Moral Equivalence

Larry Thomas and Bret Mendenhall in Uwe Boll's 2008 Postal, via The New York Times.

On the prospect of the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants on Yahya Sinwar (the head of Hamas in Gaza), Ismail Haniyeh (head of the Hamas Political Bureau), Mohammed Deif (commander-in-chief of the Qassam Brigades), and the Israeli prime minister and defense minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, there's been a lot of angry talk about the ICC prosecutor practicing "moral equivalence", including from President Biden—

The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.  We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.  

A truly weird error in this connection from NBC News, which ran an interview with Netanyahu yesterday in which the prime minister complained that he was being given a "bum rap" (Trump's language choices are a bad influence, now Bibi too sounds like a 1950s gangster):

Echoing Biden's comments, Netanyahu said Khan's decision to seek arrest warrants for both Israel's and Hamas' leaders reflected a "false symmetry" that he said was comparable to the arrest warrants that were issued for both President George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Remember when ICC put out a warrant on Bush? I was so startled I looked it up, but of course it didn't happen (the court did open a preliminary investigation of war crimes in Afghanistan after the country ratified the Rome statute in 2003, but after 11 years of that, from 2006 to 2017, it took until 2020 for them to decide to move on to a full investigation, upon which Trump put sanctions on them, which Biden has reversed). And Netanyahu didn't say it did. You can get a more accurate report of what he said on NBC from The Times of Israel:

RIP, I guess

By Freakshow, via Freaking News.

Reporters in the era when McCain flourished saw themselves as sitting between parties, creatures of neither, equal opportunity cynics, un-ideological, in possession of the most awesome crap-detectors in politics. They also loved him because he reflected this image back to them. 3

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 26, 2018

Jay Rosen's Proustian theory of McCain ("Proustian" doesn't mean it's a joke; it's pretty good) https://t.co/33bmjzkrR9

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 26, 2018

I had in mind one of a number of passages like this one, from À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, as cited in this quotes compendium:

We-ness Envy

Lillian Gish in D.W. Griffith's A Romance of Happy Valley, 1919, via Giphy.

So world-famous moral philosopher David Brooks is really pissed off with Anthony Kennedy: not, of course, because Kennedy suddenly decided to retire from the Supreme Court last week, giving Trump a second opportunity to name a Supreme Court justice and reshape the court in the Federalist Society image for the next 30 or 40 years, but for something Kennedy did 26 years ago ("Almira Gulch, for 26 years I've been dying to tell you what I think of you!"), when he single-handedly turned the philosophical collectivism of our Founding Fathers into the amoral, dog-eat-dog philosophical jungle we've been living in ever since, which you may not have noticed but it looks pretty serious ("Anthony Kennedy and the Privatization of Meaning"):

America’s founders certainly believed in individual liberty, but they believed that liberty happens within a shared community. They began the Constitution with the phrase, “We the People.” We are all one thing — a people, a nation, a collective.

Yes, instead of starting off the Preamble with "I James Madison, I Alexander Hamilton, I William Samuel Johnson, I Rufus King..." as you would have expected, though it would have made the Preamble kind of long, they just used the plural, quietly inventing the great American concept of corporate speech.