If SCOTUS Had Its Way, Countless Michigan Jews Would Be Dead By Now

A Dearborn, Michigan man was indicted on gun charges stemming from an alleged plot to attack a Michigan synagogue. The suspect, Hassan Chokr, was blocked from purchasing a shotgun, rifle, and semiautomatic pistol following the conclusion of a background check, and federal prosecutors said that in his attempt to purchase a gun Chokr made "three false statements, any one of which would prohibit him from possessing a firearm." Those statements were denials that Chokr

1. Had ever been convicted of a felony;
2. Had currently pending charges of a felony; and
3. Had ever been committed to a mental institution.

Presumably, the background check revealed the existence of one or more of these flags in Chokr's record, thus preventing the purchase and likely averting a tragedy.

Given that, it's worth noting that all three of these bases for denying someone a gun purchase are currently on thin ice following the Supreme Court's Bruen decision, which radically circumscribed the government's ability to place limits on American's right to gun ownership.

On the first, the Third Circuit is in the process of reconsidering its earlier ruling that non-violent felons can be excluded from gun ownership (Chokr's conviction related to theft relating to a financial device such as a credit card, and so likely would be viewed as a non-violent felony).

On the second, a federal judge has already concluded that it is unconstitutional to bar those under felony indictment from possessing guns.

And on the third, prominent gun advocates like Eugene Volokh have aggressively challenged whether a per se bar on gun possession by persons who have been committed to a mental institution is constitutional.

In short, it is entirely plausible that the federal judiciary, following the Supreme Court's lead in Bruen, will conclude that all the failsafes that successfully prevented Hassan Chokr from purchasing guns he would have likely used to massacre Michigan Jews are unconstitutional and must be stripped from the books. It's not guaranteed -- while Bruen's language is expansive to the extreme, nobody knows how far the Supreme Court's nerve will go when push comes to shove -- but none of these objections can dismissed out of hand given Bruen's radical reinvention of Second Amendment doctrine.

Certainly, the Court has been crystal clear that the essential liberties of the Second Amendment are far more important than the countless lives its jurisprudence puts at risk. You know what they say: the tree of liberty must periodically be watered with the blood of tyrants innocent Jews.

New York Voters Who Elected George Santos Should Be Ashamed of Themselves

The degree to which George Santos appears to lie about everything really is jaw-dropping even in a post-Trump America. Is it worse to be the subject of a general list of one's "top 11 most absurd lies", or to be the subject of more specific headlines like "George Santos took $3,000 from dying dog’s GoFundMe, veterans say"? I can't even process.

I am curious, though, to see more interviews with voters in New York's 3rd congressional district, who just sent him to Congress. The NY-03 is a swingy enough district that I don't think Santos will be the beneficiary of too much "own the libs!" or "red right or wrong!" apologetics. Nonetheless, I want to know -- are Santos' constituents embarrassed? Not just of him, but of themselves? They picked this guy, after all. We get angry at politicians all the time, but in a democracy the choices of We the People are the responsibility of We the People. George Santos is first and foremost a failure of George Santos, but he is also in non-negligible fashion a failure of the voters who elected him.

It is I think too much to hope for that voters reckon with how they can taken in by such a naked fraudster and internalize some lessons that will inculcate them from future mistakes. But a boy can dream.

DEI's "Psychology" Double-Bind

The NYT has an op-ed today regarding DEI programs -- and in particular, the scant research suggesting that they actually, you know, work.

I'm familiar with some of the research in this area and while I could quibble on the margins, the core point is more or less accurate. There is fairly robust research evidence that establishes implicit bias is prevalent in our society, but there is not much in the way of verifiably effective interventions that combat it. Many DEI programs which purport to address implicit bias and other forms of prejudice are at the very least not proven to actually have an impact on the problem they purport to address. Finding an intervention that reliably and durably alters discriminatory attitudes (particularly implicit ones) is somewhat of a white whale for the social psychology profession. But in the meantime, the lack of evidence that many DEI programs tailored towards altering attitudes are effective suggests that a ton of time and money is being wasted.

Given that, the article makes the following suggestions:

So what does work? Robert Livingston, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School who works as both a bias researcher and a diversity consultant, has a simple proposal: “Focus on actions and behaviors rather than hearts and minds.”

Dr. Livingston suggests that it’s more important to accurately diagnose an organization’s specific problems with D.E.I. and to come up with concrete strategies for solving them than it is to attempt to change the attitudes of individual employees. And D.E.I. challenges vary widely from organization to organization: Sometimes the problem has to do with the relationship between white and nonwhite employees, sometimes it has to do with the recruitment or retention of new employees and sometimes it has to do with disparate treatment of customers (think of Black patients prescribed less pain medication than white ones).

The legwork it takes to actually understand and solve these problems isn’t necessarily glamorous. If you want more Black and Latino people in management roles at your large company, that might require gathering data on what percentage of applicants come from these groups, interviewing current Black and Latino managers on whether there are climate issues that could be contributing to the problem and possibly beefing up recruitment efforts at, say, business schools with high percentages of Black and Latino graduates. Even solving this one problem — and it’s a fairly common one — could take hundreds of hours of labor.

I have no intrinsic quarrel with this. Instead of looking for "bad brains" and trying to fix them, focus on tangible actions and outcomes. If your company has too few Black and Latino people in management roles, instead of trying to root out the deep-seated biases in your executives and HR staffers, just get to work directly on the problem.

But this anti-psychology turn is interesting for one particular reason: it flies in the face of the prevailing conservative formulation of what discrimination is: namely, discrimination occurs if and only if one can prove the presence of malign intent by a discrete decisionmaker. Unless someone holds racially discriminatory attitudes, there cannot be said to be racial discrimination at all. From that framework, which holds out psychology as the exclusive prerequisite of discrimination, it makes sense that an anti-discrimination initiative would have to be psychologically-inclined as well. And indeed, focusing on actions and behaviors in absence of establishing bad psychological intent is an anathema to the conservative (and, often, alt-liberal) framework -- that way lies "racial balancing" or "equality of result" or any number of terrible ghouls which are supposedly the patrimony of the progressive DEI edifice.

And so we have a double-bind: first, prominent political and social institutions (to say nothing of legal precedents) say that the only cognizable way to speak of discrimination is through psychology -- bad motivations. Then, when DEI professionals accordingly work within that framework and try to address the problem through psychology, they're pilloried because such interventions, it turns out, are only dubiously reliable and don't directly correlate with fixing the "actual problem" of underrepresentation of social outgroups. Which is fine as far as it goes, except that when DEI tries to pivot back to the "actual problem" without the baggage of wading through conscious and subconscious attitudes, they're lambasted as crying "discrimination!" without proof, since only psychology is said to generate valid evidence of discrimination in the first place. It's an impossible situation. 

Make Portland Normal

Portlanders are very much fans of the slogan "keep Portland weird!" For the most part, I agree -- I'm generally a fan of Portland's various quirks and idiosyncrasies. I definitely count myself as a Portland booster!

Nonetheless, there are a few areas where it'd be nice for Portland to act like a normal American city. I'll give two examples:

1) Fluoridate our damn water, like a normal city!

Finding out Portland is the largest U.S. city to not fluoridate its water is I gather a rite of passage for new Portlanders. I always thought of anti-fluoridation activists as falling in the same category as anti-vaxxers and chemtrailers, and on reflection, I still do. There is absolutely no reason why Portland needs to have unfluoridated water.

73% of Americans have fluoridated water. It's clearly fine. Don't be weird about it.

2) Maintain your streets, like a normal city!

Before I talk about this, I need to briefly rant about Portland's street grid, which (particularly in the west part of the city where I live) is by far the most confusing of any city I've ever driven in. I hate driving in Portland, which is full of absurd seven way intersections and freeway entrances that look like alley ways and poorly signed lanes which inexorably force you to cross a bridge.

Still, all that, I can forgive -- in part because I respect that Portland's hilly geography probably makes a straight grid functionally impossible, in part because it's too late to fix now without digging the entire city up.

But what I can't fathom is why, throughout the city, random, seemingly normal streets are unmaintained by the city.

To be clear: I don't mean "the city has fallen behind in providing maintenance." What I mean is that there are many regular streets that get normal, local through traffic, that the city intentionally disclaims responsibility for maintaining.

This is the best explainer I've seen for the phenomenon, and it doesn't explain much. And it means that you could be driving to a friend's house only to discover that the route suddenly becomes a pot-hole ridden cart track. Check out this interactive map -- the random red portions? Those aren't maintained by the city. They're listed as "private" roads, even though for every relevant purpose they are just as public as any other road. They're not some isolated track that only connects a few houses over private property. They're part of the normal street grid! And this is encoded into statute somehow!

Here's an example from my own neighborhood. The subdivision I live in is 14 city blocks long, west to east. On the west side, most streets outlet onto the "main" road, but on the east side only one street does (Coronado). The only way out of my neighborhood going east is via Coronado. And wouldn't you know it if Coronado is unmaintained for its last four eastbound blocks, leading to giant gaping potholes on my unavoidable route to work each day. Coronado isn't all unmaintained -- from west to east it's (a) unmaintained for two blocks, (b) maintained by the city for six blocks, (d) non-existent for two blocks (it doesn't go through all the way), and (e) unmaintained again for the last four blocks.

Don't be weird Portland -- just take responsibility for your own street grid.

Who's Defending Hamline?

By now, you've probably heard of the flare-up at Hamline University in Minnesota, where an adjunct professor of art history was dismissed following student complaints after she showed a historic painting that depicted the prophet Muhammad. Every account I've seen suggests that the professor presented the painting (which was created in Persia by a Muslim artist in the 14th century) in a respectful and sensitive fashion, including notifying students that it would be depicted in her syllabus and again before the start of the relevant class (and told students they were free to opt out of attending that session). Nonetheless, the college not only declined to renew her contract, they expressly accused her of "Islamophobia" and indicated that "academic freedom" should not have protected her ability to "harm" her student.

The decision to terminate the professor has been met with a firestorm of criticism (e.g.: FIRE, PEN America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Academic Freedom Alliance). I personally found this post by Jill Filipovic to be especially thoughtful. So far, though, the college has been emphatic in defending its decision.

On that note, however, one thing I've yet to see is any prominent figure defending Hamline. The closest I've seen is a local CAIR official who (at a university-sponsored forum) said that the lesson had "absolutely no benefit" and compared alternative Muslim perspectives on portraying Muhammad as akin to the existence of people who think "Hitler was good." I've also heard hearsay that some academic professional organizations have privately declined to speak out because many officers and/or members feel uncomfortable. But as far as public discourse goes, I've seen essentially nothing but wall-to-wall condemnation.

Indeed, the universality of the "Hamline got it wrong" position in some ways renders it impressive the degree to which the Hamline administration is sticking to its guns here. It is one thing to abandon principles of academic freedom under intense external pressure demanding censorship; it's another thing to abandon principles of academic freedom in the face of intense external pressure to abide by them. It does make me wonder if there are any unknown cross-currents of pressure that the college is responding to. It's not out of character for a university to make terrible, craven decisions, of course -- but it's a little out of character for a university to make terrible, brave decisions, which makes me think that there must be some point of leverage on the administration that they are succumbing to. Again, the prospect that these cross-currents exist doesn't at all excuse the college's actions here. If, for example, the decision to terminate the professor was widely popular amongst Hamline students (or groups that Hamline hopes to recruit students from), it would still be the case that the college had an obligation to stand up for the right principles. But at least that would be a normal, explicable failing.

But maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe the Hamline administrators are that ideologically committed to being thoughtlessly censorial. Or maybe there's a line of Hamline defenders I haven't seen. But as far as I can tell, virtually everyone (left right and center) is onboard with the view that Hamline fouled up. The last people to agree, it turns out, are the Hamline administrators.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXII: Women Attending College

You might have heard the (latest) terrible news from Afghanistan, where the Taliban has enacted a ban on women attending college.

Now, I say "terrible news". But if you're Tyler Russell -- a White supremacist sporting an "America First" cap (ironic, given that he's Canadian!) -- you call it a "step in the right direction." Why? Since women only attend college because they're being "tricked by Jews".

Female education: a Jewish plot! Once again, our enemies sometimes seem to say far nicer things about us than our friends do!

(Dear readers: not only did my wife go to college, that's where I met her! Does that make me an apex trickster?)

Performative Brinksmanship is Obviously Stupid from the Outside

The farce that is the GOP House leadership fight continues, as Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has just lost the eleventh ballot for speaker in the face of a small but entrenched far-right rebellion. The knot of far-right extremists who refuse to back McCarthy has led to chaos in the GOP, with no signs of a compromise being reached. Ringleader Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has even indicated that he'd be fine if the fallout of his putsch results in Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) ascending to the speaker position (though if a compromise is reached with Democrats to thwart the right-wing rebellion, I suspect it will not involve Jeffries as speaker).

For the most part, pretty much everyone on the left-side of the political spectrum has been content to sit back, munch on popcorn, and watch the GOP eat itself alive. Democrats are enjoying making a show of unity against GOP irresponsibility; meanwhile, Republicans are literally arguing that their decision to cripple the House doesn't matter because if a real crisis occurs President Biden will be there to set things right (the infantilization of the American right continues apace). The whole thing is one ongoing trainwreck for the GOP, and I absolutely agree with what I take to be the Democratic Party conventional wisdom that we need not lift a finger to bail out the GOP unless we get some superb concessions for our trouble.

So here's my question for the peanut gallery. I'm sure the arson caucus of the GOP has its boosters among other far-right extremists. But is there anybody on the left side of the spectrum observing what's happening here and thinking "I may not agree with their policies, but this is a savvy play by Gaetz and co."? Does anybody think this sort of performative brinksmanship is smart politics?

It doesn't seem so to me -- progressives right now are laughing our heads off at a GOP in complete disarray, and rightfully so. We're not jealous of the far-right for having the gumption to take a stand; we see just how catastrophic this whole farce is for the conservative agenda (and thank god for that!).

So perhaps there's a lesson to be learned here. Thankfully, there are few if any Democratic equivalents to the bomb throwers currently making chaos in the House. Even our far-left members so far have known when to rein it in -- a quality which sometimes yields loud cries of "betrayal!" and "spineless!" from certain corners of the commentariat. I might suggest that next time such an instinct comes over you, you remember this moment. Remember how you didn't look across the aisle and marvel at the steely-eyed rebels who stood their ground and played hardball. Remember how what you actually saw was a bunch of children embarrassing themselves and self-sabotaging for their own self-aggrandizement. And then remember that it's probably a bad idea for Democratic progressives to emulate the GOP's dumbest members' most nihilist strategies.

UPDATE: And the winner for the first prominent left outlet to praise the GOP's political savvy and declare it a model to emulate is ... Jacobin Mag! Who's shocked?

On Being an Intellectual Submissive

I had an interesting experience the other day.

My wife likes to remark that, for someone as terminally online as I am, I don't know much about the standard pop-online memes and stories. I'm not very up on pop culture (I barely know who the Kardashians are, let alone what they're famous for). And while I'm aware of all internet traditions from a very specific corner of the internet, by and large I'm isolated from what the Kids (or even Adults) These Days are talking about.

As a fun game, my wife found a list of the top 50 "internet moments" of 2023 and went through them one by one to see how many I (and she) had heard of. She knew most of them. I knew maybe a quarter. And  when I didn't know, she'd gleefully try to explain some insane story about Jorts the Cat while I stared in incredulous ignorance.

Here's the thing: I loved this. Indeed, it was an experience that kind of made me "get" the phenomenon of high-powered corporate executives who are submissives.

The way that phenomenon is always described is that such persons are constantly asked to be authoritative, be in charge, make the decision, be the boss -- and so it's just freeing to let someone else take charge and be completely and utterly at the mercy of another.

The life of a high-powered corporate executive is not at all how I'd characterize my life. But what is true is that in my job (and my day-to-day persona), I'm expected to know things. I'm smart, I'm informed, I'm aware -- that's a huge part of who I (normally) am. And I've internalized this. For example, one of my emotional triggers is when I feel like I've made a specifically dumb mistake, or I can't figure out how to do something seemingly obvious. It fills me with shame way out of proportion to the actual "offense." I have an expectation (both internally and externally-imposed) that I am chock full of relevant knowledge at all times.

Given all that, I think I really enjoyed the experience of being in a situation where I did not and was not expected to know anything. Where I could sit back in doe-eyed ignorance and just be taught by someone else, with no expectation that I'd necessarily absorb, synthesize, or regurgitate the information. When it comes to popular internet memes, it's absolutely okay that I know nothing and that I sit in the recipient-learner position! That felt so freeing -- I loved it.

Anybody relate to this? I wonder if it's just a me thing or if any other academic sorts have had similar experiences.

Happy New Year!

I'm celebrating the ringing in of 2023 in two main ways:

(1) We're hosting a group of my college friends at my house (this group has met for new year's every year since graduation).

(2) I'm taking my laptop in for repairs, since it overheats constantly even when doing comparatively minor tasks, has done so since basically the day I bought it, and I want to get it fixed while it's still under warranty.

The latter, I imagine, means I will be without this laptop for at least a few weeks. It's possible I get a cheap netbook to tide me over. But it's possible I'll be computer-free for a little while. I can scarcely think of anything scarier (cornea surgery? Definitely not).

So if I am quieter around these parts through the beginning of the new year, that might be why. Regardless, I hope you have a happy and healthy new year, one full of all the best milestones and celebrations.

Lift Every Jewish Voice and Sing

Apropos my earlier post about the prospect of a Jewish florist asked to make an Easter flower arrangement, I found this article about Jewish singers who regularly sing in churches during the Christmas season to be quite interesting.

It seems quite clear that religious majorities and religious minorities have very different understandings about the degree to which they can be expected to encounter and interact with other faith traditions, including messages that contradict their own beliefs. Church singing was, above all, a good job in a profession where regular paydays aren't always easy to come by. The singers accordingly generally viewed church singing as just a job -- even though the hymns they sung would have (understandably) expressly Christian messages, even though they sometimes encountered direct antisemitism there. They draw a clear distinction between singing a rehearsed song versus praying in their own voice.

For what it's worth, I tend to view singers as towards the far end of a spectrum ranging from "jobs expected to serve anyone who comes in the door" to "jobs where the professional has absolute discretion to pick and choose clients." The further you proceed down that spectrum, the more justifiable it is for a professional to refuse to take a job for whatever reason they want -- so I don't feel it would be unreasonable for a Jewish tenor to turn down a church job, even as in practice they typically seem able to maintain the conceptual separation I argue the florist should have. But the nebulousness of the spectrum (where do florists fall? I think somewhere in the middle, but reasonable minds can disagree on that) is part of why the anti-discrimination/free speech issues here are so difficult.

In any event, though, I wanted to flag the piece less because it illustrates any major theoretical point, and more for it says about how many Jews think about these issues in practice. Simply put, we can't afford to be hypersensitive in the way that many Christians -- perhaps for the first time experiencing the barest hints of conflict between their religious precepts and the public arena -- demand the law provide protection for. To borrow from Kimmy Schmidt: "It's so funny what people who aren't minorities think is oppressive!"

New Year's Resolutions: 2023

It's that most wonderful time of the year: Debate Link New Year's Resolutions! Last year's resolutions are here, and here is the entire series. As always, we begin by reviewing last year's performance.

Met: 1, 4, 5, 6 (damn straight: 1522 -- over 300 points higher than my peak last year!), 8, 9, 12, 13, 14 (this reminded me to do that: I just donated to the Oregon Jewish Museum!).

Missed: 2 (it's been "under review" for almost a year and a half!), 3, 7, 11, 15.

Pick'em: 10 (does Salem count as a "sight"?).

Great job, 2022! Now onto 2023!

***

1) Host a successful conference on law and antisemitism. (Met)

2) Fully recover my vision post-surgery. (Met)

3) Go through the year with no other surgeries. (Met)

4) Get a book contract (it's been "under review" for almost a year and a half!). (Missed -- but we might be getting close?)

5) Improve my teaching. (Met)

6) Do more physical activity. (Met -- and how!)

7) Visit my friend Joel in Eugene (or have him visit me). (Met)

8) Attend my 15 year Carleton reunion. (Missed)

9) Go to a sporting event with friends. (Met)

10) Attend a boxing match. (Missed)

11) Find a reliable bagel place. (Missed)

12) Make Mastodon (or something not-Twitter) my primary social media platform. (Met -- it's BlueSky though)

13) Seriously consider one significant home improvement project or modification (including converting any room into a different purpose). (Met)

14) Get my laptop fixed. (Pick 'em -- it was "fixed", but not really, and then I just got a new one)

Was Blind But Now I See

Happy holidays, all (and Merry Christmas, some!). As some of you know, I had eye surgery earlier this week. Not LASIK, but the considerably more exotic corneal cross-linking. This was actually the third time I was scheduled to have the procedure. The first time, which I believe was the summer of 2019, was scrubbed due to insurance issues; the second time, which was slated for this past summer, I got COVID a week before the operation. That's frustrating for more than the normal reasons -- cross-linking doesn't improve your vision, it just stops further deterioration, so any vision loss I've experienced from the initial date to now is likely permanent.

But let's not dwell on that. The procedure itself was not really what I was anticipating: it was (as one tech very accurately put it) 90% putting in eye drops. Seriously: that was the overwhelming majority of the 90 minutes I spent lying on the operating table -- getting eye drops placed in my eye over two minute increments. For about half of it, I also stared into a UV light while getting still more eye drops. The miracles of science. I was anticipating more in the way of scraping or needles or lasers, but other than one period where they scraped a layer of cells off the top of my cornea (don't worry, some of those eye drops were the numbing kind), there really wasn't any of that.

The recovery has been a bit more of a slog. One consequence of the surgery is that I can't wear a contact in the affected eye for a week before and a month after the procedure. With my contacts in, I have close to 20/20 vision; without them in, I'm legally blind. So the upshot is I'm blind in my right eye until mid-January (including the first two weeks of teaching).

There's also the pain. After the surgery I was prescribed percocet, which should have let me know they weren't messing around, but for whatever reason I was underselling the pain side of the recovery period. The first day once the numbing drops wore off was pretty rough -- my eye had that stinging sensation like when you stare into a bright light for too long (another helpful tech reminded me that "you kinda did"), but it wasn't really fading. The pain came in waves, abating before it would come back, and as time has progressed the severity of the pain has decreased while the length of time between waves has increased. I'm hopeful that by today I'm out the other side, and the major side effect I'll still need to deal with is the aforementioned half-blindness.

In other news, the winter storm that hit Portland (and I gather everywhere else in America) froze a pipe and knocked out water to our kitchen faucet. More annoying than anything else, but it was the first "crisis" our house has really experienced since we bought it, so a good learning experience for us. Jill spent most of yesterday trying to get a plumber to come out before "frozen pipe" turned into "burst pipe". It took a long time -- everyone was booked until at least Tuesday -- but we finally got a guy who came out, found where the freeze was, and thawed it out. The whole experience really was more stressful because of the confluence of events (holiday season making it hard to find people, I'm half out of commission because of the surgery), but we got through it. Yay us!

A Tale of Two McCarthys

Abdul El-Sayed has an article in TNR about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' latest endeavor to stake out anti-vaxx turf, promising a full-scale legal investigation into "any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to Covid-19 vaccines." El-Sayed dubs DeSantis' strategy "vaccine McCarthyism", which is a term I appreciate. After all, is not today's GOP little more than equal shares of Joseph and Jenny McCarthy?

I tend to think that anti-vaxx politics are a trap for the GOP. Yes, anti-vaxx views are passionately held by the conspiratorial Republican base, which means that under the God-given rules of media fairness we must treat that position with the utmost seriousness. But anti-vaxx politics remain broadly unpopular even with Republicans, to say nothing of independents (or Democrats). Much like (either) McCarthy, opposing vaccines may gain DeSantis press and clout for a little while, but it's likely to make him an irrelevant laughingstock in the long term.

A Holiday Greetings Flowchart

How do I handle holiday greetings as a Jew? Here's the order of operations:

• If you say "happy holidays" to me and I don't know you or what you celebrate, then I say "happy holidays" to you in return.
• If I know you're Jewish, I say "happy Chanukah."
• If you wish me "Merry Christmas" and you don't know I'm Jewish, then I say "happy holidays."
• If you wish me "Merry Christmas" and you do know I'm Jewish, or if you say "merry Christmas" in any way that suggests that doing so is your way of striking back against PC liberal elites, then I say "happy Chanukah."
• Finally, if I know you celebrate Christmas but you nonetheless wish me "happy Chanukah" because you know that's what I celebrate, then I will wish you a "merry Christmas" in return as that's what you celebrate.

Feel free to use this in your own interactions. 

And from me to you: happy holidays to all, happy Chanukah for those for whom it applies, and merry Christmas to those who've earned it!

Where the Sun Does Shine

Arguably the most prolific antisemitic organization operating in America today, Goyim TV, is decamping from its Bay Area base and moving to Florida. Notorious for distributing flyers and dropping banners blaming Jews for everything from COVID restrictions to the Ukraine war, Goyim TV's leader, Jon Minadeo, has indicated that he is tired of his negative treatment in California and thinks Florida will be more hospitable to him and his message:

Despite his close family ties and following in Northern California, Minadeo had increasingly felt besieged by negative press and by criticism of his behavior by authorities. Minadeo’s family owns the historic Valley Ford restaurant Dinucci’s Italian Dinners, a popular road stop en route to the Sonoma Coast, and a source close to Minadeo said the 39-year-old once worked as a waiter at the restaurant, one of his last real jobs.

Yet he had developed a dismal reputation in the North Bay after a flood of media attention on his provocative antisemitic propaganda operation in J., the San Francisco Chronicle, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and other outlets.

[...]

Minadeo hopes Florida will be more hospitable to him and his worldview, and he may have reason to believe that to be true. A recent report from the ADL described an upward trend of extremist and antisemitic activity in the Sunshine State, driven in part by new white supremacist groups including White Lives Matter, Sunshine State Nationalists, NatSoc Florida and Florida Nationalists. 

It is, of course, notable that one of America's most vicious antisemites looked across the country for more hospitable terrain and said "Florida -- that's the ticket". There is absolutely a straight line between the "anti-woke" neo-fascism promoted by Gov. DeSantis and the belief by the likes of Minadeo that Florida will be a welcoming home for his brand of hate. In fairness, Minadeo released a video targeting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for signing a bill targeting antisemitism and for visiting Israel; it's not that Minadeo views DeSantis as directly an ally. But the ideological consanguinity is real, to the point that I'm genuinely curious what would happen if an enterprising journalist asked the following question of some DeSantis press flack:

Jon Minadeo, proprietor of the prominent "Goyim TV" outlet, has announced he's moving his base of operations from California to Florida due to the former's ideological inhospitality and overall "woke" atmosphere. Do you credit Gov. DeSantis' policies for facilitating this sort of move, and do expect similar organizations to likewise flee states like California for Florida going forward?

I bet at least half of the press team on DeSantis' crew would give an answer praising the move and bragging about it. It'll be followed up by a clarifying disavowal, of course, but still, it'd be A+ trolling and I want someone to try it.

Testing a IFTTT Cross-Posting App

Apropos this post, this is a test to see if the IFTTT recipe I just created (with helpful guidance from the Boley Law Library!) works.

This block quote is simply to pad out the text of the post, though it does explain why I'm doing this:

For example: I use IFTTT to autopost links to my blog onto my Twitter account. This is incredibly important for me, as I'm pretty sure at this point virtually my entire readership comes from Twitter links. But as best I can tell, neither Post nor Mastodon has anything (whether via IFTTT or otherwise) that provides similar functionality. At the moment, I'm getting there sideways by an app which autoposts my Tweets to Mastodon (so my blog autoposts to Twitter, which then autoposts to Mastodon). But I've found no equivalent at all for Post. In general, cross-posting functionality is really important especially in the transition period where I want to be using both Twitter and its alternatives.

Wish me luck! 

UPDATE: It didn't work.

Why Is Biden Exceeding Expectations as a Progressive President?

Scott Lemieux makes the following observation explaining why Joe Biden has been a much, much better president than many progressives had predicted:

For those of us who lived through the 90s, pragmatism on the part of prominent Democrats was inherently suspect because it was generally used to justify feints to the right, sometimes plausibly rooted in public opinion but other times much more rooted in elite prejudices. For Biden, though, having a sense of public opinion isn’t just a pretext for moving to the right — sometimes it means sensing that the public is with you and going to be more with you and acting accordingly. 

[...]

Biden’s value as a president was going to be heavily context dependent — but, then, if LBJ had magically become president in 1952 or 1992 nobody would remember him as a great liberal on domestic policy either.

I don't disagree with this, but I'll add to it: Biden a good progressive president because he's a consummate party man in a situation where the Democratic Party has institutionally moved in a substantially progressive direction.

When I talked about what I liked about Biden back in the 2020 primary, one area I ranked him highly on is on the "staff positions with good people" metric, and that is part of this. Biden understands very well where the political center of gravity is both nationally and within the Democratic coalition, and acts accordingly. He is going to surround himself with smart, capable individuals who are roughly aligned with median Democratic Party opinion.  And under circumstances where the Democratic center of gravity is in a generally progressive place -- neither captured by bomb-throwing extremists nor slavishly adherent to chin-stroking centrism -- that's a recipe for happy outcomes for progressives.

Help Me Leave Bird App!

Speaking of off-ramps, I am trying to transition my main microblogging app off of Twitter and onto an alternative. But so far, the two sites I have accounts on -- Mastodon (@schraubd@mastodon.lawprofs.org) and Post (@schraubd) -- aren't fully meeting my needs, and each have problems that significantly deter their ability to fully serve as a Twitter replacement.

For example: I use IFTTT to autopost links to my blog onto my Twitter account. This is incredibly important for me, as I'm pretty sure at this point virtually my entire readership comes from Twitter links. But as best I can tell, neither Post nor Mastodon has anything (whether via IFTTT or otherwise) that provides similar functionality. At the moment, I'm getting there sideways by an app which autoposts my Tweets to Mastodon (so my blog autoposts to Twitter, which then autoposts to Mastodon). But I've found no equivalent at all for Post. In general, cross-posting functionality is really important especially in the transition period where I want to be using both Twitter and its alternatives.

I'm also finding it incredibly difficult to find people to follow, especially on Mastodon but to a lesser extent on Post as well. You can get some people via those sites that trawl through Twitter to see who has posted their new social handles online, but that's been limited so far in my experience. The easiest thing (albeit perhaps the most worrisome from a data privacy standpoint) would be one of those widgets where you plug in your email and it tells you all the accounts which are associated with emails in your contacts. I don't think exists yet for either site, and maybe it shouldn't for privacy reasons. The next best move is to go to the people you're already friends with and see who they're following. But Mastodon, in particular, makes this impossibly unwieldy by refusing to show followers from other servers. You can get there via the scenic route if you go to each profile on its own server, but then you can't just click a button to follow (since you're not logged into that server). It's slow and clunky and needlessly frustrating. And I'll note that even Mastodon's basic search bar functionality has, in my experience, been shaky.

Finally, while comparatively minor Post has some user interface problems that are just outright annoying. Defaulting to the "explore" tab, which is not my feed but the feed of a (presumably curated) section of randos, is not what I want and I resent having to swap over to my personal feed every time I go to the site. Also, Post might suffer from having too generic of a name -- good luck finding an answer to any question you have about its functionality online (imagine Googling "how do I cross-post on post")

So what I want is basically (1) ability to cross-post across platforms, especially autolinking to my Blogger posts, and (2) a relatively easy and straightforward way to find and follow my contacts if and when they join the new sites. Whichever site (Mastodon, Post. or something else) perfects that cocktail may well be my winner.

Can We Convince Elon Musk To Declare Victory and Go Home?

It is clear, even to Elon Musk (one has to think), that Musk's acquisition of Twitter has been a disaster.

It is equally clear that Musk is far too much of a narcissistic egomaniac to ever admit it.

And while it would be nice to leave Twitter outright and hit greener pastures, the current main alternatives to Twitter -- sites like Mastodon or Post -- are not even close to primetime ready. The ideal outcome is Twitter being put back in the hands of the at least semi-reasonable before the site detonates outright.

What Musk needs is an off-ramp -- some way for him to get out of Twitter while still claiming it as a victory.

To be clear: No reasonable observer has to actually think Musk has accomplished anything or that this excuse be anything but a flimsy façade. Much like the US and Vietnam, every rational human will understand it as pure political dissembling -- "saving face" here means only an excuse that will satisfy Musk's most sycophantic fanboys. Fortunately, that cadre is the only group Musk seems to listen to anyway.

He's never going to be able to unload it for a profit -- that's out. But is there some other narrative he could spin ("It was never about the money!") where he retroactively will have "accomplished what he set out to accomplish" and can leave while saving face? Maybe he can say the "Twitter Files" exposed the dirty heart of old Twitter but now he's successfully cleaned house. Maybe he can triple down on the random staffers he's thrown under the bus as the "real problem" and now that they're gone, all is well (none of us have to believe it; again, this is all about spinning a yarn that will successfully soothe a narcissistic manchild who can't possibly admit he screwed everything up).

I don't know. It's weird to try to come up with "pathetic lie for Elon Musk to tell himself so he leaves the rest of us alone." But that's the best exit strategy we have right now, I think. Suggestions welcome.

You Can Take the Girl Out of the Green Party ...

Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has announced she's leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent. It appears that Sinema will still be effectively caucusing with the Democrats (she's slated to keep her committee assignments), so to some extent this is just another performance and won't directly upset the balance of power in the upper chamber. Nonetheless, this is entirely in character for a woman whose politics are very slightly left-of-center but also mostly gibberish that she spins up as having a "maverick streak" and being too pure for the confines of the dreaded two party system.

I'm not exactly surprised by the news. Indeed, to some extent I think it's politically savvy. Sinema was a dead woman walking in a 2024 Democratic primary -- Mark Kelly demonstrating that one can be a normal Democrat and win in Arizona took away Sinema's only hope of staving off an inevitable progressive challenger. But formally identifying as in indie gives Sinema two big advantages. 

Rhetorically, as empty as this gesture is, it still will appeal to a certain branch of voter (and, more importantly, pundit) who salivates over "no labels!" and "independence!". At this point, that cadre is the only base Sinema could ever hope to have, so she might as well juice them for all they're worth.

More practically, by laying the groundwork for an independent run now, Sinema arguably boxes off a Democratic challenge more thoroughly than she ever could within the party. Sinema has effectively flipped a dead man's switch and promised to run in 2024 even if it means splitting the vote with an actual Democratic nominee. Do Democrats feel confident they can win in Arizona even with Sinema peeling off a non-trivial part of the vote? I bet that prospect has Democratic strategists feeling real nervous. There are several instances (Alaska springs to mind) where Democrats have simply lined up behind independent candidates in states knowing that they can't win if they split the vote, and Sinema is trying to make Arizona one of them. (The wild card is if Republicans decide not to run a candidate against Sinema, but that strikes me as vanishingly unlikely. The infuriating truth of American politics is that even in her most asinine and frustrating moments, Sinema still isn't even close to being as bad as even a normal Republican, let alone an Arizona Republican).