I persist in wanting to know the definition of democracy presently being used by people who insist that’s what they’re defending.

Example:

Recently the Chicago City Council acted to prevent a referendum vote on whether Chicago should continue its “sanctuary city” status. I genuinely want to know how the members of the City Council who voted to bar the referendum define democracy.

I wanted to bring Daniel Gordis’s analysis of the results of a recent, post-October 7 poll of Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank to your attention. If nothing else it illustrates how unrealistic a “two state solution” has become.

Mr. Gordis observes:

These are the results of the latest poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between 22 November and 2 December 2023. The period leading up to the poll witnessed the launch of Hamas’ October the 7th offensive against Israeli towns and military bases bordering the Gaza Strip and the Israeli launch of the current ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. Video images circulating in the international and Israeli media show that some Hamas fighters have committed attacks against Israeli civilians, including women and children, and took many of them hostages. International and Palestinian reports reported that thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children, were killed by Israeli arial and tank bombardment. Israeli attacks targeted Palestinian hospitals, public buildings, and most other civilian infrastructure including tens of thousands of homes, with many neighborhoods leveled completely to the ground. In the meanwhile, in the West Bank, the Israeli army blocked or restricted Palestinian access to main roads while settler attacks increased against vulnerable towns and villages in various parts of the B and C areas.

To ensure the safety of our field researchers in the Gaza Strip, interviews with the residents were conducted during the ceasefire, which saw Palestinian women and children released from Israeli prisons in exchange for women and children held by Hamas.

The sample size of this poll is 1231 adults, of whom 750 were interviewed face to face in the West Bank and 481 in the Gaza Strip in 121 randomly selected locations. The sample is representative of the residents of the two areas.

Some interesting things were revealed in the poll. There is a substantial discrepancy of opinion between people who live in the West Bank and those who live in Gaza about Hamas, with confidence in Hamas being inversely proportional to how close to it they are. They don’t believe that Hamas has been committing war crimes but they believe the Israelis have. Support for the Palestinian Authority is minuscule.

Since the PA is the only prospective “partner” in negotiating a two state solution Palestinian opinion provides a convincing case that a “two state solution” will be unrealistic for the foreseeable future.

Update

John Mearsheimer reaches the same conclusion as I have following a somewhat different route:

I don’t believe a two-state solution is a realistic possibility. Certainly after what happened on October 7, and what has subsequently happened, there’s not going to be a two-state solution. What the Israelis are determined to do is create a Greater Israel, and that Greater Israel includes Gaza, the West Bank, and what we used to call Green Line Israel — Israel as it existed before the 1967 War. And the problem that the Israelis face is that there are approximately 7.3 million Israeli Jews in Greater Israel. And there are approximately 7.3 million Palestinians inside of Greater Israel. And that creates huge problems, because they can’t have a meaningful democracy when there are probably slightly more Palestinians than Israeli Jews. The Israeli government was unwilling to move towards a two-state solution regardless of what happened on October 7, but certainly after October 7, that’s not going to happen.

James Bennet, formerly editor-in-chief of Atlantic and editorial page editor of the New York Times>, now senior editor at the Economist publishes a lengthy lament for the sorry state of modern corporate journalism. Here’s a snippet:

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

Don’t get me wrong. Most journalism obviously doesn’t require anything like the bravery expected of a soldier, police officer or protester. But far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage: not just the devil-may-care courage to choose a profession on the brink of the abyss; not just the bulldog courage to endlessly pick yourself up and embrace the ever-evolving technology; but also, in an era when polarisation and social media viciously enforce rigid orthodoxies, the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down.

It should be no surprise that a majority of young people today think it is perfectly acceptable to shout down people with whom you disagree—it’s the message they’re receiving from many media outlets every damn day.

Read the whole (long) thing.

I think the problem is much greater than Mr. Bennet does and he thinks the problem is big. I think it stems from corporate media and the professionalization of journalism. The ink-stained publisher-editor-reporter bravely putting out his own newspaper is becoming a thing of the past like horse-drawn buggies. Today’s journalistic elites have forgotten that Mr. Dooley was lampooning, i.e. criticizing, journalists when he wrote about “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”. Now they are the comfortable.

I would further assert that you could not have the massive corruption in Chicago and Illinois with the 40 chairman of the Democratic Party and Chicago’s most powerful alderman for decades both on trial for corruption in office without not just the entire political establishment but the media itself complicit in that corruption.

I’ll close with Mr.. Bennet’s assessment of the NYT:

The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

I read news and opinions from many sources, left and right, but I only subscribe to three. I subscribe to The Wall Street Journal. I subscribe to Crain’s Chicago Business>. And I subscribe to Isaac Saul’s newsletter, Tangle. Isaac describes Tangle as “an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then ‘my take.'” I encourage you to take a look at Tangle and, if you like what you see and happen to subscribe to it, tell him I sent you.

In Friday’s newsletter, Isaac interviewed Palestinian-American writer Yousef Munayyer. There’s a lengthy conversation but I wanted to call out one portion of it:

But I’m curious how you would answer that question. If you could wave a magic wand and have some influence on what happens on October 8th, what’s your guidance?

Yousef Munayyer: I think there’s a few ways to respond to that. First of all, I think there’s no situation that justifies the mass killing of innocent civilians. And we should make no mistake, this is what we are seeing in Gaza. Thousands of people, thousands of children who had absolutely nothing to do with the events of October 7th, are being killed in what is called an act of defense. That’s not justifiable in any circumstances. At the same time though, you do hear people attempting to justify this war by raising the very point that you did. “What is Israel supposed to do? You have to sympathize with this impossible predicament that Israel is in.” I think there’s a couple responses to that.

First, we know that this is not the only way that Israel can defend itself, because Israel was capable of defending itself on October 7th, but failed to do that for a number of reasons. What happened on October 7th was not because Hamas was somehow militarily superior to Israel, somehow had more resources and more guns than Israel, or had superior intelligence. It was made possible by a failure of Israeli intelligence and security apparatus. So there is clearly a way to prevent another attack like that from the Gaza Strip.

What it is seeking to do now in the Gaza Strip is not defense. It’s some form of accountability, in the most generous description, against the key architects behind October 7th. But it’s not defense. And I think it’s important to separate those two things.

Although Michael Reynolds no longer comments here, he continues to comment at Outside the Beltway and I believe that Michael’s response to Mr. Munayyer’s observation would be something along these lines (from one of his comments at OTB):

Look at the ratio of progressives demanding Israel stop, vs. the number calling for Hamas to lay down their arms and release the hostages. I’d guess it’s easily 10 to 1. A lot of ‘From the River to the Sea,’ and a lot of, ‘by any means necessary,’ and a lot of nonsense about ‘indiscriminate bombing,’ and, ‘genocide.’ Not a lot of ‘why the fuck don’t Hamas lay down their arms and stop getting Gazans killed?’

Calling for a permanent ceasefire by Israel while not equally calling for Hamas to lay down its arms is objectively pro-Hamas. Consequently, given the absence of any calls for Hamas to lay down its arms by Mr. Munayyer while demanding that Israel end its campaign against it is objectively pro-Hamas. Maya Angelou’s comment that when someone tells you who they are, believe them is being much-quoted these days. Hamas is antisemitic. Its members want to kill Jews and they won’t be satisfied until the entirety of historic Palestine is Arab, practices their brand of Islam, and that Palestine is governed by Shariah law..

There’s a reason that Bedouins and Druze in Israel agree with the Israelis. It’s because they know they are freer in Israel than they would be in such a Palestine and the Druze, in particular, recognize that once the Jews had been killed by Hamas they would be next.

In conclusion of this post I want to repeat that I think the Israelis have made many mistakes in their response to Hamas’s attack and I don’t think that there is any just solution that is in the U. S. interest. We don’t want either a Greater Israel in which most Arabs can’t vote (if they could vote they’d hold a majority and Israel would cease to exist) or has been ethnically cleansed of Arabs or a Palestine “from the river to the sea” from which Jews, Christians, Druze, and other minorities had been cleansed and, since over the last 30 years both sides have become increasingly radicalized, those are the only available alternatives.

At this point I have upgraded the version of PHP to the current version. This site runs under WordPress and WordPress is written in PHP. I have no upgrade one of my plug-ins to the current version. It’s the plug-in that allows users to edit their comments so it’s relevant to a problem reported with entering comments.

What do you think of the reports that the Russian troops fighting in Ukraine have experienced 315,000 casualties? (killed and injured) Here’s the Reuters report by Jonathan Landay:

WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) – A declassified U.S. intelligence report assessed that the Ukraine war has cost Russia 315,000 dead and injured troops, or nearly 90% of the personnel it had when the conflict began, a source familiar with the intelligence said on Tuesday.

The report also assessed that Moscow’s losses in personnel and armored vehicles to Ukraine’s military have set back Russia’s military modernization by 18 years, the source said.

I think this is part of that “full court press” I was talking about. i also wonder if they’re not comparing apples to oranges (“90% of the personnel it had when the conflict began” vs. percent who have been involved). Russian social media are not reflecting that level of casualties. Ukrainian social media are.

I genuinely don’t know what to make of it.

There seems to be a full court press going on in the media to get the Congress to pass increased funding for Ukraine. The editors of the Wall Street Journal observe:

Washington is ready to close up shop for the holidays, and so far there’s no deal for more weapons for Israel and Ukraine with changes to border security. The question to start asking is whether the U.S. is really going to let partisan divisions turn into a betrayal of Ukraine.

Hard to believe, but perhaps it is. President Biden warned Tuesday that America is “at a real inflection point in history” that could “determine the future” of Europe. He is right on that point. Without more U.S. weapons, Ukraine will lose to Vladimir Putin. One result would be an unstable Europe. The blow to U.S. power and influence would be on the order of Saigon in 1975.

The media don’t seem to be pulling for the other components of the military spending bill making its way through Congress in quite the same way. There are some signs that they want the U. S.. to decrease funding for Israel and leave the situation at the border alone. That’s all somewhat odd since it at such odds with the views of Americans among whom the majority think we’re providing too much aid to Ukraine, agree with the support we’re giving to Israel, and 2/3s of Americans think the situation at our southern border is either a crisis or a major problem.

I think we should be providing support to Ukraine, should provide military support to Israel is they ask for it but shouldn’t go out of our way to support them, and that the situation at our southern border is one that only returning to the definition of asylum in the Immigration and Naturalization Act and turning back anyone who doesn’t meet that will fix.

However, the media really needs to come to a realistic understanding of our support for Ukraine. We don’t have munitions sitting on the shelf to send to Ukraine and we aren’t producing munitions as fast as the Ukrainians are using them. The best we can do right now is slow the pace at which the Ukrainians run out of ammo.

I agree with the WSJ editors that we’re betraying the Ukrainians but the betrayal took place a long time ago when we encouraged the Ukrainians to think they would be admitted to NATO and supported the overthrow of the legitimately elected but pro-Russian Ukrainian government in 2014.

To save you the trouble of looking it up, “scapulimancy” is the art of reading the future from scapulae, shoulder bones. Today commenters are engaging in something like that to interpret Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s statement of yesterday. It is widely being interpreted as a modest declaration of victory over inflation and the Fed’s pivoting away from increasing interest rates aggressively towards cutting interest rates. The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark:

Mr. Powell is right that he has made anti-inflation progress, but his performance Wednesday will go far to easing the tighter monetary conditions that have produced this progress. The FOMC didn’t change policy this week, and it can always postpone its rate-cutting for longer. But it would be a shame to declare victory too soon.

I think a couple of warnings are necessary. First, the decline of the rate of inflation to 3.1% is still higher than the Fed’s long-held target. That would seem to imply that either the Fed is abandoning that target or that interest rates are not likely to decline as quickly as markets seem to indicate.

More importantly the rate of inflation declining does not mean that prices are declining. Quite to the contrary as Jim Grant put it in an interview with Business Insider:

“Inflation is not transitory,” Grant told the network. “It is permanent in that you never regain the purchasing power you have lost to inflation.”

My salary doesn’t increase with the CPI which I believe is the case for most people. The only people whose pay goes up every year that I know of these day work for the government.

Another risk is that it appears to me that federal spending in excess of the increase in aggregate product was a key component of the rush of inflation the Fed has been fighting. An election year increase in disbursement could see a repeat performance, just in time for the presidential election in November.

I also wanted to comment on the breast-beating about Moore v U. S. soon to be decided by the Supreme Court. The central question is whether the Congress has the power to tax unrealized income. I don’t think that a trivial question. Here’s the wording of the 16th Amendment:

The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

The question is whether the Congress has the authority to levy taxes against income that has not be realized. I think the answer is obvious (it doesn’t) but lots of other people think it does.

Previous to the 16th Amendment the Congress only had the authority to levy taxes on a per capita basis not on the basis of income. Our modern tax system would be impossible without it.

It seems to me that the basic reason that there is any question about this at all is that some Americans really, really, really want us to have a civil code system rather than the common law system we have. Under a common law system if the law and previous decisions do not determine that a law applies to the specific case under consideration, it doesn’t apply. Under a civil code system the law always applies to every situation. It’s up to jurists to determine how it applies.

Under our common law system if the 16th Amendment actually means “income” where it says income, then the Congress does not have the authority to levy taxes on unrealized income. If we had a civil code system the courts might decide that “income” didn’t actually mean income but applied to pretty much anything.

If the SCOTUS finds that “income” means income, that kills a wealth tax without amending the Constitution. I doubt that such a tax would end with a “billionaire’s tax”. Eventually, it might apply to everything you own.