unfathomable losers. https://t.co/RwTmCSv9fq
Powerline wonders if law enforcement would be equally tolerant if right-wing protesters were to hold similar “wakes” outside the residence of Fauxcahontas Lieawatha. Perhaps they could hyelpfully remind her of all the instances where she falsely claimed Native American ancestry to climb the career ladder, or of how much money she has taken from the banking indistry while risibly posing as an advocate for the common person.
(b) Even NYT columnist Nicholas Jackoff Kristof can stumble over the truth sometimes. (paywalled; cached copy; multiple h/t’s for this one). (For context, Kristof tried to run for Oregon governor in 2022, but was told by the OR Secretary of State that he didn’t meet the 3-year residency requirement.)
As Democrats make their case to voters around the country this fall, one challenge is that some of the bluest parts of the country — cities on the West Coast — are a mess.
Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction? . .
We [liberals] are more likely to believe that “housing is a human right” than conservatives in Florida or Texas, but less likely to actually get people housed. We accept a yawning gulf between our values and our outcomes. . .
[M]y take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes. . . Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.
For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools — including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.
Of course, moral self-gratification (as distinct from solving concrete problems for actual people) has not just been a feature of the soft left — it’s arguably its very essence, other than of course pure Nietzscheian Will To Power (Wille zur Macht).
(c) Bestselling (and genre-transforming) thriller novelist Frederick Forsyth discovers that his The Fourth Protocol was bowdlerized without his knowledge… and that the affected passages were those describing a Marxist “march through the institutions”. Was the wording of the passages too similar to some published “revolutionary” how-to manual (there are ‘fair use’ ways to handle that, in the context of a long book), or did he come to close to the truth for the comfort of some editor? Judge the expurgated text for yourselves:
…all history teaches that soundly based democracies can only be toppled by mass action in the streets when the police and armed forces have been sufficiently penetrated by the revolutionaries that large numbers of them can be expected to refuse to obey the orders of their officers and side instead with the demonstrators….
Our friends have done what they can. Since taking control of numerous large metropolitan authorities, through the press and the media, at every level high and low, they have either themselves, or using wild young people of the Trotskyite [i.e., communist] splinter factions as shock troops, carried out an unrelenting campaign to denigrate, vilify and undermine the British police. The aim, of course, is to vitiate or destroy the confidence of the British public in their police, which unfortunately remains the most affable and disciplined in the world….
I have narrated all of this only to substantiate one argument … that the path [to socialism] now lies though … the largely successful campaign of the Hard Left to take over the Labour Party from inside…
It’s the classic trap of perverse incentives. A special refugee agency only for the “Palestinians” (parallel to the UNHCR for all other refugees) that would have no reason to exist if the conflict were solved. So who reasonably expects that this agency will voluntary make itself redundant?
Shut UNRWA down, move such parts as function to the UNHCR, and especially make an end to the “hereditary refugee status”, which is not used for any other refugee group on the planet.
(c) Sheryl Sandberg got mugged by reality in a much harsher way than I was over 20 years ago. Note that Bari Weiss and Sandberg are basically both unreconstructed liberals, who feel deeply betrayed by their “progressive” (read: REgressive) erstwhile allies.
Conservatives and liberals may disagree on much, but we basically speak the same moral language — which is not that of the nihilistic regressives whose blind hatred of their own civilization seeks them to glorify the worst and most destructive (and most self-destructive) in “victim” groups.
(C) This is the “society” the “progressives” are glorifying. One Gaza Muslim, whose sister was honor-killed by his brothers, who witnessed boys being beheaded for homosexual acts, and was prepared for “martyrdom” himself… fled to Israel, volunteered for the IDF, and upon discovering how Judaism embraces life the way his old culture embraced death — went through a conversion course, and is now a practicing Orthodox Jew named Yaron Avraham. Here is a long write-up of his life story, and below you see him interviewed.
(a) apropos the cease-fire negotiations, US Secretary of State [for non-American readers: foreign minister] Anthony Blinken is shocked! shocked! that HamaSS would keep changing terms in bad faith. Either he’s incredibly naive or he’s feigning surprise, and hoping that pressure from Arab countries will bring HamaSS around.
(b) the long-time chair of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth [ moiser ve-malshin ] has wondered, incredibly, whether Israel’s hostage rescue may have been an act of “perfidy” under international law, because the rescue force disguised itself as civilians. He is referring here to Article 37 of the Protocol Additional to the 1949 Geneva Convention:
1. It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy. The following acts are examples of perfidy:
(a) The feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender;
(b) The feigning of an incapacitation by wounds or sickness;
(c) The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status; and
(d) The feigning of protected status by the use of signs, emblems or uniforms of the United Nations or of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict.
2. Ruses of war are not prohibited. Such ruses are acts which are intended to mislead an adversary or to induce him to act recklessly but which infringe no rule of international law applicable in armed conflict and which are not perfidious because they do not invite the confidence of an adversary with respect to protection under that law. The following are examples of such ruses: the use of camouflage, decoys, mock operations and misinformation.
Needless to say, HamaSS has been engaging in perfidy (in that legal sense) day in and day out, so to me (but I am not an international law expert) would seem to have forfeited any claim to this argument. US troops in the past appear to have operated under this principle: against Japanese troops in the Pacific theater who treacherously used Red Cross emblems, or feigned surrender and then attacked, they fought with the gloves off entirely. But a Times of Israel explainer, interviewing a number of actual experts, addresses the question in more depth.
(c) According to the Free Beacon, University of Minnesota found nobody better to hire for their center of genocide studies than what looks like a failed academic from a tier 2 college,[*] who has accused Israel of genocide in the wake of the October 7 pogroms.
Some have referred to this character — a far-left activist using his expat Israeli JINO [Jew In Name Only] background as a shield — as a “failed academic”. I’m unfamiliar with his specific tenure or promotion file, but I’ve seen more of those than you can shake a stick at, and for a faculty member in their fifties at a US university not to have been promoted to full professor generally means major flaws (or hostile relations with the campus administration). Tenure (typically tied to promotion to associate professor) is the major hurdle in the US, with onward promotion to full professor pretty much assured after a number of years if the associate professor continues to perform at the level that got him/her tenure.
(d) From my old home turf, Belgian honorary senator and erstwhile Secretary-General of Doctors Without Borders/Artsen Zonder Grenzen/Médécins sans Frontières , Alain Destexhe, excoriates the level of judeophobia in Belgium and particularly that of its intellectual and political class. The outgoing Prime Minister, Alexander de Croo [whose father Herman was one of the “useful idiots” in the West of Romanian dictator Ceaucescu], is singled out for special attention — I note with some schadenfreude that his party got thrashed like a piñata in the elections last weekend and that de Croo was forced to resign. I am not saying this was because of his sanctimoniousness about Israel not kissing the rear end of its enemies, rather that the latter is one symptom of the general out-of-touchness that cost the transnationalist “watermelon left” the election.
(e) [h/t Mrs. Arbel] UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer testifies before US Congress on UNRWA
(g) and now for something different, again from my old home turf:
Gee, whodathunkit? But better that they wake up late than never.
ADDENDUM: Con Coughlin in the Telegraph: HamaSS “terrorists are playing the West for fools” (paywalled; cached copy). Related from the WSJ: internal communications reveal how HamaSS leadership are cynically sacrificing their own civilian casualties for Western PR points. If Western pro-“Palestinians” cared one whit about the actual people they claim to care about (rather than as an anti-Western and anti-Israel pawn), all HamaSSholes they could lay hands on would be dangling from lampposts.
(a) The UN Security Council, 14-0 with Russia abstaining, adopted a US-sponsored motion calling upon Israel and HamaSS to accept the “Biden cease fire”.
HamaSS welcomed the resolution, while Israel, represented by a career diplomat rather than Ambassador Gilad Erdan (who is a political appointee), avoids publicly voicing opposition.
Israel came out against the resolution last week, taking issue with some of the amendments that were made to the text.
The US addressed one of those concerns, dropping an explicit rejection to the establishment of Israeli security buffer zones in Gaza. The move appeared to be enough to satisfy Israel, whose representative at Monday’s meeting avoided criticizing the resolution or directly commenting on it whatsoever.
(b) In the European elections, a startling percentage of the youth vote appears to have gone to the far right, in the face of the usual expectation (which actually had the German greens lobbying to lower the voting age to 16). Case in point: France (screenshot from the Telegraph; fair use under Section 27 of the Israeli copyright law).
But it was not just [the very young RN frontman] Mr Bardella who was drawing swarms of young voters. Germany’s hard-Right Alternative for Germany(AfD) also surged in the polls, propelled in part by voters under the age of 30.
One poll published on Sunday showed that 32 per cent of 18-34 year-olds voted for the RN in France, more than double the total of the 2019 European elections. In Germany, the AfD saw an 11 per cent jump in its vote share among 16-to-24 year-olds, claiming a total of 16 per cent. It saw big jumps in 25-44 year-olds, too.
In the last European election, young people in Europe overwhelmingly voted for green parties in what was heralded as a “green wave.”
However, interest has waned among a generation that grew up during the Covid pandemic and frets about war in Europe, an uncertain job market and a lack of affordable housing.
Many young voters say mainstream parties are not tuned in to their concerns – at worst hardly speaking their language.
That is an opportunity that has been successfully exploited by the AfD and the RN. Their weapon of choice was Tiktok, the video-sharing app dominated by Gen Z.
Needless to say, TikTok’s paymasters — the CCP — are rubbing their hands with glee at the chaos their platform continues to sow.
(c) Two stories about the “higher education bubble”
“Toolbelt Generation” by Insty, on how Gen Z [males especially] are embracing trade schools and apprenticeship programs — with much less student debt and well-paid work that cannot easily be digitally outsourced or replaced by AI
Arnold Kling on how to fix higher education: “get rid of all the students who don’t belong“. “Fundamentally, there are too many people on a college campus who don’t belong there. When I was an adjunct at George Mason, most of my students could not write or do math. Reading their essays or grading their exams was painful. I wanted to forward them to the admissions department and ask, “What are you doing?” It was the rare student who could actually think at a level that justified being in a college-level course.1 This country is sending way too many young people to college. Instead, they should be going to training programs to become allied health professionals, or electricians, or solar panel installers, or something. There are also many faculty members who do not belong on college campus. Obviously, you have the grievance studies departments. But if you were to dial back the number of students in the humanities and social sciences to a number that is actually qualified to study those subjects, you would have to cut the majority of faculty positions. There are way too many administrators on campus. It is not just the DEI bureaucrats who could be jettisoned. Many of the administrators are there to coddle the students who should not have been admitted in the first place. Tighten up the admissions standards and you can get by with fewer administrators. There are too many ungrateful foreign students on campus. A lot them engage in rampant cheating. Some of them participate in violent demonstrations. We should only be admitting students who are motivated to learn. Stop taking unmotivated foreign students just to collect their tuition money. The trouble with higher education is bloat. The student bodies are bloated. The faculties are bloated. And the administrations are bloated. If colleges and universities were right-sized, many of the problems with higher education would be taken care of.”
With some luck, the first item (combined with something not-so-lucky Dr. Kling does not mention: the much smaller Gen Z /generational cohort compared to Boomers and millenial “echo Boomers”) will go some way to mitigating the problem.
ADDENDUM: shame upon you, University of Amsterdam. Disinviting a speaker on a completely unrelated subject because his position on the Israel-HamaSS conflict is “unacceptable” (read: not full-deepthroated support for the “Islamistische Nieuwe Herenvolk”. Zootje walgelijke Hamaspijpers en Islamoreetkruipers. Nieuwe Anton Musserts. Krijg allemaal de pokketering.
Tonight is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, where we mark the giving of the Torah [“the Law”, but more correctly translated: “the Teaching” or “the Doctrine”] on Mount Sinai. Chag Shavuot sameach!
In Germany, according to Der Spiegel, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) is now the second party, after the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union). The Greens, who used to be #2, got a beating, as did the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. [Screenshots Fair Use under Article 27 of Israel Copyright Law]
In France, the RN (Rassemblement National, National Rally) is by far the largest party. Screenshot from Le Figaro:
In Belgium, the Flemish region sees the conservative Flemish nationalist N.VA hold steady and remain largest party, followed closely by the far-right Vlaams Belang (“Flemish Interest”). Green got a beating, Socialist “Vooruit” (Forward! [off the cliff]) and the Maoist PVDA (Party of the Worker, or Partij van de Aftrekker=W*nker). The historically center-right OpenVLD got a serious beating, the Christian-Democrat CD&V which used to be perpetually dominant in Flanders now has to settle for 4th party. [Screenshots from De Standaard]
In Wallonia, two rival center-right parties both see huge gains, and the Socialists — which for decades has had something of a political stranglehold on the region — got a drubbing, as did the Greens of “Ecolo”. Here, interestingly enough, the PTB (hard-left) also lost, unlike the PVDA in Flanders.
In Austria, the stridently right-wing FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria) dethrones the Christian Democrats as largest party.
Pretty much the only place I can see that the Social Democrats and Greens did well is Denmark — but at least on immigration, the Social Democrats govern to the right of many “conservative” parties. [Screenshot from Politiken.dk]
Developing…
UPDATES:
in Germany, the mysterious “BSW” is a breakaway from the “ex-“Communist Die Linke [The Leftists], led by a millionaire Marxist theoretician named Sahra [sic] Wagenknecht.
in France, [executive] President Macron reacted to the shocking gains of the hard-right by dissolving the National Assembly, thus triggering elections for it on June 30 (with a runoff round July 7).
in Belgium, the elections were actually also for the regional and national parliaments at the same time
in Hungary, premier Orban’s Fidesz remains the largest party despite serious losses, especially to Orban associate turned-rival Peter Magyar and his Tisza party.
in Spain, the center-right Partido Popular and the more right-wing Vox are winners, though the socialist PSOE holds steady [screenshot from the El Pais daily]. The far-left Podemos [“we can”] lost big time, while the self-declared “postnationalist” Ciudadanos [“Citizens”] party was wiped out altogether. [It’s the first time I heard of it, and the Wiki write-up of its political positions is confused enough that perhaps the voters couldn’t figure out what they stood for either.] “Ahora Republicas” is an alliance of regionalist left parties in Catalonia, Galicia, Basque Land, …
Surging hard-Right parties are plotting to dismantle EU net zero laws after the European elections on Sunday, Green politicians have said.
Nationalist forces will overturn the bloc’s ambition to hit the 2050 zero carbon target in the same way they hardened European migration policy by dragging it to the Right, they said.
“Osmosis” with traditional Right-wing parties was already weakening EU green laws, he said, and could impact on new bills and reviews of existing net zero legislation.
[…]
“There is a clear and present danger to the future of the European Green Deal” [a] Belgian MEP told The Telegraph.
“‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished”, in the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Hard-Right leaders such as Geert Wilders want the Dutch to leave the Paris agreement on climate change, while Italy’s Giorgia Meloni described the EU as waging a “holy war” on green issues.
The two most important issues facing the EU are the war in Ukraine and immigration, according to voters in a Eurobarometer survey.
Fifth was climate change, behind the cost of living.
Rising costs and inflation were the most important challenges facing voters, polls showed, outstripping the climate in fifth.
UPDATE 3: from The Economist, a projection of the major blocks in the actual European Parliament
NB: the “NI” (non-inscrits, i.e., unaffiliated) block actually contains the hard-right German AfD (after it was expelled from the Identity and Democracy group) and the Hungarian Fidesz party of the country’s premier Viktor Orban. The “New” block are parties that were newly elected or have yet to declare allegiance to any block, or to none at all.
As a Russian coworkers wrily remarked, with a pungent idiom clearly translated literally from Russian: “we may only ‘receive’ [*] and wipe ourselves off afterward” (aleinu rak le-kabel [*] ulehitnagev).
(c) “Settler” Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun has an unexpectedly dispassionate analysis of “the faltering war”. Moneygraf: “Despite the American bear hug, the US’s regional interests diverge from those of Israel – and they entail keeping Hamas in power” Read the whole thing.
(d) In a long but eloquent essay “Blindness: The Left and October 7“, self-declared “progressive feminist Jew” Hadley Freeman expresses her sense of betrayal and concludes that “her” side was always judeophobic, but now just dropped all pretense otherwise.
Corbyn railed frequently against the horrors of Israel, and yet he had frequently been a paid contributor to Iranian and Russian state TV. He had referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” in a parliamentary meeting, and after October 7 initially refused to describe Hamas as a terrorist group. I was surprised by how little Corbyn’s hypocrisy and blindness to Islamist terrorism bothered the young progressive left. Then he was pushed out of Labour in 2020 and I dismissed him as a classic useful idiot – which was right – and a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again – which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realized that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.
Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which was developed on US and – to a lesser degree – UK university campuses over the past 20 years. This ideology has now escaped to the wider world as students schooled in it have moved into workplaces. Identity politics argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions – values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.
Identity politics has proven astonishingly influential, especially in shaping US and UK policies, and no doubt many people pushing it are motivated by good intentions. (Some, of course, are pure grifters.) I initially assumed that a fear of being called racist had lobotomized them so they were unable to see the obvious idiocies of this ideology. (Is a poor white man in Glamorgan really more privileged than an extremely wealthy Black man in Nairobi?) But the more identity politics took hold, the more I understood that a lot of people on the left just want a very simple way of looking at the world, and they crave a group they can hate with impunity.
Read the whole thing. Niall Ferguson has spoken of the new “Trahison des clercs” (treason of the intellectuals). While I opposed reverse racism, er, “affirmative action” in first-principles ground even in the days where I still was broadly a social-democrat, it was the craven response of the left to 9/11 (and closer to home, the Second Intifada) that made me realize they were intellectually and morally bankrupt where it came to international politics. The mind of course then wondered, “so what else do they have their heads up their rears about?” Like for any person who passionately holds beliefs, realizing you’ve “been a useful idiot” for decades is a heart-wrenching experience — so I understand very well what she is feeling now. But ultimately, if a Jew can quote Christian scripture — which is however also the motto of several universities, including Insty’s U. of Tennessee — “the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32).
(e) and speaking of treason that is more farcical than tragic, as well as of the “asymmetry of bullsh*t law” (refuting BS requires 10x as much energy as was originally expended by the BSer), former Hebrew U. rector Barak Medina (currently Dean of its Law School) wrote this master class in dispassionate scholarly refutation of a libelous Mayan Windbag.
***
[*] In the interest of keeping this blog somewhat family-friendly, I will refrain from spelling out which orifice is meant.
Israel hostage families have hailed the rescue of four captives as a “miraculous triumph”.
Noa Argamani, 25, Almog Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40, were rescued in a complex special daytime operation in the heart of Nuseirat in central Gaza on Saturday. All four were kidnapped by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival on Oct 7 last year.
“The heroic operation by the that freed and brought home Noa Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Andrey Kozlov, and Almog Meir Jan is a miraculous triumph,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement, adding it continued to call on the international community to exert pressure on Hamas to release other hostages.
The rescue is the largest such hostage recovery operation since the war with Hamas began in Gaza.
Two men, one noticeably older, are walking on a beach. They know they are being filmed, but because the camera is at a distance no one else in the vicinity seems aware.
As they walk a nun appears.
“Look,” the older man says to the younger. “Here comes a little nun, with a whole little . . .” The nun and a parade of children walk by, neither pausing nor taking note of the men.
“How do you do, sister?” the older man says. “How do you do?”
The nun and children keep walking.
The older man, Dwight D. Eisenhower, says to the younger man: “If the GIs of 20 years ago could have seen that, that would have been something, wouldn’t it?”
The younger man is Walter Cronkite. They are in Normandy, France, to film a 20th-anniversary commemoration of D-Day that will be broadcast on 22 networks in 19 countries. Cronkite is the top journalist at CBS News, but when the program airs he won’t receive top billing. The credits will proclaim that the reporters are “General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, with Walter Cronkite.” Eisenhower, as it is being broadcast, is more than three years removed from his second term as president.
The program is being filmed because, as the narrator puts it, “20 years ago, in this, our own time, the largest invasion in history assaulted Hitler’s European fortress.” On that day, “a battle was joined between the world of freedom and the world of tyranny.” The film, shot in black-and-white, is a remarkable artifact, seldom seen since that June 1964 broadcast.
Viewers hear a recording of Eisenhower’s message to D-Day troops: “Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force: You are about to embark on the great crusade toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”
Eisenhower now recalls how, at Southwick House on the coast of England, he decided the weather was sufficient to authorize the invasion. During those stormy days, it was a matter of making “the best of a bad bargain.”
Having made the call, “about 6 in the evening I went over to a field from which the American airborne started out. Now, I couldn’t go to all these fields, because there were many of them. But I did go into the 101st Division, and it was a very fine experience.” These were paratroopers.
“They were getting ready,” Eisenhower recalls. “And all camouflaged, their faces blackened and all this, and there they saw me. Of course they recognized me, and said, ‘Now, quit worrying, General. We’ll take care of this thing for you.’ ” A correspondent is said to have reported that when Eisenhower turned away from the paratroopers there was a tear in his eye.
[…]At the American cemetery nearby, the two men walk among the white crosses. Eisenhower says that on D-Day his son was graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. On that day, he says, the men buried beneath the crosses came here “to storm these beaches, for one purpose only: not to gain anything for ourselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest, but just to preserve freedom.”
His son, Eisenhower says, has had a good and full life. “But these young boys, so many of them, over whose graves we have been treading, looking at, wondering and contemplating about their sacrifices—they were cut off in their prime.
I’ve been wondering for a while whether Jeff Bezos deliberately kept the ever-more risible Washington Compost on as a pet newspaper because he believed the same BS as they are spouting and didn’t care how much money they lost, or whether he thought there was a business case for a “Pravda” that affirmd the views of upper-class wokelibs — after all, serving lots of different niche clienteles in its ‘long tail’ was always an integral part of the Amazon business model — or whether he’d lose patience and clean the paper up.
After losing half its readers and hundreds of millions of dollars, the Bezos-owned newspaper is radically shifting strategies. […] Matt Murray, former Editor in Chief of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), will replace Buzbee as Executive Editor until the 2024 U.S presidential election, after which Robert Winnett, Deputy Editor of The Telegraph Media Group, will take on the new role of Editor at The Washington Post, responsible for overseeing our core coverage areas, including politics, investigations, business, technology, sports and features.
One additional reform discussed in the article is the creation of a “third newsroom” where risible advocacy “journalists” like Taylor Lorenz can go do their worst:
The Washington Post also announced today its intention to launch a new division of the newsroom dedicated to better serving audiences who want to consume and pay for news differently from traditional offerings.
This third newsroom will be comprised of service and social media journalism and run separately from the core news operation. The aim is to give the millions of Americans – who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed –compelling, exciting and accurate news where they are and in the style that they want.
Well, how Abu Hunter’s puppeteer referred to it kind-of suggests one thing:
Today, President Biden put forward a clear, realistic and just plan to establish an immediate ceasefire and end the war in Gaza – a plan that ensures Israel’s security, returns hostages taken on October 7th to their families, increases aid into Gaza and relieves the suffering of…
On the other hand, statements from Netanyahu’s adviser Ophir Falk suggest that the deal was proposed/ agreed upon by the “War Triumvirate” of Netanyahu and former IDF Chiefs of Staff Benny Gantz and Gabi Eisenkot. Times of Israel refers to it as “a Biden proposal based on an Israeli outline”.
Tonight the broader War Cabinet is discussing the proposal. Ultranationalists SchmuckrichSmotrich and Itamar the KachsuckerBen-Gvir, who have threatened to bolt the coalition, are not part of the war cabinet. (Even Netanyahu didn’t want those two pyromaniacs in it.) But that does not mean they are the only ones with reservations about a deal that would end the war short of complete destruction of HamaSS.
Against that work the pressure from part of the public to (as one can hear chanted at the Israel Parade in NYC right now) “bring them home now” [i.e., the hostages, most of whom I sadly suspect are dead now — which is likely the “big secret” HamaSS is hiding in Rafiach]. But there is also a feeling that the offensive has reached the point of diminishing returns and that, besides, there is unfinished business on the Northern border instead — where about 200,000 people have been displaced from their homes by Hizballah rocket fire.
I do not envy those who are having to take this decision now. But while it is worth defying international pressure to push on for a realistic goal, it might be in Israel’s interest to let the other party scupper the deal.
I remember reading how then-defense minister Yigal Allon after the Six-Day War floated a proposal to return a large chunk of the West Bank to Jordan, while retaining the Jordan Valley for Israel. When asked how dare he give away Israel’s recent conquests like that, he is said to have answered: “Jews must be smart. I know not one Arab leader will agree to this.” In that latter regard, however, things have changed.
Meanwhile NYC Mayor Eric Adams at the Israel Day Parade:
And no, I’m not throwing away my Cream or Pink Floyd CDs. Unlike the wokebags, I can distinguish between somebody’s artistry and their political opinions. It’s not just Wagner (for whose music I never cared much regardless). Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a rabid antisemite — and yet, early in his career, wrote one of the greatest French novels of all time, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the Edge of the Night). One does not gainsay the other — nor does the latter excuse the former. (Though it literally saved Céline’s life, as a French Resistance plot to have him assassinated was nixed on the grounds that “one can’t just shoot the author of Voyage like a dog”.)
ADDENDUM 3: If this story is true, both Egypt and the Abu Hunter White House will have a lot to answer for before the True Judge. And the “democratic” party needs to be sent to the opposition for a generation.
ADDENDUM 4: With just a month to go before UK elections, Nigel Farage suddenly changes his mind and agrees to run on the Reform Party ticket. The Telegraph does not rule out that with ‘Brexit Nigel’ at the helm, Reform might actually outpace the Tories. [Amusingly, BTW, while US candidates ‘run’ for election, UK candidates ‘stand’ for election.]
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock welcomes the proposal that US President Joe Biden presented as an Israeli offer for a phased hostage-for-ceasefire deal with Hamas that would end the war in Gaza.
The Israeli offer “provides a glimpse of hope and a possible path out of the war’s deadlock,” Baerbock writes on X, formerly Twitter.
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen also expresses support for the proposal.
“I wholeheartedly agree with Biden that the latest proposal is a significant opportunity to move toward an end to war and civilian suffering in Gaza. This three-step approach is balanced and realistic. It now needs support from all parties,” the European Commission president says on social media.
British Foreign Minister David Cameron calls on Hamas to accept an Israeli hostage deal proposal laid out by US President Joe Biden this evening.
“With a new hostage agreement on the table, Hamas must accept this deal so we can see a stop in the fighting, the hostages released and returned to their families and a flood of humanitarian aid into Gaza,” he writes in a post on X.
He adds that an extended ceasefire can be “turned into a permanent peace” if all parties are “prepared to take the right steps.”
“Let’s seize this moment and bring this conflict to an end.”
The Israeli proposal was submitted on Thursday to Hamas via Qatar, Biden revealed, saying the offer would “bring all the hostages home, ensure Israel’s security, create a better day after in Gaza without Hamas in power, and set the stage for a political settlement that provides a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
Biden laid out the details of three phases, with particular emphasis on the first six-week phase, which was largely similar to the framework that was discussed in previous rounds of negotiations but included new conditions detailed by the president for the first time.
Several times during the speech in the State Dining Room of the White House, Biden put the ball in Hamas’s court, urging it to accept the type of ceasefire that its leaders and supporters have repeatedly called for.
While he described the latest proposal as one crafted by Israel, and thus presumably approved by the narrow war cabinet, he evidently recognized that this was not the final say from Jerusalem and urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s full government to stand behind the offer its negotiators submitted indirectly to Hamas.
[…] The first phase of the deal would include a complete ceasefire; the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all populated areas of Gaza; the release of a number of female, elderly and sick hostages by Hamas; and the release of hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners by Israel, Biden said, noting that American hostages would be among those released in this first stage.
Additionally, a number of bodies of deceased hostages would also be released, Biden said, revealing for the first time that Israel had moved from its previous demand not to accept any bodies during this “humanitarian” phase of the hostage deal.
During negotiations in recent weeks, Israel demanded the release of 33 female, elderly and wounded hostages who are still alive in Gaza. Hamas claimed that it did not have that many living hostages in those categories. Israel demanded that Hamas release living hostages from other categories if that were the case. But the terror group refused, saying it would only be willing to release additional bodies to make up for the discrepancy.
Further detailing the first phase, Biden said that Palestinians would be allowed to return to their homes and neighborhoods throughout Gaza, including in the north. Israel in earlier rounds of negotiations had pushed back on the unrestricted return of Palestinians, particularly to the north, fearing it would lead to Hamas regrouping. In the last round of indirect contacts, though, Israel reportedly let go of this demand as well.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 