…I don’t want to jinx it…but…iran lobbed a whole bunch of stuff israel’s way late in the day…just the way joe said it would happen…& just about all of it got headed off by the combined efforts of the iron dome, the US, the UK & jordan…so…have the players rattled enough sabres…or do they still feel the need to escalate the thing they keep telling us neither washington nor tehran actually want to?

Netanyahu’s ministers voted in the middle of the night to delegate that decision to the tiny war cabinet, comprising Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, a Netanyahu opponent who joined the government as minister without portfolio after the Hamas 7 October attack, which began the spiral of violence that has brought Israel and Iran to the brink of war.

…seems pretty clear one of that pair really doesn’t want to go the escalatory path

That “remarkable” defensive capacity, Biden argued, was by itself “a clear message to its foes that they cannot effectively threaten the security of Israel”.

As of early Sunday morning, the only reported casualty from the aerial onslaught was a 10-year-old boy in Israel’s southern desert, from the country’s most marginalised community, the Bedouins. A southern military base was lightly damaged.

…& I think I buy the bit where they tell me iran is also on that page

Iran is clearly hoping for such a muted response. In a message delivered through its mission at the UN, Tehran suggested hopefully that in the wake of its retaliation: “The matter can be deemed concluded.”

…but…they’re not “in it” the way bibi & hamas are…so…not feeling the day of rest is all that restful, to be honest?

NBC News reported on Saturday night that some top administration officials are “concerned Israel could do something quickly in response to Iran’s attacks without thinking through potential fallout afterward”.

The report said Biden had privately expressed concern that Netanyahu is “trying to drag the US more deeply into a broader conflict”, citing three people familiar with the president’s comments.

Administration officials are well aware that Netanyahu has an incentive to keep hostilities going, as it fends off the collapse of his coalition and new elections.

In the short term, Washington can draw comfort from a few signs any Israeli response will not at least be immediate. Israel has called for a UN security council session on the attack, which will happen at 4pm New York time on Sunday. It would be surprising if a counter-attack was launched before that session.

Another possible sign that the response could be muted was Gallant’s conversation with his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, after the attacks. According to the Israeli defence ministry, Gallant “emphasised that the defence establishment is prepared for any further attempts to attack the state of Israel”. His comments made no mention of Israel striking back.

A third positive sign in the early hours of Sunday was a reassurance from an Israeli official cited by the New York Times that “Israel’s response would be coordinated with its allies”.

…which notably the strike on that embassy in syria wasn’t…so…hopefully that broadly translates to bibi being on the back foot in every back-channel going

The attack has for now distracted global attention from Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. Furthermore, the Iranian attack is also likely to dispel murmurs in the US Congress about curbing weapons supplies to Israel because of Gaza. Now such restrictions can be cast by Israel’s supporters as leaving America’s leading ally in the Middle East defenceless in the face of the proven Iranian threat.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/14/fate-of-middle-east-hangs-in-the-balance-as-israel-mulls-its-next-steps

…but…it’s all so damnably opaque…I mean the horrific parts are all out there in 4K…but…from the outset…earlier even if you’d been following along at home for…oh…however many years you like…the “why would anyone want to make that worse?” bits were a struggle to get your head around…israel could terrorize the palestinians…because nukes…&…by a tortuous route…the holocaust…so…nobody would make them stop…but israel being to some extent in gaza’s shoes when it comes to that end of the med…in that the majority of the bigger nations on the doorstep weren’t mad fans of giving up the requisite slices of their back yard & in a bunch of cases are on the record about wanting to have those back…while some of the people wanting to express their religious identities as direct inheritors of the OG 12 tribes…they cleave to a view that requires excising more parcels of three or so other countries’ idea of where the line is drawn…so…you get this sort of thing

Understandably, Palestinians see the conflict differently than Israelis. Most tolerate or may even support Hamas because, in their eyes, it is waging a war of liberation against Israeli occupation, even if they reject the group’s radical Islamist agenda or recognize the inherent depravity of its sacrifice of civilians. Hamas, despite its methods, is gaining support not just among Palestinians but also in Arab-majority countries and Muslim-majority countries outside the Middle East.

…I mean…if you cut&paste a bit

[Israelis] see the conflict differently than [Palestinians]. Most tolerate or may even support [Bibi’s way] because, in their eyes, it is waging a war of liberation against [existential theocratic threats], even if they reject the [faction]’s radical [Judaic] agenda or recognize the inherent depravity of its sacrifice of civilians. [Bibi], despite [his] methods, is gaining support not just among [Israelis] but also in [the wider Jewish diaspora] and [its allies in] countries outside the Middle East.

Israel needs to win back the narrative if it is to win the wider war. Making a convincing case is not about choosing different words—it requires Israel to change its approach. The country’s leaders have failed to outline political objectives for the war, and at this point, continued fighting will not bring the Israeli and Palestinian peoples closer to long-term peace. Israel must now launch a diplomatic track that revives the ultimate goal of a two-state solution, and it needs new leadership to do so. Only by demonstrating its commitment to a negotiated settlement can Israel reclaim the support it needs from partners in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, which has been undercut by the past six months of war in Gaza.

…&…bibi is looking down the barrel of being out on his ass when this thing wraps…maybe sooner…can anyone say “regime change” these days…I dunno…& ever since they took his ass to court & he should probably have been done on account of having a book so big thrown at him that he’d never get back up…the man has been emulating the breaking bad narrative arc by always doing the “but he wouldn’t go there, would he?” thing so he can stay safely ensconced in a position that protects him from direct consequences

…for some reason that sounds familiar…weird…never mind

Israel has had global opinion on its side before. International support for Israel was strong during the 1990s after the signing of the Oslo accords, which were intended to lead to a Palestinian state—even though Israel was waging an uncompromising battle against Palestinian terrorism at the same time. The international community considered this fight legitimate, however, because Israel was genuinely engaging in a parallel diplomatic track aimed at bringing about peace for both peoples. I was serving as the director of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, during this period. Our collaboration with Palestinian security organizations led to a dramatic decrease in Hamas terrorism, but my Palestinian partners also made it clear that their continued cooperation depended on political progress toward the end of occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

…but then it suited bibi to low-key bolster hamas so he’d have a sufficient threat to cow dissent with…& iran was happy to help keep flicking gasoline on anything that looked like an ember…hop…skip…jump…with both feet…you get to Oct 7th…& everything after

Yet what the world now sees is an Israel whose government denies the existence of a Palestinian people and strives to establish a “Greater Israel” by building more settlements in the West Bank—and potentially in Gaza, as well—and moving toward annexation of parts or all of the Palestinian territories. Seen through this lens, Israel’s war in Gaza looks less like a just war conducted in self-defense and more like an act of expansionist aggression.

No one should be naive about Hamas. It is a murderous organization that must not be allowed to remain in charge of Gaza. In every position I held in the Israeli security establishment, I treated Hamas as a ruthless terrorist group that Israel must fight. I opposed any attempt to negotiate with Hamas because such outreach boosted the group’s power and weakened that of the Palestinian Authority, which had recognized the Israeli people’s right to have a country.

Israel cannot win this war merely by disarming Hamas and eliminating its leadership. Even if Israel prevails on the battlefield, Hamas’s ideology will not disappear. The group will be truly defeated only when it loses the support of the Palestinian people. For that to happen, they must have reason to believe in a diplomatic process that will bring about the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

…now….I’ve heard folks who think…in some cases…”the answer” is to give israel every scrap of real estate the bible so much as hints at & tell the foreigners who mistakenly believe themselves to be natives to go suck a tailpipe…all while sounding quite prim & proper & not like some slavering extremist trying to incite armageddon so they can get raptured…& I’ve heard folks who really do mean something genocidal when they use that “river to the sea” line…weirdly, that would go for cheerleaders for teams on opposing sides of the various lines of scrimmage…but…people being people…people pretty understandably come around to the view that when it comes to people who’d like to see them dead…they’d be quite partial to a “you first” approach, given the choice

In his 1990 book War and Strategy, the retired Israeli general turned scholar Yehoshafat Harkabi made a crucial distinction between the thinking of military leaders and that of statesmen. “In military thinking, the enemy is a collection of targets that need to be attacked; in diplomatic thinking, the enemy is a human and political entity that also needs to be won over and satisfied,” he wrote. “In military thinking, we are indifferent to the adversary’s agonies and therefore seek to increase them; in diplomatic thinking, we must be mindful of his pain as well.”

…call it wishful thinking on my part…but…if you take the iranian effort overnight to have been…effectively…”diplomatic” rather than “military”…& squint just right…you can sort of see it in a performative light that allows for a fairly broad statement along the lines of iran saying “that embassy thing was out of order & it will not go unanswered”…& just about the whole neighborhood pitching in to “hold back” the one guy who doesn’t want to get in the fight he keeps talking his ass into…& the whole exercise being less-than-subtle about how everyone gets that it’s a performance…& that means if the guy they’re “protecting” doesn’t get his drunk ass home & sleep it off there are a lot of roles that could be looking at an abrupt change of costume…which is to say the sort of thing to put bibi on notice that the gig is, if not up, at least on notice…maybe it’s overly optimistic to look at it that way…but it doesn’t feel particularly optimistic & it’s the best I’ve managed, to be honest…so…all ears if someone can tell me a less concerning way to cast current events

In this war, Israel has no statesmen and no diplomatic thinking. At the beginning of the war, Israel’s cabinet decided to ignore “the day after” in Gaza because merely having a discussion of the “political goal” of the operation would undermine the stability of the governing coalition. The cabinet’s members are hemmed in by their own political considerations, and they are taking the country down a dangerous road.

This failure of leadership has left Israel without a concept of victory beyond military accomplishments. War has become an end in itself, rather than a means to achieve a better political reality. Israeli history demonstrates that wars without political objectives drag on for years and conclude only after inflicting great trauma. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which around 2,650 Israelis were killed, the Israeli government recognized that it could not guarantee security through military means alone, and it changed its defense doctrine accordingly. Israel accepted Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s peaceful overture in 1977 and began withdrawing its forces from the Sinai Peninsula in 1979. The Egyptian-Israeli peace deal signed in 1979 provides Israel with real security on what had historically been its most dangerous front. Despite that successful record, however, Israel seems to have forgotten the lesson that political agreements provide the best route to security.

War has become an end in itself, rather than a means to achieve a better political reality.

…iirc tehran wasn’t exactly overjoyed about the prospect of normalized relations between israel & the house of saud…&…I don’t want to snowball this into some diatribe about how it does seem some days weirdly like the people who stay rich enough to perch on top of beleaguered populations so long as we keep burning the stuff they provide in unfathomable quantities…notably for military purposes…because even elon ain’t trying to flog cybertrucks as a humvee replacement or building one of them tanks from tron…are back to hoovering up all the oxygen & the lion’s share of the cash in a room that never quite seems to get around to the part about mending our ways before nature gets serious about moving fast & breaking our collective shit something fierce…in ways that augur spectacularly for the price of tinfoil futures…but…if the root of these issues date back to books written a couple of thousand years ago…in which it’s pretty clear there’s already many generations of mutual antipathy instilled in a variety of tribal groups

…we can’t take that long to fail as spectacularly to deal with the environmental shit…I mean…never say never & all…but…literally…in way less time than that what we’ll be dealing with is a steadily shrinking global population all vying for the liveable bits of the joint…whose square footage is on a track to contract even faster…so that judgement day will come well in advance of our having the necessary millennia or two to fuck it up as badly as we have the middle east…or…africa…or…more places than not is how it feels this morning…& that’s a lot to rest on the shoulders of disjointed but banal instances of basic human brute force & ignorance

Israel can no longer reach any meaningful objectives through the continuation or intensification of its military operation in Gaza. Pressing forward in an attempt to kill Hamas’s remaining leaders will not bring Israel a wider political victory, even if that narrow goal is achieved—it will only boost Hamas’s power on the Palestinian street.

The Palestinian issue is now widely understood to be the linchpin of any potential regional accord. And the Biden administration has insisted that only an accord that leads to a two-state reality will enable the creation of a moderate Middle Eastern bloc that can serve as a counterweight to Iran and its proxies both in Gaza and across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

…linchpin…lynchpin…who’s counting?

Then, in the longer term, Israel must choose between two courses of action. The first is to continue the occupation and creeping annexation of the West Bank. That path spells ongoing war, international isolation, and the loss of Israel’s Jewish and democratic character. The second is to pursue a diplomatic accord that will lead to an agreement with the Palestinian people within a regional framework. The United States and Europe would oversee such an agreement, and it would include normalization with Saudi Arabia and aim to build a broader coalition with moderate Sunni countries, such as Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states.

…it’s a tough line to balance along

In spite of all the challenges Israel faces, there is cause for optimism, especially stemming from the strength of Israeli civil society. For ten months before October 7, hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens flooded the streets, defending Israel’s justice system from the government’s attempt to take it over. They proved that they are the guardians of Israeli democracy.

Yet this struggle for democracy ignored the occupation and the existence of the Palestinians as a people. On October 7, Israelis were reminded that there is no way to separate the occupation from democracy—or from security. Walls alone, no matter how high or deep, cannot protect Israel. If Hamas or groups like it think they have nothing to lose, they will choose the “Samson option,” risking all to find ways to get past any barrier Israel can erect.

More and more Israelis are now returning to the streets in anger over their government’s inability to protect its citizens and to define achievable goals for the war. They are calling for the release of the hostages still held in Gaza and new elections to replace the Israeli government. Only a coalition that excludes right-wing extremists can chart a course toward lasting peace. With a bold new leadership that recognizes the failure of policies advanced by the hard right, and with the support of the Israeli public and the country’s friends around the world, Israel may finally be able to climb out of its grief and agony and reach for a sustainable political settlement.

Since October 7, the motto “Together We Will Win” has rallied the Israeli public in the fight against the perpetrators of that day’s attacks. But Israelis must remember that any military victory will turn into defeat if it undermines the core values of a Jewish and democratic Israel.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/way-israel-truly-defeat-hamas-ayalon

…sound familiar?

…does to me…sounds like a buncha populist “alt-right” nationalist firebrand types from your man vlad through that hungarian piece of work to your le pen or farage or whoever clear across the pond to the mandarin mandarin his sundowning self…except…for a good bit of that spectrum…the rhetoric is lock-stepped to the goose-step…but the threat…is ever more confection than conviction

…now…I’m not doing this on purpose…I’m just saying before that drone armada business I had a vague idea of a few things I wanted to maybe take a shot at limiting myself to so this wouldn’t take as long as usual & maybe I’d get a brownie point on the patented @butcherbakertoiletrymaker scale for not wasting his time with that shit…but the flesh is weak…& I dunno…typing is like pringles or some bollocks…because here I am & that’s how it looks…sorry…but…to be clear…at the risk of digging this hole deeper…because punching “up” is easier than digging upwards…I don’t mean it the way…I dunno…jd vance means it that he thinks preceding it with a litany of ways of describing how the US (& most everyone else) have said they’ll give ukraine more military aid than currently gets produced…by a considerable margin…& therefore have provided a fraction of the materiel pledged…while people like jd paint the lack of progress with ukraine’s campaign to repel an invasion from their territory as their failing…so they can roll on up on the part where they say “just give the man what he wants like we did the first time with crimea” because he thinks it makes him sound like he has foreign policy chops to the sort of people who would vote a jd vance into office

Consider our ability to produce 155-millimeter artillery shells. Last year, Ukraine’s defense minister estimated that the country’s base-line requirement for these shells was over four million per year but that it could fire up to seven million if that many were available. Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year — less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million — 30 percent of what’s needed — by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad.

…see…jd is here to tell you…when it comes to repelling russian invaders…actually…nothing is better than something…particularly when you’re not even the one being invaded & it’s an election year…quite the red badge of courage for ol’ bleeding heart jd…I’m sure you’ll agree

Just this week, the top American military commander in Europe argued that absent further security assistance, Russia could soon have a 10-to-1 artillery advantage over Ukraine. What didn’t gather as many headlines is that Russia’s current advantage is at least 5 to 1, even after all the money we have poured into the conflict. Neither of these ratios plausibly leads to Ukrainian victory.

…so…stands to reason you…like jd…would like that 10-to-1 advantage to kick in sooner than later because holding it back is just pouring good money after bad…& that cash could be getting earmarked as federal assistance for his busted flush of a state…hell, so many ukrainians have given their lives at this point (even if even more of the other side has had things go that way for them) that they’re in danger of running out of bodies to stack…so now is definitely the time to cut & run & make that synonymous with the american way when the chips are down & democracy’s on the line

…that he wheels around to trying to make out his water-carrying exercise is all about how they’d be better off cribbing the russian playbook to turn yet more of their truncated territory into the sort of low-fi concrete-forward entrenched & mine-fielded defensive positions jd reckons would be cheaper is sort of beside the point when he claims a return to the state of the borders in ’91 is “fantastical”…when he says

The White House has said time and again that it can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.

J.D. Vance: The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up [NYT]

…he’s saying “let vlad have what he likes – I see no issue with that…in fact I rather fancy the man idea, in fact”…&…personally…I find that offensive…but…it’s tricky when you’re mostly talking about stuff you’re pretty sure you’re largely ignorant about…even when you seem by appearances to be less ignorant than some who believe themselves in a position to make pronouncements about it…like…your boy bedbugs…or his buddy doubt-that…who this weekend is doubting that anyone can match his penetrating insight into the three body problem

Having watched some (though not quite all) of “3 Body Problem,” Netflix’s hit adaptation of “The Three-Body Problem,” the first book in a science-fiction saga by the Chinese author Liu Cixin, I’m struck by the unusual geopolitical weight this particular piece of pop entertainment carries. At a time when Chinese-American relations are notable for a lack of sustained cultural exchange, here is a best-selling work written within our leading rival, carrying various clash-of-civilizational themes, translated into popular television for an American audience. There aren’t a lot of other cases where a major piece of pop culture is so clearly working along the fault lines that have led to great-power conflict and could one day lead to war.

…now…he makes out he’s done more homework than you by implying he read the books…plural…which he may have…but…color me skeptical he made it through the dark forest…based on this piece I think his interpretation by then would have tied itself in too tight a knot to unravel his way through the third installment…or death’s end as the translation had it

Having watched some (though not quite all) of “3 Body Problem,” Netflix’s hit adaptation of “The Three-Body Problem,” the first book in a science-fiction saga by the Chinese author Liu Cixin, I’m struck by the unusual geopolitical weight this particular piece of pop entertainment carries. At a time when Chinese-American relations are notable for a lack of sustained cultural exchange, here is a best-selling work written within our leading rival, carrying various clash-of-civilizational themes, translated into popular television for an American audience. There aren’t a lot of other cases where a major piece of pop culture is so clearly working along the fault lines that have led to great-power conflict and could one day lead to war.

But then I’m also struck, reading the commentary surrounding the show and the books, by how the different projects of translation — from Chinese-language phenomenon to English-language best seller, then from book to TV show — have created an instability of interpretation, a difficulty settling on a narrative about what Liu’s story really means. Even a three-interpretation problem, you might say (sorry!), with different gazes and different translations yielding very different readings and reactions. (Some spoilers follow.)

…you see…ross reckons there’s too many tortured think-pieces out there where people who don’t really get it try to explain what the deal is with the three body problem…but he’s here to rescue you from those…with a think-piece about what the deal is with the three body problem…which is totally different because his interpretation doesn’t fall at the fence he seems to find most problematic…namely…all those fools who can only see it through western eyes…not like him

Consider, first, the book as seen through Western eyes. The default American reaction to any work of literature produced under authoritarian conditions is to assume that it must be an act of rebellion or at least critique. Maybe not quite Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” but, at the very least, Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago.”

…so…once more for the cheap seats…& with feeling…fuck that guy…in the incontested unconsented & uncomfortable sense…for a start…nothing says multiple readings of the thing can’t all be accurate…or even intended by the author…so making out a particular one must be wrong for another to be right is about as bright an idea as using your own head as a suppository the way ross likes to…not kink-shaming but the osteopathy bills must eat most of his paycheck so it seems at the very least profligate…anyway…I didn’t set out to write a book report today, either…but the thing…if you ask me…that makes those books so worth a read…is that they paint something akin to one of those fractal things that manages to look the same whatever adjustments you make to the zoom control…& the potentially insoluble problem that there’s an unquestionable imperative to solve but whose proximate results are liable to look worse than the current level of insufferable torment…is a template you can fit over a dizzying amount of stuff across a spectrum of the abstract to the all-too-real…so if I were looking for the part where ross really & truly knots his shoelaces together…I’d probably go for this part?

When Fan pushes Liu on his political views, she gets a similar perspective: Not a liberal author pushing against the limits imposed by a dictatorship but someone who basically shares that dictatorship’s view of human nature and defends most of its policies — internment of Muslim Uyghurs, the now-defunct one-child policy, the basic lineaments of its authoritarian system — even if he’s also willing to portray and make artistic use of some of its more egregious Mao-era crimes:

I couldn’t help asking Liu if he ever thought he might have been brainwashed. “I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”

I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, “If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” …

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really — I mean, can’t truly — understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: Years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien.

…because calling the responses of that man trying in vain to convey a perspective from which they seem somewhere between the inventions of necessity, faits accomplis & foregone conclusions…a defense…sounds a lot to me like a man who didn’t even hear the whistling noise the point made when it sailed overhead because it was just so very much higher than his thoughts could stretch to…sort of like me trying to understand the political imperatives that allow jd vance to think he sounds smart or statesmanlike…& every bit as abject a fucking failure

If you come to the TV version fresh, without exposure to the books, you may find yourself thinking less about the Chinese-American rivalry and more about the general position of the developed West in recent decades: a rich and powerful society struggling to make economic and technological advancements that match the achievements of the 20th century while dealing with internal divisions and existential doubts.

…& presumably also without ross’ incredible penetrating insight into the non-western mindset required to understand the existential limbo of a sci-fi author writing that book in that context & then talking about it on the record in ways that…frankly…sound brave on spectra as opaque to ross as quantum particles…but I don’t got a pile of cheques from the NYT…so I guess that makes me the asshole?

But that exaggeration still feels like a striking commentary on our own situation, with even the pervasive alien surveillance, as Suderman notes later in his essay, reading “as much like a comment on social media and cancel culture as it does on Chinese totalitarianism.”

…gee, ross…where would we be without you to explain it all to us muppets?

Which in turn lends itself to the reading of the show offered by James Pethokoukis, who writes frequently on themes of stagnation. What if our years of relative disappointment, driven by “the surprise slowdown in tech progress and productivity growth since the early 1970s,” is actually the work of malign would-be invaders from elsewhere in the galaxy? After all, if there were some kind of alien observers “bopping around the planet and messing with us, how would the results be any different than what we’ve experienced for the past half century?”

…really? …really, ross? …this is really where you want to go with this?

Maybe that explains the weird craft that Navy pilots keep reporting. Maybe the faction in our government that seemingly wants people to believe that we have some sort of alien vessel in our possession is also responsible for the Netflix adaptation of Liu’s novel, injecting the idea of an alien threat into the pop-culture discourse in order to prepare us …

OK, I’ve said too much. (They’re always watching.) Let’s just retreat to safer ground and say that what I’m describing, this Western-centric interpretation of “The Three-Body Problem,” is a fascinating example of how translation both subtracts and adds to the meaning of a given work. In one trilogy of novels and its cultural journey, you can discern different portraits of our age of civilizational conflict, connected but distant, orbiting one another in a complicated dance.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/opinion/three-body-problem.html

…oh, ross…you fucking misshappen garden gnome of an intellect…you really should get out less…still…did finally remind me where I’d been aiming to pull my quotes from this morning…so…if the day allows…I might try to get around to that part after all…at the very least I’ll try to swing back & drop off some tunes…but for now…this’ll have to do because it’s past time something went up?

…ok…at the risk of starting over & blowing any & all points I may have scored on that brownie point scale I mentioned (remember christmas?) in one fell swoop by doubling up on the DOT count as measured by spins of the scroll-wheel…I kind of did have a sort of a throughline vaguely in mind…& doubt-that did remind me more or less how that went…so…here goes…err…probably nothing but who knows maybe something with at least a line of sight to somewhere?

…it’s all a bit tense, I think we can probably agree

China supporting Russia in massive military expansion, US says [Guardian]

…& the big boys’ table has a lot of small minds at it who are prone to splitting babies, throwing toys & breaking their mothers’ hearts…mostly anytime they don’t get to call the shots & have things go their way

The Middle East is on the precipice of the wider war no one wants [WaPo]

…when war is the continuation of continuity politics…not to mention fiduciary responsibility…the real-er it gets…the stronger your hand…but…the more it hurts & the deeper it cuts…& even once it scars over you feel the twinge before you even feel the weather shift…so…the smart money’s in the posturing

While Biden and Kishida exchange praise in Washington, Japan is asking ‘what if Trump’? [Guardian]

Trump thought Ukraine ‘must be part of Russia’ during presidency, book says [Guardian]

…but…there’s walking…& there’s talking…& there’s walking & talking

EPA has limited six ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water – but there are 15,000 [Guardian]

…& there’s walking & talking & chewing gum at the same time

For all his bombast, Trump is plummeting – financially, legally and politically [Guardian]

…so…how does it come to be that routinely we mistake the one thing for one of the others…even when that would be the kind of mistake that could cost lives?

US asks China to tell Iran not to retaliate against Israel [FT]

…well…I ask you…what can’t we get wrong if a modestly-proportioned island nation…famous for the water-falls-down component of its weather…currently “enjoying” enough of the stuff that farmers are pointing out that for the sake of the soil they won’t be putting heavy machinery in their fields until they dry out some…& therefore won’t be planting things like potatoes…on what might be called a statistically-significant scale…can not only be looking at odds-on probabilities of hose-pipe bans come the summer…but also…counter-intuitively…manages to convert seamlessly from an influx of surplus fresh water to none of the water being as fresh as you’d like via the old legislative loophole or two

The great stink of Thames Water [FT]

…that one I’d admit to having peered at from the lip of the pay wall by the grace of archive.ph…on account of it’s a literal shit show that’s been happening in slow motion in a place where the plumbing used to the the envy of the world before it rested on those laurels for a truly breathtaking amount of time…which is somewhere between dawning & catching up on a number of people in a number of places…like the guy suing the people who told him his house that (less than 15 years after he bought it) would be safe for a century at least…rather than gone the way of the sea cliff it sat upon…as possibly having been a sight longer than was advisable

As Kushner’s Investment Firm Steps Out, the Potential Conflicts Are Growing [NYT]

This Is What You Get When Fear Mixes With Money [NYT]

What War by A.I. Actually Looks Like [NYT]

…yeah…but what do the polls say it does to the share price & how soon can we cash out?

Senate investigation shows scam victims being taxed on their stolen funds [WaPo]

…uh huh

IDF colonel discusses ‘data science magic powder’ for locating terrorists [Guardian]

…well, I never

This is the most consequential technology in America (Spoiler alert: It’s YouTube.) [WaPo]

…blow me down with a feather

[…] But take a moment to savour the secular miracle here. The smartphone panic exists because we are advanced enough to have invented such a device, rich enough that most people can afford one and, above all, so insulated from life-and-death issues that sad teenagers are what pass for news. Screen addiction is a disease. But a disease of success.

…should we, in fact…all be sick of all the winning?

To that extent, it is a parable for the west, where life can be too good for our own good. Consider another problem that has received the Haidt treatment: the culture wars. Where did the “woke” movement take hold? America, more or less the richest nation on Earth. When? In the economic expansion between the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic. Pronoun protocols, statue-toppling: this is what happens when the brain has nowhere to go, no material crisis to solve or fret about. If woke is the howl of the dispossessed, why didn’t it take hold in southern Europe after the euro crisis? Why aren’t America’s minorities all sold on it? It is, in the end, a winner’s dogma. It is an insider’s code.

To describe something as a problem of success isn’t to minimise it. Rather the opposite. Problems of success are harder to fix because, almost by definition, you wouldn’t want to remove the underlying causes of them. The most effective answer to the culture war is, after all, “induce an economic depression”.

On the same principle, the most effective answer to low birth rates is “undo modernity”. Parents no longer need to have three children to ensure that one survives. Medicine has seen to that. They needn’t even have one as a source of income support in old age. State pensions have seen to that. More people have access to birth control, and fewer are credulous enough to believe that using it is a ticket to Hell. From something precious (the Enlightenment), something bleak (demographic decline).

And even this, the baby bust, isn’t the ultimate problem of success. No, that is populism. The best explanation for the strange turn in politics over the past decade is too much success, for too long. Few voters in the west can remember the last time that electing a demagogue led to total societal ruin (the 1930s). The result? A willingness to take risks with their vote, as a bank that has forgotten the last crash starts to take risks with its balance sheet. What the economist Hyman Minsky said of financial crises, that stability breeds instability, could be the motto of modern politics too.

…you can quibble…&…predictably enough…I most likely would…with exactly what the prevailing challenge might be…& between what & who for that matter…but…there does look to be something to it

The challenge is to persuade western intellectuals of this. Social democratic in their biases, most continue to believe that an anti-establishment voter must be an economic loser. It is a hopeless account of the past decade. The most important populist breakthrough, Donald Trump in 2016, happened in a super-rich country, seven years into an economic expansion. The Brexit campaign won most of England’s affluent home counties. Populism can’t, or can’t just, be the result of scarcity. It can’t be solved through more and better-distributed wealth. In fact, to the extent that it liberates people to be cavalier with their vote, material comfort might make things worse.

…&…it’s somewhat chillingly cold comfort

It is a conservative insight, I suppose, that if you change one thing about society, even for the better, don’t count on the rest of it remaining the same. Modernity — a world in which most people live in cities, have freedom from clerics and communicate across great distances at low cost — came along about five minutes ago in the history of civilisation. Economic growth was itself an almost unknown phenomenon in the three millennia before 1750. It would be strange if such abrupt and profound change hadn’t had some unintended consequences. The story isn’t phone-induced stress or even low birth rates. The story is that we haven’t experienced much worse.

The west is suffering from its own success [FT also via archive.ph]

…of course…suffering is…relative

Many Patients Don’t Survive End-Stage Poverty [NYT]

…& it’s not like anyone has or wants a monopoly on that end of the stick

What We Lose if We Let Putin Win [NYT]

2024, I’d Like You to Meet 1892 [NYT]

What Worries Me Most About a Trump Presidency [NYT]

Riding Rage Over Israel to Online Prominence [NYT]

How a Case Against Fox News Tore Apart a Media-Fighting Law Firm [NYT]

…something, something…seeds of something…destruction

How a forgotten physicist’s discovery broke the symmetry of the Universe [Nature]

…symmetry plays asymmetry, eh?

US missing pieces of AI chip puzzle despite TSMC’s $65bn bet [FT]

Fine porcelain maker Maruwa becomes the hottest bet for cooling AI data centres [FT]

…it’s…more of an art than a science, you see

How Rishi Sunak built a close relationship with Blackstone’s bosses [FT]

…beware the activist shareholder

Activists trigger referendum that could end Swiss sanctions on Russia [FT]

…but…we’re…of the world but in some ways quite attached to being detached from it

Mapping America’s access to nature, neighborhood by neighborhood [WaPo]

…&…not to insult anybody…but…that might be…backwards?

…I know…it’s hard to argue with people who have reams of data the way I have questions

But as this debate rages, it is worth stepping back for a moment to also think about the long sweep of our financial past. And no, I do not mean “history” as traders usually experience it on a trading screen — namely, the late 20th century — but instead, and more thought-provokingly, the past eight centuries. A trio of economists — Kenneth Rogoff, Barbara Rossi and Paul Schmelzing — have been amassing global data on interest rates and inflation since 1311, five decades after Venice started to issue so-called “consols”, arguably the first example of long-term sovereign debt. 

Their conclusions were released in preliminary form almost two years ago. But they have now been updated with new historical information, underscoring two fascinating points.

First, you cannot understand the political economy simply by looking at short-term rates, as most previous analyses have tended to do. To be fair, historians hitherto adopted this focus because historical data on short-term rates was more readily available, and 20th-century central bankers wanted to determine the so-called “natural” rate against which to set short-term policy rates.

However, Rogoff et al argue that while the patterns in short-term rates are noisy, if you look at long-term real rates (that is, nominal rates adjusted for inflation) there is a clear and striking trend. These have been steadily sinking over the centuries. They calculate this decline equates to almost 2 basis points a year, on average, since 1311.

…I mean…when you put it like that it’s enough to make you believe in a deterministic universe

The chart is certainly not smooth. Two big inflection points occurred during the 14th-century Black Death pandemic, and then the European “Trinity” financial crisis of 1557. There were smaller inflections in 1914 and 1981. 

But what is more striking than these inflections is how rare they are. While long-term rates have often moved in response to recessions, defaults, financial shocks and so on, they almost always revert to trend after a decade or two. As the economist Maurice Obstfeld has pointed out, the result is that they look like mere “blips” from a long-term historical point of view.

To put it another way, modernity triggered an inexorable decline in the long-term price of money, and was doing this well before we started to fret about ultra-low rates in the 21st century.

…all in all it all sounds considerably above my pay grade, I’m afraid

However, even more interesting (and counter-intuitive) is Rogoff et al’s failure to find a statistical correlation between real rates and fundamental economic trends. That might reflect the limitations of their data, but the trio offer another explanation. The real reason, they say, for falling borrowing costs is not economic shifts, but an issue economists often ignore — the nature of finance. A combination of modern capital markets, risk analysis and innovation around using collateral to back loans has made money more efficient.

…very afraid, even

Proving this is hard, but the idea rings true to me. Call this the “against the gods” effect, to cite Peter Bernstein’s seminal book of the same name. A key distinction between modern and premodern societies is that innovations ranging from double-entry book keeping to computers have left us believing that we can predict, manage and price future risks, without relying on gods, as our ancestors did.

In reality, this confidence is all too often misplaced. But justified or not, the cultural shift that accompanied it has made money more abundant and fluid, thus cutting its cost. This is good news. But it also raises two further questions. Will this downward trend ever end? And what does it mean for current rates?

On the first point, the answer rests on your level of imagination. It is hard to believe the trend will continue much further, but it is also difficult to discount future technological advances. Artificial intelligence, say, could increase monetary efficiency.

On the second point, however, the implications are clearer. Adopting an eight-century timeframe suggests that the ultra-low rates we saw in the early 21st century were a slightly excessive deviation from the trend. It should thus be no surprise that long-term rates have corrected upwards, particularly given that the short-term “natural” rate has probably risen.

What eight centuries of data tell us about interest rates [FT via archive.ph]

…&…who am I to say if the implications are truly dizzying…but I tried to imagine them & I’m all woozy…so cut me some slack…it ain’t my fault…blame the new guy…whatsisface…hank

Let me introduce you to Hank. It is a project in macroeconomics that, according to one Nobel laureate, has “an electric charge”. It is increasingly infiltrating the likes of the Federal Reserve Board, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England. And it is one of the few acronyms for which economists deserve forgiveness. “Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

…who I believe is related to A.N.Other on his mother’s side…& the renowned “rational actor” you’ve heard so much about on the other…truly a lofty lineage

The aim is to combine a theory of how the macroeconomy moves with the details of inequality. Rather than boiling consumers down to an average “representative agent”, Hank models include a fuller distribution of people, whose spending might depend on whether they are underwater on their mortgage, how exposed they are to an inflation shock, the risk that they lose their job — and the interaction of all three.

…you see…hanks assumptions are different than those other guys’

More recent questions include how demand is affected by unequally distributed fiscal stimulus or savings, as well as how richer and poorer households have been hit differently by inflation.

Matthew Rognlie of Northwestern University says that more broadly, the Hank trend tapped into a “well of discontent” with older, simpler models. Those assume consumers respond very strongly to changes in interest rates, and hardly at all to changes in their income. A bit like a model of my one-year-old in which 100 per cent of his meal makes it into his mouth.

…you can trust hank…hank is your friend…maybe your new best friend, even…although…he can make a poor showing in mixed company

All this complexity might seem a little daunting for central banks, as it suggests that the transmission of monetary policy depends on factors beyond their control. If a channel gets clogged — for example, if investment is sluggish in responding to a change in rates, buoying consumption might require more aggressive interest-rate cuts.

Another difference is in the treatment of fiscal policy. Those simpler models take stimulus cheques as impotent, as people expect future tax rises to pay for them, and save their windfall. Under Hank models, if the government hands money to people who are eager to spend it, overall activity could get a boost. For some purposes, monetary policy is less useful than fiscal policy, which can be targeted towards the neediest and those most likely to spend.

Augmenting macroeconomists’ models to make them reflect the richness of household differences sounds good. So why hasn’t Hank taken over yet? Despite big technological advances, they are still tough to handle technically. The European Central Bank recently acknowledged that further work was needed before euro-area statistics can be plugged in and results spat out.

…if the bed you’re trying to make is…one way or another…everybody’s…well…it helps if the help doesn’t shit in it

Despite including more detail, there are still areas where such models don’t seem to meet a reality check. They don’t capture the fact that individual spending can take a while to respond to an interest rate change. And worryingly, a staff report from the New York Federal Reserve found that a prominent Hank model was “much worse” at forecasting consumption than its predecessor.

Although it seems clear that accounting for inequality is important, it is not yet clear that economists have landed on exactly the right way to do it. Ultimately, tugging one part of simplified models closer to reality will be limited if other parts are wrong. Ben Moll of the London School of Economics recently suggested that the assumption of rational expectations should be ditched, given that it requires people to hold a whole distribution of inequality in their heads.

Macroeconomists, meet Hank: how new models are changing the discipline [FT via archive.ph]

…ok…I get it…I blew past wearing out my welcome in your weekend way back up thread…& even then I was mostly getting by on the part where everyone wants to know the answer to the burning question of the day

Is time starting to run out for Benjamin Netanyahu? [FT via archive.ph]

…but I figure I only have a couple more things I want to wedge in to this whole dog’s breakfast of a post before I dive for the lap of tunes…so…that let-the-AI-roll-the-dice pontius pilate bit of pointed hand-wringing (&/or washing) thing?

A chilling report published last week by the Israeli online magazine +972 highlighted the heavy reliance of the Israel Defence Forces early in the war on an AI-enabled mass target-generation system known as Lavender, which flagged 37,000 Gazans as suspected Hamas militants. As a result, many were bombed in their homes, often killing their families too.

Disaffected Israeli intelligence sources, interviewed by +972, said the system had an estimated error rate of 10 per cent, wrongly identifying some targets for assassination. They also alleged that the IDF would permit a strike on a junior Hamas militant, even at the risk of killing 15 to 20 civilians. That ratio rose from 1 to more than 100 for a senior Hamas commander. Human oversight of the automated target-identification process was minimal, sometimes lasting no more than 20 seconds, they claimed. “In practice, the principle of proportionality did not exist,” one told the magazine.

…I’m not your mathelete…but…I can do 10% of 37,000…it’s…3,700…right out of the gate…3,700 statistically guaranteed false positives…to which to attach between 15 & 100 shrugged off bits of what used to be collaterally damaged civilians…not very fucking civil if you ask me…let alone fucking civilized

Many aspects of the Israeli-Gazan tragedy are unique, born of the region’s tangled history, demography and geography. But Israel is also one of the world’s most technologically advanced nations and the way it wages war feeds the global debate about the military uses of AI. That debate pits so-called realists against moral absolutists.

Realists argue that AI is a dual-use technology that can be deployed in myriad ways for both good and bad. Few, for example, would contest its use in defensive weapons, such as Israel’s Iron Dome that has intercepted multiple rocket attacks from Gaza. But the Lavender system appears to have contributed to  a “dramatically excessive” rate of collateral damage that is morally indefensible, says Tom Simpson, a former Royal Marine now philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. 

Yet Simpson opposes an outright ban of lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS), as some campaigners are demanding, given the likelihood that less law-abiding hostile countries will still use them. Implementing any such ban would create “an appalling strategic vulnerability”. “If liberal democracies are worth defending they should have the most effective tools,” he tells me.

Robots, like soldiers, are often instructed to do the dull, dirty and dangerous work. “If we can spend treasure to save blood we should do it.”

But the moral absolutists draw a clear red line at outsourcing any life-and-death responsibilities to error-prone machines. The experience of the Lavender system shows the tendency to over-trust the computer. It also highlights the difficulty of keeping “humans in the loop” in the heat of war. 

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who supports a ban on LAWS, says that realists tend to favour the projection of power over the protection of the rule of law. But, she tells me, for western democracies effective power rests on the rule of law. “The US has only won one war since World War II and that was the liberation of Kuwait. That was the only war we have fought lawfully in full compliance with the United Nations charter,” she says.

Algorithmic warfare raises new moral dangers [FT via archive.ph]

…are they, tho? …the moral dangers…new, I mean? …or is it that everything old is new again??

How can nativist populists be beaten? Before anyone dismisses the label as meaningless, let’s define it. Populists divide the world into a “pure people” and a “corrupt elite”, says the scholar Cas Mudde. Nativists add the notion that “the people” are the majority ethnic group: Hindus in India, whites in the US. Please don’t bother accusing me of bias against nativists. I’m unapologetically against them.

…now with added internet…”intel inside”

Populism is a style of communication more than it is a policy platform. After all, many populist leaders are former communications professionals. They endlessly retell the story of the people against the elite — an echo of Marx’s account of “proletarians” and “capitalists”. The trick is to turn this story against the populists. That’s doable, now that their leaders are rich veteran politicians who look like a corrupt elite themselves.

The thing to grasp about the populist story is that it’s just that: a story, laden with values. It’s not a collection of facts or policies. That means it cannot be defeated by rival facts or policies. Clinton showed that an election campaign is not a school exam. Anti-populists need to tell a new version of the people-versus-elite story, but casting themselves as the heroes. This requires anti-populists to unite around their own value-laden story. For American Democrats opposing Trump, that story should be: everyone in this country is born equal, we all belong here and we support democracy. The story needs to hold the movement together, from far-left to centre-right. If anti-populists try leading on policies, they risk disagreeing on the detail and splintering into factions.

…we’ve all got our head out the window yelling…but who ain’t taking what anymore tends to get drowned out by all the screaming

…but there’s some loop-de-loop-s if not a fair bit that’s loopy when it comes to getting some people to come back down to earth…hard to be “we the people” when “they”+”us”=”we” & all…trips a bunch of folks right up, that part

The strongest political value available to anti-populists is decency. Recall the remark by the US Army attorney that devastated the 1950s populist Joe McCarthy: “Have you left no sense of decency?” Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who beat Erdoğan’s AKP party in last month’s local elections, knows how to weaponise decency. He praised the “language of love” instead of “rage”, and advised voters to hug a neighbour they disagreed with. Decency can also be used against Trump, who disparages immigrants, women, disabled people, etc.

A broad anti-populist coalition, united by a story, can claim (in the slogan of East German protesters in 1989) “We are the people.” This requires defining “the people” (which is populist code for “the majority”) in a non-nativist way: everyone can belong if they subscribe to the guiding values.

…so…probably helps if them guiding principles point you in a beneficial direction, I’d expect…in which respect…some are very much more equal than others in even an un-ironic & not-necessarily-post-modern sense

Anti-populists who claim to be “the people” need to present themselves as the majority. Populists try to cow opponents with the message: “Nobody agrees with you except an out-of-touch urban elite, you are alone.” Donald Tusk’s Polish coalition countered that charge by organising giant rallies before defeating the nativist PiS last autumn. Similarly, Germany’s nationwide “anti-extremism” demonstrations ate into support for the nativist AfD. The aim is to show voters: our side represents the social norm.

The anti-populist coalition has to include the native-born working class, many of whom have voted nativist. These voters don’t necessarily believe in nativist policies, but they prefer politicians who love them as they are. Trump professes to do that. By contrast, anti-populists are always telling the working class to eat healthier food, get more education and leave their dying regions. The message: “We disrespect you because of your income, schooling, geography, tastes and body weight, and anyway you’re doomed by automation.” The politicians best placed to appeal to the working class are those, like Keir Starmer, who come from it.

…always easier to talk to someone when it feels like they get where you’re coming from

Since stories trump policies, anti-populists needn’t copy populist policies. Trying to be tough on immigration probably won’t work. Populists will always be tougher. And as French nativist Jean-Marie Le Pen observed, voters prefer “the original to a copy”. The Dutch centre-right VVD party discovered this last autumn when it copied the anti-immigration rhetoric of far-right leader Geert Wilders, planning to make him a junior coalition partner. Wilders, allowed to fight the election on his preferred subject, trounced the VVD and his PVV became the largest party. The lesson: don’t let populists choose the battleground. Anti-populists should choose their own, unapologetically. After all, populists do, and they understand communication.

How to beat nativist populists at their own game [FT via archive.ph]

…still…while we’re considering the nature of human nature & all…& to hark back a little to that thing about nature in the sense of “natural” spaces & health outcomes…well…while I was poaching from the FT’s larder like yogi bear at the picnic spot…there was a pretty long piece that showed up under the headline “A Chequered Frontier” in some places…but “Battle for the American West” for the archived version…&…I think it still works out that that’s longer than this post ended up being…but by way of explaining how direct experience of the federal government & policy directives that are laid at non-GOP feet might lead a person to conclude that the clowns are on that side of the aisle…it confirmed some stuff for me I’d have preferred to be wrong about…so…maybe try that one on for size…that way I might get back here with some tunes before you’re done & getting impatient?