This American Bro: A Portrait of the Worst Guy Ever

It is almost 9 AM on St. Patrick's Day, and he is on the Metro North train to Manhattan from some grassy, forgettable Westchester suburb. When he boarded the train he was carrying a case of light beer, but now it is on the floor, obstructing the aisle, in everyone's way —his entire existence is in everyone's way. He is wearing a North Face fleece and sunglasses made of neon-orange plastic. He is pulsing like the mercury on a cartoon thermometer; he is ready to explode through the glass. It seems impossible for a human being to care this much about recreation, to care this much about celebrating something so tiny, so contrived, but that is why he is alive. He will come, he will see, he will conquer. He will vomit out the window of a taxi. He is the American Bro.

Being flagrantly offensive, irritating people, making noise, commanding an audience—this is what fuels him; this is his required voltage. He is on the phone with someone named Ryan or Tyler or Kyle; he is saying "cunt" or "nigger" or "slut" out loud, then half-apologizing to no one in particular. "I GOT NO FILTER, BRO." He tilts his head and neck back, cackling at the ceiling, electrified by the degree to which he does not give a fuck, by this ability to appall other people, to make your mouth hang wide open like you were witnessing a wildfire. He is not saying words now but just grunting and ejecting "YOOOO" and "DUDE" in varying cadences, asking Ryan or Tyler or Kyle when they are getting there, what they brought, if they are pumped. He is pushing it to the limit, going hard, pouring Jäger into a plastic cup, making the conductor wait. All he can hear is his brain-engine humming, the bolts coming loose, people chanting his name. He is a renegade, he is looking women in the eyes for a period of time that blew past bold and is bordering on restraining order, but maybe this turns her on, he thinks; maybe he is dangerous, maybe he is going to walk over to her right now. He is alive to a degree that you will never be capable of, and he is scaring all the inhabitants of the universe back into their homes.

He has existed for as long as there have been gluttonous men dedicating ceremonies to their own existence. Anyone who objects is either a slut or a hater or a minority, and you need to GET ON HIS LEVEL, SON. The only things that change are the miscellaneous wristbands he wears, and the brand of energy drink on the promotional T-shirt they gave him. He is a chest-pounding, chandelier-swinging, Godzilla-id mutant who does not need friends, just a hierarchy of other men around him who will simply acknowledge the noises he is making, his indignance, his fury. He doesn't want relationships; he wants witnesses. Don't listen, just turn up the volume. Amplify this moment. (...)

He is always eating. Not anything in particular, just FOOD. Things. Condensed matter. He is all about CONSUMPTION. Every decision is dictated by the pursuit of this. He consumes women, exploits weaknesses, spends 23 dollars at In-N-Out and posts a picture of the receipt to Instagram. To him, everything is a dick pic, a flex, a look-how-hard-I-get, a watch-me-fuck-the-universe. Fast food restaurants and insecure redheads from Murray Hill—there is no difference. Not because he really wants the thing, but because no one else should have it, because he wants the world to know that he will attain it if he pleases. Everything is a display of dominance; he conquers things, he rolls deep. He is bench reps, maxing out, calorie arithmetic, choking down cans of tuna fish, contorting his body in the mirror to see that one specific muscle articulation. (...)

He is a walking scorched-earth policy. He takes what he wants to satisfy some hedonistic impulse, and then he leaves her sobbing in a hallway with her friend on the other line. He wrings every moment of every drop of novelty. He is doing shots and never with a chaser, because moderation and restraint are for women and faggots and children. The only way to be a real man is to be a real man as ferociously as humanly possible. He goes all-in; he gets shredded and ripped and defines his life by aggression and competitions. He buys the hamburger that comes with two other hamburgers and a chicken cutlet on top of it. Why? Because it's three hamburgers with a chicken cutlet on top of it.

by John Saward, Vice |  Read more:

Image: Vice/X

[ed. And the opposite phenomenon: The Alt-Bro (as a Young Dumbass). or maybe, the Person- Guy. See also: The "American Bro" Is an International Embarrassment (BestLife):]

"Over the last decade, a type of semi-ironic patriotism has crept into the zeitgeist—or at least your social media feed—and there's no escaping it. It comes if the form of a certain loud and obnoxious white dude. (...)

Yes, he is the patriotic America Bro and he isn't going anywhere—especially not now. In fact, he's having an explosive cultural moment, which doesn't bode well for the rest of us."

You Can't Just Say "Oh, That Doesn't Matter" About Every Single Political Question

Back in the early-to-mid 2010s, I often wrote about developments in campus politics that concerned me. You know what I mean - the rise of illiberalism among college students, growing threats to free expression and academic freedom, an institutional assumption of profound emotional fragility among students and an associated paternalism towards them, the dominance of a certain identity-obsessed approach to left politics, the rise of an abstract and academic vocabulary that seemed destined to alienate regular people…. You don’t need me to reprosecute that case here.

To my considerable frustration, the most common response at the time was not to say “those politics that the college students at elite colleges express, they’re the right politics.” Most people, even most left-leaning people, did not defend campus politics on the merits; had they done so, we could have had a productive debate. No, most people, especially in the media, said some version of “they’re just college kids, it’s just crazy places like Yale, it doesn’t matter, why do you care?” Again and again and again, the arguments that defined the progressive consensus were arguments to irrelevancy. It wasn’t so much that I was wrong, it was more that I was focusing on the wrong thing, and also old man yells at cloud, and also it’s a little weird that you care about college kids so much, isn’t it Freddie? Not a good look! Such were the tactics of the time. Few people were saying that it was good when, say, students at an elite college tried to shutter the campus newspaper because they published a conservative editorial. Instead they were saying that it just didn’t matter.

Whoops!

You know what happened next. By 2020, the concepts, vocabulary, rhetorical strategies, and social norms that dictated campus politics had spread from the campuses and into the media, the nonprofit sector, certain aspects of government, and the front-facing parts of many corporations. The activist discourse so recently dismissed as irrelevant had become the basic terms under which politics were debated. Plenty of people rejected those politics, as the basic nature of partisanship and culture war hadn’t evaporated. But the language that was used to discuss politics, the topics of interest within politics, certain assumptions about what constitutes the core disagreements of politics, the purpose and goals of political organizing and elections, the scope of change that would be necessary to achieve real progress - all of these had changed radically over the course of the prior decade, and it was under those terms that the various sides debated. You might have been the kind of person to mock the way that “white supremacy” had replaced “racism” in our culture. But you had an opinion on that question because that was a change that had legitimately happened in our culture.

And campus politics, particularly the way they were brought from campus into media and nonprofit land and the corporate world, had everything to do with that shift. College students at elite colleges have a way of graduating and becoming highly overrepresented in important industries, and particularly in idea-generating and culture-creating industries like media, academia, Hollywood, government, or the nonprofit sector. And because they are both the class that aspires and the class that defines what our culture wants us to aspire to, they have a massively disproportionate impact on how our society tells its own story. In particular, they have great control over how we define our political problems, frame their potential solutions, and fix our place in the political spectrum relative to both. Such is the stuff of democracy. (...)

Having lived through the past decade, I am consistently amazed at how often I am told that I’m fixating too much on this or that niche, that I shouldn’t care about particular trends I see in social media, that nothing that happens on YouTube matters…. I just don’t understand how people can maintain that stance after the past several decades of American public life. Even if you think there are more factors involved in the social justice turn in contemporary left politics from the start of the second Obama administration to the start of the Biden administration, there’s no question that highly motivated subcultures played a huge role. People have talked about the academic humanities as a dying and impotent fringe for a long time, and yet ideas from that world became inescapable and powerful in a remarkably short amount of time. The alt-right was always numerically tiny, and yet its influence on the Republican party and our culture wars was massive. How can you tell me that subculture X just doesn’t matter, when American politics has become so mimetic and so defined by the most motivated 10% on any given issue? (...)

But things do matter. Our discursive environment matters. In particular, we live in a world in which the distributed opinions of many people who aren’t individually influential matter. I make my living in media. Recently, Twitter’s stranglehold on media culture has been seriously challenged. But there’s no question that since, say, the 2008 presidential election, Twitter has had more of an influence on professional media than any individual person or publication. And so how can you simply dismiss the importance of that network and what gets said on it? #MeToo was, before it was anything else, a social media campaign. (That’s why it starts with a hashtag!) Are you really going to say that had no effect on Hollywood in the past five years? Really? And yet any time I refer to anything that happens on Twitter, ever, I get a lot of performative eye-rolling from readers. If I speak in general terms, they say I haven’t provided evidence. If I screencap specific individual tweets, they say “oh those are just a few random people.” And it’s transparently the case that they do so because they don’t want to grapple with the specific point I’m making, or they don’t want to deal with the irrefutable power that distributed opinion has in our society, or both. 

by Freddie deBoer, FdB |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Everyone Can't Do Everything (FdB).]

The Unilateralist's Curse

1. Introduction 

Consider the following hypothetical scenarios: 

(1) A group of scientists working on the development of an HIV vaccine has accidentally created an air-transmissible variant of HIV. The scientists must decide whether to publish their discovery, knowing that it might be used to create a devastating biological weapon, but also that it could help those who hope to develop defenses against such weapons. Most members of the group  think publication is too risky, but one disagrees. He mentions the discovery at a conference, and soon the details are widely known.

2) A sports team is planning a surprise birthday party for its coach. One of the players decides that it would be more fun to tell the coach in advance about the planned event. Although the other players think it would be better to keep it a surprise, the unilateralist lets word slip about the preparations underway. 

(3) Geoengineering techniques have developed to the point that it is possible for any of the world’s twenty most technologically advanced nations to substantially reduce the earth’s average temperature by emitting sulfate aerosols. Each of these nations separately considers whether to release such aerosols. Nineteen decide against, but one nation estimates that the benefits of lowering temperature would exceed the costs. It presses ahead with its sulfate aerosol program and the global average temperature drops by almost 1˚. 

In each of these cases, each of a number of agents is in a position to undertake an initiative, X. Suppose that each agent decides whether or not to undertake X on the basis of her own independent judgment of the value of X, where the value of X is assumed to be independent of who undertakes X, and is supposed to be determined by the contribution of X to the common good. Each agent’s judgment is subject to error—some agents might overestimate the value of X, others might underestimate it. If the true value of X is negative, then the larger the number of agents, the greater the chances that at least one agent will overestimate X sufficiently to make the value of X seem positive. Thus, if agents act unilaterally, the initiative is too likely to be undertaken, and if such scenarios repeat, an excessively large number of initiatives are likely to be undertaken. We shall call this phenomenon the unilateralist’s curse. 

Though we have chosen to introduce the unilateralist’s curse with hypothetical examples, it is not merely a hypothetical problem. There are numerous historical examples, ranging from the mundane to the high-tech. Here is one: 

Until the late 1970s, the mechanism of the hydrogen bomb was one of the world’s best kept scientific secrets: it is thought that only four governments were in possession of it, each having decided not to divulge it. But staff at the Progressive magazine believed that nuclear secrecy was fuelling the Cold War by enabling nuclear policy to be determined by a security elite without proper public scrutiny. They pieced together the mechanism of the bomb and published it in their magazine, arguing that the cost, in the form of aiding countries such as India, Pakistan and South Africa in acquiring hydrogen bombs, was outweighed by the benefits of undermining nuclear secrecy.

Another possible example from atomic physics had occurred several decades earlier: In 1939 the Polish nuclear physicist Joseph Rotblat noticed that the fission of uranium released more neutrons than used to trigger it, realizing that it could produce a chain reaction leading to an explosion of unprecedented power. He Social Epistemology 351 assumed that other scientists elsewhere were doing similar experiments, and were thus in a position to release similar information, an assumption that turned out to be correct. Initially, Rotblat vowed to tell no-one of his discovery, believing it to be a threat to mankind, and it is plausible that others did likewise, for similar reasons. However, when the war broke out, Rotblat decided that releasing the information was now in the public interest, given the likelihood that the Germans were working on an atomic bomb. He confided in colleagues and thus unilaterally triggered the United Kingdom’s atomic bomb project.

Rotblat was later to leave the Manhattan Project, coming to the view that his had overestimated the German nuclear threat, and underestimated the likelihood that the US would use an atomic bomb offensively. 

It is perhaps too soon to say whether these unilateral actions were suboptimal. But in other cases, it is clearer that unilateral action led to a suboptimal outcome: In the mid-nineteenth century there were virtually no wild rabbits in Australia, though many were in a position to introduce them. In 1859, Thomas Austin, a wealthy grazier, took it upon himself to do so. He had a dozen or two European rabbits imported from England and is reported to have said that “The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting.”

However, the rabbit population grew dramatically, and rabbits quickly became Australia’s most reviled pests, destroying large swathes of agricultural land.

The abovementioned examples were isolated incidents, but similar situations occur regularly in some spheres of activity, for instance, in the media: 

Media outlets sometimes find themselves in the situation that journalists have access to information that is of public interest but could also harm specific individuals or institutions: the name of a not-yet charged murder suspect (publication may bias legal proceedings), the news that a celebrity committed suicide (publication may risk copycat suicides), or sensitive government documents such as those leaked by Wikileaks and Edward Snowden (publication may endanger national security). It is enough that one outlet decides that the public interest outweighs the risk for the information to be released. Thus, the more journalists have access to the information the more likely it is to be published. 

Unilateralist situations also regularly crop up in regards to new biotechnologies: 

Gene drives, a technique for inducing altered genes to be inherited by nearly all offspring (rather than just 50%) of a genetically modified organism, have potential for spreading altered genes across a population, enabling ecological control (e.g. making mosquitos incapable of spreading malaria or reducing herbicide resistance) but also potentially creating worrisome risks (e.g. to genetic diversity or of sabotage). Here unilateral action could both be taken in releasing a particular altered organism into the environment, and in releasing the information about how to produce it in the first place. There is scientific disagreement on the utility and risk of both. [ed. For a nightmarish vision of this last scenario see: The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi.]

2. The Unilateralist’s Curse: A Model 

The unilateralist’s curse is closely related to a problem in auction theory known as the winner’s curse. The winner’s curse is the phenomenon that the winning bid in an auction has a high likelihood of being higher than the actual value of the good sold. Each bidder makes an independent estimate and the bidder with the highest estimate outbids the others. But if the average estimate is likely to be an accurate estimate of the value, then the winner overpays. The larger the number of bidders, the more likely it is that at least one of them has overestimated the value. 

The unilateralist’s curse and the winner’s curse have the same basic structure. The difference between them lies in the goals of the agents and the nature of the decision. In the winner’s curse, each agent aims to make a purchase if and only if doing so will be valuable for her. In the unilateralist’s curse, the decision-maker chooses whether to undertake an initiative with an eye to the common good, that is, seeking to undertake the initiative if and only if the initiative contributes positively to the common good. (...)

There are six features of the unilateralist’s curse that need to be emphasized. 

First, in cases where the curse arises, the risk of erroneously undertaking an initiative is not caused by self-interest. In the model, all agents act for the common good, they simply disagree about the contribution of the initiative to the common good.

Second, though the curse could be described as a group-level bias in favor of undertaking initiatives, in does not arise from biases in the individual estimates of the value that would result from undertaking the initiative. The model above assumes symmetric random errors in the estimates of the true value.

Third, there is a sense in which the unilateralist’s curse is the obverse of Condorcet’s jury theorem. The jury theorem states that the average estimate of a group of people with above 50% likelihood of guessing correctly and with uncorrelated errors will tend to be close to the correct value, and will tend to move closer to the true value as the size of the group increases. But what is also true, and relevant to the argument in this paper, is that the highest estimate will tend to be above the true value, and the expected overestimation of this highest estimate increases with the size of the group. In the cases we are interested in here, it is the highest estimate that will determine whether an initiative is undertaken, not the average estimate. 

Fourth, though we have chosen to illustrate the curse using initiatives that are (probably) irreversible, the problem can arise in other cases too. The problem becomes sharper if the initiative is irreversible, but even for actions that can be undone the problem remains in a milder form. Resources will be wasted on undoing erroneous initiatives, and if the bad consequences are not obvious they might occur before the problem is noticed. There might even be a costly tug-o-war between disagreeing agents. 

Finally, fifth, though we have thus far focused on cases where a number of agents can undertake an initiative and it matters only whether at least one of them does so, a similar problem arises when any one of a group of agents can spoil an initiative—for instance, where universal action is required to bring about an intended outcome. Consider the following example:

In Norse mythology, the goddess Hel of the underworld promised to release the universally beloved god Baldr if all objects, alive and dead, would shed a tear for him. All did, except the giantess Þo¨kk. The god was forced to remain in the underworld.

Similar situations can arise when all the actors in a play must come together in order for a rehearsal to take place, when all members of committee must attend a meeting in order for it to be quorate, or when all signatories to an international treaty must ratify it in order for it to come into effect. The United Nations Security Council frequently provides examples of unilateral spoiling. The five permanent members of the Council—currently China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States—each possesses the power to veto the adoption of any non-procedural resolution. In the early years of the Council, this veto power was frequently employed by the Soviet Union to block applications for new membership of the United Nations. More recently, it has been used by the United States to block resolutions criticizing Israel, and by Russia and China to block resolutions on the Syria conflict. While some of these vetoes presumably reflect differences in the national interests of the council members, others may reflect different estimations of the contribution that a resolution would make to the common good. Certainly, considerations relating to the common good are often invoked in their defence. For instance, the United States’ 2011 veto of a draft resolution condemning Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory was defended on the grounds that the resolution would be an impediment to peace talks.

These cases of unilateral spoiling or abstinence are formally equivalent to the original unilateralist curse, with merely the sign reversed. Since the problem in these cases is the result of unilateral abstinence, it seems appropriate to include them within the scope of the unilateralist’s curse. Thus, in what follows, we assume that the unilateralist’s curse can arise when each member of a group can unilaterally undertake or spoil an initiative (though for ease of exposition we sometimes mention only the former case). 

Lifting the Curse 

Let a unilateralist situation be one in which each member of a group of agents can undertake or spoil an initiative regardless of the cooperation or opposition of other members of the group. We will say that a policy would lift the unilateralist’s curse if universal adherence to it by all agents in unilateralist situations should be expected (ex ante) to eliminate any surfeit or deficit of initiatives that the unilateralist’s curse might otherwise produce. 

The Principle of Conformity 

When acting out of concern for the common good in a unilateralist situation, reduce your likelihood of unilaterally undertaking or spoiling the initiative to a level that ex ante would be expected to lift the curse. In the following subsections we will explore various ways in which one might bring oneself into compliance with this principle. These can be organized around three models: collective deliberation, epistemic deference, and moral deference. The three models are applicable in somewhat different circumstances, and their suitability might depend on the type of agents involved. 

It should be noted that, though some of the methods discussed below do not require agents to be aware of the nature of the situation, most hinge on agents recognizing that they are in an unilateralist situation. However, this is not to say that agents must be able to identify the other parties to the unilateralist situation: this is necessary for some but not all of our proposed solutions.

by Nick Bostrom, Thomas Douglas & Anders Sandberg, Social Epistomology | Read more (pdf):

[ed. In other words (as I understand it): one bad apple ruins the bunch, or put another way, outliers have an outsize influence on outcomes (as we see in many hung juries). Not a good prospect for controlling existential threats such as AI, biotechnology, geoenginnering, etc. Also, perhaps a good reason for refining prediction markets in decision-making. See also: Why Worry? (Good Optics).] 

The Man Who Changed Portraiture

Frans Hals was poor, overshadowed, and often unproductive. He also made paint look like life.

The new retrospective of the Dutch painter Frans Hals at the National Gallery in London—the first major exhibition of his work since 1989—is a slightly nervous event for the most talented one-trick pony of the seventeenth century. Hals bet everything on portraiture. “Never did he paint Christs, annunciations to shepherds, angels or crucifixions and resurrections; never did he paint voluptuous and bestial naked women,” Vincent van Gogh wrote. “He painted portraits; nothing nothing nothing but that.” His two hundred or so paintings consist of a strict diet of burgomasters, brewers, pipe smokers, regents, street urchins, people holding various things in their hands (donkey’s jawbone, stretched pig’s bladder), and hundreds of Dutch heads plattered on flat linen collars and millstone ruffs. The question that hangs guillotine-like over the exhibition: Can we love him as much as Rembrandt and Vermeer?

Hals was not the second- or third-best Dutch painter of the seventeenth century; he was the best of the nineteenth. In the eighteen-sixties, the French art critic Théophile Thoré (who famously rescued Vermeer from oblivion) kicked off a revival of Hals, making him a favorite of art collectors and painters—Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt and James McNeill Whistler, Robert Henri and George Luks. (Luks reportedly said that the only two great painters in history were Hals and himself.) By 1900, the city of Haarlem had installed a statue of Hals in a public park. Even as he fell behind Rembrandt and Vermeer in the twentieth century, his paintings would retain a sheen of newness. According to the painter Lucian Freud, Hals was “fated always to look modern.”

His genius boils down to a contradiction: loose, unblended smears of paint that create the flesh-and-blood likeness of a human being. The late works of Titian, Velázquez, and Rembrandt would all head in this direction with their “rough” manner, but Hals achieved a kind of scary immediacy that seemed almost foreign to the medium—a photographer suddenly among painters. One of his satisfied customers, the scholar Theodorus Schrevelius, said that Hals’s portraits seemed “to breathe and to live.” His style was so distinct that he rarely even signed his paintings. There’s a sort of taunting element to them, with their passages of waxy smoothness that suddenly combust into vibrating little sparks. Your eye can never really settle on the picture; it’s constantly being stirred and needled by the brushwork.

What we know about Hals with certainty—and it’s not much—is that he was born in Antwerp between 1582 and 1584, and spent most of his eighty-plus years in Haarlem, about eleven miles from Amsterdam, swatting away various kinds of debt. (A nursemaid, tavern owner, tradesman, and baker all took him to court.) He married twice and fathered at least fourteen children, five of whom he buried, and two of whom he sent to workhouses—a daughter for being promiscuous, a son for being mentally disabled. He died, penniless, in the summer of 1666. (...)

The National Gallery exhibition includes fifty paintings and is a more streamlined version of the 1989 retrospective. When we first meet Hals, he’s around thirty years old and a meester schilder (master painter) in the local art guild. There are no juvenilia or early false starts; no one even knows what he was doing for the first part of his life, though one source tells us that he was “lusty” as a youth. His early portrait of Pieter Cornelisz van der Mersch (1616), a satirist from Leiden, shows Hals already at full tilt, bearing a style that’s not too far-flung from where he would land fifty years later. Van der Mersch has a herring pinched in his right hand and a bundle of straw in the other. The gesture is a riff on a Dutch proverb that means something like “to take the piss out of someone.” As will become his custom, Hals paints the portrait like he’s short on time. The linen cuff on van der Mersch’s right hand is done in four touches, max. Even when you’re standing ten feet back from the canvas, you can peel off individual brushstrokes with your eyes. They’re just floating there, like little spears of light.

The two showstoppers of the exhibition appear in the second room, grouped under the elusive theme of “Portraiture into Art.” The first is “The Laughing Cavalier” (1624), Hals’s most famous painting, though it’s not a particularly Halsian one. Sure, the sitter has a Renaissance elbow—the arms-akimbo pose Hals used to give his portraits more depth and swagger—but the smooth density of the man’s face is much more van Dyck-ish. The painting is on loan from the nearby Wallace Collection, where it typically hangs on sumptuous red wallpaper and gets a lot of admiring attention. Here, it almost slumps into the gallery of faces.

The real coup of the exhibition is Hals’s masterpiece “Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard” (circa 1627), which has left Haarlem for the first time since it was painted nearly four hundred years ago. Between 1616 and 1664, Hals was commissioned to paint nine major group portraits—six of militiamen and three of regents. To see what he did for group portraiture as a genre, compare his 1627 painting with Cornelis van Haarlem’s portrait of the same guard, from 1599. In the van Haarlem, the whole scene is overcrowded and stiff. Every officer’s mouth is zipped shut, and all of the faces look vaguely milky and homogenous. With Hals, you’re turning up to a live banquet. The lieutenant Frederik Coning has a lemon in his fist and is mid-squeeze over a tray of plump oysters. (It’s moments like these that Hals is famous for.) The star of the painting is the guard’s captain, Michiel de Wael, who wears a yellow jerkin with an icy-blue sash in the foreground. His loose-jawed, watery facial expression, the critic John Berger once noted, had never been captured before in paint: “We watch Captain de Wael as the sober always watch a man getting tipsy—coldly and very aware of being an outsider. It is like watching a departure for a journey we haven’t the means to make.”

In the sixteen-twenties and thirties, Hals came into his own as a so-called genre painter, moving beyond strict portraiture. In a part of the exhibition devoted to his “Invented Characters,” we meet the staples of Halsania: the merry drinkers, the boys playing lutes, the fisher children, the deranged woman with an owl on her shoulder. These were cheaper paintings that could be sold via auction or lottery and hang in family homes, butcher shops, or brothels. Hals didn’t have to satisfy the vanity of a newly married couple or the scion of a wealthy brewer clan. His brushwork could fully unwind, and his worst (or best) painterly habits found their match in comic characters like “Pekelharing” (1625), whose face appears to be sliding off itself like a warm cheese. Is he drunk, or are we? (...)

This exhibition follows a blockbuster Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum, which sold over half a million tickets, and a landmark Rembrandt retrospective in 2019, which turned into a “year of Rembrandt” celebration. A run-of-the-mill Hals exhibition feels vaguely doomed by comparison, as though we’re resigned to giving him the bronze medal of the Dutch Golden Age. Vermeer’s paintings have inspired an opera, a rockabilly song, and a feature film with Scarlett Johansson (“Girl with a Pearl Earring”); Rembrandt has a town in Iowa named after him, as well as a toothpaste. The best argument you could make for Hals is that he excelled at making more with less. How much feeling could be squeezed into a single brushstroke? How much range into a single genre (portraiture)? How much personality into a single color (black)? A single pose (the Renaissance elbow)? A single expression (laughter)?

by Zachary Fine, New Yorker | Read more:
Images: The Laughing Cavalier (Wallace Collection); Portrait of Pieter Cornelisz. van der Morsch; Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard; Pekelharing; Jester with a Lute (Wikipedia).

[ed. "Renaissance elbow". Never heard the term before, but now that I think about it... yeah, it was everywhere.]

Land Ho

The tradwife is pioneer burlesque

A woman prepares a snack for her family while her youngest child, an eight-month-old named Mabel Mae, looks on from her high chair. She pours milk into a Dutch oven from a glass jar almost as big as the baby girl beside her, heats it to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and mixes in citric acid. Off to the side, a blonde girl in a pink dress—Frances, age six, the woman’s fourth child and eldest daughter—tends to her baby sister. The woman checks the milk’s temperature, lets it sit until it congeals. She slices the curd into half-inch cubes, stirs it into a runny mixture, adds salt. Black rubber gloves materialize on her hands, and she plunges them into the pot, picking up the cheese she’s made out of almost nothing, forming it into a ball, stretching it as if it were saltwater taffy.

Then she moves on to the meatballs. The woman dices onions, garlic. She pours breadcrumbs into another jar, stirs in fresh cream. She sautés the onions in butter, puts a mound of ground beef in a bowl, pours the soggy breadcrumbs over it, and cracks in two eggs with yolks so golden they’re almost orange. She chops fresh basil, then grinds in some pepper and mixes it all together with a wooden whisk. She opens another glass jar—this one full of tomato sauce, almost certainly homemade—and empties its contents into a cast-iron pan. The woman shapes the beef into seventeen fist-sized balls and plops them into the sauce one by one, sprinkling Parmesan on top. She puts the pan into a rustic green oven that stays on day and night, constantly radiating heat.

Then she dusts the wooden countertop before her with flour, and a bowl of risen dough appears miraculously. She forms it into two baguettes and puts those in the oven too. All the while, her children cycle in and out of frame. The girls help roll the dough, play with the whisk, and nibble at the cheese once it’s ready. But mostly they watch, thumbs in mouths, as their mother works. The boys do nothing. The woman never looks up from her task, never stains her white T-shirt, and never appears flustered, not even when the kids shriek in the background or when her long braid unravels down her back.

In the end, her labor yields one single large sandwich. She takes the first bite. The second is for her husband, absent until this moment; the third is for one of their sons. Just like its preparation, the consumption of the meatball sub was a family effort. The couple in this video, Hannah and Daniel Neeleman, live on a 328-acre ranch in Kamas, Utah, with their seven children. The milk used to make the mozzarella came from one of their dairy cows, the ground beef from their herd of Angus cattle, the eggs from their chicken coop, and the basil from their garden. Hannah milks the cows, and Daniel raises the animals, while their sons and daughters help out with farm chores and collect the eggs every morning. Daniel butchers the meat, and Hannah cooks it. The family always eats together.

The Neelemans want you to know that you, too, can live like this. In fact, they’ll give you the tools. Their ranch, Ballerina Farm, is so named because Hannah is a Juilliard-trained ballerina who danced in New York City in another life, the one that came before the babies and the homestead, and she still dances at every opportunity: in the barn after a long day of chores, in the living room of her century-old farmhouse, in the pasture surrounded by cows and sagebrush. The Neelemans sell not only direct-to-consumer meat but also the cookware Hannah uses in her own kitchen and the aprons she dons to protect her clothing from stains. Ballerina Farm fans can buy a baggie of dehydrated sourdough starter named Willa ($18), a white oak cutting board ($87), a bench scraper ($15), a wooden farm whisk ($16) or spatula ($17), a Ballerina Farm-branded cast-iron skillet ($39), and ground beef from cows raised by the ballerina herself ($110 for ten pounds or $220 for twenty, divided into vacuum-sealed one-pound bags “for easy thawing and quick meals”). The cooking videos Hannah posts weekly for her over twelve million followers on Instagram and TikTok are advertisements for these wares, and for her life—some assembly required, husband and children not included.

Country Life

This is the story the Neelemans tell: they grew up “city kids,” Hannah in Utah and Daniel in Connecticut. They met in college and got engaged after just three weeks. Hannah always wanted to be a mother and claims she was the first pregnant Juilliard undergraduate “in modern history.” After graduation, the family moved to Brazil for Daniel’s job. While visiting a ranch there, Daniel decided he wanted to give up his corporate career and become a farmer. They returned to the United States, spent three years looking for farmland until they found the right place in 2017, and lived there for a little over a year before outgrowing it and moving to their current ranch. Now, they run a family farm that they built from the ground up. The children ride horses and four-wheelers, wear cowboy hats and prairie dresses. They go to church on Sundays. Hannah and Daniel dance in the fields and the barn together, and they’re all the best of friends.

These are the details the Neelemans leave out: Daniel’s father is an airline tycoon who, among other things, founded JetBlue and oversaw the privatization of TAP Air, formerly owned and operated by the Portuguese government. Daniel’s first job, the one for which he moved his young family to Brazil, was the directorship of a home security company called Vigzul, also founded by the elder Neeleman. When the family moved back to the States so Daniel could fulfill his dream of becoming a hog farmer while attending business school at the University of Utah, he retained his seat on the board of another security company. This isn’t exactly unusual; small farmers increasingly struggle to make ends meet, and as of 2017, 56 percent of farmers held primary, nonagricultural jobs. What is unusual is the type of job Daniel has held.

Why Ballerina Farm’s public-facing origin story obscures the Neeleman family wealth isn’t difficult to understand. It’s much harder to convince ordinary people to buy into a lifestyle when they know it has been funded by airline millions, especially if that lifestyle champions simplicity and frugality. When, in 2018, a fan asked Hannah how her family could afford their farm life, she provided a technically honest answer that nonetheless obscured the whole truth: “I’m full-time farm, but Daniel still has a job,” she wrote. “We are working towards both of us being full-time farm.” Another follower thanked Hannah for showing him that it could be done. “Really encouraging to read this! My wife, three-year-old son and I are going into our fifth year of production and have rented land up until this point,” he wrote. “Great financially and for starting our business, but we are ready for our own land. We want to be able to farm exactly how we like, but also have something we can pass down to our children or to another young passionate farming couple when we’re old and gray.”

If we can do it, Ballerina Farm’s posts imply, then so can you.

Domestic Bliss

The word tradwife—a portmanteau of traditional wife that refers to women who eschew feminist values in favor of homemaking, child-rearing, and other conventional domestic pursuits—is not part of the Ballerina Farm lexicon, but Hannah Neeleman is its platonic ideal. She is a dutiful wife and mother; a talented cook; blonde, beautiful, and modest; and thin despite having delivered nearly a child a year for a decade, all but one of whom were born at home. She is willing to follow her husband wherever his career takes him, even if that means giving up her own; she is willing to support his passions, even if that means trading her pointe shoes for cowboy boots. She not only takes care of the children but protects them from anything that could corrupt their bodies, minds, and souls: their meals are cooked from scratch with farm-fresh ingredients, their schooling is conducted on the ranch. Unlike many of their imitators, however, Ballerina Farm’s content is not explicitly political, for good reason. Any public proclamation of the Neelemans’ beliefs, whatever they may be, would surely alienate a portion of their audience. But the words Hannah does use to describe her lifestyle are a clarion call to those who know what to listen for: living off the land is “natural,” sourdough bread is a “God-given marvel,” and the hogs they raise are “real heritage pork, the way great grandma remembers it.”

Hannah doesn’t have to call herself a tradwife because she already is one. As such, Ballerina Farm has become the lodestar for those still aspiring to establish an aesthetically pleasing—and, ideally, monetized—pastoral existence. Most of her acolytes are less subtle about their politics, which they assume Hannah shares. (...)

Take Gwen the Milkmaid, a Canadian “ASMRtist” and wellness-influencer-turned-tradposter. “Pov: you used to be a pro-abortion, anti-marriage, lesbian ‘feminist,’” reads the caption on a TikTok post of her rehydrating sourdough starter, “but now you’re getting married to your fav man on earth, love serving him, and can’t wait to make babies.” Like Hannah, Gwen is blonde, posts videos of herself cooking and frolicking in prairie dresses, and emphasizes the difference between her old life and the new one she has built for herself—or, rather, the life she hopes to have built, someday. In one video, Gwen asks God “why I don’t have a fifty-acre farm, seven children, forty chickens and five jersey cows yet.” Lacking a multimillionaire father-in-law, or a dairy cow of her own, she’s forced to churn store-bought cream into homemade butter. Gwen’s videos turn the subtext of Ballerina Farm’s videos into text, as if to compensate for the ranch she lacks: Gwen is proudly antigovernment, antivaccine, and anti-birth control. (...)

A month later, the magazine published a treatise on tradwives by Gina Florio, a personal trainer who moonlights as manager to Candace Owens, a conservative commentator whose BLEXIT foundation urged Black people to abandon the Democratic Party. (Owens has also promoted Ballerina Farm on Instagram. Hannah, for her part, reposted the endorsement and later deleted it.) Like Gwen the Milkmaid, Florio is a reformed liberal who wrote for Teen Vogue and PopSugar before she “left the left.” Tradwives, she argues, are superior to “the shrieking, blue-haired protester who wants on-demand abortion and supports the ‘free the nipple’ movement.” She describes Ballerina Farm as the example on which conservative women should model their lives: “The children are blonde and seemingly well-mannered. The father herds cattle in a cowboy hat. And the mother is impossibly beautiful as she milks cows in her overalls, loose braids, and zero makeup.” This is all in contrast to “the average twenty-five-year-old woman” who “lacks basic domestic skills, serially dates multiple men, and loudly opposes manners and decorum.”

by Gaby Del Valle, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: © Laura Collins

How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes

In July, BuzzFeed posted a list of 195 images of Barbie dolls produced using Midjourney, the popular artificial intelligence image generator. Each doll was supposed to represent a different country: Afghanistan Barbie, Albania Barbie, Algeria Barbie, and so on. The depictions were clearly flawed: Several of the Asian Barbies were light-skinned; Thailand Barbie, Singapore Barbie, and the Philippines Barbie all had blonde hair. Lebanon Barbie posed standing on rubble; Germany Barbie wore military-style clothing. South Sudan Barbie carried a gun.

The article — to which BuzzFeed added a disclaimer before taking it down entirely — offered an unintentionally striking example of the biases and stereotypes that proliferate in images produced by the recent wave of generative AI text-to-image systems, such as Midjourney, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion.

Bias occurs in many algorithms and AI systems — from sexist and racist search results to facial recognition systems that perform worse on Black faces. Generative AI systems are no different. In an analysis of more than 5,000 AI images, Bloomberg found that images associated with higher-paying job titles featured people with lighter skin tones, and that results for most professional roles were male-dominated.

A new Rest of World analysis shows that generative AI systems have tendencies toward bias, stereotypes, and reductionism when it comes to national identities, too.

Using Midjourney, we chose five prompts, based on the generic concepts of “a person,” “a woman,” “a house,” “a street,” and “a plate of food.” We then adapted them for different countries: China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria. We also included the U.S. in the survey for comparison, given Midjourney (like most of the biggest generative AI companies) is based in the country.

For each prompt and country combination (e.g., “an Indian person,” “a house in Mexico,” “a plate of Nigerian food”), we generated 100 images, resulting in a data set of 3,000 images.

by Victoria Turk, Rest of World |  Read more:

Image: Midjourney/Rest of World

Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s Family Bubble

At Stanford Law School, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried specialized in ethics and social fairness. Now that their son stands accused of one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history, they’re scrambling for legal escape routes.

The Magistrates Court of the Bahamas, in Nassau, is situated in an imposing pink-and-white building edged with palm trees. On December 13, 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former C.E.O. of the now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, arrived there to ask for release on bail after being indicted on eight criminal charges. Bankman-Fried typically wears T-shirts and shorts, no matter the occasion; on this day, he wore, like armor, an ill-fitting navy-blue suit. He’d spent the previous night in jail, where he hadn’t been given the medication he normally took for his depression. But of greater concern was the indictment, unsealed that morning in the United States, which accused him of fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and other crimes that could lead to more than a hundred years in prison.

The evening before, he and a colleague had been working on their laptops in the oceanfront penthouse of a resort where he lived when his parents, who were visiting, called him into a bedroom. Minutes later, according to the colleague, a group of Bahamian law-enforcement officers, accompanied by members of the resort’s staff, strode into the apartment. One officer had a warrant for Bankman-Fried’s arrest.

When the officers entered the bedroom, Bankman-Fried asked for a drink of water and seemed to gird himself for what was ahead. “I can give you my passport,” he told a broad-shouldered officer, who in turn suggested that he might want to bring a jacket with him. Passing his phone, wallet, and college class ring to the colleague, whom he’d asked to try to keep his parents calm, Bankman-Fried raised his wrists to be cuffed.

Now, as the court hearing got under way, his parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, sat in the third row, feeling shattered. Bankman told me later, “I think most parents would much rather die, frankly, than see their child accused of such horrible things.”

Bankman and Fried have long been popular faculty members at Stanford Law School, and known for their involvement in liberal causes. When Sam, their firstborn, was a child, they recognized him as being intellectually exceptional and emotionally atypical—an often isolated boy who entertained himself with baseball statistics and math puzzles. In his twenties, Sam achieved international fame as the head of FTX, a crypto company that he co-founded in 2019, and that promised to bring a measure of legitimacy to a nascent industry sometimes associated with money laundering and corruption. He shared a stage with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, made the covers of Fortune and Forbes, and persuaded a range of prominent venture-capital investors to give his company hundreds of millions of dollars. Ten months before his arrest, FTX was valued at thirty-two billion dollars. A partner at Sequoia Capital, one of FTX’s biggest financial backers, posited in an online profile of Bankman-Fried, since deleted, that he might become the world’s “first trillionaire.”

The academic community in which Bankman-Fried was raised is a place where immense wealth is often discussed with suspicion, even when privately courted. But Bankman-Fried stood out from other young billionaires for his commitment to the effective-altruism movement, some of whose adherents believe in trying to earn as much as possible in order to maximize what they can give away. By the time of his arrest, he had become a major contributor to public-health and other causes, and one of the biggest personal donors in American electoral politics.

His parents come from modest backgrounds and have lived in the same house—a one-story bungalow on the Stanford campus—since the nineties; they describe themselves as “utilitarian-minded.” As academics, Bankman and Fried share an interest in using tax law as an instrument of social fairness. When Sam and his younger brother, Gabriel, were growing up, there was an ongoing household conversation about what it means to conduct an ethical life, and the brothers later worked together on philanthropic ventures that Sam funded. (Gabriel declined to be interviewed for this article.) As Larry Kramer, a former dean of Stanford Law School, told me, Bankman and Fried “loved that their children had these commitments that were so idealistic and powerful.”

The rewards of being Sam’s parents were financial as well as reputational. In 2022, he gave them a gift of ten million dollars; a lawsuit filed by FTX’s bankruptcy estate against Bankman and Fried this September claims that the money was “plunder[ed]” and came from an account that contained customer funds. Their attorneys said that the lawsuit’s claims are “completely false.”

Bankman and Fried visited Sam in the Bahamas frequently, sometimes staying at a sixteen-and-a-half-million-dollar, thirty-thousand-square-foot beach house in a gated community. In December, 2021, Bankman took leave from Stanford to work full time at FTX, providing legal, philanthropic, and tax advice for a salary of two hundred thousand dollars a year, plus expenses. Those expenses included twelve-hundred-dollar-a-night “hotel stays,” the lawsuit alleges.

“I’m in on crypto because I want to make the biggest global impact for good,” Bankman-Fried said in an ad that ran in The New Yorker. Like other crypto evangelists, he professed a belief in the power of digital currencies and blockchain technology to eliminate corporate middlemen from the financial system and provide life-changing economic opportunities to the poor. He also relied on slick advertising to do the talking. In one commercial, a plumber realizes that he, too, can make bank in crypto with FTX, and the football legend Tom Brady says, conspiratorially, “You in?”

In March, 2022, a month after an extravagant Super Bowl ad starring Larry David (with Bankman-Fried’s father hamming it up in the background in a powdered wig) told viewers not to miss out on FTX’s crypto, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, in part to combat inflation. As money became more expensive to borrow, the value of many cryptocurrencies plummeted. Regulators and reporters began revealing that companies in the industry had been lending money to one another in a closed loop to prop up the value of their assets. The allegation that Bankman-Fried created his own closed loop in order to deceive investors and the public is at the crux of the government’s case against him.

In addition to owning FTX, Bankman-Fried owned the majority of a crypto hedge fund called Alameda Research, which was run by Caroline Ellison, a trader whom he sometimes dated. On November 2nd, CoinDesk, an industry news site, reported that Alameda held almost fifteen billion dollars in cryptocurrency assets, a large chunk of which was in FTT—a digital token that FTX had issued. The disclosure raised questions about the true value of Alameda’s holdings and about the conflict of interest between the two supposedly independent companies. Changpeng Zhao (generally known as C.Z.), the C.E.O. of Binance, a crypto competitor, wrote a series of skeptical tweets indicating that he was dumping his FTT. Alarmed, FTX customers withdrew six billion dollars in just three days. By November 8th, FTX was so broke it stopped honoring withdrawal requests.

Some of Bankman-Fried’s employees quit, and he huddled with those who remained, trying to calm investors and raise money to save the company. Meanwhile, a former FTX employee told me, “the parents were freaking out and asking, ‘What about your legal safety?’ ”

On November 11th, under what Bankman-Fried describes as pressure from FTX’s lawyers, he agreed to relinquish control of the company to a new C.E.O.—a decision that he regretted immediately and tried in vain to reverse. The new C.E.O., quickly installed, was John Jay Ray III, a bankruptcy lawyer who had overseen the dissolution of Enron; he filed for Chapter 11 and began the process of formally winding FTX down.

Shortly after Bankman-Fried’s arrest, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said in a lawsuit that he’d caused the loss of more than eight billion dollars in customer assets. Among those reported to be affected were Tom Brady; his ex-wife, the supermodel Gisele Bündchen; the basketball star Steph Curry; the billionaire oil investor Robert Belfer; the tennis star Naomi Osaka; the former Trump spokesman Anthony Scaramucci; a teachers’ pension fund; and many ordinary investors, including construction workers, small-business owners, and college students.

In Magistrates Court, Bankman-Fried stared straight ahead as his attorney argued for his release while his extradition was negotiated, noting that he had stayed put and tried to “fix things” for customers when he could have fled the country. A local prosecutor countered that Bankman-Fried was a flight risk, with the means to charter a private plane. When the prosecutor referred to Bankman-Fried as a “fugitive,” his mother laughed darkly. Bail was denied, and eight days later he was extradited to the United States.

Bankman-Fried’s trial is scheduled to begin in New York in early October, and until recently he was preparing for it while under house arrest in California, at his childhood home, which is surrounded by redwood trees and cacti. His parents were back to taking care of him and working to bolster his spirits, as they’d done when he was a child, but now they were also scrambling to find legal escape routes from circumstances they say they had failed to anticipate: that their son, now widely considered a crypto villain, would be facing life in prison, and that they would be accused of being complicit.

by Sheelah Kolhatkar, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Keith Negley; Source photograph from Getty
[ed. Well, we know how that turned out. You wouldn't want to tar an entire institution for the crimes of a few, but it is ironic that two of the biggest grifters in recent memory/history (Elizabeth Holmes; SBF) both came out of Stanford. And that SBF's parents were 'ethics' experts there. Even the the school's president has been implicated in improprieties (falsifying data). Could it partly be tech's 'get rich quick'/'smarter than everyone else' ethos? (probably); or something more intangible - like an elitist perception of invulnerability? (maybe). Perhaps a lot of other things too (its meritocracy system; connections to capital and important industries, scientific societies, political influence, etc.).]

Jazz Avengers (Live)

Uncertain Contact

‘Stephan’s Quintet’ galaxies

Image: Courtesy NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI

via: Uncertain Contact (Aeon)
"The detection of alien life won’t be obvious. It’ll be partial and inconclusive: a perfect task for the scientific method."

Giving Up

According to a recent study of ebook usage in the UK, conducted by the Audience Agency, men are likely to give up reading a book before page 50, while women more often make it to page 100 (at least). That said, almost nobody gets to the end of their books at all—according to the data, “only 5 percent of ebooks are finished by more than 75 percent of readers.” They found that the majority of books were finished by 25-50 percent of readers. (...)

Other notable takeaways from the study include the fact that people are more likely to read literary fiction on the weekend and that people from 18-24 are “the most avid readers of poetry in the population,” because “almost one in five” of them have read a single poem in the last year. Yikes.

by Emily Temple, LitHub |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Depressing, but consider we're talking about 'ebooks' - whatever the hell that is. Read real books.]

The Masters of War

Where is Biden's moral compass?

On the Sunday following the start of the war, Biden gave an interview to the CBS show 60 Minutes. Here was his opportunity to speak to a large American audience, to provide clarity, to make the case for a de-escalation of violence, to demonstrate some kind of moral wisdom. Instead, he assured interviewer Scott Pelley that the United States could easily participate in wars in Ukraine and Israel at the same time. “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake,” Biden said, “the most powerful nation in the history—not in the world, in the history of the world.” Like George W. Bush two decades ago, he asked Americans to focus on terrorism as the evil that justifies war. He chose to express that view in a way that was not only factually absurd but repugnant: “Israel is going after a group of people,” he said, “who have engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust.”

It was this sort of fevered rhetoric that put the United States on a war footing after September 11, 2001. Biden’s “moral compass” led him to vote in 2002 for Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Later, Biden admitted he was wrong. In his visit on Wednesday to Israel, he vaguely referenced the “mistakes” the United States made in Iraq while cautioning Israelis not to be consumed by rage. But here we are again: Hamas must be “eradicated” by any means. Rage is marshalled to justify a genocidal attack on people described as “animals.” As bombs rain down on Palestinians, Israel and the United States are claiming to be the enforcers of civilized norms; again we are expected to believe in a “war on terror.” Meanwhile, especially in the heat of the moment, one must not equivocate by discussing other evils: one must not talk about oppression, apartheid, or the everyday brutality that comes with occupation in Palestine. More civilians in Gaza will surely suffer, but only by accident—they are collateral damage.

And the blame for merciless new rounds of killing in Gaza is not to be attributed to Israel or the United States. Hamas made the Israeli army do it—just as the 9/11 bombers gave us no choice but to launch a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Israel, Biden said, has a duty to respond, presumably in whatever way the far-right regime of Netanyahu thinks duty requires. This argument about the ultimate responsibility of Hamas for the unfolding war crimes in Gaza has been made in a specific way, by both centrists and reactionaries. The even-handed, moderate view was articulated by New York Times columnist David French, who drew on his experience while deployed in Iraq of giving legal advice to U.S. soldiers. Writing last week in a Times newsletter, French explained the “law of war,” which he believes both the United States and Israel do their best to honor. “Even in its rage and pain, Israel may not level cities without regard for innocent life,” he conceded. But Hamas, he asserted, disregards the “principle of distinction”—the obligation to fight openly in marked vehicles or in uniforms. By doing so, “Hamas is responsible for the civilian damage that results.” He added: “If Hamas fights from a hospital—or stores munitions in a hospital—damage to that hospital is Hamas’s responsibility. If Hamas fighters shoot at Israel Defense Forces from a home that contains a Palestinian family, then Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties if that family is harmed in the resulting exchange of fire.”

It’s a short distance from David French’s objection that Hamas does not observe the proper rules of warfare to the bloodthirsty fulminations of the likes of Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas. In an interview on Fox News, Cotton said, “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza. Anything that happens in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas—Hamas killed women and children in Israel last weekend.”

As many have pointed out, this notion that Palestinians should be collectively punished for violence organized by Hamas is not sanctioned by the law of war, or international law, or any decent understanding of human rights. And yet it was explicitly stated by Israeli president Isaac Herzog in the first week of heavy bombing in Gaza. Herzog claimed, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. . . this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.” This conveniently ignores the history of Israel’s own role in bolstering Hamas to divide support from other Palestinian movements. It ignores the daily constraints Israel has put on ordinary Gazans just to survive. Yet, Herzog insisted, “They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” Since they did not, he said, “We will fight until we break their backbone.”

War fever always attempts to impose a uniformity of thought, a suppression of dissent. The government of Israel and its American defenders have been relentless in insisting one must acknowledge Israeli casualties and suffering first and foremost, while treating Palestinian suffering as the just deserts of a violent population, or at least as a secondary concern.

by Dave Denison, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Legitimate violance. via

[ed. See also: Retire the Word "Terrorism" (It obscures the things it is supposed to illuminate) (HTW).]

Young Morality and Old Morality

All of us who live through our teens and 20s and into our 30s and 40s and beyond get to experience the evolution of our own political thought. Life is a rich pageant and I’m sure that this process varies for everyone, but typically, youth is characterized by passion, energy, and stridency, which over time softens into nuance and “shades of grey” as our life experience accumulates. From the perspective of the young, this process can be seen as one of disappointing acquiescence to the world’s injustices; from the perspective of the old, it can be seen as one of gaining invaluable wisdom. For the purpose of our discussion, it is enough to just recognize that people change with time.

It is, of course, impossible to have a great deal of wisdom produced by life experience when you’re young. You are young. By definition, your life experience is limited. But this lack of lived experience is balanced out by something that young people tend to have more of than their elders: moral clarity. The rage and impatience of youthful political energy is a natural result of gaining insight into how the world works for the first time, and being disgusted by its many outrages. History? Economics? Foreign policy? To learn for the first time about any of these things is to be introduced to an unbroken string of murder, oppression, and theft stretching back thousands of years. Education, performed correctly, gives kids the knowledge that the world around them did not just spontaneously come into being; it is the result of the work of many, many generations of stronger groups wiping out weaker groups and taking all of their stuff. And sustains itself today not through a friendly spirit of universal cooperation, but through power arrangements that culminate, almost everywhere, with the barrel of a gun. To see the world through a child’s eyes, and then to have the actual, blood-soaked machinery of history and politics unveiled is a shock. It prompts an urgent desire to do something in anyone with a conscience. Young people are able to see the evils of our systems with eyes that are unclouded by the harsh compromises that life imposes on all of us.

Older people who have lived through more things and read more books often mock this moral clarity as the product of childish, unsophisticated minds. Yet that judgment is itself a product of fear, of weakness, of the very human need to justify ourselves to ourselves. In fact, the moral clarity of youth is priceless treasure. It is the fuel that propels action towards justice. It is untainted idealism, which is a necessary ingredient for any movement that aspires to change the world for the better. The very things that older people find repellent about young people’s political attitudes—the certainty, the self-righteousness, the impatience with any delays—are the same things that we should welcome. They are the things that older people, with all of their knowledge, often lose.

Are young people annoying? Yes of course. They don’t know jack shit and they act like they know everything and they mock our outfits, which we are certain are cool. More to the point, what chafes older people so much is, I think, the fact that younger people seem eager to pass judgment on the world without ever having had to navigate its many challenges themselves. We see their certainty as unearned, their arrogance as off-putting, and their smooth, glowing skin as an insult to our own mortality.

What I want to say at this very fraught political moment, however, is this: The wisdom that older people claim grants them the legitimacy to control the world also demands the grace and humility to be able to admit that young people bring important qualities to the political mix that we lack. To high-handedly dismiss the demands of the young that knotty moral outrages be fixed, just because those demands feel simplistic or tinged with self-righteousness, is to reveal that we are not as wise as we claim to be after all.

Awful things are happening in Israel. This week’s attack by Hamas and the subsequent brutal retaliation against Gaza by the Israeli government has thrust in front of everyone the horrific human cost of oppression, rage, and war. This is a time when public discourse takes on a real importance—what is being written in the media and said on television can have life and death consequences, as the unspooling public narrative gives shape to the boundaries of conventional wisdom about what is considered acceptable. Imagine for a moment that you are employed as a professional commentator right now. What is truly important? Well: Human life. Human death. The political choices and historic background that produced this situation. And, most urgent at this moment, the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza, prompted by the Israeli government’s plans to lay waste to the entire region, with little regard for the civilians trapped therein. No matter what your position is on these issues, it is fair to say that those whose job it is to focus public attention on important things must, right now, be engaged with the momentous matters of life and death that are playing out before our eyes with every passing hour.

But here is what many professional commentators have chosen to spend their time and energy drawing our attention to instead: The annoying things that young people are saying and doing. Many people who hold prestigious and well-paid media jobs, and who control an influential megaphone at a time when that is of incredible importance, squander their time and ours with wheedling complaints about bullshit. (...)

Who is being childish here? Is it the young college students, appalled at genocide looming in front of their eyes, possessed with the overwhelming urge to do something, who—despite not possessing a PhD in global affairs—flood into the streets and rage against the atrocity? Or is it the well educated and highly placed and influential adults, granted positions of great importance, who, as a crisis unfolds, as civilians are murdered, as neighborhoods are bombed, as oppression and religion collide in war, use their time griping about the hotheadedness of the young people protesting in the streets? Which of these groups has more accurately identified what should be our current topic of attention—the young people whose focus is on the governments that possess militaries and missiles and are poised to cause thousands of deaths, or the adults whose focus is on how some college kid said something annoying at a DSA rally? Wake the fuck up. The adults in the room are everywhere proving the kids’ critique to be true.

Young people have a voice, but no power. Old people have a bigger voice, and all of the power. Guess which group has a greater responsibility not to waste the current moment moaning about petty bullshit? An inability to ignore the small annoyances of youth in order to welcome the indispensable purity of morality that young people give to us is not a mark of wisdom. It is evidence that one has maintained immaturity even as they have gotten older. It is proof that you have allowed age to shrink your moral universe, rather than expand and deepen it. It is, above all, a reason to think that you should stop talking for a minute and listen to what the angry young people are saying.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Keep On Looking for Those "Corporate Values," I'm Sure They'll Turn Up One Day (Companies are machines and must be treated as such) (HTW).]

Godzilla Has a Birthday

November 3rd is Godzilla's birthday (X)

via: Tokyo Walking

[ed. Birthday?]

The Chevron Deference

The Supreme Court looks set to deliver another blow to the environment. Two upcoming cases take aim at the government's power to regulate.

Last week, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that’s nominally about herring. Arguments will be heard this winter, in tandem with a case that the Court had agreed to hear earlier, that one also ostensibly about herring. In both cases, though, the Justices have much bigger fish to fry: what’s really at issue is the fate of federal regulation. The stakes are enormously high, and, given the Court’s predilections, the outcome seems likely to undermine still further the government’s ability to function.

Like many potentially precedent-setting cases, the one that the Court agreed to hear last week—Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce—has a long and complex backstory. In 1981, the first year of the Reagan Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a set of regulations aimed at reducing environmental protection. (The head of the agency at the time was Anne Gorsuch, the mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.) The rules were technical in nature. Basically, they enabled big emitters to replace a major piece of equipment—a boiler, say—without triggering a Clean Air Act requirement that new equipment be less polluting. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, sued the agency to block the rules, and won the case in D.C. district court. (That decision was written by Judge—later Supreme Court Justice—Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)

The Chevron Corporation, a potential beneficiary of the Reagan-era rules, appealed the case to the Supreme Court. Arguments in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. N.R.D.C. were heard in the winter of 1984, and the Court handed down its ruling in the spring. (By that point, Gorsuch had been forced to resign from the E.P.A. She resigned after being held in contempt of Congress in connection with an inquiry into the use of toxic-waste cleanup funds.) David Doniger, the N.R.D.C.’s lead attorney on the case, learned about the decision from Nina Totenberg, the National Public Radio reporter.

“This was before the days of the Internet,” Doniger recalled recently. “So I had no idea the case had been decided that day. Nina Totenberg called, and I said, ‘Tell me what happened.’ And she said, ‘Well, you lost.’ I think my next twelve words were ‘shit.’ ”

In deciding against the N.R.D.C., the Court established what has since become known as the “Chevron deference.” According to this principle, judges faced with disputes over federal regulations should follow a two-step process. The first is to ask whether Congress explicitly addressed “the precise question at issue” when it wrote the legislation underlying the rules. If it did, then the court’s job was simple: to insure that the regulations furthered Congress’s intentions.

If Congress hadn’t spoken to the “precise question,” or if its intentions were ambiguous, judges were to proceed to step two. They should ask: Is the agency’s interpretation of the legislation “reasonable”? If so, then the court should defer to the agency. It should not substitute its “own construction of a statutory provision.”

“Judges are not experts in the field, and are not part of either political branch of the Government,” the ruling, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, stated. “Courts must, in some cases, reconcile competing political interests, but not on the basis of the judges’ personal policy preferences.”

When Chevron was handed down, it was not regarded as a particularly momentous ruling. (Justice Stevens said that he saw it just as a restatement of existing law.) But over the years it has become one of the Court’s most influential and frequently cited decisions. According to Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, it “may well be the most important case in all of administrative law.”

Also over the years, conservatives have come to loathe it. Justice Gorsuch has been particularly critical of Chevron, calling it a “judge-made doctrine for the abdication of judicial duty.” On the face of it, this loathing makes no sense. The Chevron decision expressly prohibits judges from substituting their own views for those of Congress or federal agencies; thus, it constrains just the sort of “activist judges” the right wing loves to hate. The only way to make sense of the campaign against Chevron is to see it for the cynical ploy it is. Over the past forty years, courts have relied on Chevron to uphold a slew of regulations aimed at combatting climate change, promoting public safety, and protecting consumers. Therefore, in the right’s view, it ought to be dismantled.

Enter the herring. Under a 1976 law, the owners of some kinds of fishing boats are required to pay the salaries of fishery monitors. In 2020, the New England Council, which develops fishery-management plans for that region, finalized a proposal that would require payment from herring-boat owners. Loper Bright Enterprises, based in Cape May, New Jersey, objected to the plan and filed suit. The company lost its case in the D.C. district court, and then lost the appeal; the courts ruled that the council’s plan was reasonable under Chevron. Earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suspended the whole payment plan, because the agency lacked the funding to implement it. Nevertheless, Loper Bright successfully appealed the case to the Supreme Court. It asked the Court to decide not only whether the Chevron standard had been correctly applied in this instance but also whether Chevron should be overturned entirely. In agreeing to hear Loper Bright’s case, back in May, the Court said that it would take up only the second question.

The case the Supreme Court added last week, Relentless v. U.S. Department of Commerce, involves a different fishing company, Relentless, Inc., based in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, but the same basic issues. (...)

As many commentators have pointed out, the alternative to the Chevron deference is to leave the fate of regulations up to judges. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seems perfectly happy augmenting the judiciary’s power at the expense of the executive’s; several of its recent decisions have done just that. “One of the Supreme Court’s most consequential projects in the last several years, a project that took off after former President Donald Trump remade the Court with three appointees, has been concentrating authority over federal policymaking within the Court itself,” Ian Millhiser, Vox’s legal analyst, observed recently.

The conservative argument against Chevron is that it leaves too many important decisions to federal bureaucrats—the much maligned “administrative state.” Since those officials aren’t elected, the argument goes, the practice is undemocratic. But this argument, as many commentators have also noted, is obviously specious. At least the federal bureaucrats’ boss has to face the voters every four years. There’s no such check on unelected federal judges. As the Department of Commerce, which is being sued in both Loper Bright and Relentless, has argued: “federal agencies, unlike federal courts, are politically accountable to the American people through the President.”

Relentless and Loper Bright are just the latest in a string of recent cases brought before the Supreme Court with the same all-but-explicit goal: to make it more difficult for the federal government to protect the public. Relentless, Inc., is represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which, on its home page, announces that it “views the administrative state as an especially serious threat to constitutional freedoms.” Loper Bright is represented by the Cause of Action Institute, which describes its mission as working “to limit the power of the administrative state to make decisions that are contrary to freedom and prosperity.” Both groups have close ties to the right-libertarian network funded by Charles Koch. According to the Washington Post, over the years, the Cause of Action Institute has received “millions of dollars” from the Koch network. (Recent revelations that Justice Clarence Thomas attended network fund-raising events have led to calls for him to recuse himself from Loper Bright.) The New Civil Liberties Alliance was founded in 2017 with $1.6 million in grants, a million of which came from the Charles Koch Foundation. (...)

The Court has scheduled arguments for Relentless and Loper Bright in January, and is expected to deliver its decision in the spring. Almost certainly, a majority of the Justices will vote to modify Chevron; the only real question is whether the majority will opt to toss out the standard entirely. Doniger noted that, if the Court does toss Chevron, it will be faced with the challenge of finding a substitute.

“If you’re going to say Chevron was the wrong approach, then what’s the right approach?” he asked. 

by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Jemal Countess/UPI/Shutterstock