Satyagraha at the Gaza Border

At least 16 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during mass demonstrations on the Gaza border.

Israeli government officials blamed Hamas for "provoking" a conflict and said its response was justified due to the risk of a mass attempt to breach the border.

That response is a problem. Let me explain why.

Non-combatants attempting to cross a border may be a crime, but it isn't a crime that can justify the use of lethal force. Lethal force can only be justified in cases where the target poses an imminent threat to life. Yet even under the Israeli narrative, threats of that scale were only sporadic (two of the dead Palestinians are alleged to have opened fire at IDF soldiers -- that probably warrants a lethal response -- but that leaves up to 14 who didn't). In a simplicitor case of attempted unlawful border crossing, the only lawful remedy is arrest and trial -- not bullets.

The main apologia we're seeing on that score is the claim that some (not all) of the shot Palestinians were members of terrorist groups. Even if that turns out to be the case (and that hasn't been independently corroborated yet), it'd be less of an absolution of the IDF than apologists might believe. Put aside the general thorniness of whether someone who's a member of a terrorist organization can be treated as a "combatant" even when partaking in civilian (in this case, protest) activities. I'm skeptical, but we can even stipulate that they could be. The bigger issue is that the lawfulness of the use of deadly force has to be justified based on what was actually known, or reasonably should have been known, by the shooter at the time -- and there's no evidence that the IDF soldiers were aware of the identities (let alone affiliations) of the Palestinians they were firing at in the moment. For example: If I fired into a crowd in a city street, and it just so happened that the person struck by my bullets was a member of a terrorist group, my action would still be unlawful because I had no way of knowing that fact when I opened fire. Likewise, the affiliations of those killed by IDF bullets could not in themselves legalize the decision to open fire -- that can only be justified based on specific threats to life that were reasonably perceived at the time (of which simply approaching the border is not one).

The other argument I can imagine being made is that -- in the context of a mass march on the border -- "arrest and trial" isn't a feasible response. It'd be impossible to arrest them all; the only viable means of deterrence may well be the use of lethal force. But this is a rather dangerous and hypocritical position -- the same in form as the argument that suicide bombings are justifiable because the power imbalance between Israel and Palestine means the latter can't win a traditional military conflict. The laws of war and humanitarian international law in that case say that if you can't win a conflict without suicide bombings, then you don't win the conflict (as much as it might seem unjust). They likewise say that if you can't stop non-violent attempts to cross a border without resorting to lethal force, then you don't stop the attempts (as much as that might seem unjust). In either case, the rule of law quite properly does not contain an "unless you'd lose" exception.

And this really gets to the rub of the problem. Were these protests a perfect exemplar of non-violence? Almost certainly not. But it seems equally clear that the Israeli government (and many of its defenders) wouldn't accept the legitimacy of protests of this nature even if they were. They view it as a form of cheating, precisely because it likely would succeed but-for the use of violent force that can't actually be justified. But that's an untenable position. A protest or resistance strategy doesn't become illicit on the grounds that it does work, nor because it forces Israelis to do things they'd otherwise not want to do or puts them in a position they'd otherwise not like to be in. That's not, and cannot be, the standard for what conduct by Palestinians is acceptable (it obviously isn't the standard for what Israeli actions are justifiable vis-a-vis Palestinian actors). Palestinians are allowed to come up with ways to put pressure on Israelis, and massed civil disobedience falls into that category.

Indeed, this is in many ways the power of resistance strategies of this sort -- they are difficult to counter without resorting to violence that both appears to be and juridically is excessive and unjustified under the circumstances. This is why civil rights leaders placed young activists in the path of Bull Connor's firehoses, this is the efficacy of Gandhi's satyagraha. What violence there was on the Palestinian side was a sterling example of "worse than a crime, it was a blunder," because it allows dust to fly up around this basic point. But while I don't want to as far as to say this violence was a "distraction", I do think it must not occupy the entirety or even the majority of our attention, because the Israeli response -- almost by its own admission -- wasn't keyed into the sort of violence that could warrant resort to lethal force, and because the Israeli government has no answer to what it would do if the protests really did meet the platonic ideal of satyagraha.

WPSA and Personal Troll Roundup

I presented my "White Jews: An Intersectional Approach" paper at the Western Political Science Association (intersectionality section) yesterday. It went quite well! I've now presented the paper to political theorists, to Jewish Studies folks, and to intersectionalists. If you haven't read it yet, I think it's pretty good.

But the prize for biggest professional accomplishment this week goes to the discovery that someone has created a website dedicated solely to informing the world that "David Schraub the UCLA Law Professor is a Disgusting Zionist Punk."  That's how you know you've made it. I may not have the highest quality trolls ("UCLA"?), but at least they're mine. (I can't say I recommend reading the entire screed on the website, but it's worth browsing for a few laughs).

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The African Muslim immigrant who saved a dozen Jews during the 2015 terrorist attack on a Paris kosher supermarket quietly arrived at the funeral of the elderly Holocaust survivor who was stabbed and burned to death in her apartment in an antisemitic hate crime. "I want to tell the Jews of France, you are not isolated. You are not abandoned. This is your country."

Jews and Muslims in America actually agree on quite a lot! And alignment increases alongside devoutness (more devout Jews and more devout Muslims share more in common), as well as contact (the more Jews and Muslims interact with each other, the more likely they are to perceive the two faiths as being similar in nature).

A former police officer turned criminal defense attorney discusses the Stephon Clark shooting, the way police are acculturated to fear (especially fear Black men), and the way poor instructions (e.g., "show me your hands" when your hands are holding a cellphone) can place innocent people in impossible situations.

Russian airline allegedly "deports" U.S. citizens of Indian descent back to India during a layover in Moscow. Great -- another reason for Trump to love the Russians.

Jewish News (UK) publishes an interview with Jeremy Corbyn. It's rare to see a conversation this long between two parties who so evidently loathe one another (it's really, really apparent in the interview).

Harvard Hillel is hosting a "liberation seder" focusing specifically on the ongoing injustices faced by Palestinians under occupation. The organizers worked closely with Jewish groups already affiliated with Hillel to ensure that it did not run afoul of the partnership guidelines. I'm all for this -- I have mixed feelings about the guidelines, but it's important to establish decisively that they will not be applied ad hoc to prohibit any criticism of Israel that's deemed too "sharp" in character. (Harvard Hillel has actually been consistently good on this issue -- refusing to allow the guidelines to metastasize to block, say, a program which has nothing to do with BDS because one participant backs the movement).

Sephardic Chief Rabbi in Israel may face criminal charges for likening a Black child born to White parents to a "monkey."

Two Standards of Opinion-Columnist Selection

Conservative writer Kevin Williamson, late of the National Review, has been hired by the Atlantic. This is proving controversial, possibly because he's conservative, or possibly because he compared a Black teenager to a primate and suggested women who have abortions should be hanged. Who can say?

In reality, the anxiety over Williamson's hiring is revealing a fissure in how we think opinion-column space should be distributed. We might think of two different rationales for why a magazine should publish a particular opinion columnist or column -- a reflective rationale and a legitimation rationale.

Under the reflective view, opinion columns should roughly mirror -- reflect -- the opinions that exist in the wider public around politics. We should have conservative columnists because many people are conservative, and it's important that the readership be exposed to that common view. Note that this makes no claim about whether this perspective is a good one, only that it's a common one.

Under the legitimation view, by contrast, opinion columnists should be chosen because the editors conclude that their views are affirmatively worth considering. This almost certainly falls short of requiring agreeing with the views -- I can think of many opinions I don't share but which I nonetheless think are worth wrestling with -- but it does represent some commentary on quality. Often (not always), the legitimation rationale for hiring a columnist cuts in the opposite direction from the reflective view -- as in the claim that so-and-so's perspective is one "you don't hear often" or is "novel and original" (though these are not in themselves reasons for publishing someone unless they're also paired with the ideas actually being decent. A string of gibberish isn't heard often in august editorial sections, but that doesn't mean it should be published).

One problem that's partially being illuminated by the Williamson hiring is that we're not sure what purpose we want opinion section editors to adopt. Some of the critics of Williamson's hiring note that, as a Never-Trump Republican, he's actually not reflective of conservative ideology as it's currently practiced -- wouldn't ideological diversity better be served by hiring an avowed Trump defender? But of course one can feel the anxiety in that sentence even as it's written -- do we really want the views of avid Trump supporters (Muslim ban, "shithole countries", and all) gracing more prominent media outlets? No, because we think it would legitimate them.

But if Williamson can't be defended as a reflective hire -- and a #NeverTrump Republican by definition isn't reflective (if even a fifth of American conservatives were of this ilk, Hillary Clinton wins in a landslide) -- he has to be justified based on legitimation. Yet it's really hard to justify him along that metric either. Certainly, the usual bromides about hearing "alternative points of view" won't do on their own. We need to know why "hang one quarter of American women" is the sort of keen social insight that is worthwhile on it's own right -- not simply as a "different" view but as an independently justifiable one.

So what do we want? The reflective case has one thing going for it, and that's that it would represent an honest portrayal of the state of conservative argumentation in America today -- which doesn't even carry Williamson's patina of #NeverTrump-ism. Yet going that route would have to mean consciously abandoning any legitimation justification for their publication -- and most editors don't really want to write that out of their job description. The fetishization of an objectively tiny branch of contemporary conservatism -- acting as if it is of more than trivial social influence -- is I think primarily grounded on how they let us deny what is before our eyes.

Seth Mandel suggests that one reason conservatives are skeptical of this reaction to Williamson is that -- even though some of the criticisms of him hold water in isolation -- it seems to happen to every conservative who joins a mainstream media outlet (cf. Bret Stephens). But the problem is that, given the state of conservatism today, an attempt to find a remotely representative yet not-terrible conservative voice will start to look like an error theory: it's possible in concept to imagine a representative conservative argument worthy of legitimation, but in practice none of them will qualify. Given where conservatism's center of gravity is right now, even if you step a standard deviation off the middle of the bell-curve, you're still likely to encounter at goodly chunk of the (again, wholly mainstream) conservative pathologies -- like "execute women" (Williamson) or "science is a hoax" (Stephens).  But there's no reason -- at least once we stop grading conservatives on a curve -- why "I don't like Trump, but global warming is made up" should be thought to count as a good argument.

The sad fact is, the mean, median, and modal conservative argument in American politics today is not some deeply Burkean reflection on the need for cautious change and considered ponderings about the continuing legacy of racism coupled with healthy respect for historical American traditions. It is deep-set, gutter-level racism and xenophobia of the sort which gleefully catapults a know-nothing slur-tossing conspiracy theorist to the Oval Office and continues to enthusiastically back him to this very day. That's not fringe, that's central. We might be able to justify printing such views on the grounds that it's important to be crystal clear about what American conservatives actually believe. But if that's the rationale, there's no reason why editors should try to gussie them up to make them seem more considered and legitimate than they are on their own merits.

Hard Left Jews Are Not "We Young Jews"

There's something just ... perfect about Annie Cohen writing a column in the Forward criticizing Jews for trying to hold Jeremy Corbyn accountable for his antisemitic associations under the title "Leave Jeremy Corbyn Alone. He’s The Leader We Young Jews Have Waited For."

Why?

Because last year, Annie Cohen ran for the presidency of the UK's Union of Jewish Students (as an avowedly non-Zionist candidate) -- a delightfully democratic mechanism for determining what, exactly, "young Jews" desire.

And she came in last place. With less than 9% of the vote.

Turns out, we have pretty compelling evidence that Annie Cohen doesn't have her finger on the pulse of what "young Jews" are waiting for.

Now, to be clear, Cohen has every right to dissent from the predominant view of her generation of Jews. She's absolutely entitled to say "while most young Jews believe A, I believe B, and here's why."

But what's troubling here is the pretension of being representative -- the claim of being right in the thick of a live controversy (if not on the leading side) as opposed to sitting way out on the marginal wings.

It's part of a disturbing trend among this sort of Jewish activist -- claiming to "speak for" communities that by all objective metrics want nothing to do with them. Ben Gladstone pointed out cases in the US, David Hirsh has written similarly about the function of groups like Jewish Voice for Labour in the UK. Groups and individuals whose modus operandi is to kick up dust to deny the existence of any "consensus" in the Jewish community around issues of antisemitism, to give third parties an excuse to simply pick the "side" that better matches their pre-existing priors.

The issue isn't of moral correctness, but simply of numbers. When Cohen writes vaguely that, "of those of us who voted Labour last year, many were Jewish," that might be technically true -- but only in the same way that "many" of Trump's voters were Muslim (Trump's level of Muslim support was in fact identical to Corbyn's rate of Jewish support). It's a classic example of how to tokenize with proportions. The sleight of hand isn't in acknowledging its existence of pro-Corbyn Jews, it's in implying that they're more than an obscure fringe that could satisfy any remotely robust obligation to "engage" with Jews as a group.

So this happens all the time. But normally it's obscured -- how can we really know who speaks for young Jews, or what politics they do and don't find appealing?

It is one of the many virtues of the UJS actually having democratic elections that here we get a crystalline case: where we know just how little support someone who claims to be representing "we young Jews" has among said "young Jews." That it didn't stop her from making the claim is testament to the hubris of the movement, and how little it cares whether its pretensions of authority map onto any reality.

I'm not sure which leader "young Jews" in the UK are waiting for. But they've been pretty emphatic in saying Annie Cohen isn't it.

Eighth Circuit: Go Ahead and Taze Him, Bro -- He's Mentally Ill

Today from the Eighth Circuit: "[N]o reasonable officer" would have concluded that tasering an unarmed, passive paranoid schizophrenic unsuspected of any criminal activity five times after a different police officer broke his arm because just sitting there "could have [been] interpreted" by the officer "as resistance" constitutes "excessive force."

As is always in cases like these, if this strikes you as obviously ludicrous, you really need to read up on your qualified immunity jurisprudence.

Incidentally, as the gun control debate shift in focus -- as it always tends to do -- towards "mental illness", it's worth reflecting on cases like this. The victim in this case probably did need mental health services -- his father wanted him to get evaluated after he stopped taking his medicine and began behaving erratically. His father almost certainly did not want his son to have his arm broken and be shocked into submission. But now that he's learned that's what happens when you try to get your son mental health services, he's presumably going to be far less likely to call in the future. Imagine that: Imagine that every time you had a medical emergency part of the calculus before calling 911 is asking "will the EMTs beat me up?" It isn't exactly a recipe for the ideal distribution of health care service.

The man in this case wasn't violent, but our cultural discourse increasingly is treating him like an inherent threat -- which means police officers (and all of us -- but officers are the ones empowered to use physical violence) will be more inclined to treat him as a threat, which means he's more vulnerable to having violence visited upon him when what he needed was medical assistance.

Police officers are often not trained to be front-line responders in cases like this. When we treat mental illness as a subcategory of crime control, though, this is a predictable result. I think we can have a conversation about the toxic interaction of mental illness and easily accessible firearms while recognizing that the stigmatization of those suffering from mental illness doesn't just obscure who's actually more at risk from whom; it in many ways produces these risks. And the result is that mentally ill individuals and their families -- when seeking the assistance they need to be healthy -- have to make a terrible risk calculation before they make the call.

Hold It: Now Jews Talk About Antisemitism Too Little?

I don't really want to join the pile-on that greeted Jonathan Weisman's NYT column wondering why, in his view, American Jews aren't calling out antisemitism enough. If you'd like, here's commentary from Allison Kaplan Sommer and Andrew Silow-Carroll, as well as a follow-up interview Weissman did with the Forward.

I've actually written some things which might be thought of as in alignment with Weisman's thesis, e.g., praising the ADL but calling out other Jewish groups for going soft on Steve Bannon (the terrible revelation that many Jewish orgs kept quiet specifically to avoid alienating conservative donors would also fit very well here). That said, I think the story of whether Jews are or aren't sufficiently calling out antisemitism in America and globally is a complicated story; I don't think the answer is pat

But for now, all I want to add is this: How can we write a column on this subject, where the thesis is "Jews talk too little about antisemitism", without even acknowledging the trope that Jews talk too much about antisemitism? Isn't that the more pervasive stereotype? Certainly, it isn't dead yet -- as I found out a few years ago at an academic conference:

The folks questioning me seemed to think that the debate we were having was whether anti-Semitism is raised too often or just the right amount. But I don't think anti-Semitism is talked about the right amount; I think we talk about far too infrequently.... For all we have convinced ourselves that it is easy to cry anti-Semitism, that Jews don't have qualms about doing so when it's false let alone when it's real, the reality is far different. Pretty much all the Jews I know, especially those left-of-center (which is to say, most Jews), are keenly aware of the costs of anti-Semitism talk -- that each time they try to raise the subject (no matter the context or validity), they are feeding into this narrative of "there they go again."

A good chunk of the comments responding to the (very good) Trayon White apology this past week also were in this vein -- "look at the Jews, crying antisemitism just because someone says the Rothschild's control the weather!"

Just like conservatives started on "colleges indoctrinate impressionable youths with obscene smut and Marxist propaganda" and skipped on over to "colleges shield snowflake youths from controversial ideas and difficult viewpoints" without seeming to miss a beat. somehow we've hopped from "Jews always talk about antisemitism" to "Jews never talk about antisemitism" without even acknowledging the shift.

As it happens, I think I more-or-less agree with Weisman in that I think Jews aren't particularly vocal about antisemitism and that we should be louder on the subject. But one of the more plausible explanations for that observation is that Jews have grown gun-shy on raising the issues for fear of supporting the omnipresent narrative that Jews are too vocal and too loud on the matter. I find it baffling -- bordering on bizarre -- that one could write a column (hopefully not a whole book!) on this subject and just skip over that stereotype entirely.

Employers Don't Make Passes ....

A new, very depressing study finds that women applying for jobs are penalized (compared to men) for getting good grades in college. Basically, employers value competence in men but likability in women, and so they reward men for getting better grades (associated with competence) while viewing high-achieving women with skepticism (assuming they're less likable). The effect is strongest among women majoring math, because of course it is.

Ugh, ugh, and ugh.

Quote of the Day: Nozick on a REAL "Powerful Argument"

No joke, I had remembered Nozick said something like this but couldn't remember the exact quote -- then spent forever searching for it fruitlessly before someone completely randomly posted it on twitter today.

The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premises you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief.

Though philosophy is carried on as a coercive activity, the penalty philosophers wield is, after all, rather weak. If the other person is willing to bear the label of "irrational" or "having the worse arguments," he can skip away happily maintaining his previous belief. He will be trailed, of course, by the philosopher furiously hurling philosophical imprecations: "What do you mean, you're willing to be irrational? You shouldn't be irrational because..." And although the philosopher is embarrassed by his inability to complete this sentence in a noncircular fasion - he can only produce reasons for accepting reasons - still, he is unwilling to let his adversary go.

Wouldn't it be better if philosophical arguments left the person no possible answer at all, reducing him to impotent silence? Even then, he might sit there silently, smiling, Buddhalike. Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies. How's that for a powerful argument. Yet, as with other physical threats ("your money or your life"), he can choose defiance. A "perfect" philosophical argument would leave no choice.

For the record, it's from Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1981), p. 4.

"I'm in a Book -- No, Not Because of That!" Roundup

The political theory class moves onto its feminism unit. I thought about recommending my students read Kate Manne's fantastic book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny -- after all, I'm in it! Upon reflection, telling my students that I'm "in" a book about misogyny may be a bad idea unless I provide considerably more context about the nature of my inclusion (I was discussant when she presented a chapter of the book at a Berkeley workshop; she was also generous enough to cite to my "Playing with Cards" article).

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New Voices (a periodical promoting young Jewish writers) has a piece on Mizrahi Jews trying to find space for their stories in generally-Ashkenazi-dominated campus Jewish spaces.

Study: Middle School students (of all races) prefer teachers of color. Suggestive that implicit biases aren't as prevalent among tweens and young teens? Or that teachers of color who manage to overcome racialized barriers and mistrust to reach and keep their positions are particularly talented?

Oregon judge suspended after, among other things, putting up a picture of Hitler in his courthouse's "Hall of Heroes" (he also refused to marry same-sex couples, tried to use his judicial status to intimidate a youth soccer referee, and allowed a felon whose case he was adjudicating to handle a firearm in his presence).

BDS activists in Spain are suing an anti-BDS watchdog for "intimidation" stemming from the latter's successful legal efforts to overturn BDS ordinances passed in various Spanish municipalities. A judge is allowing the lawsuit to proceed. While there's something unnerving about a suit claiming that the counterparty winning discrimination suits constitutes a form of "discrimination", I try not to jump to conclusions about the meaning of pre-trial rulings in foreign legal cultures, because I have no idea what the relevant legal standards of review are in (in this case) Spain. So grain of salt.

Trump Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo is deeply tied to anti-Muslim bigots. There's a special place in hypocrisy hell for those in the Jewish community who went all-in on Tamika Mallory for her ties to Louis Farrakhan last week who back Pompeo this week (RJC, looking at you).

Professors in the Geography Department at the University of British Columbia successfully pressure their own students to cancel a gala that would've been held at the campus Hillel space. The gala would not (to my knowledge) have been Israel (or Jewish-related). Hey, I remember when we went through this at Brown!

Things People Blame the Jews For, Part XLIV/Rate That Apology, Part 8: DC Weather Edition

It's another two-fer!

Yesterday, two separate people texted me asking if I'd see the D.C. Councilman, Trayon White Sr., who blamed the Rothschild's for manipulating the weather in Washington and causing recent snowstorms. And I'm like -- dammit, I just wanted to enjoy my weekend. But alas:

“Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation,” he says. “And D.C. keep talking about, ‘We a resilient city.’ And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.” 

Okay, first of all, as a long-time resident of the DC metro area, I can attest that I don't care one bit about snowfall -- the weather pattern that's worth developing a conspiracy over is our 95 degree/9000% humidity summers. That's hell on earth. Second, I don't think we've had a weather-related entry in this series since Jews created the tsunami that hit the Fukushima reactor in Japan, so way to give us a throw-back!

Anyway, because I'm old and slow and can't respond to things how I used to, I wasn't able to blog on this until after Councilman White issued his apology.



I actually really like this one. Let me explain why.

The first reason I like it is based on something perhaps not evident in the four corners of the apology itself, but which I've confirmed from other sources: White took it upon himself to reach out to Jews United for Justice (a DC-area Jewish group) to ask them what he had done wrong and how he should make amends. Now, just to be clear, this is not an "I-have-Jewish-friends" defense (that's bad). It wasn't even "after Jews reached out to me, I realized I was wrong" (better). It's "after realizing I hurt them, I took it upon myself to take the initiative and reach out to Jews to figure out what I should do better" (best).

But the bigger reason I like it is that it commits to the idea that White needs to learn. Yes, we can roll our eyes at the prospect that someone is utterly unaware of how "Rothschild" stands in for antisemitic conspiracies. But even if they somehow managed to be ignorant on the subject, that's no excuse unless it's coupled with a recognition that one clearly needs to learn more if one is to be a good ally to Jews. And that's what this apology does quite well. It speaks of how JUFJ is "helping me to understand," and that he is "committed to figuring out ways [to] continue to be allies with them." It doesn't claim that he's already exemplary on the subject, and that the video was some inexplicable blurt that shouldn't sully an otherwise perfect record. The contrast to, say, the Harvard Law Student who gave a decent apology for allegedly inadvertent antisemitism but didn't indicate that he thought he had more to learn on the subject is striking, and cuts strongly in White's favor.

One thing that it is often hard to remember for for those of us committed to fighting antisemitism is that our end-goal isn't to fight antisemitism, it's to beat it. And one corollary of that goal, then, is that any campaign against antisemitism worth its salt has to account for -- indeed, actively desire -- the possibility that some people who said or believe genuinely antisemitic things will, at some later date, change their minds. Put another way, we have to have strategies through which, when encountering antisemitism, we actually change minds. Naz Shah is a great example of how much power can emerge when this works.

I'm not saying that Councilor White has earned his stripes yet. That remains to be seen based on what he does going forward; one apology (even a genuine one) issued in the moment will not and should not suffice.

But it's a start. And as a start, it's a pretty good.

Grade: 9/10.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XLIII: Uber Turkey

Where ever Uber goes, so go complaints from the local Taxi industry. I have some sympathy -- really, I do. Uber isn't exactly known for playing by the rules, and it seems reasonable enough to demand that Uber face the same regulations as taxis generally (whether that entails leveling regulations up or down, I'm agnostic to).

But regardless of how you feel about Uber, nobody should be surprised about who's being blamed for its disruptive effect (in Turkey, at least).

The president of the Chamber of Istanbul Taxi Businesses has accused Uber of being a targeted attack on his industry carried out by what he called “the Jewish lobby”, Turkish Jewish newspaper Şalom said . 

“The global thieving Jewish lobby is carrying out commercial taxi piracy in Turkey,” Eyüp Aksu told a crowd of anti-Uber protesters outside an Istanbul courthouse.

He said the Turkish media were joining in, attacking taxi drivers with biased articles.

For the record, "global thieving Jewish lobby" is offensive and inaccurate. We prefer the term "Guild of Jewish Thieves," which is much cooler.

Anyway, I use Lyft, so presumably I'm exempt from blame here? (Obviously I'm kidding -- the whole point of this series is that there's no escape from blame for anything).

Post- (and Pre-)National Roundup

No, this isn't about Tillerson (or Goldstein, or McEntee ... goodness, this was a hell of a morning). I delivered the lecture on Nationalism in our Political Theory class today -- which went fine, except that I also have to teach a section on Nationalism tomorrow and now I've used up all my knowledge on the subject. Time for many rounds of my old standbys -- "say more on that", "well, what do you think?", and of course "break off into small groups to discuss."

Anyway, roundup time!

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Advances in turbine technology are making wind power a real player in electricity market -- and not grading on the "renewable energy" curve either.

A powerful story on a UC-Berkeley student living in an unheated trailer with no sewage hookup .... that he's about to be evicted from. This is an extreme story, but it gets to why I get very defensive when Berkeley students are attacked in the media as supposedly epitomizing careless, unserious millennial frivolity. Many of the students here are coming from places and backgrounds where they're well aware of what it means to be attending UC-Berkeley, and are behaving accordingly under conditions that God willing I'll never come close to. When they're lazily stereotyped as aimless hippie stoners, it disrespects them, their work ethic, their talent, and their perseverance.

U. Penn. Law Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff on his colleague, Amy Wax, whom he persuasively argues has converted into the academic equivalent of an Ann Coulter provocateur. This passage is also generally applicable:

What academic freedom does not provide, however, is a free pass entitling faculty who say inflammatory things to escape denunciation or to engage in toxic behavior without consequence. Invoking academic freedom to delegitimize sharp criticism or to claim impunity for improper conduct is a misuse of that principle.

Many people have seen Adam Serwer's excellent commentary on Tamika Mallory's relationship with Louis Farrakhan (a sterling example, incidentally, of how to explain the NoI's appeal to certain segments of the Black community without washing away it's hideously bigoted track record), but Stacey Aviva Flint is another good addition to the list of Black Jews whose opinions you should read on this matter.

Gretchen Rachel Hammond -- the half-Indian Jewish transwoman best known for breaking the story of the Chicago Dyke March expelling Jewish marchers and then being fired from her own newspaper for covering the story -- has a powerful piece detailing her experience and her "divorce" from the trans community in its wake. It is a poignant, cutting, and often very sad piece -- not the least because, for all her fulminations against "intersectionality", the concept in its original manifestation would be very well suited to articulating the sort of marginalization and exclusion Hammond details (one would not be off the mark in summarizing Hammond's experience as one of being "split at the root" -- Adrienne Rich's felicitous phrase which has often been approvingly quoted in the intersectionalist literature).

Trump's Mideast Peace Plan is Going To Be YUGE!

The Trump administration is getting ready to announce its big Mideast Peace Plan. Details are sparse, but we already know a few things which won't be included:

According to the report, the officials said the plan does not have a set of guiding principles.

Alright.

Also, they said, the plan also does not prescribe whether the outcome should be one states or two states, nor does it call a “fair and just solution” for Palestinian refugees.

Hmm.

The White House must now figure out how to present the plan so that it is not immediately rejected by the Palestinians.

I'll bet.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XLII: Russian Meddling in American Elections

Vladimir Putin wants you to know that it might not be (ethnic) Russians behind the attempts to meddle in the U.S. elections. It might have been Ukrainians. Or Tatars.

Or Jews.

Of course Jews.

And of course, people have thoughts on Putin suggesting maybe all this election interference really traces back to the Jews.

There's a bad piece by David Klion trying to defend Putin from charges of antisemitism, which asks why Putin "singled out" Jews alongside Ukrainians and Tatars (the latter two are maybe easy to explain -- they're the two largest ethnic minorities in Russia. Jews are ... not in third place), answers "it's complicated", and then seems to entirely forget to explain what's "complicated" about it in favor of a stirring ode to the advances Jews have made since the era of the Tsars and a list of all of Putin's good Jewish friends.

There's a better piece by Anshel Pfeffer, which seeks to absolve Putin of personal antisemitism while noting that he has long been willing to tolerate it as a useful vector for stirring up anti-Western resentment.

And then there's the best piece by Talia Lavin, who agrees with Pfeffer that Putin generally "launders" antisemitism through allies or (in this case) trolling, but observes that this doesn't actually provide absolution for promoting antisemitism.

Read them in order, and feel yourself getting smarter.

One Great Argument Against Anti-BDS Laws? Who Enforces Them

In the abstract, there are solid arguments for or against anti-BDS laws (so long as they're written narrowly and carefully to avoid impinging on constitutional free speech rights).

In practice, anti-BDS laws are enforced by state bureaucrats. And state bureaucrats -- well, state bureaucrats are often the worst.

Hence, putting said bureaucrats in a position to embarrass the anti-BDS cause with boneheaded applications that create PR disasters -- as we've seen in Texas, Kansas, and most recently Arizona State University -- maybe isn't the best tactical move for people who oppose BDS.

Read the full argument in my new column for the Forward.

Three Black Jews on the Women's March and Farrakhan

All three of these columns are excellent. I'm just linking to them here so they're in a convenient spot (and hopefully give them a bit more attention -- not just for the present controversy but as important voices generally in the Jewish community).

Nylah Burton

Ben Faulding

Elad Nehorai [UPDATE: While Elad is a JOC, he isn't Black. My bad. And while that shouldn't stop you from reading his piece, feel free to swap in Adam Serwer or Stacey Aviva Flint].

Give them all a read.

Danny Davis' Primary Opponent Tackles His Farrakhan Love

Many of you are no doubt aware of the recent controversy where a Women's March leader was cozying up to Louis Farrakhan (you can read my take on it here in Haaretz, or a complimenting one I wrote on this blog). After a lot of foot-dragging, the Women's March leadership has finally issued a statement that says Farrakhan's antisemitism, homophobia, and transphobia are not aligned with their values. Does it suffice? This thread gives a taste of my and others' reactions.

But sadly, the Women's March isn't the only progressive entity that just got caught playing footsie with Farrakhan.

Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL) told the Daily Caller (sidenote: who on his staff was dumb enough to let him speak to the Daily Caller?) that Farrakhan was an "outstanding human being", then said he was misquoted, then re-reversed course to say "I don’t have no problems with Farrakhan ... The world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question."

Davis actually has a Democratic primary challenger this year in Anthony Clark, and I guess it's not surprising that he'd be the main political figure to jump on this (Davis' colleagues in the Democratic caucus have kept quiet). But while beating an ousting an entrenched incumbent is always hard, it's revealing that Clark thinks that snuggling up to Farrakhan is a valid attack point in a Democratic primary in a plurality-Black district.

(Both Clark and Davis sit on the left-edge of the Democratic Party; Clark's primary pitch is that Davis has become too enmeshed in the establishment and has stopped actually working for the progressive reforms he claims to support).

UPDATE: J Street, which had previously endorsed Davis, is reaching out to his office for comment and may "reconsider" its endorsement.

On the Women's March and Farrakhan

A Women's March leader, Tamika Mallory, attended a speech by Louis Farrakhan, notorious for antisemitic bigotry (which manifested itself in the speech). When called out on it, Mallory doubled-down with a remark ("If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader!") that was less of a antisemitic dogwhistle than a bullhorn.

For the most part, the response of the other Women's March leaders has been to defiantly have her back (here's a particularly terrible intercession from Linda Sarsour). At the same time, there's been virtually no public justification as to why the rather obvious antisemitism of Farrakhan should be excused. There's been no effort to defend the things he says about Jews, no attempt to argue that his perspective on Jews is in fact in bounds.

This oddity -- defiant refusal to concede any ground on the antisemitism count, coupled with no attempt to actually rationalize the antisemitic content -- demands explanation. My hypothesis is this:

Leftists don't like thinking about antisemitism in their own ranks. At the same time, they'd never admit this is so. Fortunately, most antisemitism controversies that implicate the left relate to Israel in some fashion, and so they can respond with their favorite chestnut: "criticism of Israel isn't antisemitic." On face, this response assures the audience that they do care about antisemitism (the "real" antisemitism), but that the case at hand doesn't count as such (that it never seems to count as such is suspicious in its own right. But leave that aside.).

But Farrakhan's antisemitism isn't really tied to Israel. Which means that the stand-by response won't work. And these leftists are left flummoxed, because they don't really have another thought on antisemitism beyond "criticism of Israel isn't." Forced into a situation where it seems necessary to say something else, they find themselves at a loss. Suddenly, they can't play their get-out-of-talking-about-antisemitism-free card.

And this is revealing. If the problem really was Israel, the Farrakhan case shouldn't present any difficulty. But if the problem is that these leftists just don't want to have to reckon with antisemitism in their community (and Israel is a convenient but ultimately epiphenomenal factor), then Farrakhan presents a huge problem.

We're getting an excellent peek into who falls into which category here.

#NeverAgain Means Constantly Packing Enough Firepower To Bring Down a Tank

Some of you have no doubt seen Rep. Don Young (R-AK)'s suggestion that the Holocaust wouldn't have happened had the Jews been armed.

On twitter, responding to a similar claim, I observed that the Warsaw Uprising (where some Jews did have guns) belies the notion that Jews simply having guns would have meaningfully obstructed the Nazi genocidal machine. To which the reply was -- well, clearly they didn't have enough guns. Which, given that the NRA's response to any gun violence is "there should have been more good guys with guns in the room", isn't that surprising.

Now, in a sense it is right to say that the reason the Warsaw Uprising failed is that the Jews didn't have enough firepower -- that is, enough firepower to singlehandedly defeat a modern state's war apparatus. But I think we should hone in on the precise claim being made here. When the NRA says "we need an armed populace to defend ourselves from potentially genocidal government", it can't be talking about a couple people with handguns in their house or even some AR-15s. The only way this logic works is if they think every social group in America should have at its disposal enough advanced weaponry to take out a tank battalion along with its air support.

That power is, should, and must be vested in states -- which means there is no alternative response to the risk of (domestic) state violence and oppression other than inculcating that state with liberal and rule-of-law values so that it can both have the capacity to defend itself against external threats while not using those capacities to oppress others. This is a far more plausible lesson to draw from the Holocaust compared to a world where we hand out Stingers and Hellfire Missiles as Bar Mitzvah presents.

Today in Middle Eastern Jewry Roundup

For whatever reason, an outsized number of interesting stories about Middle Eastern Jews are currently occupying my browser. I don't have time to write on them individually, so ... roundup!

* * *

A formerly-Islamist, now secular Tunisian political party places a Jewish candidate at the top of its list.

Interesting story of an Iranian Jew-by-choice, currently seeking legal status in America.

Libyan Jews worry that new American agreement restricting importation of ancient artifacts from that country will -- in effect -- ratify the expropriation of their property. This, incidentally, is a great example of "why intersectionality needs to include the Mizrahi case."

A step away from Middle Eastern Jews, but still germane: an interview with the Palestinian Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace.

One Good Essay on "Immigrants Get the Job Done"

American Olympian Mirai Nagasu landed a triple axel at the Olympics. That's a big deal (apparently -- I don't really know a lot about figure skating).

New York Times columnist Bari Weiss reacted to the occasion by tweeting out: "Immigrants: They get the job done."

Problem: Nagasu isn't an immigrant. She was born in the United States.

Weiss suggested that "poetic license" was in order, as Nagasu's parents were immigrants. She also questioned what the big deal was.

The answer was that Weiss -- perhaps inadvertently -- stepped on the trope of Asian-Americans as "perpetual foreigners": never really American, always forced to answer the question "no, where are you really from."

From this conversation, internet hell predictably came down (Nagasu's own eventual statement was quite diplomatic. But between the fact that a huge chunk of the internet had already decided that even slightest showing of offense proved one was a deranged threat to American freedom as we know, and the fact that Nagasu almost certainly had no interest in wading into any sort of political controversy while she's, you know, focused on being an Olympian, I think it's easy to overread it).

The vast majority of the comments on l'affaire Weiss were stupid. This essay by Mari Uyehara is a welcome exception. I encourage you to read it.

As for me, my one contribution to the conversation was simple: Had Weiss simply acknowledged that the initial tweet was sloppy and let things lie, there would have been no storm. What made it a big deal was Weiss (and later, her defenders) continually doubling-down on the notion that no sane person could have possibly took exception to the tweet, that it was wholly innocuous, and that anyone who raised any questions about it whatsoever embodies trigger-happy internet "call out culture" that's toxic to free expression and the open discussion of ideas.

In a sense, it was a vindication of an oft-misunderstood maxim of "SJW" culture, which is that if an outgroup says you've done something that wounded them, take a moment to listen. Breathe, keep a level head, and assume that they're saying it not because of some gratuitous desire to take offense, but because there's at least some there there. Had that simple advice been taken, had Weiss simply said "I meant to honor Nagasu's immigrant parents, but I see how the tweet could be construed differently. I'll take it down," a lot of pain and a lot of frankly idiotic commentary could have been avoided.

The Socialist Revolution Will Be Led By the Billionaire Financiers

One of the nice things about antisemitic conspiracy theories encompassing everything (even mutually contradictory things) is that one can blame the Jews for anything.

One of the weirder things about antisemitic conspiracy theories encompassing everything, even mutually contradictory things is that one can somehow manage to knit them all together in a single person.

So it is that NRA chieftain Wayne LaPierre informs a pulsing CPAC crowd that socialism is coming on the backs of ... George Soros. And Michael Bloomberg. And Tom Steyer. (Also, they're all backed by the ghost of Saul Alinsky -- because let's throw in another Jew for good measure).

Soros, as you may recall, grew up under Communist oppression and has devoted a substantial portion of his life to bringing market values to former Eastern bloc states. Bloomberg is perhaps America's most prominent independent political figure, apparently holding down the "Democrats are too liberal but socialism sounds great!" political bloc. Steyer is a run-of-the-mill Democratic Party donor. Each of them made their wealth in ways that are, shall we say, not typically part of the socialist revolutionary gameplan. And none of them have shown the slightest interest in anything but bog-standard liberal (or in Bloomberg's case, Wall Street centrist) political engagement.

No matter. It makes perfect sense to say the billionaires are the heralds of the socialist revolution ... if said billionaires are Jews. That's the logic here. One doesn't need a dogwhistle if one has a bullhorn.

Kucinich: Because Fervent Hatred of Anyone Not Reviled By Mainstream Democrats is its Own Rationale

There are some people who want the Democratic Party to be more progressive. This is generally a good thing. These are the people who, for example, rather quickly ensured that the DNC chieftain race quickly coalesced around two staunchly progressive candidates in Tom Perez and Keith Ellison.

There are some people who want the Democratic Party to simply lash out in a blind fury against "the establishment". These are the people who, for example, went far beyond having a preference between Perez and Ellison and crossed into a groundless and seemingly random fervor insisting that Tom Perez was unacceptably right-wing because something-something-most-progressive-Labor-Secretary-in-recent-memory-is-neoliberal, and swore to dynamite the entire Democratic Party if he won (by the way, Democrats just picked up their 37th special election seat-flip since Trump was elected after swinging a Kentucky state House seat 86 points from its 2016 presidential margin).

The people who endorse Dennis Kucinich -- Dennis Kucinich!, shilling for Assad and Putin when he isn't playing the "Trump is speaking to real American outrage" card* -- over Richard Cordray for the Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nomination are definitively in the latter category.

As always, the question isn't whether Cordray is perfect (though one expects the Jill Stein bait-and-switch -- laboring to make a mountain out of a molehill's worth of liberal heresy when the candidate is "establishment" while resolutely ignoring all the ways the "insurgent" is ideologically terrible in her own right -- is coming). But there's very little reason why a Elizabeth Warren-esque former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should be so unacceptable as to provoke a turn to a cartoon character like Kucinich (in this way, it's far worse than Perez/Ellison, as at least there the alternative candidate was perfectly fine in his own right). The motive rather seems to be just an undirected form of contrariness towards anyone who establishment Democrats are content with -- if they like him, then he must be unacceptable for ... reasons (probably something to do with neoliberalism). But that's not actually a way of building a progressive movement.

Loomis is too generous in saying it's a problem of progressives not being "smart" (though it is profoundly stupid). Independent of it being bad tactics, it's also bad on the level of ideals. It's difficult to know what to do with that sort of blind self-destructiveness (again, shades of the Stein voters who answered the question "why should I vote for the lesser of two evils" by electing to vote for the middle of three). The best thing that can be said about it is that so far, it hasn't actually had that much influence on actual Democratic voting patterns (which is more than can be said about the Republican Party, which has been entirely consumed by a pure id of reactionary anti-"establishment" ressentiment).

* Researching this post, I rediscovered that Kucinich was one of 12 Democrats to vote against the House resolution of "disapproval" after Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) famously exclaimed "you lie!" in the middle of President Obama's State of the Union. So add that to the list.

Ranking Winter Olympic Sports

I love the Olympics -- Summer and Winter. A few of my favorite activities include rooting for Winter Olympians from countries which have no snow, rooting for formerly colonized nations to defeat their colonial overlords, and being a sucker for any good personal drama story.

Also, the some of the events are interesting. Here's the full ranking:

Short Track Speed Skating

Demolition derby on ice. This is a sport I'd totally watch off-season. I haven't gotten the chance to watch the mass start version yet, but it seems particularly ludicrously dangerous and therefore extra delightful. It makes me wish that Olympic sprinting didn't have lanes. A+

Snowboard/Skiing Cross

If you're the sort of person who thinks "NASCAR would be better if they had speed bumps and jumps" (also: hurtling downhill) -- this is for you. Another event with great demolition derby character. But what I really want is for downhill ice cross skating to make it to the Olympics. That's a sport where at the bottom everyone just looks grateful that they've survived the evening. A

Long Track Speed Skating

Like middle-distance running, but more interesting because it's on blades. Something about watching the skaters criss-cross lanes is deeply hypnotic. A-

Slopestyle

The best of the "trick" events, mostly because it most closely approximates a Tony Hawk game (or, to be technical, a Cool Boarders game). I hate to say it, as a die-hard skier, but the snowboard version is more interesting. B+

Skeleton

"Who's ready for death sledding!" We can't call it that. Okay, we'll call it "skeleton." Seriously, if the Summer Olympics is about pitting the world's greatest athletes against each other in head-to-head competition, the Winter Olympics seems to be about finding ever-more creative ways to get Europeans to kill themselves. B+

Biathlon

Nothing will ever top Robin Williams referring to this sport as "Norwegian Drive-by". But of all the long-distance sports -- Winter or Summer -- this one's the best. Not just because it involves gunfire, but because the shooting segments actually allow the race to get shaken up on a dime, adding interest and variety to what otherwise would (literally) be a marathon. B

Luge

I love the camera shots on Luge, which last for approximately a quarter of a second on each turn as an insane German hurtles ball-first down an ice chute (another steal from Robin Williams). B

Figure Skating (individual and pairs)

The marquee event of the Winter Games. It's not that I dislike it, but it's virtually impossible for me to tell the difference between the tricks, so I'm left rooting for falls just to create some visual distance between the competitors. I do appreciate that the area the skaters sit in to wait for scores is officially called the "kiss and cry" area (seriously: I saw it on an official's nametag). B

Ice Hockey

The only sport I can watch regularly outside of the Olympics, which diminishes its Olympic appeal somewhat. Its ranking would shoot way up if the women's game was full-check (it looks like they're using every fiber of self-restraint to avoid laying each other out for sixty consecutive minutes). B

Aerials/Big Air

"Ski jumping? That's for pussies. Make them do a few tricks while they're in the air and get back to me." This is the only trick event where I think skiing does better than snowboarding. B

Bobsled

The ranking of Skeleton, Luge, and Bobsled depends heavily on what you prioritize. In terms of raw speed, Bobsled is fastest, then Luge, then Skeleton. But in terms of reckless disregard for one's personal safety, it goes Skeleton, then Luge, then Bobsled. You can obviously see what my preferences are. B-

Curling

The breakout hit of Sochi now feels a little overcooked in Pyeongchang. It's perfectly entertaining, and it's the only Olympic sport I could even vaguely conceive of competing in, but it takes a long time to complete and there are apparently 142 games scheduled over the course of the Olympic Games, which take up valuable TV time that could be used for speed skating. B-

Alpine Skiing

As a skier, I should like this, but once again I can't really tell what makes someone fast or slow so there's not a lot to watch here. Now mass start alpine skiing -- that I could get behind. C+

Halfpipe

The marquee snowboard event (and generally-forgotten skiing event) is also the worst of the lot. To the naked eye, at least, it has less speed, less air, and less interesting tricks. C+

Moguls

All Olympic sports are physically punishing, but moguls is the only one I can't actually watch without feeling my knees twitch in sympathetic pain. As my brother observed: "you'll never see a 30-year old Moguls skier." C+

Ski Jump

It says a lot about the reckless disregard for human safety that characterizes the Winter Olympics that you can take a sport where competitors jump the length of a football field from 35 stories in the air and I can be like "but it's kinda boring?"  C

Nordic (Cross-Country) Skiing

The same problem as distance running, or cycling. Not enough happens for too long. More than any other sport in the games though, competitors earn their "collapse in exhaustion at the finish line" moment. C-

Ice Dancing

"Let's start with figure skating, and then remove all of the most interesting parts of it and ensure that at least one competitor always stays firmly planted on the ground, where it's safe." Why? D

Conservatives No Longer Can Conceive of Non-Partisan Motives, Part II

The Mueller investigation is not going to turn out well for the Trump administration.

One would think that's uncontroversial, given that it's already secured guilty pleas from several Trump associates and indictments against several more. "How bad" is an open question, but "bad" surely isn't.

In the wake of indictments against several Russian nationals for interfering in Election 2016, Democratic Senator Bob Casey (PA) suggested that Mueller not release any final report on his investigation immediately before the 2018 midterms.

Casey said he couldn't make any assumptions about where the Mueller investigation is going in light of indictments issued on Friday. But he added that he would recommend Mueller not release a report on his findings near the midterms, when it would distract from elections or cause people to question the election's integrity.

One can agree with this analysis or disagree. The case for disagreement is that the Russia scandal is a valid and important issue that voters should have full information on when making their choice come 2018. The case for agreement is that Russian interference has already badly frayed our collective faith in the integrity of our democratic system and a last-minute FBI report would only further their goal of sowing chaos.

But Glenn Reynolds reacted to the news somewhat differently:

Weird I thought it was going to be bad for the GOP. https://t.co/Qf7d7kSvaa

— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) February 18, 2018

Oy.

But seriously -- remember last year when (talking about the Russia investigation!) I wrote that conservatives can no longer conceive of non-partisan motives? Great example right here. The only possible motivation of anyone talking about the FBI probe into Russian interference in our elections is a partisan one. Hence, if a Democrat -- one in no position to know what Mueller will end up finding, but one who (like the rest of us) already see it ensnaring Trump associates -- says that he doesn't want a bombshell release right before the election, the only possible motive is ... the report will somehow hurt Democrats. The proffered rationale -- "bombshell revelations of foreign electoral interference right before an election where voters are already mistrustful of each other and on edge is a bad idea" -- doesn't even register. It's like the very concept of being a good civic citizen is just beyond comprehension.

Adrien Broner Arrested On Groping Charges

Adrien Broner, once heralded as boxing next big thing but never living up to the moniker, has been arrested after a woman accused him of groping her at an Atlanta mall.

Responding to the charge, the ever-classy Broner wrote on social media: "Just cause I voted for trump don't mean I'm going around grabbing pussies."

Yeah, I'm voting that he did it. Not just because of Broner's prior brushes with the law (though thus far he's escaped having any of his cases go to trial), and not just because he's a notorious asshole (though even in boxing he stands out), and not just because he voted for Trump (of course he did; also, moths to the flame much?). But the sort of person who'd respond to a sexual misconduct allegation with a flip "Just cause I voted for trump don't mean I'm going around grabbing pussies" is exactly the sort of person whom I totally believe would go around "grabbing pussies."

Thankfully, unlike late-stage Floyd Mayweather, who boxing fans like myself had to pay attention to even as he was racking up domestic violence cases of his own because he was the best fighter in the world, Adrien Broner is basically irrelevant at the top echelons of boxing now. So if this ends up torpedoing his next fight (a scheduled scrap with Omar Figueroa Jr.), we won't be missing much.

Nothing Went On At Fresno State

Last year, I blogged about an emergent controversy at Fresno State, where a faculty member alleged that a Middle East Studies search was canceled due to external "Zionist" pressure. Her claims quickly got substantial attention amongst the usual suspects -- JVP put together a condemnatory letter that quickly amassed 500 signatures -- but there was a crucial component to the case that remained missing.

Evidence.

Like, any of it.

The Fresno State administration consistently maintained that the search was suspended due to procedural problems; reporters who contacted the local Jewish community found nobody who had even heard of the search, let alone organized against it. Against that, those crying Zionist sabotage were left stringing together a few stray (and unattributed) comments allegedly made by some skeptical faculty members expressing concern.

So at the end of the day, was there any "there" there?

Fortunately, Northwestern University Law Professor Steve Lubet took the time to made and wade through a FOIA request for the relevant records that could answer that question. And it turns out that the University's denials were completely, absolutely, and 100% justified. The search was canceled because the finalists were all social scientists, but the position was going to be housed in a humanities department which didn't want to add faculty from outside its discipline. It was that mismatch which caused the search to be delayed a year (presumably so the parameters of the position could be realigned with the areas of specialization of the most interested candidates). Not a single document revealed any contact, let alone "pressure", from Zionist or Israel-advocacy organizations -- leading the President of the Faculty Senate to flatly declare (in an internal document) that the original complaining faculty member who made the allegations was simply "lying".

One hopes that puts this matter to bed. But it is fair to question how this "controversy" exploded in the way that it did. I wrote at the time:

Abba Eban once famously quipped that "If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions." So too, it seems, that if JVP circulates a letter saying Fresno State was devoured by a hellmouth and Israel had summoned it, it would amass 500 signatures within the week.

Lubet uses this to coin the term "Occam's BDS razor": the simplest explanation, anytime anything on campus doesn't go precisely the way pro-Palestinian advocates would like, is the interference of nefarious pro-Israel lobbying. We can see how that mentality shook out at Fresno both "vertically" and "horizontally". "Vertically", a few offhand remarks that were critical of the search proceedings got elevated to cases of "harassment". And "horizontally", these few remarks were roped together to form the locus of an imagined conspiracy of intimidation against the entire search. The ease at which these jumps are made is itself illustrative of antisemitism in its structural dimension -- even the tiniest shreds of Jewish public or private discourse immediately metastasize into dark threats of domineering power. Such moves, I have to think, wouldn't fly (or wouldn't fly as easily) were they not so easily slotted into the grooves of antisemitic discourse.

Lubet concludes similarly: the fact that the allegation of Jewish interference was taken as gospel with virtually no evidence whatsoever, coupled with the (perhaps more alarming, though less surprising) fact that none of the bodies which leveled the accusation at Fresno State have shown any interest in even reviewing the documentation showing that the claim was groundless, is properly thought of as a manifestation of antisemitic conspiracy theorizing.

Democracy Remains the Solution to Hillel's Biggest Problems

Hillel International endorsed Kenneth Marcus for the head Civil Rights position at the Department of Education -- mostly because Marcus is a firm opponent of BDS and campus antisemitism more broadly.

The problem is that (controversy over BDS aside) Kenneth Marcus also is viewed as weak on sexual assault, favoring a rollback of Obama-era regulations designed to get colleges to clamp down on sexual violence.

This has led to serious controversy within Hillel. Hillel International head Eric Fingerhut refused to rescind his endorsement, but did agree that the organization should "consider" altering its policies regarding endorsements and the need for consultation with Hillel constituent members:

In an email sent to campus Hillel directors Friday, Hillel President and CEO Eric Fingerhut acknowledged that the Hillel staff had raised questions about the Marcus endorsement. He said that Hillel International’s board would consider new procedures by which the organization’s leadership would in the future consult with Hillel staff and students before taking public positions on political issues. He also said that he had meant to endorse Marcus’s work on anti-Semitism only, not his position on the campus sexual assault issue.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, you know what would be a great "procedure" facilitating consultation with Jewish students before Hillel adopts a public policy position? Democracy! If Hillel was a democratic organization, this misstep would have been far less likely to have occurred, and the position Hillel did take would have been far more likely to be in line with the actual preferences of Hillel students.

The thing is, democracies are responsive to their actual constituents in a way that Hillel is not. Given Hillel's institutional setup, it's utterly unsurprising that Fingerhut made his decision based on an issue of high-importance to his donor base while being utterly unaware of a countervailing issue of equal if not greater importance to Hillel's actual constituency. Simply put, Fingerhut is accountable to the former but not the latter. So he's going to be well aware of what matters to the former while being blissfully ignorant about the concerns of the latter. And the result is that he'll blunder into errors like this over and over again.

And one more thing: Maybe it's the case that Hillel students actually do care more about Marcus' work incorporating Jews under DOE regulatory protection than they do his conservative views on sexual violence prevention. If that's the case, then maybe a Democratic Hillel would have also given him an endorsement. But one suspects it would've been done in a more qualified and politically sensitive way. More importantly, in that circumstance the endorsement would carry democratic legitimacy that is lacking when decisions are made by the equivalent of an unelected autocrat. Democratic governance is good because it yields more responsive decision-making, yes, but also because it is simply legitimate in a way that Hillel, right now, cannot claim to be.

"Talking to Minorities? Oooh... That's a Censorship."

Andrew Sullivan is worried about campus life.

If you're thinking that his musings are going to be an uncreative recycling of greatest-hits complaints about out-of-control student lefties utterly unmoored from any actual account of contemporary campus life, well, you'd be mostly right. 

We do get obligatory swipes at "microaggressions", and fury at accused sexual assailants being adjudicated under the exact same standard of proof they'd encounter were they sued in court (and a far more protective standard than they'd be entitled to in the workplace -- which is to say, there is one), and no less than three references to "cultural Marxism," which is always a good signal to turn one's ears off (on a New York Times editor's ambitions to be "intersectional", he writes aghast: "Does she understand that the very word intersectional is a function of neo-Marxist critical race theory?" Does he understand how many Marxists -- "neo-" or otherwise -- would choke to hear that?). 

Thankfully, Sullivan spares us a literal appeal to the First Amendment, but his invocations of its "spirit" appear to collapse "censorship" into "outgroups publicly disliking what I have to say", and delegitimizing their temerity is more or less the core thesis of the argument. Free exchange of ideas indeed.

But I confess that Sullivan did introduce me to one element of PC-culture that was genuinely new to me. These were the "sensitivity readers", by whom Sullivan tells us "Books are censored in advance ... to conform with 'social justice' protocols." 

Goodness, that sounds positively awful! But fortunately, Sullivan provided a link to educate us on the contours of this new threat. And there, we encountered a truly harrowing tale: a young-adult author who ... voluntarily reached out to a readers from a community she was writing about to elicit their reactions on her draft.* Yes, we've finally reached the stage where even speaking to outgroups is a form of "censorship". How indeed could the free exchange of ideas survive such terrors like ... talking to the sort of people you're writing about? (To be fair to Sullivan, there's an element of self-interest in play here: one highly doubts any of his ideas could survive the encounter).

There's something to be said about cultivating a spirit of open inquiry that goes beyond opposing de jure censorship. It should be obvious that "speaking with people different from yourself and modifying your views in the wake of the encounter" has very little to do with that spirit. But the larger problem writers like Sullivan obstinately fail to grasp is that part of open inquiry includes considering whether our positions or ideologies create or perpetuate injustices (whether against socially-identifiable outgroups or anyone else). If censorship can exist beyond the formal power of the state and includes leveraging social power to preemptively prevent certain views from being heard, than there's almost certainly no more committed censor in Sullivan's column than Sullivan himself.

* Admittedly, the article indicates that sometimes "sensitivity readers" are not hired directly by authors but rather provided by the publishing house. I can sympathize with how this may feel like "censorship" to a writer, but in our more sober moments we tend to call it by the more prosaic name of "editing".

What's In Peer Review For Me?

UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge continues to decline peer review requests from law reviews (for friends in different disciplines, law is unique in that nearly all of our scholarly journals are run by law students -- up to and including article selection. A few top journals have started to move towards a "semi-" peer review system where they solicit comments from outside academic reviewers, typically to supplement their own internal deliberations. I give a qualified defense of the law review system here). This is a blast in the past for me, as Bainbridge's initial broadside came against the University of Chicago Law Review shortly after I left that august institution (see my guarded comments here).

Bainbridge has several reasons for not participating, but he devotes an extended amount of time to a discussion of self-interest, featuring an guest appearance from Adam Smith:

Why on earth would I ever want to review an article for them? To be sure, there are things one supposedly does for free for other law schools because they are for the good of the profession. Writing tenure letters springs to mind. Yet, while doing so is for the good of the profession, it can also be personally beneficial. If I write a tenure review letter for your tenure committee, the members of that committee will feel obliged to return the favor when I'm chairing our tenure committee and need outsider reviewers. Professors at other schools read my brilliant tenure review and conclude they should hire me instead of promoting the candidate. I take the job offer to the Dean and she gives me a raise. And so on. But what possible benefit do I get from giving a review to bunch of kids who may or may not end up in law teaching? I'm a rational economic actor. My time is valuable. There are opportunity costs entailed in responding to your request. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages." So make it economically rational for me to respond affirmatively.

Actually, this made me think of one reason someone in Bainbridge's position might want to participate in peer review: to influence the window of prestigious legal scholarship in a direction more amenable to his scholarship (and more generally, ideological predilections).

It is a common complaint of conservatives in academia that one barrier to their success is the hammerlock the left-wing majority has over article selection -- supposedly elevating mediocre (but ideologically congenial) leftist scholarship while knocking out good conservative contributions. I don't know if Bainbridge feels this way about the areas he writes in (corporate law), but presumably even shorn of a partisan valence Bainbridge has a vested interest in facilitating a match between scholarship is thinks is actually good and that which deemed "good" via the signal of elite article placement. At the margins, this could help in quite directly (by making his own scholarship more closely resemble that which is considered to be cutting edge), and at the very least it offers a benefit to his ideological school (to the extent he cares about such things). When Bainbridge declines to review articles for top law journals, the reviewer they replace him with may be one with very different views on what makes for a good corporate law piece. The net effect will be to push the contours of well-regarded scholarship in his discipline away from Bainbridge's preferences.

Of course, this sort of analysis is another way of saying that "self-interest" -- defined broadly enough -- can include a whole host of "good for the profession" (or community, or society) values. But that seems to reflect a sociological observation that those most keen on quoting Adam Smith are often those most blind to that sort of "self-interest". If conservatives decline, on grounds of "self-interest", to partake in "selfless" acts of professional courtesy like providing peer reviews, and liberals -- more amenable to doing things for good of the community -- take their place, well, each may reap what they sow, and the corresponding ideological state of "elite" scholarship perhaps shouldn't surprise us.

Anyone Can Be "Not Racist" To Someone (With Bonus Right/Libertarian Intercession!)

After viciously beating an African-American man in an Iowa bar,  Randy Joe Metcalf was convicted of a federal hate crime and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In relevant part, the federal statute says that "[w]hoever . . . willfully causes bodily injury to any person . . . because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin of any person . . . shall be imprisoned not more than 10 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both[.]"

The evidence surrounding the "because of" race element of the crime against Metcalf was substantial (and -- fair warning -- quite graphic). During the night of the attack (and into the following day), witnesses heard or saw Metcalf:

• Brag about burning crosses in front of an African-American family's home.
• Tell the bar owner "I hate fucking niggers."
• Show off a tattoo of a swastika to said bar owner and another bar patron while saying "that's what I'm about."
• Call the friends of the African-American man whom he'd later attack "nigger lovers" and "nigger loving cunts."
• Exclaim, in the course of attacking the man, "fucking nigger!" and "die nigger!"
• Tell a friend the following day that "the nigger got what he had coming to him."

What was Metcalf's main factual defense at trial?

That he wasn't racist. And indeed, the man with the swastika tattoo who savagely beat a man while hurtling racial slurs called seven witnesses who were prepared to testify that he was in no way a racist.

Un(?)surprisingly, the jury didn't buy it, and voted to convict. And the Eighth Circuit just affirmed that conviction, so it looks like Metcalf will spending quite some time in prison.

That was all I initially planned to write. But while rereading the case for this post, I came across another interesting tidbit: Metcalf had some powerful right-wing/libertarian allies filing amicus briefs on his behalf. The Cato Institute, the Reason Institute, The Individual Rights Foundation (an arm of the David Horowitz Freedom Center), the Center for Equal Opportunity, and two right-wing appointees to the United States Civil Rights Commission (Gail Heriot and Peter Kirsanow) all interceded to argue that the relevant provision of the federal hate crimes statute is unconstitutional as in excess of Congress' enforcement power under the 13th Amendment (I've read all the briefs, though it seems only the Cato Institute's is publicly available).

Now to be clear, even repulsive White supremacists have rights, and I don't think it's an endorsement of White supremacy to file an amicus brief in a White supremacist's criminal case. But it is worth tracing the precise argument these groups felt so passionately about that they'd intercede on behalf of a guy like Randy Joe Metcalf. 

Part of their argument is that the 13th Amendment only permits barring so-called "badges and incidents" of slavery (such as being targeted for physical assault on basis on one's race) when it is necessary to prevent the literal reimposition of slavery. Since, amici argue, there is no realistic change of literal slavery reemerging, it is no longer (if it ever was?) necessary for the federal government to ban racially-motivated assaults in order to pursue the constitutional ends of abolishing slavery (if you think they've been emboldened by Shelby County, you're right).

The other half of the argument is that hate crimes prosecutions, in particular, are a dangerous tool to give to the federal government because they're more susceptible to public outrage and thus "double jeopardy" prosecutions. This is a highly revealing argument. The double jeopardy clause doesn't apply when the federal government prosecutes its own criminal law (even after a completed state prosecution covering the same incident). The amici argue that the federal law here exceeds Congress' constitutional authority; but if that's the case the double jeopardy complaint is superfluous -- the law's just unconstitutional in its own right. So what's the point of bringing up double jeopardy?

The point is one of policy, or more accurately, of worldview. The argument is that "hate crimes" are particularly likely to arouse public anger and legal response, and that therefore we're more likely to see zealous prosecution (up to and including using these federal laws to get a "second bite at the apple" in the event an initial state prosecution fails). In doing so, the Cato Institute and its cohort wish to evoke a particular vision of civil rights laws -- wherein they're mainly a tool of oppression and governmental overreach and so must be highly limited and closely watched. They present a world where the government can hardly resist the pleas of minority communities for justice in the case of racist crimes; where the main problem when it comes to race in our society is too much zealousness in protecting outgroups. Who will think of the poor White supremacist, reviled by all and protected by none (except, of course, a President who thinks some among his number are "good people")?

It was difficult to swallow this logic in 2013, when Shelby County was decided. In 2018, it would be laughable save for the fact that it appears to be virtually indestructible. Just as for some people there's no amount of evidence that could establish someone to be racist, for some organizations there's no amount of evidence that could establish racism as an actual, non-trivial problem in American society.