Drawing by Patrick Chappatte/Globecartoon.com,
Switzerland/CagleCartoons.com 2018, via
Washington Post.
David Rothkopf may be
the most respectable person coming out to say this, and he says it well:
as much as we may condemn the actions of the regime in the Islamic Republic
and feel its government is a threat to the stability of the region, Israel
started this war. Furthermore, Israel started it not for the reason it
gave—the imminent threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program. That threat
has existed for many years and U.S. intelligence did not feel Iran had made
any notable new strides recently. Rather, Netanyahu decided to strike for
three reasons. 1.) He remains in political jeopardy and war has proven an
effective means of helping him to stay in power. 2.) Rather than fearing an
Iranian breakthrough on nukes, he feared one on a potential nuclear deal. He
opposed the one negotiated under Obama. He goaded Trump into abandoning it.
And he was deeply troubled that Trump was now advocating re-entering just
such an agreement. 3.) He has made the conflict between Israel and Iran a
centerpiece of his politics throughout his career. He is Ahab. It is his
Great White Whale.
Of which point (1) is the most obvious to me, as you might expect, and the
most offensive to the respectable, because of the moral implications that that
is the kind of person the Israeli prime minister is, OK with killing a
substantial number of human beings (something like 600 in Iran as of
yesterday, including at least
239 civilians, and 24 in Israel, under Iran's retaliatory strikes, which seem to have been
more effective than usual), as the price of office, and escaping prison in his
corruption cases. That's exactly how I've seen him, though, for the last 18
months of slaughtering Gazan civilians (something like 50,000 at this point)
and abandoning the kidnap victims from Israel still held in Gaza, so I'm not
especially shocked.
Point (2), on the possibility of a US deal reviving the 2015 JCPOA or
something like it, in which Iran would stop enriching uranium in return for
some sanctions relief, hasn't been taken very seriously by the punditry at
large, though newspapers loyally reported the five rounds of talks between the
two countries in April and May, of which the last, held
May 23
in Rome, was described by the Americans as "constructive—we made further
progress" and by the Iranians as "one of the most professional rounds of
negotiation," though they held out little hope of an agreement any time
soon.
Los neoyorquinos latinos son el corazón de esta ciudad y merecen un alcalde que les hable directamente. Este vídeo es un esfuerzo a presentar nuestra visión a la comunidad latina, para que podamos trabajar juntos para construir la ciudad que todos merecemos. Latino New Yorkers are the heart of this city — and they deserve a mayor who will speak to them directly. This video is an effort to introduce our vision to the Latino community, so we can work together to build the city we all deserve.
This
is pretty irritating, from the New York Times Editorial Board keeping its
promise not to endorse any candidates in local elections any more:
Given those polls [showing Cuomo and Mamdani dominating over the other nine
candidates] the crucial choice may end up being where, if at all, voters
decide to rank Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Mamdani. We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani
deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his
agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio’s dismaying
mayoralty. As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and
conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.
For any voters tempted to leave both off their ballots, it is important to
understand that this decision would be tantamount to expressing no
preference between the two. It is similar to voting for neither major-party
candidate in a traditional election.
"We refuse to choose, because it's beneath our awesome dignity, but if you
follow our example you're a moral coward. Also, you should choose the
ethically challenged Cuomo." As they make clear by devoting three paragraphs
to Zohran Mamdani's shortcomings, condemning his ideology, policy ideas, and
inexperience, and the way he reminds them of de Blasio, and just one to Andrew
Cuomo's—the issue of his weird though probably not criminal mistreatment of
women, over which he resigned from the state governorship four years ago, on
the advice of this same editorial board, which now seems to think that was
less serious a fault than advocating a minimum wage hike or free buses, as
Mamdani does.
In the first place, the argument is bullshit. It's a rank-choice vote among
11 candidates, and it is not similar to voting for neither major-party
candidate in a traditional election. With the much smaller (and better
informed) turnout you expect in a primary, and only Democrats voting in New
York's closed-primary system, it's easy to imagine one or two of the other
candidates emerging if enough people decided not to rank the two frontrunners,
and if the frontrunners are as bad as the board seems to think they are,
that's what the board ought to call for, instead of using this backhanded
technique of pushing us in one direction.
Then, Cuomo's ethical failings
aren't limited
to the #MeToo moments that helped to drive him out of office. In the middle of
his first term as governor, in 2013, he named what's called a "Moreland
Commission" in New York to fight corruption in state government, then abruptly
shut it down halfway through its 18-month appointed lifetime. It later became
apparent that Cuomo and his aides had never really allowed it to function, as
The Times
reported:
I'd been wondering if Hegseth was freelancing, volunteering out of the blue
when he said on Saturday he was ready to deploy Marines to Los Angeles, the
project sounding so off the wall, even more illegal than the National Guard
proposal, and I had trouble imagining they'd allow Trump to call him up and
ask for them. "Hey Pete! They're burning down Los Angeles! Send the Marines!"
And indeed, on the Sunday, Trump didn't seem to have heard of it, suggesting,
as he often does when asked about some abuse that he hasn't thought about,
that he hadn't made any decisions but definitely could
if he felt like it:
When asked what the threshold is for sending in the Marines, Mr. Trump said
Sunday: "The bar is what I think it is."
If I'm reading that right, he was saying the only consideration would be the presidential will. When he found out how he felt, what he wanted to happen, that would be the thing that would happen.
Wall Street Journal (gift link) confirms what you probably have been suspecting, that the ICE push over last week in Southern California, where they raided garment factories and warehouses, car washes (nabbing customers as well as workers) and at least one day care center (where they grabbed a mom dropping off her four-year-old), climaxing with Friday's and Saturday's assaults on Home Depot parking lots in Westlake and Paramount, was engineered by Reichskommissar Stephen Miller as part of a general strategic shift away from trying to deport gang members and criminals to deporting any unauthorized immigrants at all.
The somewhat amusing part is that it was motivated by jealousy, of Joe Biden:
Philipse Manor War Memorial, Yonkers, New York, via.
David Brooks writes about the thing that made him angriest last week,
something he says William F. Buckley, Jr. advised him to do when he first
entered into punditry, but doesn't often get the chance, because it's so rare
that anything makes him angry at all, but apparently he did this time ("The Trump World Idea That's Pushed Me Over the Edge"):
Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a
Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen
wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t
motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die
not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of
life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to
brave all for the men and women of their unit.”
This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting
for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of
postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump
administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the
national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut
their teeth.
I think we can assume "communing with my phone" means "googling desperately,
having forgotten for the past three days that Memorial Day existed, for
something I could hang a belated Memorial Day column on". I'm not sure what
"the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism" is (postliberalism with accordions and a
bubble machine metonymically representing Champagne?), but "postliberalism" is
Brooks's current term for the bothsides thing that gets him sort of quietly
irritated just now, not angry of course, the thing that
JD Vance and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
do where they object to "neoliberalism", which seems in his view to be when
they are pushing "populism", which seems to me (a non-bothsiderist) to refer
to two quite different responses to income and wealth inequality, depending on
whether you have ideas for doing something about that (as Ocasio-Cortez does)
or not (like Vance) and thus different sides, but maybe that's just me.
Wong Kim Ark, from a 1904 US immigration document, via Wikimedia Commons.
Revised and expanded from the post of January 26, with what I think is a somewhat new argument up in front, inspired immediately by an irritating Bluesky post.
Maybe the birthright citizenship order will ultimately be held unconstitutional, but I find it highly embarrassing for a judge to say something so unequivocally at a preliminary stage without the slightest acknowledgement that there is an entire literature that disagrees. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/2R4OE9lT8a
The "entire literature" (which seems to consist of a single book by Peter Shuck and Rogers Smith, Citizenship without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, Yale University Press, 1985, and its brief recap in the American Enterprise Institute's magazine National Affairs, summer 2018, presumably published in the hope of attracting attention from President Trump and his factotum Stephen Miller), is fatally flawed by its failure to recognize the significance of an obvious fact: there were no "illegal aliens" in the United States at the time the 14th Amendment passed Congress in 1866 and was ratified two years later, only millions of immigrants who might or might not choose to be naturalized (white immigrants, that is, under the terms of the Naturalization Acts of 1798 and 1802).
And when those immigrants had children, as they often did, no reason to question their citizenship or "naturalize" them; as affirmed in an 1844 New York state case, Lynch v. Clarke, in which a state judge held that a woman born in New York City, of alien parents temporarily sojourning there, was a U.S. citizen. They were "natural" already; for the children of immigrants, birthright citizenship was the universal norm (local governments could order the deportation of obnoxious individual immigrants, but there wasn't a national policy). Miller's scenario is completely irrelevant to the realities of the time when the 14th Amendment was written.
The hard cases before 1866-68 were not immigrants, but people whose parents were born within the borders of the US: citizens of the Indigenous nations, and the freed descendants of enslaved Africans.
At Top Cottage, Hyde Park in 1941, with Fala and Ruthie Bie, granddaughter of one of the gardeners. Via.
In March 1944, not long after his 62nd birthday, President Franklin Roosevelt,
who was taking too long to recover from a bout of flu the previous December,
went to Bethesda Hospital for a battery of tests meant to find out why, and
diagnosed with a pile of serious heart problems: hypertension,
atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, and congestive heart failure. The
doctors' recommendations focused on rest—no business guests at lunch, and two
hours' rest after lunch—not easy, as he was pretty busy prosecuting World War
II and running for his fourth presidential term. They also prescribed some
drugs, and thought he should cut down smoking, and try to lose some weight,
which last turned out awkward: Roosevelt was anxious to hide his health
problems from the public, as he always had been, going back to the paralysis
he'd been concealing since contracting polio at Campobello in 1921, and the
successful dieting ironically left him looking sick to the public, not his
robust, jaunty, grinning self but gaunt and haggard, sparking exactly the
rumors he was most anxious to avoid.
That was a kind of bad thing, as everybody understands nowadays, in the wake
of Eisenhower's heart attacks, Kennedy's Addison's disease, Nixon's
stress-related alcoholism, Reagan's incipient Alzheimer's, Trump's obesity, severe personality disorder, and
possible psychoactive drug use (sniff, sniff!), and whatever was going on with
President Joe Biden during the presidential campaign last year on June 27,
during the presidential debate with Trump, when he spoke in an almost
inaudibly hoarse whisper, and altogether lost the thread of what he was saying
at at least one point early in the show. Just an hour or two later he seemed
fine, as loud and as on message as ever, but the damage (thanks in part to a
long campaign on the part of The New York Times and other organs, not to claim that Biden was suffering age-related infirmities but that the
public thought he might be, based not on observation of the
president but on a bunch of rather pushy Times-Siena public opinion polls) was done.
Over at Techdirt, the genial
Mike Masnick
has come up with a brilliant explanation of what is happening when Trump does
an interview like the one with
Time
a couple of weeks ago; it's something remarkably similar to the way a chatbot,
especially the less successful-looking early models like ChatGPT itself,
handles a conversational series of prompts, with its "response generator":
A journalist asks a specific question about policy or events
Trump, clearly unfamiliar with the actual details, activates his response
generator
Out comes a stream of confident-sounding words that maintain just enough
semantic connection to the question to seem like an answer
The response optimizes for what Trump thinks his audience wants to hear,
rather than for accuracy or truth....
Brilliant, if maybe not exactly right. Consider Masnick's first example:
You were harshly critical of what you called the weaponization of the
Justice System under Biden. You recently signed memos—
Well, sure, but you wouldn’t be—if this were Biden, well, first of all,
he wouldn’t do an interview because he was grossly incompetent.
We spoke to him last year, Mr. President.
Huh?
We spoke to him a year ago.
How did he do?
You can read the interview yourself.
Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn’t do well. He didn’t do
well at all. He didn’t do well at anything. And he cut that interview off
to being a matter of minutes, and you weren’t asking him questions like
you’re asking me.
(In case you’re wondering, you can see the Biden interview here and he did not cut if off after a matter of minutes).
Because he's not doing what the automaton does, saying "what he thinks his audience wants to hear" (or, more accurately, trying to assemble the string that represents the most probable response to the prompt). Unlike the automaton, he is thinking, but in this passage from late in the interview what he's thinking about is how not to respond to the prompt, an uncomfortable series of questions on the abuse of foreign students' free speech rights over the Gaza issue, which he's not enjoying and doesn't know anything about (other than the less than accurate report that there was "tremendous antisemitism at every one of those rallies"), and he leaps at the mention of Biden's name as an opportunity to change the subject to something more comfortable, the subject of how superior he is to Biden, who would never have had the courage to submit to an interview with Time, except of course it immediately turns out he did.
So he instantly switches to pretending not only that he already knew that, though he obviously didn't, but even more ridiculously that he'd actually read the transcript, bringing in the words from the prompt.
That's the part that really looks like AI, where he lies, or hallucinates, "I did read the interview", though he's just told us he's hearing about the interview for the first time. AI is unable to maintain discourse coherence over a certain distance, as in this beautiful example I saw yesterday:
I asked Google how much $1M in gold would weigh. Simple math problem. It gave the wrong answer, then the correct answer, then wrong answer again.
Somehow they have broken the math ability of a mathematical machine.
It’s impressive, actually.
Gemini's conversational rules for answering a prompt like that are evidently to state the conclusion, then show its work, then repeat the conclusion: but it doesn't "know" the conclusion before it's done the rather complicated work required for this question, and "hallucinates" an answer instead. Then, after doing the work, it doesn't "know" that it has contradicted the prefabricated conclusion.
In a similar way, Trump has a set of prefabricated conclusions about Biden that he has been deploying for well over a year, that he's afraid of interviews and that everything he does is a failure, and when the prompts force him to switch them up, he simply does so, without showing any awareness that he's contradicting himself, and adding a kind of "hallucination" for verisimilitude, in the bit about the interview having been cut short (possibly inspired by an incident of September 2023, when a very jet-lagged Biden was giving a speech in Hanoi and his staff pulled him offstage before he was finished).
That's exactly how he maintains that tariffs will both protect the return of manufacturing industries to the US (because people will buy American dolls and pencils rather than pay the tax) and simultaneously raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue (because people will gladly pay the tax). The two concepts aren't connected for him, so they never collide, unless some mean interviewer forces the issue, like Time here telling him that the magazine did interview Biden, or Terry Moran on Kilmar Ábrego García:
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don't do that -- M-S-1-3 -- It says M-S-one-three.
TERRY MORAN: I -- that was Photoshop. So let me just--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That was Photoshop? Terry, you can't do that -- he had --
-- he-- hey, they're givin' you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you're doin' the interview. I picked you because -- frankly I never heard of you, but that's okay --
TERRY MORAN: This -- I knew this would come --
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I picked you -- Terry -- but you're not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed --
TERRY MORAN: Alright. Alright. We'll agree to disagree. I want to move on --
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.
Where Trump responds to being contradicted like a Mafia don.
And you don't necessarily need the AI concept to understand it. There's a lovely formulation by David Roth at Defector:
It is one of the defining Trump things that any belief that makes it into his mind will bump around in there forever; his understanding of the world is the sum of those things, thousands of permanent and perpetual irritants cut free from any context or facticity, smashing into each other and echoing forever inside of his luxuriously appointed skull. They drop bowling balls on the cars; there is no such thing as gold paint; they looked at his hand and the proof was right there. None of this, of course, is new. None of the beliefs are new, really, and nothing that Trump will do between this moment and his last one on earth will be new, or surprising in the least. It's just a matter of which echoes are ringing most loudly at that moment.
Just floating around his brain, from the bowling balls (probably not originating in a bizarre misinterpretation of the Nissan ad at top—the most thorough investigation I've seen is by Philip Bump, from 2018) to Kilmar Ábrego's knuckle tattoos, and all the rest.
