Bots and Nots in the Sanders Sib Community

Twitter protestations notwithstanding, I find it wholly plausible that Russian bots masquerading as Bernie supporters are the culprits behind some of the toxic online abuse that goes out under the pro-Bernie flag.

And contra some, I don't think that this means that the Russians are "backing Sanders" in any meaningful respect. This is a chaos play -- it's a way of sowing division; there's no implied commitment to any underlying policy preference. When Russian trolls simultaneously promoted both pro- and anti-Muslim rights rallies, it was not because they couldn't decide which side of the issue they fell on. The chaos was, and is, the point (although Sanders' backers could stand to reflect as to why his campaign represents such an alluring vector for sowing mistrust).

However. Being a Democrat who is under the age of 35, I know plenty of Bernie Sanders supporters. The majority of them are normal, pleasant people who are supporting their preferred candidate in normal, pleasant ways.

But I've certainly seen a contingent -- not a majority, but a vocal one -- of the Sanders supporters I know who do endorse or at least excuse the sort of abusive behavior and toxic conspiracy-mongering that Sanders himself has long repudiated. I know this culture is real, and not just a case of bots, because I see people who I know are real partake in it.

The recent story of the Bernie Sanders staffer whose private Twitter account was brimming with vicious, brutal, often misogynistic attacks on rival candidates provides a case in point. This was disgusting behavior, and the Sanders campaign to its credit immediately canned the staffer once it went public.

But many of Bernie's supporters, instead of taking the easy route of "wow, this was terrible stuff -- I'm glad he was fired!", instead elected to pile on the reporter for covering the story at all. The preferred objection -- and I saw this from multiple people who I know are real flesh-and-blood humans -- is that because the account was a private one, the staffer's remarks could not be harassment.

There are, to be sure, indications in the article that the staffer also might have been anonymously responsible for other instances of insults and invective that were made through public channels. But leave that aside. The "it's not harassment if it's a private channel" would be a pedantic objection under the best of circumstances -- yes, it's true that Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren themselves weren't in a position to see the tweets, but nobody is under any illusions as to how "private" messages of abuse circulated to campaign backers the vast majority of whose accounts are not private contributes to a culture of abuse and maltreatment.

It is normal, and not strange, for internet harassment campaigns to begin with and by nurtured by conversations on sites and fora where the vast majority of posts are not intended to be and likely never will be seen by the putative target. The reason that these conversations on reddit or 4chan or wherever nonetheless matter isn't because the objects of their hatred could theoretically read them. It's because of what they precipitate out -- "private" conversations where edgelording and abuse and brinksmanship are encouraged and cheered on become the fermentation ground from which the "public" harassment springs. Eventually, someone takes it both seriously and literally.

And even if none of that were the case, the apologia still boils down to "he was only privately spreading misogynistic abuse (to 4,000 of his closest friends)." Is that really the hill people want to die on?

It was frankly shocking how many real-life people I know who, when confronted with objectively atrocious, grotesque, hateful behavior by a Sanders staffer, responded by trying to pooh-pooh the importance of the issue because technically it wasn't "harassment". On that note, while the article juxtaposes the staffer's behavior with Sanders' condemnation of online harassment and clearly considers the two to be part of the same family (which they are), it generally describes the posts as "toxic" or "abuse". The second paragraph is indicative:

But the private Twitter account of a newly promoted campaign staffer indicates that despite his condemnation of online harassment, at least some of the Vermont senator’s most toxic support is coming from inside the house.

Perhaps it is fair to say that the article is implying that the staffer's behavior is also harassment. But the nitpicking effort to reframe the issue as about the technical distinction between "harassment" versus purely private abuse -- as if that debate, even if it were resolved against the reporter, would reveal the greater evil here -- was terrible, if illustrating, to witness. It reflects not just the abusive culture itself, but the wider circle wherein the abuse is apologized for, denied, minimized, or viewed as a smear -- a form of toxicity that, if not as visceral as the direct offenders, nonetheless is a necessary auxiliary to it.

Not every Sanders supporter is a "Sanders Sib". The vast majority are normal, reasonable people who support Sanders in normal, reasonable ways. But the fact of the matter is that -- augmented by bots or not -- the cadre that has earned the Sanders Sib label has largely come by its toxic reputation honestly. They're not being framed. They're not being held to unreasonable standards. They have their reputation because of what they -- flesh and blood humans -- do, and tolerate, and excuse. I know it's not bots, because I've seen it from people who I know in real life.

It won't stop me from voting for Sanders if he is the nominee in November (among other reasons, even if I didn't care about substantive policy at all and my criteria for voting was solely "which candidate has the most toxic base of internet support", Sanders still would be orders of magnitude better than Trump). But I'm not going to pretend like reality isn't there.

The Smart Kids

Susan Demas argues that the reason pundits are so persistently cool on Elizabeth Warren is simply that she is one of the smart kids. Like Obama, she is sniffed at for being professorial, elitist, schoolmarmish, and so on.

The common thread between them is that they’re usually the smartest people in any room — something that particularly irks pundits who pretend to be experts on all manner of policy (but usually are just glorified theater critics).

This checks out, and I'd date the phenomenon back even further to Al Gore in 2000. That election was very much formative in my political development, and not just because of how it ended.

Al Gore was also a smart, wonkish, thoughtful guy -- obviously more qualified than his dim-bulb pseudo-cowboy of an opponent. But the narrative going into the election was that Al Gore's intelligence and wonkishness was his biggest electoral liability. He made people uncomfortable. He was awkward. Who would really want to have a beer with him?

As a studious and somewhat wonkish kid, this made a very large imprint on me. To that point, my only experience with "democracy" was in student government elections, where -- no matter how much the teachers lectured us to vote for the best candidate who will do the best job -- everyone just voted for the popular kid who promised pizza for lunch every day. And even then I think we all thought that was kind of silly, but we did it because student elections were silly and kids are silly and once we grew up and voted in grown-up elections we'd vote based on the serious reasons we were supposed to.

And then we flicked on the news, and it turned out that the grown-ups were being just as frivolous -- deciding the election as if it were a drinking game. If I had any nascent interest in a political career, it was squashed at that moment.

I suspect that there are more than a few young women -- and hey, maybe some young men too! -- who are having a similarly formative experience right now with Elizabeth Warren. They see her as smart and studious and talented and attentive to details. And they see not just that this doesn't matter, but that it is viewed as a deficit -- it is hurting her political chances.

It's a very depressing thing to live through. All I can say to those kids going through it now is: been there.

Susan Collins as Marie-Reine Le Gougne

If you're my age or older, the name "Marie-Reine Le Gougne" may ring a faint bell of recognition. Better known as "the French judge", Le Gougne was at the center of 2002 Olympic figure skating scandal which saw a Russian pair win gold over the seemingly far more deserving Canadian duo of Jamie Salé and David Pelletie. Le Gougne voted for the Russians and immediately attracted suspicion for it -- she soon confessed that she had been pressured into her vote by the head of the French federation as part of a trade where a French couple would receive a scoring advantage in the ice dance competition later in the games. Le Gougne was suspended and disgraced; eventually the decision was made to give both pairs a shared gold medal.

Here's the thing though: there were nine judges in the 2002 Olympic figure skating competition. Five voted for the Russian pair. Four went for the Canadian. So why was Le Gougne, "the French judge", singled out?

The answer is simple: everyone knew that the four eastern bloc judges (from Russia, Ukraine, China and Poland) would vote for the Russian pair. And everyone "knew" that the western judges (from the USA, Canada, Germany, and France) would vote for the Canadian. The only real decider was the Japanese judge -- who passed for neutral. He picked the Canadians. But it didn't matter once Le Gougne didn't vote for her "side". A 5-4 vote gave the Russians the victory.

It is a testament to just how deeply this sort of corruption was ingrained in the Olympics that nobody even thought to be aggrieved by the fact that the regional blocs were guaranteed to vote for "their" skater regardless of performance. Indeed, the entire fix was premised on the assumption that they would do just that. And yet, despite the fact that their votes if anything represent a deeper rot inside the body of Olympic figure skating, unlike Le Gougne, these judges received no punishment and no public attention whatsoever. Everything fell on the head of Le Gougne, because her corruption wasn't assumed from the get-go.

And that brings us to Susan Collins. Collins has had a rough year, politically-speaking: she's seen her approvals tank over the course of the Trump administration; and she's now in a statistical dead heat with her 2020 Democratic challenger Sara Gideon. This brings me almost indescribable joy. Time after time, Susan Collins has been a loyal water-carrier for the worst excesses of the Trump administration. She may grumble or pout or furrow her brow in grave concern, but when push comes to shove she has almost unerringly toed the party line. If a "moderate Republican" is someone who "talks about voting differently from other Republicans before voting exactly the same as other Republicans," Susan Collins is indeed Washington's quintessential moderate Republican. And this identity has made her one of the true, great villains of the Trump era.

In a sense, this is unfair. Susan Collins isn't voting any differently from Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz. Indeed, that's the very indictment against her: she votes just like they do. But like the eastern bloc judges, the corruption of Cotton and Hawley and Cruz is assumed. Everyone knows they're in the bag for whatever Trump would have them do. Collins has cultivated a public identity predicated on the idea that we should not "know" this about her. So it is more of a shock (even if by this point it should have ceased to be one) when she inevitably caves.

But still -- if Susan Collins feels that this is all unfair, I do think she has a point. She is not, objectively speaking, any worse than Cotton or Hawley or Cruz.

She has a point, and that point should be reflected in how we see her. And so when Collins loses her seat in 2020 (and I expect she will), and all the columnists race to write their eulogies for her Washington career, this is the only point about her truly worth making: Susan Collins was, at root, no different -- no better, no worse -- than Ted Cruz.

That is her legacy. And it is completely, entirely, deserved

Republican Jewish Coalition Supports the Most Antisemitic Congressman in Recent Minnesota History

You might recall a brief blip of news last year where Ilhan Omar was deemed antisemitic for implying that pro-Israel Americans may have dual loyalty with Israel.

It was, to be sure, problematic. But here's the thing: Ilhan Omar is not the most antisemitic politician in America. Hell, even if we restrict the terrain to "most antisemitic member of Congress from the greater Minneapolis area who ran for election during the Trump administration", she still wouldn't place first. That honor has to go to ex-Rep. Jason Lewis (R-MN), who did not imply, but outright stated, that many pro-Israel actors in American politics had "dual loyalties" with Israel and that congressional Republicans were controlled by the "Jewish lobby". Everything Omar hinted at, Lewis outright said. He's the easiest of easy cases.

But alas. Overt antisemitism should hardly be expected to stop the Republican Jewish Coalition from fundraising on Lewis' behalf as he seeks to parlay his 2018 congressional loss into a 2020 U.S. Senate seat. Because while there are many Jewish organizations that earnestly care about antisemitism regardless of source, the RJC is most certainly not one of them.

The New Labour Zionism(?)

In the wake of devastating losses in the 2019 general election, Labour is looking for a new leader to replace Jeremy Corbyn. Four candidates are running: Sir Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy, Rebecca Long-Bailey, and Emily Thornberry.

One major issue the party faces, of course, is how to deal with an antisemitism crisis in the party that precipitated a collapse in Jewish support and the departure of several prominent Jewish MPs (Louise Ellman and Luciana Berger) from the party.

Today the Jewish Labour Movement membership voted to endorse Nandy, an MP and former shadow energy secretary. The voting results demonstrate a pretty strong love-hate relationship among Jewish Labour figures: Nandy got 51% and Starmer got 45%, while Long-Bailey and Thornberry both were under 2%. This is not a reflection of front-runner bias: while Starmer is considered the odds-on favorite, Long-Bailey (the spiritual successor to Corbyn) is in second-place, with Nandy and especially Thornberry considered to be much longer shots. Rather, it is a divide between those candidates who are closely associated with Corbyn and perceived as continuations of his agenda (Long-Bailey, Thornberry) versus those who are perceived as offering a departure (Starmer, Nandy).

But something even more interesting, to me at least, happened at a candidate forum JLM hosted the other day. All four candidates were asked if they are Zionist. And all four answered "yes" -- either they were, or they support Zionism. Specifically:

• Thornberry: "I believe in the state of Israel and therefore I'm a Zionist."
• Starmer: "I don’t describe myself as a Zionist but I understand, sympathise and support Zionism."
• Nandy: "I believe that Jewish people have the right to national self-determination. That makes me a Zionist.

Even Long-Bailey, who is the most explicitly Corbynist of the candidates, said "I also agree with a secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state... I suppose that makes me a Zionist because I agree with Israel’s right to exist and right to self determine." A little begrudging, perhaps, but far better than one expects out of a candidate who rated Corbyn "10 out of 10" as a party leader!

One might have expected that the term "Zionist" would be too toxic for prospective Labour leaders to touch. The fact that they were willing to line up behind it -- a decision which, incidentally, does not and should not preclude critical attitudes towards Israeli policy -- is quite striking.

Of course, things are never all roses. Anti-Zionist-not-antisemitic Labour Twitter was decidedly not pleased with these philo-Zionist responses:

This is what fucks me off. We live in the UK not fucking Israel. I’m heartily sick of a minority of less than 0.5% of the U.K. population dominating our political agenda and @UKLabour MPs allowing it. Look after the working classes and leave Israel to sort it’s self out #fuming

— Tom Joad. (Google it) 👍 🌹 (@jtw_25_51) February 14, 2020

"A minority of less than 0.5% of the U.K. population dominating our political agenda...." I have an inkling of who is being referred to here -- but maybe I just don't understand British irony?

UPDATE: Another fascinating wrinkle: Nandy was also the chair of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East.

UPDATE 2X: This is a good account of the JLM event, and the palpable sense among attendees that things really may have turned a corner. It also notes that the JLM crowd was especially warm to Nandy when she noted her chairwomanship of Labour Friends of Palestine.

Post-New Hampshire Thoughts

New Hampshire is in the bag, and it's a win for Bernie Sanders. That makes him one for two, or two for two, depending on how you count. Let's go with 1.5 for two. And second place goes to none other than South Mayor Pete Buttigieg -- the Iowa Caucus winner (or "winner" -- again, I'm just not going to go into it). Third place, in a huge late surge, was Amy Klobuchar, who rounds out the pledged delegates winners. Fourth and fifth were Warren and Biden, respecitvely.

So where is the race now? My assorted thoughts:

• The biggest story is, of course, the Klobucharge. Namely, that people have finally settled on "Klobucharge" being the correct term. Indeed, as Eric Muller observes, this is just the tip of the iceberg: there's laying on the Klobucharm, flying off the Klobucharts, watching opponents get Klobucharred....

• We're so starved for hot takes that "the winner of the evening was the guy who won the evening" never satisfies. After all, Bernie beat Pete Buttigieg by less than two points in a state where he obliterated Hillary Clinton four years ago, and they actually earned the same number of delegates. Is that really good news? Answer: yes, because the moderates are still fractured and it's really hard to see Buttigieg consolidating the vote while there's time for it to make an impact. Sanders is now the definite -- though not overwhelming -- favorite.

• That said, the other big winner definitely is Klobuchar, who I think probably has positioned herself as the moderate candidate to beat. But does she have the resources and time to really launch in other states? Does she have any significant basis of appeal in communities of color? I'm doubtful -- which is another reason why this was a good night for Bernie.

• On the one hand: It's strange how we make all this noise about how unfair it is that the Democratic primary begins with two states that have virtually no POC voters, then write campaign obituaries after just two states with virtually no POC voters hit the polls. On the other hand: Joe Biden looks like toast, and his last stab at relevancy may be to play kingmaker among the remaining moderates. My guess is if he passes the torch to anyone, it will be Klobuchar.

• Tough night for my candidate, Elizabeth Warren. Getting the Castro endorsement may well have been prescient in the worst way: just like with Castro, my entire Twitter feed loves her, and just like with Castro, that love sadly is not translating to significant real world impact. She's not yet DOA, but she's in a tough spot. Sad.

• Two drop-outs: Yang and Bennet. I think a lot of Yang's supporters go to Sanders. As for Bennet's voters, well, you'd have to ask Michael Bennet because I'm pretty sure he's the only one.

• There were also reports -- quickly retracted -- that Tom Steyer was dropping out as well. This was the only time anyone has thought about Tom Steyer in the past month.

• While everyone else has been distracted, Michael Bloomberg is quietly rising in the polls based on the irresistible grassroots force of having literally infinity money to spend on advertising. But what happens when that force hits the immovable object of "Bloomberg is a sexual harasser whose signature political program was police harassment of Black people"? I imagine Bernie will start lighting him up on this sooner rather than later -- but until we actually see it, it's hard to know what will happen.

• Every year, political commentators breathlessly ask "could we have a brokered convention?" And every year, actual knowledgeable observers roll our eyes and say "there will never be a brokered convention." And yet ... could we have a brokered convention? Most of the "Sanders is the front-runner" case right now is based on the moderates dividing up the vote and allowing  Sanders to continue skating to narrow plurality wins based on his high floor/low ceiling. But Democrats don't have any winner-takes-all states, so even if Sanders keeps "winning" pluralities he's not amassing a delegate majority or anything close to it (the New Hampshire delegate tallies right now are Sanders 9/Buttigieg 9/Klobuchar 6).

• A brokered convention would be a disaster. Dis-as-ter. It's almost impossible to imagine Sanders winning it -- with the possible exception of Warren, none of the remaining heavies seem likely to have delegates itching to back him. But can you imagine how Sanders Sibs will react if they have a plurality of delegates going in, won the most states, and still lose the nomination? Hell, they barely accept it as legitimate when they lose the normal way. It will be Dems in disarray on steroids, except this time it will actually be true. A brokered convention might well rip the party apart.

• The only way Sanders wins the nomination in a brokered scenario is if his delegates credibly threaten to shoot the hostage (in this metaphor, the hostage is America, and shooting it means sitting back and letting Trump win), and they just might do it, which means threatening to do it just might work. Either way, it's a nightmare.

Happy Birthday (Media Quotation Edition!)

It's my birthday (my actual birthday, not the blog's birthday). I'm an alarming-number of years old today, and have the creaky knees to prove it.

In celebration, I give you this article on how the Trump administration's Executive Order on antisemitism may or may not affect free speech on campus. I'm quoted extensively in it.

(I also got myself Breath of the Wild as a self-present. So far it's pretty good!)

Rate That Apology, Part 9: AIPAC!

A few days ago, it emerged that AIPAC had ran some rather ... aggressive ads targeting Democrats. "The radicals in the Democratic Party," the ad text read, "are pushing their anti-Semitic and anti-Israel policies down the throats of the American people." Whoof. The ads also linked to a petition which said that "It’s critical that we protect our Israeli allies especially as they face threats from Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah ISIS and — maybe more sinister — right here in the U.S. Congress." Double whoof.

When I first saw these ads, they were so out-of-character for AIPAC (which -- reputation notwithstanding -- generally tries to avoid wading into partisan frays) that I assumed they were fake. But they were not, and AIPAC has apologized for running them.

So let's rate that apology, shall we?

The apology is four paragraphs long, and it is interesting while it starts off pretty good, each paragraph is worse than the one which comes before it. Let's take them one at a time:

We offer our unequivocal apology to the overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress who are rightfully offended by the inaccurate assertion that the poorly worded, inflammatory advertisement implied.

That's not bad! What I like most about this is the phrase "rightfully offended". Not "those who were offended", not "if you were offended", not "read it as offensive". The apology owns up that the ad was, objectively, offensive. It also agrees that the ad was inaccurate and inflammatory. "Poorly worded" is a bit of a hedge, but in the context of the rest of the paragraph I don't think it detracts from the message.

We appreciate the broad and reliable support that Democrats in Congress have consistently demonstrated for Israel. The bipartisan consensus that Democrats and Republicans have established on this issue forms the foundation of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

This is also generally fine. It's less "apologetic" than the first paragraph, to be sure. But had these been the only two paragraphs, I think this would have been an overall pretty decent, unequivocal apology. Alas....

The ad, which is no longer running, alluded to a genuine concern of many pro-Israel Democrats about a small but growing group, in and out of Congress, that is deliberately working to erode the bipartisan consensus on this issue and undermine the U.S.-Israel relationship.

I understand the temptation to try to explain, in one's apology, why you said the thing you're apologizing for. I'm not going to say one should never do that, but it's a high-risk proposition and it rarely pays off. Mostly, that's because it comes off as an effort to dodge responsibility and to rehabilitate what actually matters, which is the underlying cause. But here we see pitfall of a different and more ironic sort. The purpose of the ad was to express concern about the erosion of a bipartisan consensus around Israel? Well gosh golly, what do they think this ad did if not contribute to that erosion? It'd be like writing an apology for cursing out prominent entertainer and then saying you did it only to draw attention about diminishing civility in public life.

We regret that the ad's imprecise wording distorted our message and offended many who are deeply committed to this cause. We look forward to continuing our work with friends in Congress to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship and oppose any efforts to undermine its deep, bipartisan support.

Oh how far we've fallen from the first paragraph. At the start, "poor wording" was contextualized in language that straightforwardly accepted responsibility. Here, it stands alone, suggesting that the only problem with the advertisement was in its choice in rhetoric and that it was expressing an important point poorly. Nooope. The advertisement called Democrats antisemites who were ramming anti-Israel politics down the throats of the American people in a fashion potentially more sinister than ISIS. We're a well ways past the point of poor wording here. AIPAC needs to actually reckon with what it did here, and why it was wrong. If the beginning of the apology seemed to gesture in that direction, it's gone by the end.

I'll add one more note. For the most part in this series we've rated the apology of individuals, not organizations. And there are certain additional elements of an institutional apology that don't make a lot of sense for an individual. An individual can't "discipline" or "fire" the person responsible, nor can they really implement processes to "guard against this happening again". But an institution can, and maybe should be expected to. I don't think AIPAC has said anything on either of these fronts -- who was responsible, what actions (if any) were taken to discipline them, and what guardrails have been put up to ensure we don't see a repeat. That's worrisome, and knocks them down a grade.

In general, my view of AIPAC differs substantially from the conventional wisdom. The latter sees AIPAC as this titan of Washington politics that brutally crushes even the slightest deviation from Likudnik policy. I see AIPAC as a paper tiger that generally seeks to cultivate relationships more than enforce dogma and has largely struggled to flex any concrete muscle in circumstances where there is significant political energy pushing against it. This truth is masked because for many years there rarely was any political energy pushing against -- but you see it in the case of, e.g., the Iran Deal, where AIPAC really did go all out to sink it and made pretty much zero headway.

The problem AIPAC is running into is twofold. First, it wants to be bipartisan in an era of increased polarization. And second, it has a staff which I suspect actually is mostly left-of-center paired with a donor base that is increasingly right-wing. As much as folks like me see AIPAC as engaging in partisan attacks against Democrats (for all its talk about how it "supports a two-state solution", one never sees it drop $40 million to attack Republicans for abandoning it), it's also under a lot of pressure from its right flank which wants to see it really take the gloves off and explicitly come out as an anti-Democratic actor. They are tired of what they see as AIPAC coddling Democrats and want it to announce what they already know: Democrats are the anti-Israel party. These ads almost certainly came either from actors within AIPAC who agree with that sentiment, or as a result of pressure from external donors who are pushing that narrative. Hyperpolarization cuts both ways: Republicans, too, have little use for even a politically-friendly organization if it continues to gesture at straddling the middle. They don't want earnest efforts at cultivating bipartisanship; they want an attack dog.

AIPAC isn't paying me for advice, but I'll offer some anyway: this would be a very short-sighted strategy. It's not just because explicitly aligning with the right would be perhaps a boon for the Republican Party but a disaster for pro-Israel politics. It's also that the right-wing actors AIPAC would embolden are ones whom AIPAC has surprisingly little influence over. Even as its reputation has drifted right-ward over the past few years, AIPAC has progressively lost influence among Republican elected officials who prefer to take their cues from more explicitly partisan outlets like ZOA or CUFI. AIPAC might rule the roost of "bipartisan" Israel talk, but it's hard to see what their niche is as just one explicitly right-wing group among many.

For better or for worse, though, I doubt AIPAC is going to be able to right ship. It's just too big, and archaic, and creaky, and doesn't have the institutional adroitness to adjust to the new era its finding itself in.

Unfortunately for people like me, these sorts of transitions are difficult, and there will be adjustment pains. Is it fun watching AIPAC get used as a punching bag, accused of forming an "unholy alliance" with Islamophobes and White Nationalists while prominent Democratic candidates nod along? Not for me -- but then again, perhaps AIPAC should have thought of that before handing out money to Frank Gaffney or putting Adam Milstein on its national board. More broadly, to the extent the pro-Israel movement aligns itself with Trump, that ipso facto represents allying with an Islamophobe and White Nationalist of the highest order.

The sad truth is that AIPAC is mostly reaping what it has sown here. We can wince at intemperate rhetoric all we want, but the fact is the claim that AIPAC has aligned itself with -- has supported and is supported by -- at least some Islamophobes and White Nationalists is just as strong as the case that Bernie Sanders has aligned himself with antisemites, and the folks getting themselves up in high dudgeon over Elizabeth Warren not rushing to AIPAC's defense hardly would blink at similar accusations being leveled at Sanders (the idea that, if a rally-goer prefaced a question by saying Sanders is "forming an alliance with antisemites and Communists", Donald Trump would do anything but cheer him on is almost as fanciful as the idea that the national media would view it as an unspeakable slander if Trump did nothing more than ignore it).

Anyway, I've digressed a bit from rating that apology. So: A good start is undermined, albeit not wholly erased, by a mediocre ending. 5.5/10

David's 2020 Endorsement: Elizabeth Warren! (Plus: Likes and Dislikes!)

I've been keeping quiet about who I'm backing in the 2020 Democratic primary. I mean, I guess I came out for Booker earlier on, but that was with the self-conscious knowledge that I was just delaying my actual decision until he inevitably dropped out. It actually worked pretty well, since one of my key motivators is "not getting so invested in one person that I get mad if they don't win", and being on team Booker meant avoiding a lot of drama for the first infinity months of this never-ending primary season.

However, the time has come to plant my flag. And so the coveted David Schraub endorsement goes to: Elizabeth Warren!

In a field with many great candidates, I think she aligns closest to both my ideological values and my practical considerations for what a good President needs. To wit: she's a smart, New Deal liberal technocrat with good ideas and good instincts for finding and managing talent. I think she has the smarts to inspire good policy innovations and the savvy to actually move the ball forward in implementing them.

But when it comes right down to it, there are things I like and dislike (or at least am concerned about) for all the candidates. So if you want to follow my logic in making your decision, here's my current appraisal of the major remaining players in the Democratic field (with the important caveat that my main commitment is to vote for the Democratic candidate, no matter who it is, and be happy about it).

Elizabeth Warren
Likes: I already mentioned it above: smart, wonkish New Deal-style liberal with technocratic instincts. That's my jam. She has experience both as a thought leader coming up with ideas and a practical leader implementing policies on the ground -- a good President has to have a good handle on both. I also think that, of all the candidates, she's best positioned to unite the "progressive" and "establishment" wing of the party after the primary is over.

Dislikes: Many of the things I liked about Warren are the same things that attracted me to Hillary Clinton. And I'm obviously feeling a bit burned about how that turned out. She's going to face a boatload of misogyny (e.g., the assumption -- ludicrous if you listen to her -- that she's "shrill"), and that's on top of the easy "Massachusetts liberal" attack line.

Bernie Sanders
Likes: I actually do think a lot of his policy proposals are realistic -- at least in concept (getting them through the Senate, on the other hand....). He wrote a pretty darn good essay on Jewish issues in Jewish Currents. And I think he has more general election viability than a lot of other pundits believe -- his brand of anti-establishment fire is definitely on trend right now, and it is a myth that "independent" and "centrist" are coterminous categories.

Dislikes: All candidates have bad actors among their supporters, but Sanders definitely stands out here and not in a good way. A Sanders victory will embolden a cadre of actors who've embraced a leftist iteration of the paranoid style in American politics, a development I think would be outright dangerous for the future of American progressivism. And while Sanders can't be held fully responsible for the actions of his supporters, he's also shown shaky judgment on the people who he, personally, has decided to surround himself with. That's actually a big voting issue for me, since a large part of what a President does is picking other people to elevate to positions of power.

Amy Klobuchar
Likes: There's something to be said for a purpling-state Democrat who has utterly annihilated her Republican opposition every election she's faced. My lean-Republican midwestern in-laws love her, for what that's worth. I think she's smart and competent -- and if those sound like backhanded compliments, I don't mean them to be.

Dislikes: I may chuckle at some of the abusive boss stories, but it really is inappropriate and raises questions about how she'll attract good talent as President. The fact that she's been bragging on the campaign trail about a conviction of a kid who may well be innocent is not the best look. Plus, I think we can push in a more progressive direction than what she's offering.

Joe Biden
Likes: The ultimate "return to normalcy" candidate. 95% of his campaign pitch is "don't you miss the Obama years?", and I won't lie -- that sings to me a bit. He's also another person who I think will do well on the "staff positions with good people" metric.

Dislikes: He's just a bad campaigner. I'm sorry, but it's true. Any time he's run a national race he's imploded, and I think he'll do it again. His Iowa strategy of "repeatedly tell people they should vote for someone else" was a predictable disaster. Biden just feels like someone whose time has passed.

Pete Buttigieg
Likes: Another entry in the "basically smart guy" camp. Twitter notwithstanding, a lot of people seem to find him quite likable, and a fresh face. Fresh faces can be good.

Dislikes: Call me crazy, but I think politics is a job and I don't think one should jump from "Mayor of South Bend" to "President of the United States." Also, as a coastal-born American, I cannot stand this whole "real American heartland guy" shtick. Utter lack of support in non-White communities also is a turn-off -- though it'll be interesting to see if that changes after Iowa.

Mike Bloomberg
Likes: He seems to scare Trump, and genuinely get under his skin. I don't know if infinite money = unstoppable election campaign, but Bloomberg certainly could test the hypothesis. He's shown leadership on a couple of issues that matter to me -- guns and the environment, mostly. And again, I think he's someone who would pick competent people to surround him.

Dislikes: Not really interested in backing a random billionaire. And -- as one would expect from a recent Republican -- he's got a lot of problems on the issues. Stop and frisk is the obvious one, but he hasn't been good on trans rights either. Oh, and he has a history of harassing women, which the country may not care about but I do.

Tom Steyer
Likes: Of the billionaires, he seems to be better on the issues. So as against Bloomberg, he's a more progressive way of having "infinite money" to spend on the race.

Dislikes: More so than any other candidate running -- even Bloomberg -- Steyer is clearly just buying his way into political viability, and that makes me feel he's a bit of dilettante. For example, unlike Bloomberg, he has no actual political experience. Again, politics is a job, and I want a candidate who has experience holding office.

If Sanders Wins...

I think Bernie Sanders has to be considered the front-runner for the Democratic nomination right now. Not prohibitively so, but a moderate favorite. So what if he does win the Democratic nomination? This is what:

If any of you don’t vote for Bernie in November, you are as bad as any Nader voter, any Bernie Bro who wouldn’t pull the lever for Hillary. You are saying you are OK with fascism if the guy you don’t like is the nominee, as if voting for the Gore-Lieberman or Clinton-Kaine ticket was some kind of great thing for a whole lot of people who did it. If you spend the next six months after he wins the nomination whining about it, you are just as bad as all those guys who complained and whined and undermined Hillary’s candidacy before maybe finally voting for her.

I really don't have anything to add. There's no hemming and hawing here. If Bernie Sanders wins the nomination, and you're a Democrat, or an independent, or anyone halfway decent, you vote for Bernie Sanders, and you do it without any hesitation or caterwauling. Same goes for any Democratic nominee. Nothing more to it than that.

Iowa Caucuses: Winners and Losers

Fun fact: I was out to dinner with some folks Monday evening, and mentioned the Iowa Caucuses were happening. "That's today?", they asked. "Yup," I responded. "Hell, they'll be done by the time we finish eating!"

Oh, such a sweet summer child I was.

Anyway, 86% of precincts are reporting and it seems that folks are comfortable declaring a winner: South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, with 26.7% of "State Delegate Equivalents". Bernie Sanders placed second with 25.4%, followed by Elizabeth Warren (18.3%), Joe Biden (15.9%), and Amy Klobuchar (12.1%). Nobody else finished in double digits.

Of course, this being Iowa, there are many other ways to count who "won". In terms of how SDEs translate to actual national convention delegates, Buttigieg and Sanders tie (11 each), with Warren taking 5 (and zero for everyone else). In terms of original vote tallies (before supporters of non-viable candidates redistributed), Sanders came out ahead with 24.3% to Buttigieg's 21.5% and Warren's 18.7%. And following redistribution, Sanders still came out ahead in the "popular vote", with 26.1% to Buttigieg's 25.5% and Warren's 20.5%. If you're wondering how Sanders could win the popular vote but lose the SDE count, Buttigieg's support was spread out across more of the state and so more efficiently translated into SDEs.

Incidentally, as much as everyone is hating on the Iowa Caucuses for the technological catastrophe, this is my biggest beef -- why is it so hard to just say "the candidate with the most votes wins"? But nobody's asking me.

What they are asking me is -- who are the ultimate winners and losers of the Caucuses?

Winner: Pete Buttigieg. Obviously -- he won. And this is a good reminder, once again, that Twitter is not real life. On Twitter (my Twitter at least), Buttigieg is basically a joke. But in real life, lots of people really like him! It's still hard for me to believe he'll win the whole thing -- Iowa was a good state for him. But I think there was a slowly coalescing narrative that Buttigieg was fading out of the top tier, and this certainly puts a stop to that.

Winner: Bernie Sanders. Not just because he had a strong second place showing. If Biden fades, Sanders is probably the next-in-line as the "default" candidate, and I'm inclined to agree that he may well be the new front-runner at this point. The only dark cloud is that it still doesn't look like he's good at consolidating support from other candidates -- there may well be a sizable "anybody but Sanders" contingent among Democratic primary voters, and the more the field narrows the harder that is to overcome. But while Sanders may still have a low ceiling, he has a high floor, so if the field never unjumbles itself he may be able to ride his core base of support all the way to the convention.

Winner: Amy Klobuchar. While not quite a Klobu-charge (dammit, I'm going to make it happen), this was a strong showing for the Minnesota Senator -- enough to at least get people to give her a real look. That's no guarantee they'll stick with her, and she still has a lot of obstacles in her way; but it's a way better posture than the one she occupied before Iowa.

Loser: Joe Biden. It wasn't the worst-case scenario of an utter shellacking, but it was definitely an underperformance. We can talk all we want about how he was never going to win Iowa, and how his best states are ahead of him, and it's all about relative performance -- but at the end of the day, if you're the nominal front-runner placing fourth is not a good look. The chaos of the results was frankly a godsend for Biden in that it completely stepped on the story of his bad showing (and his disgraceful insinuations that the results couldn't be trusted).

Loser: Elizabeth Warren. Kind of like Biden. She certainly didn't do badly, and probably arrested any incipient narrative about a campaign freefall. But I don't think a clear third place finish -- definitely above Biden, definitely below Sanders and Buttigieg -- does much for her, or gives people confidence that she can ever quite pull out of the back.

Loser: Iowa. Florida 2000 jokes were getting kind of stale, but I think Iowa might just have stepped into those big shoes. Please, for the love of God, take away their caucuses next time (or better yet, take away their "first in the nation" status entirely -- but the caucuses have to go).

Monster Jam

Remember when Samantha Power called Hillary Clinton a "monster"?

It was in the middle of the 2008 primary. Feelings ran hot. Emotions were intense. But it just wasn't the sort of thing you can do. So Power resigned from Barack Obama's campaign. Later, when Obama was elected, she returned and served in his administration (along with Secretary of State Clinton).

This past week, Rashida Tlaib led the crowd at a Bernie Sanders rally in a rousing round of boos for Hillary Clinton. She now sort-of regrets it (this thread would not score highly in my "rate that apology" series). Of course, many people are defending her and saying of course she should boo Clinton, she has all the reason in the world to boo Clinton, everyone should boo Clinton, look at all the terrible things Clinton has done to Bernie Sanders.

For me, though, this is just like the Power scenario. I backed Obama over Clinton in 2008, and I am a massive admirer of Samantha Power. But -- putting aside whether it was "appropriate" in some objective sense -- calling your main intraparty opponent who still carries significant support among the class of voters you need both the primary and the general a "monster" is just bad message discipline. The project of political campaigning means sometimes -- probably often -- biting your lip and not saying what you really feel, even -- especially -- when emotions are running hot. If you can't do that, you're a liability. I said then, and I meant it, and I believe it, that Power was correct to resign from the campaign (I also said, and I meant it and I believe it, that this was not a call for permanent exile -- and I was thrilled when she rejoined the Obama administration).

I was very unlikely to vote for Joe Biden in this primary field, but one of the things that has especially driven me away from him is the repeated clips of him snapping at prospective voters who've asked challenging questions to "vote for someone else." I'm sure Biden feels like he's being unfairly harangued. I'm sure the questions he's facing make him hot under the collar. Maybe I think some of the questions he's facing are unfair too. But you've got to keep it together. Joe Biden lacks discipline, and that makes him a weaker candidate in a grueling election season.

I saw one prominent leftist writer defend the Sanders campaign re: Tlaib by saying, in essence, that the reason Sanders was so great was that he doesn't try to regulate what his surrogates say. Everyone's allowed to speak from the heart! That is such a lovely, egalitarian, romantic idea for running a campaign that will barrel headfirst into electoral catastrophe. Campaigns need discipline. They need people to keep their heads on straight.

The fact of the matter is -- and too many Sanders supporters seem unwilling to accept this -- they need to appeal to Hillary Clinton voters. Lots of Democrats like Hillary Clinton! And Obama! And other members of the dreaded "establishment"! Obama and Clinton won their primaries! They've gotten the support of most Democrats! Telling a Democratic primary voter -- and I've gotten this exact phone call -- that they shouldn't vote for so-and-so in the primary because she's "an Obama Democrat" is such a colossal misreading of the political space, it's campaign malpractice. If I'm cutting ads against Sanders in primaries in South Carolina or Georgia, it's just going to be a string of clips of Sanders and his surrogates dismissively deriding popular Democratic figures.

Plenty of Sanders supporters are frustrated with Hillary Clinton (plenty of Biden supporters are frustrated with Bernie Sanders!). I get it. There's some bad blood, and the primary season is intense. Too bad. Suck it up. Politics ain't beanbag, but it isn't a therapy session for you to vent your honest emotional truth either. Campaigns need discipline. If you're on a campaign and you can't hold it inside when necessary, you need to step back.

The Good Place: Final Thoughts

*MAJOR SPOILERS*

At the conclusion of season three, I registered my prediction of how The Good Place would end:

The abolition of the afterlife in its entirety (no more good or bad places); a re-emphasis on doing as best you can when it matters (i.e., during one's actual life); the core quartet is sent back to Earth to live out the rest of their natural lives as friends.

I would say that, like most religions, I got about 5% right. The afterlife, as we knew it, is abolished. And the series does end with all of the human characters passing on. But in between, The Good Place takes a much more audacious swing: a genuine attempt to reform the afterlife. And -- and I think this is perhaps even more profound -- an essential acknowledgment that this attempt fell short. A perfect paradise was not created, and in fact the final conclusion of The Good Place seems to be that such a paradise is impossible even in concept.

After all, cut away the underbrush and the heroes' solution to the problem afflicting The Good Place was to offer the choice of suicide. And while the penultimate episode suggests that perhaps just having the option will suffice to stave off the ennui of eternal bliss, the finale refuses to accept that out. Every human character, eventually, kills themselves. Their happy ending is that they are content to die. The best possible paradise is one where people can and do eventually choose to erase themselves from existence. Skip over the beatific forest setting and the stipulation of emotional contentment, and that's a rather melancholic, if not outright grim, conclusion.

It's easy to draw a parallel between the last episode and the need for fans to accept the voluntarily-chosen end of a great show like The Good Place (it's even easier to draw it to the need to accept our own mortality). But another recurrent theme in The Good Place is the failure of systems. Over and over again, the systems the characters find themselves in are revealed to be either malfunctioning or outright designed to immiserate them.

From the very beginning, Eleanor and Chidi confront the brutal harshness of the points system, which results in nearly all people being horrifically tortured for eternity (incidentally, that Chidi isn't immediately repelled by -- and suspicious of -- this set-up is a rare miscue in terms of characterization, if not plotting). They resolve to try and improve Eleanor, only to find out that they're actually in a perpetual torture chamber which will literally reset every time they come close to escaping it.

At this point, the series becomes a repeated effort to find ever-higher levers in the celestial bureaucracy that can be appealed to. They find a judge, who is at best indifferent to their predicament and not particularly interested in helping them. Upon returning to earth, they discover first that they can't ever improve enough to enter The Good Place (because -- knowing the stakes -- their motivations are corrupt) and then that nobody can successfully enter The Good Place because existence has become too interwoven and morally interdependent for anyone to satisfy the standard of admission. They meet the actual Good Place committee, who are worse than useless and content to let everyone suffer forever because taking any concrete action risks violating some procedural norm. And when they finally enter The Good Place, they discover it's as dysfunctional as everywhere else -- gradually sucking the life out of its residents who, given eternity, eventually tire of everything. All the systems fail. All of them are doomed to fail. They can't not.

Hence, the suicide gate (and sidenote: If The Good Place ever has a spin-off series -- and lord knows it shouldn't -- it should definitely involve exploring the first murder in the Good Place when someone gets involuntarily shoved through that archway).

By the time it reaches its conclusion, The Good Place is one of the few depictions of the afterlife to take the concept of eternity seriously. Some other venues glance in this direction. Agent Smith in The Matrix tells Neo that humans reject a simulation of paradise -- the implication is because we're diseased, but perhaps also indicating that perfect, eternal happiness ... isn't. Maya Rudolph's other afterlife vehicle, Forever, certainly touches on this theme. The Order of the Stick has an afterlife where people can eat all the food and have all the sex and otherwise satisfy all the "messed-up urges you people have leftover after having your soul stuck in a glorified sausage all your life". But this is only the "first tier" of heaven: once you're bored, you can "climb the mountain" to search for a higher level of spiritual satisfaction. And while what this entails is left vague, it is not death -- those who ascend can, if they wish, descend back down to the lowlier pleasures (OOTS also introduces the very neat concept of "Postmortum Time Disassociation Disorder").

But the story which provides perhaps the most powerful foil to The Good Place's view of eternity and immortality is (and of the approximately 143,000 Good Place retrospectives being written right now, I bet I'm the only one to make this comparison) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

The ultimate adversary in HPMOR is not Snape, or Malfoy, or Voldemort. It is death, and Harry is committed to the "absolute rejection of death as the natural order." The message on the Potters' gravestone is, after all, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (and it's a sign of my cloistered Jewish upbringing that I thought this was a Rowling original -- it is in fact a quote from I Corinthians). Harry Potter wants people to live forever. And the story anticipates the objection, placed in the mouth of Dumbledore, "What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

The last few episodes of The Good Place are, in a sense, a calling of this bluff. Even if you play out the string all the way to extinguishment of the sun or the heat death of the universe -- well, forever is a long time. It can wait. Harry argues that the only reason we accept death is because we're used to it, and if you took someone who lived in a world where there was no death and asked them if they'd prefer to live in a universe where eventually people ceased to exist, they'd look at you like you're crazy. The Good Place provocatively argues the precise opposite -- that if death didn't exist, people would have to invent it. Or they would go crazy, with infinite time on their hands.

And so we are, perhaps, back to where we started. The paradise the heroes create is certainly better than that which they replaced. But it still is deeply, tragically flawed -- and The Good Place seems to believe that these flaws are fundamentally inescapable.

The suicide option is the clearest manifestation of how cracked paradise must be, but there is another issue that the show alludes to: paradise depends on other people, and on their choices. Way back in the first season, "Real Eleanor" raises this precise point: if her soulmate doesn't love her, "this will never truly be my Good Place." Sure it's actually a contrivance to torture Chidi, but it's easy to imagine it as real. What if your paradise is to live blissfully with a certain special someone and ... that person doesn't love you back? Both Simone and Tahani seem okay with Chidi and Jason respectively choosing someone other than them (Eleanor and Janet). But that's in harmony with the audience's happy ending. It's not hard to imagine a different world where they were less sanguine about it.

Or take a far more direct problem: If paradise comes with a suicide option, what happens if your loved one takes it? Harry's excited declaration of all the things he'd do with infinite time is not fundamentally, the reason why he desires immortality. When push comes to shove, he's motivated by a far more basic yearning: to make it so "people won't have to say goodbye any more."

Eleanor's utter panic at the thought of losing Chidi forever was, for me at least, the most visceral emotional gut-punch of the entire series -- even more than the finale of season three (at least there, we could be reasonably assured their separation was temporary). She eventually comes to terms with it. But sit on it a little more: imagine a "paradise" where your soulmate has left you forever. People fantasize about heaven to be reunited with their loved ones, yet we end up looping right back into eternal separation. What kind of paradise is this, where people still have to say goodbye?

So we have two problems that seem to threaten even the conceptual coherency of a paradise:

• First, if paradise is forever, eventually everything will become tired. That suicide is presented as a good solution to this problem shows just how serious it is (and, for what it's worth, I'm not sure the suicide "option" would necessarily bring relief. It could easily generate crippling anxiety -- a sense of trappedness between the irrevocable permanence of death and the unbearable ennui of existence). 
• Second, if paradise depends on the choices other people make, how can we be sure they'll make choices compatible with your happy ending?

The Good Place presents the first problem as unavoidable and skates past the second entirely. But could they be overcome?

Maybe. In the penultimate episode of The Good Place, one solution proposed to the problem of eternal ennui is to reset people's memories, so the things that bored them become fresh again. This is swiftly rejected as a repetition of how the quartet was tortured in The Bad Place. Too swiftly, in my view. Neighborhoods were also used to torture -- should those be jettisoned too?

The problem with eternity is that eventually, everything gets repetitive. Go-Kart Racing against monkeys may be a blast the first time, but it loses its luster after a million reiterations. The wistfulness comes from wishing one could go back to that initial burst of discovery and experience -- before one had the memory of doing it all over again. This was my immediate solution to the ennui problem -- not that some demon should periodically reset you, but that you should be able to choose when, where, and how to reset yourself. It's not just about going back in time. It's reoccupying any memory state you've ever possessed. Go back to before you ever raced against monkeys -- then zoom forward to when you've already experienced all the monkey-races you could handle.

It's like a load/save system for your mind. Hell, you can even adjust the "difficulty" level. It's true that, for many, a "paradise" where one simply automatically gets whatever one wants will feel unsatisfying. But one needn't set the parameters of paradise to guarantee success. It can be as hard or easy as one wants; people can be as pliant or obstinate as one likes (not for nothing is one of the afterlife attractions in OOTS -- a fantasy roleplaying-based setting -- "The Dungeon of Monsters That Are Just Strong Enough to Really Challenge You").

Or dream bigger. If one has infinite ability to reverse and remake memory as one wishes, then one could at any point adapt any set of memories one ever could have had. Don't just live a different life, remember a different life. Then jump forward and remember all the different lives you lived -- each of which (when you lived them) you had erased the memories of all the others. Every single possible timeline is lived -- and can be relived in all its glory, as many times as one wants.

For me, at least, this dissolves the problem of others' choices as well. If anyone can make not just any possible choice, but live through any possible timeline, what does it mean to ask which one is "real"? If your paradise involves loving and being loved by a particular someone, will in your paradise, the person you need to love you, loves you, and stays with you as long as you need. In their paradise, they might love someone else. You enjoy a timeline where people choose exactly the choices that would make you most happy; they live in a timeline which is the same for them. Of course, the sorts of philosophical questions that would raise (among others: What does it mean for the "same" person to simultaneously exist across multiple timelines? Who, exactly, is "choosing" which version they occupy? And if the one that does choose doesn't choose a timeline that involves them loving you back, is the version that does love you really "them"?) are even more esoteric and less accessible to a network audience than the moral philosophy questions The Good Place did try to introduce. So I don't blame them for skipping by it.

* * *

The last enemy to be defeated may not, after all, be death. It may be time.  Time ruins all things. Eventually you run out of it. And even if you never ran out of it -- you had infinite time -- it would defeat you in a different way: via boredom, repetition, and ennui. We can, perhaps, imagine a world where we vanquish death. But can we imagine one where (forgot about possibility, and just think conceptually) we defeat time?

I can. Barely, but I can. Of course, it's in many ways a moot point, since I'm profoundly skeptical that humanity ever will master time in this way -- or even if it's practically possible (that it won't happen in my lifetime is actually less material, given that if it ever did happen we'd probably be at Omega Point anyway). But at least it holds out the possibility of an actual happy ending -- where the last enemy is truly vanquished, and nobody has to say goodbye.

Bernie Sanders, Joe Rogan and the Politics of Conviction

If you're relying on me to inform you about the Bernie Sanders/Joe Rogan controversy, you need to read more widely.

The short version is this: Joe Rogan is a podcaster with a brand of anti-PC anti-establishment angry comedy, who is popular with ... exactly the sort of crowd that likes anti-PC anti-establishment anger. He endorsed Bernie Sanders, and Sanders loudly trumpeted the endorsement.

On one level, Rogan's endorsement is a big coup for Sanders insofar as it gives him credibility with the proverbial disaffected White voter. Sanders ability to appeal to this crowd is central to his "electability" case.

On another level, Rogan's "brand of anti-PC anti-establishment angry comedy" often in practice has been vicious racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant. So Sanders is taking a lot of flak from people who think the supposed standard-bearer of the left shouldn't be aligning himself with that sort of reactionary hatred.

Sanders' defenders think this is all yet another bad-faith cheap shot from the "establishment" desperate to take Bernie down a peg. After all, how many other candidates have accepted endorsements from morally compromised figures (Henry Kissinger is a popular target) and not gotten half the backlash? Many of the critics rejoin by saying they are not anti-Sanders per se -- some are even backers -- but feel especially betrayed that Bernie Sanders is elevating and amplifying the voice of the likes of Joe Rogan.

So that's the controversy in a nutshell. And I have two points. First, when people argued that Bernie Sanders could build a different sort of political coalition because he could uniquely appeal to disaffected White voters, this is what they meant. They may not have realized it was what they meant; there's been quite a bit of romantic naivete that when these voters back Sanders they were doing so because they've become converts to a true-blue socialist vision that goes all the way down, and in comradeship they would join the left cultural issues right alongside economic ones. But in reality, this was always going to be the way that it worked -- if Sanders was able to build a novel coalition that brought back these angry White male voters that had been attracted to Trump back into the fold, they were going to come with all the baggage that made them Trump-curious in the first place. As I remarked last year, it's fine to say "that's politics" and accept that political coalitions always will entail alliances with some unsavory sorts. But one can't just wear blinders that this is what one is doing.

Which brings me to point number two. One of the reason Bernie Sanders, in particular, is taking flak over this sort of arguably unremarkable political compromise is because so much of his campaign's organizing narrative is based on the idea that he doesn't compromise. In contrast to an establishment that is hopelessly tainted by disreputable associations and opportunistic corrupt bargaining, Sanders stands as someone who will always do the right thing, even if it's the hard path. He has his convictions, and he sticks to them. That's what makes him stand out, and -- for his more passionate supporters -- that's what makes other Democrats unpalatable. They play the game. Sanders will overturn the game table.

What Sanders is finding out, though, is something Max Weber observed years ago: nobody who is actually seeking to exercise political power can get away with the pure politics of conviction. One will always have to compromise, there will always be instances where one has to sacrifice ideals on the altar of expediency. Sanders is getting hit harder for the Rogan endorsement because in some ways the very controversy falsifies one of his core campaign narratives. When you've held yourself as the beacon of uncompromising conviction, obviously you're going to take a few shots when you so publicly engage in a political compromise -- accepting Rogan's backing (and the disaffected White voters he may bring with him) and the expense of excusing his anti-egalitarian rantings against various other marginalized groups.

It's kind of like conservative legal originalists. They get on such a high horse about how they're the only legal interpreters who are apolitical and unideological and just calling "balls and strikes". And so when they inevitably have to engage in judgment calls and contested interpretation -- and those calls and interpretations oh-so-shockingly skew towards their political priors -- there's going to be some extra mustard on the ensuing denunciations. It's not that adherents of other legal theories are immune to those sorts of behaviors. But they haven't dedicated their entire public profile to declaring they are so immune (and therefore superior).

Me, I'm a pragmatist -- I've long since come to terms with the fact that politics entails political compromises, so I don't get too exercised when I see it in the wild. Whether or not I think Joe Rogan's endorsement is a net positive or negative, it is not in the family of political misconduct that particularly bothers me (for similar reasons, actually, to why I don't get too worked up that "Linda Sarsour is a campaign surrogate!"). All it tells me is that Bernie Sanders is a perfectly ordinary politician -- and to be honest, it never occurred to me to view him as anything else.

No. Matter. Who.

First things first: If you are a Democrat, the only valid answer to the question "will you support the Democratic nominee regardless of who it is?" is "yes." No hemming. No hawing. No "it depends." Yes.

I don't care whether the nominee is Biden or Warren or Sanders or Klobuchar or Bloomberg or Tulsi frickin' Gabbard. The answer is yes.

So: Joe Biden gets today's tsk of shame for not answering this question correctly:

Former Vice President Joe Biden stopped short Tuesday of saying he’d support Bernie Sanders if the progressive Vermont senator wins the Democratic presidential nomination.

“I’m not going to make judgments now,” Biden told reporters in Muscatine, six days before the Iowa caucuses. “I just think that it depends upon how we treat one another between now and the time we have a nominee.”

Bzzzt. Wrong answer. The correct answer is "yes", without further adornment. See above.

But a new poll suggests that while Biden-the-candidate may be getting it wrong; at least his supporters are getting it right. And as for Bernie Sanders -- well, vice versa. He's taken the right line on the issue, but his supporters....

Only a small majority of Bernie Sanders voters say they will definitely support the eventual Democratic nominee at the 2020 election if the independent Vermont senator does not win the race, according to a poll.

The National Emerson College Poll of 1,128 registered voters between January 21 and January 23 found that 53 percent of Sanders supporters said "yes" when asked if they would support the Democratic nominee even if it is not their candidate.

Another 31 percent of Sanders supporters said it depends on who the nominee is and 16 percent flat-out said no. The poll, conducted via landline calls and an online panel, has a 2.8 percentage point margin of error.

The poll suggests some Sanders supporters are out of step with their own chosen candidate on the question of supporting the Democratic nominee regardless of who it is.

"Let me be clear: If any of the women on this stage or any of the men on this stage win the nomination—I hope that's not the case, I hope it's me—but if they do I will do everything in my power to make sure that they are elected in order to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of our country," Sanders said at the recent Iowa debate.

By comparison to Sanders, 87 percent of former vice president Joe Biden's supporters said yes to voting for whoever wins the nomination, 9 percent it depends on the winning candidate, and 5 percent said no to anyone that is not Biden.

And 90 percent of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren's supporters said they would vote for whoever is the nominee, while the remaining 10 percent said it depended on who won the nomination.

None of Warren's supporters said they would not vote for the eventual nominee if she loses the Democratic race.

Chalk this up as another data point in favor of "Bernie Sanders" being far, far superior to "Bernie Sanders supporters."

Wilder/Fury II: Preview

It's been awhile since we had a boxing post on this site, but I've got $40 on Tyson Fury to defeat Deontay Wilder in the rematch, so why not run through my thinking?

Full disclosure: My track record of boxing betting involving any fight not including Floyd Mayweather is not great. So take what I say with a grain of salt -- or as a guide in the opposite direction.

When I visited Las Vegas a few weeks ago, the Wilder/Fury fight was a pure toss-up -- -110 odds for either fighter. That makes some sense, given that their first fight went to a draw. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked Fury in the rematch -- and that's accounting for the fact that as a fan I greatly prefer Wilder. Two things loomed largest in pointing towards "The Gypsy King":

First, most observers thought that if anybody won the first fight, it was Fury. Instead the outcome was a draw. In my experience, when most people thought boxer A defeated boxer B in the first fight, but the judges disagree, boxer A beats boxer B more decisively in the rematch. Think Pacquiao/Bradley. There are exceptions, but they tend to fall into two categories. Either A's win would have been a huge upset (in which case, often the explanation is that B overlooked A, and doesn't make the same mistake twice); or B has a lot more drawing power/promoter backing than A. Neither one applies here: Wilder and Fury are roughly equally popular, and were viewed as evenly-matched from the start. It's hard to imagine Wilder was "overlooking" Fury in their first fight.

But that's mostly me doing amateur psychology on the mindset of the judges. Substantively, I see a much bigger issue for Wilder -- at the very top level, he's repeatedly needed his power to bail him out. That was true in both Ortiz fights, each of which he was losing before he came-from-behind with a knockout. And it was true in the first Fury fight, where he needed two knockdowns (including one in the final round) to scrape out a draw that even then many observers thought he was lucky to get. If Wilder didn't land his one big shot, he loses those fights.

Now of course, if ever there was an eraser, it's Deontay Wilder's power. I don't overlook that. And I get the whole argument that Tyson Fury has to be good for 12 rounds, while Deontay Wilder only has to be good for one second. Even still, it's never a good thing to go into a fight needing a knockout. There's a reason why Randall Bailey didn't win every fight he was ever in. If that's your only dimension, eventually you'll encounter a guy who can neutralize it long enough to take a decision.

And let's not forget -- Tyson Fury might be the one guy on the planet capable of surviving Wilder's power. The punch that dropped Fury in the 12th round of their first fight was the sort of shot I didn't think it possible to get up from. But Fury did, and survived the round. It's not enough for Wilder to land the big shot, it has to actually end the fight. Against 99% of all opposition, that's a foreordained conclusion. Against Fury, it isn't.

Tyson Fury certainly didn't look perfect against Otto Wallin in his last fight. But unlike Wilder, he didn't have to bail himself out of a hole with one punch. Much the opposite, he gritted out a decision under deep adversity (and I'd point out that we really have no idea just how good Wallin is). He showed heart and discipline, two things he'll need in spades against Wilder. But if he sticks to a gameplan and boxes smart, I think he can ride out Wilder's one punch, and get the victory many observers thought he deserved the first time around.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LVII: The Death of Kobe Bryant

When seeking to attribute a given historical happening that doesn't seem to involve Jews to a Jewish conspiracy, one generally can take one of two routes.

The first is to find a connection between a critical figure in the event and a Jewish person in their social orbit. This isn't hard, since most of the prominent figures one would want to build a conspiracy theory around probably know at least some Jews. This is the angle that gave us classics like "Blaming Jews for a coup in Turkey" or "Blaming Jews for Taylor Swift endorsing Phil Bredesen".

But if the connection can't be found or feels to tenuous (though lord knows what could be "too tenuous" for the people in this series), there's another route: it's a distraction to draw attention away from some other news.

The people who -- surprising no one -- immediately jumped aboard the "Jews killed Kobe Bryant!" train appear to be taking Door #2.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the rest of the child molesting adrenochrome injecting jew rats killed Kobe to distract from the fact THAT THEY ARE STILL LETTING FLIGHTS FROM WUHAN LAND AT LAX, JFK, ATL...

— MicroaggressionMedia ✝️ (@MicroAgMedia) January 26, 2020

More examples of the genre collected here.

My sincere condolences to the Bryant family and all those who died today.

Technically, Any Number of Seconds Can Be Split Any Number of Times

Yesterday, in Chestnut v. Wallace,* the Eighth Circuit denied an officer qualified immunity. That itself is arguably worthy of noting, since the Eighth Circuit is not exactly predisposed to denying qualified immunity.

The case itself is straightforward: a man (Chestnut) quietly observed a St. Louis police officer perform a traffic stop from about 30 - 40 feet away, while leaning against a tree. The officer viewed this as suspicious, and called for backup. A new officer asked for Chestnut's name, birthday, and social security number; he refused to provide the last of these. The officer then frisked Chestnut for weapons, found none, and then proceeded to have Chestnut handcuffed. After about twenty minutes and a conversation with the officer's supervisor, Chestnut was released. Since observing the police does not provide reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, and since people are allowed to not answer questions from the police (such as providing their social security number), no reasonable officer could have had suspicion of criminal activity, and so there is no qualified immunity.

Judge Gruender dissented. This is considerably less noteworthy, since an officer could probably shove a handcuffed detainee off a six-story building and Judge Gruender would conclude he has qualified immunity.

I do want to flag one thing though, from the end of Judge Gruender's opinion. He writes that "police officers are not—and should not be—expected to parse fine distinctions between statutory and constitutional law in split-second decisions." This rhetoric of "split-second decisions" is increasingly common in judicial opinions that seek to insulate police officers from accountability, particularly in use-of-force cases. Maybe we have sympathy for it in that context, maybe we don't.

But it is interesting to see this rhetoric make a near-reflexive showing in this case, as nothing about the police's interaction with Chestnut involved anything like a "split-second decision". There were no sudden movements, no unpredictable reversals or unexpected flinches. Chestnut was far away from the action and was not an imminent threat to anyone. By the time he was placed in handcuffs, the police already knew he was unarmed. That Judge Gruender nonetheless characterizes this case as involving a "split-second" decision suggests that anything the police do deserves that label. But it's just not true. Not every decision a police officer makes in the field is a "split-second" one; the decision to detain Chestnut certainly was not. It was a decision taken after many seconds, under no particular pressures and with ample time to deliberate.

In that same paragraph, Judge Gruender hoarily remarks that police officers in the field are not "participating in a law school seminar." Indeed, they are not. They are taking real actions which have real consequences for real people. Kevin Chestnut was placed in handcuffs for having the temerity to look at the police in public. That's a terrible thing to have experienced; obscured though it might be behind rhetoric of "reasonable suspicion" and the fuzzy line between "detention" and "arrest". We should step out from the legalese fictions that justify qualified immunity, and start taking the reality of what the police do -- and who they are doing it to -- a lot more seriously.

* The opinion was authored by Judge Arnold, joined by Judge Grasz -- and I'll reiterate again what a pleasant surprise Judge Grasz has been on qualified immunity issues.

On the AMCHA "Bringing BDS into the Classroom" Study

The AMCHA Initiative has a new self-published study, which is gaining some attention in the Jewish Press, purporting to show that when teaching courses related to Israel, Palestine, or Zionism, (academic) BDS-backing faculty are more likely load up their syllabi with fellow BDS-supporters, as opposed to giving their students a balanced perspective. Their big takeaway findings are:

• For academic BDS supporters, a median 78% of syllabi readings are by "BDS supporters", compared to a 17% for non-BDS supporters.
• All academic BDS supporters have  at least a majority of readings from "BDS supporters", whereas only 6% of non-BDS supporters have a majority of readings from "BDS supporters".

I'd been hearing about this study for awhile, and I was finally prompted to look it over after reading this laudatory account from Daniel Gordon. Gordon argues that the AMCHA study proves that BDS supporters are sabotaging the values of balance and even-handedness in favor of a one-sided propagandistic approach in their classrooms -- so much so that he suggests that either academic administrators or "the public" at large might be justified in interfering with their content.

That's an aggressive claim, and one that requires equally strong proof. Yet the AMCHA study provides, at best, mixed evidence regarding who is actually being one-sided. Let me present AMCHA's data in a different way that might generate a different intuition (this is derived from "Figure 1" of the study):

• 63% of "no BDS" faculty have at least 80% of their syllabus readings come from fellow "no BDS" authors. For 31%, that number rises to 90%.
• By contrast, just 33% of academic BDS supporters have at least 80% of their syllabus readings come from fellow BDS supporters. And only 7% (aka, one syllabus) has over 90% of readings come from other BDS supporters.

Framed that way, one could argue that it's the BDS supporters who do a better job avoiding overwhelmingly one-sided syllabi. Two-thirds of them devote at least a non-trivial chunk of their syllabi to their ideological opponents. By contrast, BDS opponents are far more likely to completely or almost completely load their syllabi up exclusively with fellow BDS opponents. If the idea is, in Gordon's words, to present "competing narratives", it's far from clear that BDS opponents are doing their diligence in meaningfully presenting the "opposing side".

Now to be clear, I think one can very easily overinterpret this framing as well. Most notably, it doesn't take into account the base rate -- what percentage of authors active in Israel Studies qualify as "BDS supporters"? If it's only a marginal few, then the "no BDS" crowd might be giving their views proportionate weight even if they only occupy 10 - 20 % of the syllabus (and this would, similarly, suggest that BDS backers are significantly oversampling their side relative to its support levels). But base rate levels are very difficult to tease out, and almost certainly vary depending on the specific topic of the course. It's quite plausible that many more authors working on "Palestinian Literature of Resistance" support BDS compared to those working on "Israeli Constitutional Law", and so the fact that a class on the former contains many BDS-backers on the syllabus (or one on the latter contains few) does not necessarily reveal any especial bias on the part of the professor. And that doesn't even go into the over-simplified notion that "BDS support/opposition" necessarily mark out the relevant ideological "sides" for every class.  The difficulties in parsing these out in practice, when they're almost always going to be matters of interpretation, are just some of the many reasons why outside observers should be very leery about substituting their own judgments regarding "balance" and "even-handedness" for that of the professor.

The AMCHA study also raises another pertinent question: Who counts as a "BDS supporter"? Here, the study authors do something rather slick -- they change their answer for the independent versus the dependent variable. The result is to significantly inflate the level of same-side bias that exists on the side of the "BDS supporters".

Here's how it works: For the independent variable -- that is, the professors authoring the syllabi -- the study only includes supporters of academic BDS, specifically, as "BDS supporters". On the other side, "no BDS" professors are those who oppose BDS in all its forms (not just academic BDS but, say, settlement boycotts as well). Those who fit into neither group (people who support some forms of BDS, but not academic boycotts) are excluded.

But for the dependent variable -- that is, which syllabus readings are identified as being authored by "BDS supporters" -- that entire middle-ground category is grouped back into the pro-BDS crowd. Along this axis, "BDS supporter" includes not just academic boycotters, but also

• Anyone who has supported, or signed a petition in favor of, any form of BDS (including settlement boycotts);
• Anyone who has supported a boycott of "specific Israeli leaders"; 
• For Israeli scholars, anyone who either has "challeng[ed] Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state" or "call[ed] on Israelis to resist obligatory military service", regardless of whether they've endorsed any form of BDS or not.

And any reading that is even co-authored by anyone in this expansive category is coded as being by a "BDS supporter".

Putting these two different renditions of "BDS supporter" together, the study is measuring the homophily of what we think of as the hardest core of BDS supporters (those favoring academic boycotts) by asking how many of their syllabi readings are at least co-authored by anyone at least as left-wing as Peter Beinart. This is not, to say the least, an especially illuminating metric.

In short, the AMCHA study fails to demonstrate that pro-BDS faculty produce syllabi that are more one-sided than their anti-BDS peers. Indeed, it may instead offer some (albeit weak) evidence in the opposite direction. Not only does it almost certainly exaggerate the same-side bias of BDS supporters by contracting and then expanding the definition of "BDS supporters", but even on face the study findings seem to show that the most ideologically-lopsided syllabi -- in terms of giving significant attention to authors on the opposite side of the BDS ideological divide -- tend to come from BDS opponents.

NYTimes Endorses Warren and Klobuchar

The New York Times has officially endorsed not one, but two candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary: Senators Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Amy Klobuchar (MN). In essence, the Times' picked one candidate from the "moderate" lane and one candidate from the "progressive" lane, while suggesting that either one can and should be acceptable to any decent person seeking to defeat Trump.

The internet reaction, at least in my quarters of it, has been mostly disdainful. The NYT should have had the gumption to make an actual choice. Choosing two people was a cop out. Dismiss dismiss dismiss.

Most of this reaction has stemmed from more left-ward elements. And to be fair, on net the double-endorsement probably helps Klobuchar, who has struggled to gain traction, more than Warren. So it maybe isn't surprising that the left isn't wild about this choice, insofar as it probably does more to help an "establishment" candidate they dislike over a more progressive candidate they (well, some of "they") like or are at least fine with.

But I think there's another element in play here. Recent events notwithstanding, there remains some efforts on the left-side of the party to build a unified front along the axis of either Warren or Sanders, as against the "establishment" wing represented by Biden or Klobuchar. Key to their efforts is a strong distinction between these two wings, such that it is important to maintain progressive unity so we don't hand the nomination to a moderate because the left can't stop fighting amongst itself. This view is very much adverse to the sentiment, communicated by the Times, that all the Democrats (Klobuchar, Biden, Warren, Sanders ...) are fundamentally on the same side, so that we should all be content no matter which of them is picked. This aspect of the editorial is probably what got the most sustained mocking, at least in my feed.

It also is, as you probably know, a view I basically endorse, which is why the Times' double-endorsement didn't bother me all that much. I'm inclined to think that Warren is the best of the "progressive" wing, and Klobuchar probably the best of the "moderate" wing. There's a case to be made for nominating a progressive wing candidate, and a case for a moderate wing candidate, but if the nomination goes in the direction I disprefer I wouldn't view at as a betrayal. Either way, we'd still be getting a candidate who is more-or-less on my side.