The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.
– George Orwell’s 1940 review of Mein Kampf
This week’s featured post is “Revisiting the fascism question“. I didn’t notice this cartoon until after that article posted.
If you wondered what I was doing with my week off last week, I was in a church speculating about death.
This week everybody was talking about Gaza
A frequently rumored deal where Hamas would release some number of hostages in exchange for a ceasefire of a certain number of days keeps not quite happening.
The war news this week centered on the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which Israel has claimed sits over a Hamas command-and-control center. Meanwhile, though, it was a hospital, and conditions there became horrific while Israel searched it for Hamas fighters and their hostages. Saturday, a deal was reached to evacuate the patients that could be moved and leave the hospital with a skeleton crew to take care of the rest.
Israel turned up a collection of weapons from the hospital and a shaft that presumably goes down into deeper tunnels. But so far this evidence has fallen short of a command-and-control center, so not everyone was impressed.
It’s hard to feel good about any news coming out of Gaza. My interpretation of the October 7 attacks is that Hamas designed them to offend Israel as deeply as possible, giving Israelis the maximum motivation to come to Gaza and root them out. Simultaneously, Hamas had embedded itself in Gaza so tightly that Israel would have to do ugly, horrible things to succeed in rooting them out. For its part, Israel is now doing those ugly, horrible things, and Palestinian civilians are dying in large numbers.
Watching from the outside, I have a hard time coming up with some alternative path Israel ought to be taking, and yet I also have a hard time rooting for them to succeed in their current path. I find myself agreeing with this Nicholas Kristof column, especially this line:
Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.
There’s been a lot written — maybe appropriately so — about antisemitism on college campuses, and from the left in general. But this week we got a reminder that antisemitism on the right is far more pervasive and virulent.
Matt Yglesias wrote a fairly long column about left and right antisemitism, which I’ll oversimplify down to this: Leftists sympathize with Palestinians, and sometimes end up overshooting into hating Jews. Rightists hate Jews, and so invent conspiracy theories to justify that hatred. Neither position is good, but they’re not exactly mirror images of each other.
Cases in point are these statements by Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, which blame Jews for financing “white genocide” and “anti-white causes”. Elon Musk responded to a tweet expressing a similar view with “You have said the actual truth.”
In case you thought Hamas was the only group of unreasonable radicals, The New Yorker interviews Daniella Weiss of the Israeli settler movement.
The borders of the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest.
That’s the land promised to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis 15. It includes big chunks of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.
If someone decides to invent a new religion today, who will decide the rules? The first nation that got the word from God, the promise from God—the first nation is the one who has the right to it. The others that follow—Christianity and Islam, with their demands, with their perceptions—they’re imitating what existed already. So, why in Israel? They could be anywhere in the world. They came after us, in the double sense of the world.
She’s fine with non-Jews continuing to live in these lands, as long as they accept that
We the Jews are the sovereigns in the state of Israel and in the Land of Israel.
That means accepting that “they are not going to have the right to vote for the Knesset. No, no, no.”
and averting a government shutdown
I give Speaker Johnson credit for not waiting until the absolute last minute to recognize reality: Any plan to keep the government funded has to rely on Democratic votes, so loading a continuing resolution up with right-wing culture-war riders can’t work. The House got a relatively clean CR done Tuesday (supported by 209 Democrats and only 127 Republicans), the Senate passed it Wednesday, and President Biden signed it Thursday, with a day to spare. The ordinary business of government shouldn’t be dramatic. Things that need to get done should get done without watching some clock tick down to zero.
Johnson accomplished this by pulling the same trick Kevin McCarthy did just before the House sacked him: He avoided putting the bill through the Rules Committee (where all bills usually go, so that rules can be established for amendments, debate limits, etc., and which McCarthy had stacked with “Freedom” Caucus members as part of the deal that made him speaker). That meant it needed a 2/3rds supermajority to pass, which it only got via overwhelming Democratic support.
Predictably, passing a realistic CR with mostly Democratic votes angered the “Freedom” Caucus, which has no interest in the kind of compromise democracy always entails. So far no one is proposing another vacate-the-chair resolution. But it’s hard to see how Johnson gets past the next set of funding deadlines without a revolt.
About those deadlines: The one weird thing about the Johnson-designed CR is that it has two. The bill would extend funding until January 19 for military construction, veterans’ affairs, transportation, housing and the Energy Department. The rest of the government – anything not covered by the first step – would be funded until February 2.
It’s not clear what kind of game Johnson has in mind. Maybe he wants to get full-year appropriation bills approved for the January 19 departments approved first, then have a showdown over big cuts to the February 2 departments. Or maybe he wants to be able to have a shutdown over the January 19 departments while the others are still funded. We’ll see how Democrats maneuver in response.
In general, it’s hard to disagree with one part of Johnson’s rhetoric: Congress ought to debate individual programs on their merits, rather than vote the whole government up or down. However, such a plan requires repeated compromises with Democrats, and recognizing that the small and fractious Republican House majority can’t get its way on everything. As long as the House loads every bill with things Democrats will never support, nothing will pass and we’ll keep coming down to deadlines with the government unfunded.
The CR does not include additional aid for Israel or Ukraine. Meanwhile, Johnson’s previous bill that coupled aid to Israel with a deficit-increasing IRS cut is dead in the Senate. If Israel (not to mention Ukraine) is going to get more aid, the House is going to have to try again.
The fact that the IRS cut increases the deficit (by making it easier for rich taxpayers to cheat; I’ve heard the cut described as “defund the tax police”) is routinely left out of conservative-media articles. Conservative media frames the situation as Democrats wanting to protect IRS bureaucrats, not Democrats wanting rich people to pay the taxes they legally owe.
Basically, there are two kinds of legislators. When something needs to get done, one kind thinks “What am I willing to give up to make this happen?” and the other thinks “What can I get people to give me to stop blocking this?”
and the China summit
President Biden met President Xi on Wednesday, and accomplished a small number of important but not flashy things: They restored communications between Chinese and American military leaders, which is how minor incidents are settled without escalating into war. And China agreed to reduce precursor chemicals for making fentanyl, which is a key point in the China-to-Mexico-to-America drug trade. The two leaders disagreed about a number of other issues, like Taiwan.
Yeah, yeah, Taiwan and trade and climate agreements and all that are important, but here’s what you were really concerned about: China will resume sending pandas to US zoos.
Back in 2018, John Oliver publicized the banned-in-China anti-Xi memes styling him as Winnie the Pooh, and now I can’t see him without noting the resemblance.
and the Tuberville drama
Senator Tuberville’s blockade on military promotions continued this week, and we found out that he has at least one ally: Mike Lee of Utah.
Several Republicans have publicly expressed frustration with Tuberville on the floor of the Senate, to no avail. Democrats are going to propose a temporary rule change to circumvent the blockade, but it needs 60 votes to pass. If all 51 Democrats show up to support the change, nine Republicans will be needed. No one knows whether the anti-Tuberville faction has that many Republicans.
and Trump’s “insurrection”
A Colorado judge weighed in Friday on whether the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause makes Donald Trump ineligible to be president again. The ruling is a mixed bag: She finds that Trump did engage in insurrection, in the sense intended by the Amendment, but denies that the phrase “officer of the United States” was intended to include presidents. As a result, Trump’s name should appear on Colorado primary ballots.
That sounds like a victory for Trump, but Harry Litman isn’t so sure. The engaged-in-insurrection part is a finding of fact (based on extensive examination of evidence) which the appellate courts would be inclined to defer to, while the not-an-officer part is a matter of law that the higher courts will want to decide for themselves. So this Trump “victory” may set up a less victorious outcome on appeal.
The judge’s opinion is a good summary of what happened on January 6. A key point is that Trump’s words can’t be taken at face value because
Trump developed and employed a coded language based in doublespeak that was understood between himself and far-right extremists, while maintaining a claim to ambiguity among a wider audience.
and you also might be interested in …
Former first lady Rosalynn Carter died Sunday. Her husband, former president Jimmy Carter, has been in hospice since February.
When Republicans and a few Democrats voted against a resolution to expel George Santos from the House of Representatives a few weeks ago, they claimed it was because he had not yet gotten the due process that an Ethics Committee investigation would provide.
Well, the Ethics report came in Thursday, saying that
Mr Santos exploited “every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.”
A new expulsion resolution is expected after Thanksgiving, and it will probably pass.
The Supreme Court finally adopted an ethics code. Critics are not impressed.
The most glaring defect of the new code is its complete lack of any enforcement power. Its 15 pages are littered with weak verbs like “should,” “should not” and “endeavor to,” which, as any college student on a pre-exam bender will tell you, is a reliable way to sound serious without actually doing the work. … Whatever the justices do, they must know there will be no professional repercussions. Appointed for life and removable only by impeachment, they are effectively untouchable.
Baseball’s A’s will move from Oakland to Las Vegas by 2028, leaving Oakland without any sports franchises. The A’s are baseball’s most traveled franchise, beginning as the Philadelphia Athletics, then moving to Kansas City, Oakland, and now Las Vegas.
My annual exercise in humility — reading various publications’ best-books-of-the-year lists and admitting how few of them I’ve even noticed — begins with the Washington Post. And Vox reviews the 25 nominees for a National Book Award.
and let’s close with an interesting question
WaPo columnist Michael Dirda raises the idea of books you come back to again and again, and refines it a little: Books you may have read only once, but you want to come back to. What’s interesting in his column isn’t his list of 22 books, but the question itself.
I’ll offer All the King’s Men as a novel I re-read every five years or so, and Gravity’s Rainbow as one I don’t re-read cover to cover, but keep coming back to for specific scenes and descriptions. (If you write, you need to keep exposing yourself to authors whose grasp of language is deeper than your own.) As for a set of books I want to come back to someday: Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Nick Harkaway’s Gnommon, which I almost understood the second time through.
Your turn.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
“Congress ought to debate individual programs on their merits, rather than vote the whole government up or down.”
That makes compromise harder. When voting for multiple programs at once, there is room for trading. “We’ll give you this funding you want or cut this funding you hate if you’ll allow us this funding we want.” If they’re not bundled, you might get promises, but after the last agreement getting killed by the Freedom Caucus, it would be foolish for Democrats to trust Republican promises over the budget.
I have to agree that nearly 20 years on, I’m still in awe of The Baroque Cycle, and have had to more than once pull back my discussion of history of that era, because I’ve “forgotten” I’m basing my talking point(s) on a work of fiction. I think it’s close to the only series that done that to me.
I read Michael Chabon’s _The Yiddish Policeman’s Union_ about once a year, maybe more often. I really could read it serially and be perfectly happy, I think, for a while anyway. I have about four places in the book where I say, “this is my favorite chapter,” and then a few chapters later, “No, THIS is my favorite chapter,” and so on.
I can also read Anthony Trollope’s _Barchester Towers_ multiple times, although I think it’s been about five years since last time.
Finally, Richard Adams’s _Watership Down_. And I cry at the end, every damn time.
It’s hard not to choose something that will make me sound erudite (the social-desirability bias on full display) but honestly, Alexander McCall Smith’s various series (44 Scotland Street, The Sunday Philosophy Club, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, etc.) have taught me a great deal about living graciously and writing short.
On the “writing short” theme: John LeCarre’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold”. I don’t think I could edit a sentence out of it without losing something.
I keep coming back to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary cycle – space opera, sentient ships, distributed intellect and colonial politics, all combined into something that feels increasingly cozy and increasingly nearly funny as the books wend along. I always find something new in them. I also reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy at irregular intervals.
I wish you’d commented on Biden’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post. It’s the most reasonable take on the Israel-Gaza situation I’ve seen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/18/joe-biden-gaza-hamas-putin/
With the understandable focus on Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack, what we’re not seeing are plans for after the war is over. That Hamas must be removed goes without question. It’s also clear that Netanyahu’s career is over – the liberals in Israel already hate him, and the conservatives have no use for him if he can’t even keep them safe.
The two-state solution isn’t new; it goes back to the 1947 UN partition plan and arguably the Peel Commission report ten years earlier. It’s pointless to argue over whether attempts to implement it have been derailed by Israeli or Palestinian intransigence. Let’s just say that the two sides have failed to reach agreement. My suggestion, which I’m sure many people won’t like, is for Israel to unilaterally grant the Palestinians an independent state. The borders, the fate of settlements in the West Bank, and the status of East Jerusalem will be up to Israel if the Palestinian leadership refuses to compromise. Anything resembling the right of return for Palestinians whose grandparents left Israel in 1948 is off the table.
Obviously, an independent Palestinian state will require massive assistance for development, and safeguards will have to be in place to prevent this from being misdirected. But at this point, anything will be better than endless blockade and occupation. It will be better for Israel as well, as most of the international condemnation is focused on their treatment of the Palestinians.
E.R. Edison, _The Worm Ouroboros_. Reread regularly. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. Tolkien. _Moby Dick_.
I try to reread Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day, Persuasion, Mulligan Stew, and the Malazan books by S. Erikson every few years. Books I am looking forward to rereading after reading only once: The Ambassadors (H. James), The Name of the Wind (P. Rothfuss), and Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. –Sam
There’s so much new stuff coming out so quickly that I almost never re-read nowadays. But things I want to re-read someday include Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren and John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting.
Books to reread: “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus.
And to read at least once: “Empress of the Nile” by Lynne Olson.
I reread every few years Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Personal excellence (Arete). Quality. Western duality vs. Eastern oneness. Romantic aesthetics vs. classic organizing structure. Its themes are present constantly in everyday life, and we live most fully when we recognize and embrace them.
Why is it that Muslim theocracies, of which there seem to be no shortages, are generally accepted as legitimate forms of government along with their socially regressive consequences, especially for women and non-cis minorities, but a single nation-state organized to ensure having one place in the world dedicated to both the survival of Jews and Western values, and well-informed about what happens to Jews without such protection, is deemed illegitimate and must give way to the consequences of absolute democracy, even if that democracy results in subjecting Jews, once again, to the consequences of people opposed to their very existence? How many Holocausts are necessary before the international community accepts an Israel that is Jewish before all else, especially in the context of a world full of Irans, Saudi Arabias, and Pakistans?
I would like to point out that :
1) the Israeli government prosecutes Israeli settlers who carry out illegal actions. That is a far cry from Hamas.
2) The pro-Palestinian protestor would be killed by Hamas. Indeed , many of the victims killed on Oct 7 were active in peace/ co-existance movements.
3) Most Israelis are concerned about Palestinian casualties, but as you pointed out so aptly, there really is little recourse for them, battling an enemy who are so expert at using their own civilians as human shields.
A former Israeli soldier calls for international intervention to stop settler violence
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/14/1212836719/ex-idf-soldier-calls-for-international-intervention-to-stop-settler-violence
He says that Israel actually doesn’t much of anything about settler violence.
well, I see in the news that several have been refered for prosecution.
I used to reread 100Years of Solitude every couple years, but recently I’ve found myself so dreading the decline that I cannot enjoy the magic of the first half of the book.
I love revisiting Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, Jasper Fforde’s Eyre Affair, Connie Willis’ To say Nothing of the Dog, and Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh.