I wanted to call Oona Hathaway’s piece at Foreign Affairs, “War Unbound”, to your attention. It’s basically a lament for the abandoning of international law, using Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and Russia’s war against Ukraine as examples:

International humanitarian law, also known as the law of war or the law of armed conflict, is supposed to spare civilians from the worst calamities of conflict. The aim of this body of law has always been clear: civilians not involved in the fighting deserve to be protected from harm and to enjoy unimpeded access to humanitarian aid. But in the Israel-Hamas war, the law has failed. Hamas continues to hold hostages and has used schools, hospitals, and other civilian buildings to shield its infrastructure, while Israel has waged an all-out war in densely populated areas and slowed the flow of desperately needed aid to a trickle. The result has been utter devastation for civilians in Gaza.

The conflict in Gaza is an extreme example of the breakdown of the law of war, but it is not an isolated one. It is the latest in a long series of wars in the years since 9/11, from the U.S.-led “war on terror” to the Syrian civil war to Russia’s war in Ukraine, that have chipped away at protections for civilians. From this grim record, it might be tempting to conclude that the humanitarian protections that governments worked so hard to enshrine in law after World War II hold little meaning today. Yet even a hobbled system of international humanitarian law has made conflict more humane. Indeed, for all the frequent transgressions, the existence of these legal protections has provided continuous pressure on belligerents to limit civilian casualties, provide safe zones for noncombatants, and allow for humanitarian access—knowing they will face international consequences when they do not.

None of my ensuing comments should be taken as taking one side or the other in either of those conflicts.

I would suggest to Ms. Hathaway that she read Ernest Gellner’s book, Plough, Sword, and Book. “International law” as exemplified by, say, the Geneva Accords, is a fine illustration of cultural bias. Like it or not those accords were arrived at by Western Europeans when Western European countries ruled most of the world.

To most of the rest of the world including (to use Samuel Huntington’s taxonomy) the Orthodox world, the Islamic world, and the Sinic or Confucian world, distinguishing between the military and civilians is meaningless noise. We only think that distinction has a meaning because there is a millennia-old basis for it in our Western culture. That is not the case for other cultures.

Contrary to its portrayal by many in the West, Israel’s is not a Western culture any more than the Palestinians’ is. Indeed, they are more alike in their practices than different. What’s amazing is that the Israelis have been as restrained as they have. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are part of the Orthodox world.

If we are to be really serious about international law we must a) follow it ourselves (the U. S.’s reluctance to obey international law is the meat for another post) and b) reassert Western dominance over the rest of the world. I don’t believe we can be successful in such an effort. In other words we should get used to a world in which there is no international law or, possibly, no international standards of conduct for nations at all because that is likely to be the world we will be living in.

In her latest Washington Post column Megan McArdle muses on what will happen when automation begins to supplant professionals’ jobs. After noting that she continues to believe that free trade and increased automation are the correct prescriptions she goes on:

But as artificial intelligence starts coming for our jobs, I wonder how well the professional class will take its own medicine. Will we gracefully transition to lower-skilled service work, as we urged manufacturing workers to do? Or will we fight like hell to retain what we have, for our children as well as ourselves?

My prediction is that professionals will go through the Five Stages of Grief. It may be that has already begun and they’re in the denial stage.

My prescription on the other hand is that professional education needs to change with the times, both in how prospective professionals are selected and what they’re expected to do.

A number of other observations occur to me. I wonder how Megan squares this:

As we entered the electorate, it became a major force in our politics, as the Clintons tried to steer the economy toward a global, postindustrial future.

with the fact that there was a sharp upswing in immigration, almost entirely of low-skill workers whose jobs could easily be performed via automation, during the Clinton years? Different Clinton policies were working at cross-purposes? Or that much of Washington Consensus policy was either wrong or inconsistently applied?

My second observation is that I suspect that generative artificial intelligence will replace the lowest cost entry level “professional” jobs first which is almost entirely backwards. As I have pointed out any number of times junior engineers become senior engineers. When you cut off the paths to becoming a junior engineer whether by offshoring or automation, it will inevitably lead to no senior engineers eventually.

The sad reality is that some of the things that can actually be done better by algorithms, e.g. a lot of what lawyers do and some of the things that physicians do, e.g. diagnosis based on clinical findings but that lawyers and doctors have the political clout to prevent their jobs being taken over by machines. The comparison I would make is to occupational licensing. It’s one way of preventing your job from being offshored.

Nate Silver cautions that campus activists are not synonymous with “the youth vote”:

Speaking of which, as you can see from the poll, “Israel/Palestine” and even climate change also ranked as issues of relatively low importance to young voters. The Middle East may be the exception that proves the rule — even if relatively few people care about it, those who do are obviously extremely passionate about it, and I don’t think people are bluffing when they say it could swing their votes. However, the reporting often treats protests on elite college campuses, or social media posts from articulate activists, as though they’re a proxy for the youth vote overall. Young voters do differ from older ones on some issues, including Israel-Palestine and free speech. But they do not care about these issues nearly as much as they care about more basic stuff like the economy and health care.

Here are the poll results to which he refers:

As you can see the issues they’re most concerned about are inflation and healthcare while the issues most frequently mentioned in the media as issues swaying “the youth vote”, e.g. climate change, Israel/Palestine, and student debt, are way down on the list. How to explain the discrepancy? I think there are many reasons including:

• The issues they report on make more colorful copy
• The issues they report on are more important to them, personally
• The issues they report on reflect the interests of people who work on political or campaign staffs
• The issues that are actually young people’s highest concerns don’t fit the preferred narrative
• The issues that are actually young people’s highest concerns are seen as disadvantageous for Biden and advantageous for Trump

Here’s a wacky idea. The White House could start focusing on the problems that people including young people actually care about rather than the issues political activists care about.

Could someone explain to me the argument in favor of ethnic cleansing including why Americans should support it? I don’t support it regardless of who is practicing it: Germans, French, Dutch, Israelis, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Russians, anybody.

If your argument is a historical argument, it should rely on actual history rather than one side or another’s propaganda. For example, in Ukraine nearly all of the “Russianization” took place between 1897 and 1939. In other words it was the grandparents, great-parents, or great-great-grandparents of the present ethnic Russians in Ukraine who moved there. Take Odesa (Odessa), for example. It has been multi-ethnic since at least Catherine the Great’s time. Up until the last 50 or 60 years the largest ethnic group in the city were ethnic Russians.

Similarly in Israel. There have been Jews in the country the Romans called Palestine since Roman times at least. There have also been a few Bedouin Arabs there since then but most of the Arab population arrived after the 12th century. Most of the period since then Palestine was owned and ruled by the Ottoman.

I don’t think that Americans should be taking sides in the ethnic conflicts of other countries. I guess I could be persuaded differently by a convincing enough argument.

Why did the U. S. go to war in Europe against Germany and Italy in World War II? Offhand I would say there were several reasons:

• Pulling the British chestnuts out of the fire. The Brits were facing an existential threat and had been importuning us to enter the war against Germany for several years by the time we actually did.
• Germany did pose a threat to the U. S. albeit not an existential one. German ships and aircraft were attacking U. S. merchant ships.
• Germany invaded the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the American Left, which had been steadfastly opposed to entering the war, insisted that we enter.
• Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the Japanese were allied with Germany and Italy. That removed the other impediment to U. S. entry into the war—American isolationists who also insisted that we enter the war.

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor U. S. public opinion remained pro-neutrality and we were officially neutral despite providing supplies to both the British and Soviets.

Consider this article by Tatyana Deryugina and Anastassia Fedyk in the Japan Times:

After a monthslong delay, the fractious United States House of Representatives finally approved more than $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine last week — and not a moment too soon.
Two years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, there is mounting pessimism about Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The Ukrainian counteroffensive last summer failed to achieve its stated objectives after repeated delays in the delivery of Western weapons, while Russia ramped up its own military production and made limited territorial gains. As a result, a growing chorus of voices is asking whether it’s time for Ukraine and its allies to rethink their aims and consider a negotiated settlement.

Europe has been here before. The same question was being asked in 1941, two years after Nazi Germany began its own imperialist conquest by invading Poland. Among the prominent figures arguing against U.S. entry into World War II was Charles Lindbergh, who argued that there was no chance of success and that it would be best for the European war to “end without conclusive victory.”

Charles Lindbergh was a prominent isolationist. As I observed above we didn’t enter World War II until almost 2½ years after Germany invaded Poland and our entry had nothing whatever to do with Poland. I presume the authors are casting Russia in the role of Germany during World War II and Ukraine as Poland. The invasion and defeat of Poland took 35 days.

Nowhere in the article cited to the authors explain how the Ukrainians can prevail against Russia in a war of attrition or why the United States should enter into direct combat with Russia as we did against Germany during World War II.

As I’ve observed many times before, I advocate providing material support for Ukraine in its war with Russia but my objective is to secure the best possible terms for negotiating a settlement with Russia not the stated objectives of the Ukrainians. I believe the alternative to a negotiated settlement isn’t outright Ukrainian victory but continued destruction and deaths along with the possibility of a completely landlocked permanently dependent Ukraine.

Via Christian Piekos at ABC 7 Chicago:

A Northwestern University spokesperson released the following statement after 11 p.m. on Thursday:

“Today, members of our community, along with individuals unaffiliated with Northwestern, set up an encampment on Deering Meadow, in violation of University policy. Throughout the day, University officials spoke with the demonstrators, including a two-hour meeting with senior administrators this evening, to convey that while we strongly support free expression, the safety of all members of our community cannot and will not be compromised, nor can their expression disrupt the learning environment or University operations. The University offered to let the demonstrators continue to peacefully assemble if they comply with Northwestern policies, including removing tents and ceasing the use of bullhorns and speakers. The offer was declined. The University will move forward with other options to protect the safety of the community and the continued operations of the Evanston campus.”

Tents, bullhorns, and speakers are not protests and do not constitute protected speech. Furthermore, the Northwestern campus is private property.

IMO the university should be checking IDs and having individuals who are not enrolled arrested and removed.

Is it my imagination or have we gone from a phase in which the only humor was irony to people being unable to recognize irony with blinding speed? I’ll give examples. If DA Alvin Bragg’s argument that Donald Trump engaged in illegal election interference holds up, then he’s engaging in illegal election interference. And if Trump isn’t exempt from the suit, then he wouldn’t be, either? Or if Jack Smith’s argument is correct and upheld, every living or future president would likely be subject to criminal suit?

I’m really, really not a Trump supporter. I’ve never voted for him and never will. I think he’s a shmuck unworthy of being president. But the irony of these suits is astonishing.

You might be interesting in this piece at UnHerd by Kat Rosenfield:

Between the chanting, the dancing, and the… well, whatever this is, it’s hard to blame the kids for wanting to join what is, for all intents and purposes, a party. It’s also hard to blame them for being somewhat bewildered when the party ends with their own university calling the cops, who in turn force them to disperse with a fire hose. It’s not just the brutality; it feels like a breach of contract. As writer and academic Tyler Austin Harper has noted, Columbia and others like it explicitly highlight their histories as incubators of political activism with the express purpose of attracting a particular type of young person, the kind for whom protesting and partying seem like one and the same thing.

I suspect that this is why these events have the feeling of performance, or even parody: a photogenic, vibes-based facsimile of radical activism instead of the thing itself. It’s not just that their ostensible goal of “divestment” — in this case, from ETFs that include shares in businesses with ties to Israel — is a categorical impossibility; a number of the campus demonstrators will openly admit that they neither know nor care what specific policies they’re demonstrating against. What matters is, they’re part of something, a tradition of campus activism that dates back a hundred years. For the students who are drawn to Columbia’s “Social Justice university” branding, protesting is less about results than participation, a sort of institutionally-sanctioned Larp, like one of those interactive team-building exercises where you get to solve a murder, or escape from prison — or, in this case, hunt a witch.

I wonder if it would surprise her that that is what the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s were like as well. Speaking as someone who was there and lived a half block from one of the universities most notable for the protests, right next door to one of major organizers, there were precious few protesters who were actually opposed to the war. There were lots who were opposed to the draft or, in other words, they were motivated by self-interest. And for others it was just something to do. I can’t speak for every protester at every demonstration at every university but that’s what I saw at my alma mater.

I subscribe to a newsletter called Tangle. Recently, Tangle interviewed recently retired Republican Colorado Congressman Ken Buck and I wanted to pass along a small passage from the interview:

We have some huge problems that we need to deal with — spending, immigration, you name it. And Republicans — the other side does it too — but Republicans are lying to the American public. The election wasn’t stolen. We don’t have political prisoners from January 6th. We have criminals who were assaulting police officers and destroying federal property.

Those kinds of lies I think undermine our credibility and our ability to deal with some of the most serious problems. So I announced that I wasn’t running for reelection. And as I got back into America and started talking to people, not in campaign mode but really listening to what they were saying, people believe we have the worst two major party nominees in modern history.

which at the very last provides some food for thought. Here’s another snippet:

We have a problem with how we elect members of Congress — the House, the Senate, governors, state legislatures. And the problem is that someone can win a primary with 34% of the vote. [Ed: Buck means “34%” of the total electorate, but the majority of one party] You know and I know that the primary vote is low anyway to start with, but they win that low vote with 34% of the vote, and then because they’re in a deep red or a deep blue district, they win the general election.

The result of that is that we get these people who have no background, who have no business making policy for the United States of America, and what they focus on is getting reelected and making themselves a social media star in a way that is harmful. It’s harmful because they are publicly attacking particular members. It’s one thing to have a policy debate on social media. It’s one thing to have a policy debate on TV or radio. It’s another thing when you attack a particular member.