Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
For some reason the Telegraph has thrown in its lot with Intelligent Design creationism—and in the “News” section no less. The author of the piece below, ID creationist Stephen C. Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, has been hacking away at Darwin for decades, often declaring him dead. Sadly for Meyer, Darwin (represented here by Dawkins, the New Atheists, and naturalism), refuses to lie down.
And the arguments adduced by Meyer as “scientific” are nothing new, and have been rebutted over and over again. In fact, they’re pretty much the same arguments used by Ross Douthat in his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious to not only dispel faith, but to conclude that the TRUE faith is Catholicism, which just happens to be Douthat’s faith. (Meyer himself is a pretty devout Christian.) The only ID advocate I’ve found who isn’t religious, and I’m not sure he isn’t really, is David Berlinski. One would think that if the scientific evidence for Intelligent Design were so convincing, belief in it wouldn’t have nearly a 100% correlation with religion. And surely some scientists would have defected from Darwinism to the hogwash called ID, but I can’t name any (and naming one or two doesn’t prove anything, anyway).
The Torygraph should have rejected this lame effort not only on the grounds that its arguments have long ago been rebutted, but also because it says nothing that hasn’t been said many times before. Click to read an archived link. I’m not going to engage in rebuttals, but will point you to some of them so you can investigate for yourself. And shame on the Telegraph!
First, though, Meyer has to take a few obligatory slaps at Dawkins (in the title and first paragraph) and the New Atheists:
But now, two decades on, the influence of the New Atheists has waned. Former adherents, most notably Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have repudiated atheism entirely and embraced the Christian faith. Others, such as Alex O’Connor, the hugely popular atheist YouTuber and Steven Bartlett, the businessman turned podcaster, have moderated their outlooks too. Ironically, even Dawkins admitted in 2024 he feels “at home” in the Christian “ethos” – though he still firmly rejects the existence of God.
As many atheist philosophers (such as the eminent John Gray) have noted, the New Atheists’ philosophical arguments were never very good. Moreover, their arguments seemed strangely anachronistic following many of the great scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
Well, two atheists who have either become more moderate or become Christian, and Dawkins’s statement that his nurturing environment was Christian, don’t prove that the influence of New Atheists has waned. In fact, it you lump together atheists, agnostics, and “nones,” you see a rise from about 13% to 35%—nearly a threefold increase—between 2000 and 2020. And the “philosophical arguments” for atheism amount largely to the philosophical arguments for the Loch Ness Monster: hypothesis of huge, powerful being erected, evidence for said being not adduced, hypothesis rejected. As Victor Stenger wrote, the absence of evidence is evidence for absence [of God, too] if that evidence should be there. And it isn’t—not when it comes for God.
Here are Meyer’s tired old arguments, with links to rebuttals.
The Big Bang is evidence for God.
Consider first modern cosmology. Cosmologists have discovered that the universe, contrary to the expectations of those who long portrayed it as eternal, probably had a beginning. Multiple lines of evidence from observational astronomy support this conclusion. Developments in theoretical physics (such as the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which states that any universe that is expanding – as ours is – cannot be infinite in the past), also back it up.
Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, who helped make a key discovery supporting the Big Bang theory, noted the obvious connection between its affirmation of a cosmic beginning and the concept of divine creation. “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses…[and] the Bible as a whole,” he wrote in 1978.
You should know some of the rebuttals of this (multiverses, a cycle of expansion and contraction, physical explanations of the “big bang”), but just click here, here, and here.
And of course even if you think a divine being created the Universe, that doesn’t mean it was the Christian or Abrahamic God. It could have been Brahma or Zeus, or a giant, omnipotent squid.
The “finely-tuned universe” is evidence for God.
Second, physicists have discovered that we live in a kind of “Goldilocks universe”. In other words, the fundamental laws and parameters of physics are finely tuned against all odds to make a life-friendly universe. Even slight alterations of many independent factors – such as the strength of gravitational and electromagnetic attraction, the masses of elementary particles, or the initial arrangement of matter and energy in the universe – would render life impossible.
Not surprisingly, many physicists have concluded that this improbable “fine-tuning” points to a cosmic “fine-tuner”. As Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle, previously a staunch atheist, argued: “A common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics” to make life possible.
Again, you probably know some of the rebuttals, but go here, here, and here to see some.
The “digital code” of the DNA molecule, which are like letters in a language, prove God.
Third, discoveries in molecular biology have revealed digital code in even the simplest living cells. Francis Crick and James Watson elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. Crick then developed his famed “sequence hypothesis”. He proposed that chemical constituents in DNA function like letters in a written language, or digital symbols in computer code.
Computer code depends upon a precise sequence of zeros and ones. Similarly, the DNA molecule’s ability to direct the assembly of crucial protein molecules depends upon specific arrangements of chemical constituents (called “bases”) along the spine of the double helix.
As Dawkins has acknowledged: “The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.” Or as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates explains: “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”
This seems to me prima facie dumb: the DNA code comprises four bases (“rungs”) on a phosphate-and-sugar ladder, but it’s not zeroes and ones. It’s the way that nascent life found could help build proteins. Yes, it’s complex, but many aspects of life are far more complex than anything than humans can create, including a simple cell. But for better refutations of this idea, go here, here, and here (a video).
Th-th-that’s all, folks. No new arguments here. The Telegraph should have its tuches paddled.
This paragraph shows that the real object of ID, as stated in their founding document, is not evolution itself but materialism, of which evolution is one example. This program is laid out in the 1998 “Wedge Document,” long kept secret, that led to the foundation of ID and the antecedents of the Discovery Institute. IDers hate materialism and naturalism because they believe in the supernatural. If you don’t need the supernatural to explain the universe, their program falls apart.
Materialists also reject the idea of a designing mind because no such entity can be directly observed. Yet scientists often infer unobservable entities – physical fields, subatomic particles, past evolutionary events, subsurface geological features, the Big Bang – based upon the explanatory power of those postulated entities or events.
Welcome to Sunday, September 7, 2026, and Morning Show Hosts Day. Although “The View“, a talk show that made me cringe every time I saw it, isn’t exactly a morning show, it’s uber-woke (often with a token conservative), and Nellie Bowles has two items about it in her latest TGIF (Sunny Hostin is one of the passel of woke women who was on the show):
→ Sunny Hostin once served on a jury: This week on The View, Sunny Hostin said that when she was on a jury in the early ’90s, she was the holdout juror who prevented a good, if ill, man from going to prison. That’s right: She claims to have been the holdout in the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” trial (which might not be true but let’s go with Sunny). Here’s Sunny on his crime: “He did not mean to kill her and once he killed her, he panicked. He chopped up her body, yes, boiled her body parts, tried to commit the perfect crime,” she continued, talking over the other panelists to make one final important point: “And he fed her body parts to the unhoused.” So crucial. He fed her body parts to the unhoused. She really wants to be sure you heard that part. Because, well, that’s honestly admirable. The unhoused are famously hungry. If someone slaughters your mother but then feeds her flesh to the homeless, it’s morally neutral. What? You want to starve our unhoused community of human flesh? You’ve never panicked and accidentally chopped up, boiled, and served human body parts? Okay, Ms. Perfect! Speaking of The View:
→ In sickness and in murdering our children: I love The View, the beating heart of absolutely berserk American discourse. Because Sara Haines was also on the show criticizing Patrick Clancy for leaving his wife after she, uhh, strangled their kids. Haines said, “What bothers me is he talks about forgiving her, which I love, but he focuses on that and never jumps to what so many people struggle with. How did the marital love end so quickly?” Yes, Patrick, how? How did that love end so quickly? What changed? We’re all struggling to understand. You made a commitment!
The mule. . . .Old Rivers. . . and me. That last “me” is enough to make you weep, eh? We have a better song below.
Posting may be light until later in the week due to slow healing of my eye and a passel of doctor visits. Bear with me, though some people aren’t bearing!
President Trump has rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms, U.S. officials said.
Tehran’s proposal would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz and resumed nuclear talks in return for the U.S. lifting its blockade of Iranian ports, which is causing deep damage to the country’s economy. Trump says openly that Tehran is begging for a deal after the midterms that dismantles its nuclear program.
But privately Trump was skeptical Iran would meet his demands and has told his staff that he sees a renewed bombing campaign as likely, the officials said.
After this article was published, a reporter asked Trump on Saturday about the offer. “I’m rejecting their deal,” he said
Trump’s current position indicates the conflict’s stage—a liminal space between war and peace—is likely to tilt back toward hostilities. But the president, who has declared victory since the earliest days of the seven-month fight, alternates between pursuing diplomacy, ordering airstrikes and tightening sanctions around Iran. His views today could shift as the war drags over the coming weeks, officials said, and could be affected by the results of the midterms.
The level of strikes Trump is contemplating couldn’t be determined. He is reluctant to resume major combat operations, the officials said, partly because the U.S. wants to reserve dwindling munitions for other contingencies. But Trump has also announced massive attacks to push through diplomatic deadlocks in U.S.-Iran negotiations, sometimes following through but always stepping back from his most audacious threats, including wiping out the entirety of Iranian civilization.
Trump told the United Nations this week politics don’t enter his mind when aiming to pry nuclear fuel from Iran.
There was no mention of nuclear fuel in the proposed deal, at least so far as I know, and yes, Trump keeps flip flopping on war strategy. I keep saying that all he has to threaten to do is bomb Kharg Island, cutting off all of Iran’s oil supply to the West, and that might well turn the tide. But what do I know? I’m a biologist, not a pundit.
*Over at the WaPo, Henry Olson lists the ten Senate seats most likely to flip, and all, save the ones in Michigan and Iowa, he deems likely to flip to Democratic control. Given that there are 43 Democrats in the Senate (including independents who caucus with them) and 53 Republicans, a flip of just six of these seats would give Democrats firm control of the Senate.
North Carolina: North Carolinaunsurprisingly tops my rankings. The Tar Heel State leans Republican in federal elections and has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since Kay Hagan in 2008. But most statewide races there are close, and the Democrats nominated popular two-term former governor Roy Cooper, who has led in polling all year. Some of that lead — he’s ahead of GOP nominee Michael Whatley by eight points in the RealClearPolitics average — is certainly because Whatley is still largely unknown to about a third of voters. But RCP has Cooper at 49.3 percent, and as long as he remains around the magic 50 percent mark, it will be hard for Whatley to win.
Ohio: Democrat Sherrod Brown appears on track to reenter the Senate two years after he was defeated by Republican Bernie Moreno. Throughout his career, Brown has run ahead of the Democratic trend, and polling has consistently put him ahead in this race by three to eight percentage points. Like many states with large agricultural sectors, Ohio seems to be swinging against Republicans this year.
Maine: [Susan] Collins has survived in this blue state only because she attracts many Democratic voters. She certainly can win again, but Trump’s low popularity will be a barrier to the levels of ticket splitting she needs, and this week brought a bombshell ProPublica report that until 2025 she had been a subject of an FBI bribery investigation (her office strongly denied any impropriety by the senator). . . One to watch, but Democrat Troy Jackson is the favorite.
Michigan: Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s well-known weaknesses give Republican Mike Rogers a shot to pull off a blue-to-red upset. Michigan has not elected a Republican to the Senate since 1994, but Rogers came close in 2024. The big unknown: Will Michiganders who vote Democratic in other races abandon El-Sayed knowing his defeat could cost the party control of the Senate? It’s a good sign for El-Sayed that his support has been steadily rising since he won his primary on Aug. 4, but the race is far from over.
Alaska: It may surprise some readers to see Alaska this high on the list. But here’s another case of a good Democratic candidate combining with a good environment. Former congresswoman Mary Peltola beat a flawed Republican nominee and showed her crossover appeal by running five points ahead of Kamala Harris even when she lost in 2024.
Texas: Democrat James Talarico has been ahead in the last nine polls, but his lead still averages under three points. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the scandal-scarred GOP nominee, is flawed in the extreme. Will Republicans and GOP-leaning independents vote party over person?
Iowa: According to the polling, the race between Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson and Democrat Josh Turek is a dead heat. Hinson does not seem to be suffering as much GOP voter defection as other nominees, and she trails among independents by a smaller margin than her more endangered colleagues. It’s still a toss-up, but I join most raters in thinking Hinson is likelier to prevail.
New Hampshire: Republicans have reason to be excited about New Hampshire, where polls consistently show former senator John E. Sununu running ahead of expectations in this light-blue state. Three respected race raters have moved this one into their toss-up category. The fact remains, however, that New Hampshire is a highly educated, moderate state that has elected only one Republican to the Senate (Kelly Ayotte in the GOP wave of 2010) since President George W. Bush’s first term. It would be extremely strange if Sununu, who lost his reelection bid in 2008 to outgoing senator Jeanne Shaheen, can buck that trend in such a Democratic year.
Minnesota: Recent polling shows Minnesotaclose. The Democratic candidate, Peggy Flanagan, is very progressive, and as the sitting lieutenant governor she can be tied to the benefits-fraud scandal that destroyed Gov. Tim Walz’s career. Republican Michele Tafoya, a former NFL sideline reporter, is a talented campaigner, and one cannot entirely rule out an upset. But it’s very rare for a candidate from a party likely to do poorly in a midterm to capture a seat in the opposing party’s column.
Georgia: After a narrow runoff win in 2021, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff has turned himself into a fundraising powerhouse and dark-horse presidential contender. Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Mike Collins has had trouble raising money and has been stalked by a series of controversies involving problematic staffers. Georgia is Republican enough that the GOP is spending to try to elevate Collins, but don’t be surprised if he gets cut off — triaged, in political parlance — in October.
A lot of this sounds like wishful thinking.
*Roxane Gay, writer and NYT contributing editor, has a column that is mixed, “The W.N.B.A should take care of its own” (archived here; the WNBA stands for “The Women’s National Basketball Association”). She’s right about the dominance of drama over basketball, but dead wrong about wanting trans-identified males to play long with the women.
The W.N.B.A. is having a moment.
As the league celebrates its 30th anniversary, the audience is growing exponentially, and the number of teams is expanding. After years of fighting tirelessly for fair wages and a successful strike authorization vote, the players’ union earned a collective bargaining agreement; for the first time, star players in the league have secured million-dollar contracts; the league minimum salary is now $270,000; and there are higher salary caps for teams.
For anyone watching the W.N.B.A. blossom over the past three decades, this has all been a long time coming, hard-earned and richly deserved. But alongside the growth and increased public attention, the league is also facing a pair of crises, not necessarily of its own making: how to welcome trans women, if and when it becomes necessary, and a rise in racism directed toward Black players. How the league and the players navigate that will determine its future, one made possible by a loyal fan base that is largely composed of the very people most vulnerable to those ideological attacks.
. . .The league, however, does not exist in a bubble. The former N.B.A. players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, in a bid to be provocative, declared in August for the 2027 W.N.B.A. draft. In doing so, they stated that they were going to identify as trans women so they could be eligible to play. Freedom has continued this farce, appearing on conservative media, desperately seeking the attention he was unable to garner in the N.B.A.
Freedom has mostly pushed the league to provide a definition of “woman,” a tired conservative talking point, presumably because he and White think they are cleverly revealing some flaw in inclusive logic. The W.N.B.A. has indicated that neither Freedom nor White is eligible, but the question of how to craft a fair and reasonable policy for trans women remains.
The Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham was vocal earlier this year about her beliefs that trans women shouldn’t play in the W.N.B.A. “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” Cunningham said in an ESPN interview. Her claims exploit one of the most popular attacks against trans women — the idea that women and girls are not safe around trans women.
That’s not my reason for opposing trans women (“trans-identified men”) playing in the WNBA. It’s that they have an unfair advantage over biological women. I agree with Cunningham.
. . . Thus far, there has been only one openly trans W.N.B.A. player — the talented Layshia Clarendon, who retired after playing for 12 seasons, and also identifies as nonbinary. Thus far the controversy has been entirely manufactured by people with no real connection to the trans community.
The author goes on about the preponderance of black and queer women in the WNBA, but I don’t see a reason why that should cause concern. And yes, there’s a rivalry that sometimes becomes physical between Caitlin Clark, white, and Angel Reese, black, and watching the WNBA I think there’s too much concern over that, though the physicality is horrific. If the WNBA is to hold our attention, we’ll have to concentrate not on that drama but on the sport. Speaking of which, one of the author’s maladaptive recommendations is this:
The W.N.B.A., as a league, should lead the charge for making space for trans women in women’s sports.
Does that mean that trans women should be able to compete in all women’s sports? If not, why just basketball? Yes, there was once a trans woman WNBA player, but that should be the last one.
*And, if you need more stupid kerfuffles in the culture wars, read the Free Press‘s column by Liel Leibovitz, “Why you should care that Aslan is a woman.” (The voice of an upcoming animation of “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew,” has the voice of the Jesus-lion Aslan spoken by Meryl Streep. And there’s the rub: the subtitle is “The decision to have Meryl Streep voice the character in the new ‘Narnia’ film is neither a stroke of brilliance nor a microaggression against conservatives. It’s much more profound and dangerous.” Seriously? Profound and dangerous?
In case you’ve never stepped through that famous wardrobe door and into C.S. Lewis’s magical world, you should know that Aslan is a lion and the King above all High Kings in Narnia. Why, then, would anyone mind if Streep—a lioness and the Queen above all High Queens of Hollywood—gives the big cat a new purring sound?
The usual pop pugilists, still licking their wounds from the fight over Christopher Nolan’s casting choices in The Odyssey, rose to offer the usual arguments. Gerwig, growled the culture warriors on the right, is feminizing a quintessentially male figure; they could overlook her decision to turn Ken into a bumbling bobo in Barbie, her previous film, but giving the mightily maned lion a bit of gender reassignment surgery is a step too far. Relax, cooed their counterparts on the left, this is Meryl we’re talking about here and, really, there’s no one that woman can’t brilliantly portray.
But a woman can’t play a man if that man is JESUS!:
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who Aslan is meant to emulate. Any fifth grader could point toward Jesus—which is precisely what a class full of actual fifth graders argued in a letter to Lewis in 1954. The author, however, wrote back right away, telling the children they had it dead wrong.
“I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia,’ ” Lewis wrote from his office in Oxford Magdalen College. “I said ‘Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.’ If you think about it, you will see that it is quite a different thing.”
As is usual with C.S. Lewis, I fail to grasp the distinction there. But let’s proceed:
Which, Lewis wrote again and again to anyone who broached the topic, was the entire point of the Narnia novels. Aslan wasn’t an allegory for Jesus; he really was Jesus. All the author did was project Christ into a different world, where, he told another correspondent, “He would really have been a physical object. . . as He was in Palestine and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than His death on Calvary.” And if little boys and girls walked away from the books loving Aslan, then the faithful author would’ve achieved his goal, because the one they were really loving was Jesus Christ Himself.
. . . The problem, then, isn’t merely that a woman can’t or oughtn’t play traditionally male roles, a retrograde worldview which, thankfully, none but our grimmest guardians of tradition still hold. The problem is that, while imagining Jesus as a lion merely explores an image already present in the Bible, Jesus’s maleness is an essential aspect of his being. A woman can’t play Aslan because Aslan is Jesus, and Jesus, the son of God, is male. To alter that fact is to make him precisely what he is not: an allegory that may be repurposed and redesigned at will.
. . . And an attack like that isn’t about just another cheeky casting decision or wild artistic choice. It’s a bold step toward telling American believers that their culture rejects them and their beliefs. Gerwig’s film, then, may be fun and entertaining and even moving. But to Aslan’s loyal followers, it will never be more than a deliberate assault on their core beliefs. And if we’ve learned anything from our repeated visits to Narnia, such assaults rarely go unanswered.
O horrors! We can’t let this happen, even though some people say that Jesus was trans or bisexual. But there’s a far more pressing question here. Why did Leibovitz, who said explicitly that he’s a religious Jew, care so much about this? Presumably, religious Jews don’t see Jesus as a savior or the Messiah. And why did the Free Press deem this worthy of publication?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili vehemently denies she’s praying. And of course she isn’t: she’s an atheist cat.
Me: Are you praying? Hili: No, I’m talking to a spider.
In Polish:
Ja: Modlisz się?
Hili: Nie, rozmawiam z pająkiem.
*******************
From reader Michael Glenister, who saw this face in the back of a truck:
From Luana: What was really suspended was the American Psychological Association’s authority to give or withhold accreditation. And it was a federal panel’s recommendation, based on the APA’s antisemitism, not a final decision. What does that accreditation panel do? The City Journal says this:
While the APA does not possess a formal legal monopoly on psychology education, in practice it exerts near monopolistic influence on professional training across clinical, counseling, and school psychology. This includes control over doctoral education, internships, and hospital and medical-center placements. The accreditation standards of the APA disproportionately shape the values and practices of the mental-health workforce in the United States.
BREAKING: An advisory panel on accreditation has recommended that the Department of Education suspend the American Psychological Association (APA) for 12 months amidst concerns about ideological standards on DEI, gender-related treatment, and especially antisemitism.
From Jeff Maurer. Does this mean we can call them “Eskimo pies” again?
When I was a speechwriter, I was told by many American Indians that they call themselves “Indians”,* so I was constantly writing the word into speeches and then explaining my choice to disbelieving white people.
After following a sign to “follow the cat,” they were guided around the corner directly to a bar table where the cat jumped up like a proper host.. Bro really works there..🐈🐾😅 pic.twitter.com/RX5pPLGlPU
This French girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would be 89 today had she lived. https://t.co/wQn5uoQo7D
Music for the day: The Four Tops sing “Ask the Lonely” as performed in Paris. This, along with James Brown’s performance at the TAMI Festival, is in my view the most soulful music ever recorded on video. Look at Levi Stubbs sweat as he belts it out!
Rob K. Henderson is identified by Wikipedia as “an American writer and political commentator known for coining the term luxury beliefs.” These beliefs are said to “”confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”, and are said to include “defunding the police” and “getting rid of the SAT”.
Apparently one of Henderson’s “luxury beliefs” is belief in free will, as you can tell from the title of his Substack post below. But his thesis is not only wrong, but a dog’s breakfast of a meal. For one thing, he never defines free will. And he makes a ton of statements about it that are simply full of holes. I could write a substantive essay about how Henderson’s short piece is misguided, but it doesn’t deserve that. So what I’ll do is put his statements in bold, indented type, and put my responses in plain text flush left. Truly, I don’t understand why this guy doesn’t understand.
Let me start by saying that, as always, I conceive of free will as “contracausal” or “I could have done otherwise” free will, explained as the ability of a person in a given situation, with all the molecules of the universe poised at the moment of decision/action, to have done more than one thing. It does appear that Henderson has that notion, too, but he doesn’t say so.
And Henderson’s thesis is that the elites do think they themselves have free will, but propagate to the “lower classes” an idea of determinism, which harms those people by making them think they’re automatons.
Click the headline to read:
Here we go. Strap yourselves in, as it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in “Free Will” (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”
Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep and then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.
No determinist I know pretends that these two situations are equal. They’re “equal” only in that a man breaks his wife’s nose when she’s asleep. In one case it’s an accident, in the other a deliberate act. Although we may not be able to find out which is which, no determinist I know thinks that the situations are equivalent in how they should be dealt with. If we could find a way to distinguish them, then of course the abusive man should be punished.
Here Henderson paints a misleading view of what determinism is, and what the consequences of various actions are in light of determinism. A man who breaks his wife’s nose may be likely to abuse her further, or abuse someone else, and for that reason alone should be punished. This sanction does not apply to an accidental blow, which does not come from malice and isn’t likely to recur.
More confusion:
Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction. Determinists like Messrs. Sapolsky and Harris tell us that behavior can be explained through systems, incentives, trauma, inequality, neurochemistry and social pressure. Much of this is true. But a culture that speaks only this language teaches people that they are spectators in their own lives. The implication, rarely stated outright, is that no one really chooses anything. We are all the first man in the example above, thrashing in our sleep.
The determinists don’t deny that we have wills, or that our actions follow from them. Their argument is that will and action are themselves the products of deeper causes, such as genes, molecules and the environment, and so we can’t really be called free.
Well, we are spectators in our own lives, in that we know not the wellsprings from whence our thoughts and actions derive. But no determinist is trying to blur the consequences of disparate actions, arising in different ways, that have similar consequences. The rest Henderson gets right, but the bit about determinists “blurring” the causes of actions is dead wrong. And Henderson still hasn’t given us a cause of an action that does not ultimately rest on material objects like neurons. Does he believe in “ghostly” free will? Does he think that at a given instant, we can make more than one choice? He doesn’t tell us.
The psychologist Roy F. Baumeister has spent much of his career arguing against this type of thinking. In his recent book, “The Science of Free Will,” he claims that free will evolved because it was required to live in complex social systems. Culture works only if people can restrain themselves. They must follow rules when no one is watching. They must delay gratification. They must make plans. They must explain themselves. They must know that actions today bring consequences tomorrow.
Mr. Baumeister’s key move is to treat free will as a matter of degree. Some actions are freer than others. A man ordering dinner from a menu is freer than a man being robbed at gunpoint. A sober adult planning his career is freer than a drunk teenager in a parking lot at 2 a.m.
If free will “evolved”, then it must be material, for only material things are subject to biological evolution. Does Henderson mean that the feeling that we have free will evolved? I’m willing to believe that, but the existence of something immaterial affecting thoughts and “decisions”, which is what contracausal free demands, cannot have evolved.
As for degrees of freedom, that won’t wash, either. The man robbed at gunpoint is determined by his genes and environment to hand over his wallet, for he’s evolved to not want to die. And a man ordering dinner? At the moment he selects his entree, could he have chosen another? Not according to what we know of physics. Coerced action seems less free, but still involves determinism, just as with the man who chooses a burger rather than salmon (that would be me).
But hold on folks, for here comes the “luxury belief” part:
The determinists would have us drop these distinctions. But notice the asymmetry in their position. They rarely treat themselves as automatons. They also reserve agency for the educated reader, who is presumed to have the ability to redesign legal systems and reimagine institutions. Free will for me, but not for thee.
The deniers of free will haven’t improved society. They have merely produced a more forgiving vocabulary for those who damage it. The man who waits for his wife to fall asleep becomes harder to condemn, because somewhere in his past there is a reason. There is always a reason, but that isn’t the same as an excuse or justification.
Whaaaaat??? From what I know of Sapolsky and Sam Harris, the paragons of determinism, they do indeed see themselves as automatons. Sam Harris has even used the image of a puppet to represent a determinist, with genes and environment pulling the strings. Wherever Henderson got his idea that the “elite” determinists think they have free will while others don’t, it’s a blockheaded and palpably wrong idea.
Now why, you might ask, do the “elite” embrace free will for themselves but tell others that they don’t have free will? Apparently because all of us elitists want to parade their virtue by arguing that criminals should be treated more leniently—a consequence that Henderson sees as inevitably following from belief in determinism:
Arguments against free will often carry a hidden moral assumption. If no one truly chooses his actions, then no one deserves blame. Criminals should be treated more leniently because they couldn’t have acted otherwise. Judgment is redirected away from the criminal and toward the person who chooses to condemn him.
Notice, though, the asymmetry. The determinist grants agency to himself and a handful of other anointed beings. They can choose to become more enlightened. They can exert agency to redesign the criminal-justice system, revise social norms and build more compassionate institutions. Criminals and everyone else, meanwhile, are reduced to billiard balls.
This is presented as humane, but it’s condescending. It strips people of agency in the name of compassion. And once a person is no longer regarded as capable of governing himself, it becomes easier to justify governing him without his consent. If people are merely carried along by forces they can’t understand or control, then perhaps their preferences need not be taken seriously either.
The scientific and philosophical arguments about determinism are worth considering. But they should be separated from the moral conclusions that are so often attached to them. Too many deniers of free will smuggle in an exception for themselves. The unenlightened masses are automatons. The enlightened few, though, are free enough to decide what to do with them.
As I’ve said many times, and I believe Sam and Robert would agree, yes, people who do acts, injurious or meritorious, do deserve praise or blame. But that is simply a way of promoting good acts, discouraging bad ones, and reforming baddies or sequestering them away from society by locking them up. You don’t have to have free will to come to those conclusions; all you have to do is observe human behavior and decide what kind of society you want. (Note that the elites seem to be denigrated for designing a more humane justice system, which does follow from accepting determinsim, but also that Henderson thinks we reduce criminals to “billiard balls.” What happened to all the other non-elites who aren’t criminals?)
Determinists don’t strip people of free will in the name of compassion; they strip people of free will because what is what, as far as we know, the databsuggest. Compassion may indeed follow from realizing that nobody makes a free-will choice to do good or ill, but again I emphasize that this doesn’t mean that criminals should be free from punishment or treatment. And of course we have to take people’s preferences seriously, because those preferences are coded in their genes and neurons, put there by their inheritance or their environment (environment, of course, can change people’s preferences and their apparent “choices.” And it is disrespectful to ignore their preferences: “No Sam, you don’t want the steak; you want the sirloin. I know!”
This is all an attempt by Henderson, I think, to shoehorn free will as a “luxury belief”, a belief entertained by the “enlightened few” who are able to follow a scientific conclusion to its social consequences. But you don’t have to be “enlightened” to ponder the idea and, I hope, to realize that there is no such thing as contracausal free will. (There is of course “compatiblist free will”, but that is a semantic trick described by Sam Harris as the idea that “a puppet loves his strings.”)
And how, pray tell, does the rejection of free will promulgated by the elites “inflict costs in the lower classes”? And how does it stamp us as “elites”?
I swear, this is one of the most misguided and erroneous things I’ve read on free will. I suppose that because “luxury beliefs” are Henderson’s leitmotif, and apparently his Big Contribution to social discourse, he has to grab free will with his tentacles and drag that “luxury belief” into the Tent of Philosophy.
Why did I waste a couple of hours reading this stuff and trying to show its problems? Because I had no choice, of course.
All I know of this photo is from reader Peter, who said, “quickly snapped this black street cat in Samoa.” Your job is to spot it, and if you do, don’t give away its location in the comments, but just say “I found it.” I rate it “pretty easy”.
The reveal will be at noon Chicago time.
I urge other readers to submit “spot the animal” photos, but if you do be sure not to put the critter at dead center.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, September 25, 2026, and the last Friday of the month. There will not be a Caturday post this week due to the visit of the Black D*g. It’s National Pancake Day; here’s a stack of blue corn pancakes with piñon nuts I ate in Santa Fe eight years ago:
Iran has offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume talks on its nuclear program in seven days if the United States lifts its naval blockade, waives sanctions on Iranian oil sales and observes a ceasefire that would include Lebanon.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi detailed the proposal in a private gathering on Thursday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, according to one attendee.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute think tank, who attended, said Araghchi suggested that a speedy agreement would help U.S. President Donald Trump ahead of November’s midterm elections.
There was no immediate comment from Iran’s U.N. mission or other Iranian officials.
The proposal strongly resembles the so-called Memorandum of Understanding reached in June, but with an accelerated timetable. The earlier agreement, which had called for a 60-day interim period, quickly collapsed as Iran resumed attacks on shipping in the strait.
Trump has said he is in no rush to reach a deal, even as high oil prices fuel inflation and exacerbate cost of living concerns. On the Iranian side, there are questions as to whether the hard-liners who dominate the security forces will accept compromises championed by relative moderates, like President Masoud Pezeshkian.
“If Trump calculates this arrangement is worthwhile and can bring political benefit before the midterms and reduce gas prices, perhaps we’ll see flexibility not seen in previous weeks,” Parsi said. But he noted “deep suspicion,” especially around the prospect of Iran merely buying time to get out more of its oil and ease its economic pain.
President Trump rejected Iran’s latest proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart talks aimed at reaching a deal on the country’s nuclear program, according to U.S. officials quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this week, Iran’s foreign minister offered a proposal to implement a seven-day ceasefire, reopen the strait and restart talks with the U.S. aimed at reaching a final nuclear deal.
However, U.S. officials quoted by the Wall Street Journal reportedly said Mr. Trump is “skeptical” Iran would meet his demands and that he expects to resume a bombing campaign.
Indeed; this shows that Iran is being economically squeezed, and although Trump has a political loss in the offing if he holds firm with Iran, he also has a military gain. Do I know what he’s going to do? Of course not. Do I think he should stay the course? Yes, of course.
*After a federal judge order restoration of White House press pool access to MS NOW, Politico, and CNN journalists on Thursday morning, on Thursday evening some of them were still blocked from access to the White House, and enforcement of the judge’s order was also spotty throughout the day. After all, Trump thinks they purvey “fake news”:
Journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were allowed reentry to the White House on Thursday, days after being banned by the administration, and hours after U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered their credentials restored.
This followed a chaotic morning in which journalists from all three outlets were initially turned away from the White House, and some had their press credentials seized by the U.S. Secret Service.
But later in the day CNN and MS NOW reported that some of their journalists were denied access to cover the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House for a state dinner.
CNN said that a reporter and producer were blocked from the event, while a photojournalist and audio technician were able to attend. MS NOW said its White House reporter Laura Barrón-López was denied entry to President Xi’s arrival ceremony.
President Donald Trump berated the two media outlets in a post on Truth Social Thursday, falsely claiming they had “refused to cover” the arrival.
“The event was magnificent — Actually made for Television but, because they’re Fake News, and because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to “TRUMP,” they refused to be there,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether the White House pool system — which splits video coverage of the president among five major networks — will resume to cover the remainder of the visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, MS NOW White House reporter Akayla Gardner said. ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC said they would halt TV coverage of presidential events after the White House banned CNN, while other outlets, including The Washington Post earlier this week, temporarily refrained from publishing new photos of Trump in a show of support.
“This is a historic moment. We have President Xi coming here to Washington for a major state visit, and at this moment, we’re seeing tremendous solidarity among the news outlets,” Gardner said on air Thursday, adding, “I think we can assume that if the White House does comply with this order, that the pool potentially will be back in effect once again, and the public can get information the same way that they had before.”
The White House on Friday night blocked CNN from accompanying President Trump on a Saturday trip to Tennessee, a network spokeswoman confirmed, in the latest twist in a weeklong standoff between Mr. Trump and the Washington press corps.
The decision immediately raised the question of whether the television pool would cover the president’s trip. The TV pool, a rotating group of networks that share the work of filming the president’s daily activities, had boycotted those responsibilities this week after Mr. Trump first banned CNN from participating in the pool.
I’m glad the news outlets, including Fox News, are standing together to oppose Trump’s clearly unconstitutional act, and the administration might as well realize they’re on a Losing Cause Train and stop censoring the press pool.
*According to the NYT, the University of Cambridge has abandoned plans for a full investigation of the Jason Arday affair, including examining the University’s hiring practices, and instead will focus largely on “whether the school offered [Arday] sufficient support amid accusations that he plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis and embellished his personal narrative.” This, of course, reflects the University’s desire to avoid at all costs an analysis of how the school could hire a completely unqualified fabulist, apparently because he was both black and claimed to be disabled.” (h/t Greg; article archived here).
The University of Cambridge has abandoned plans to fully investigate its hiring of Jason Arday, the professor who became a lightning rod in the debate over diversity-and-inclusion efforts in higher education, following his abrupt death last month.
Instead, the university said, the inquiry will examine whether the school offered him sufficient support amid accusations that he plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis and embellished his personal narrative. Dr. Arday may come up as part of a broader look at university hiring practices, but he will not be a focus.
That marks an abrupt shift from the plan announced this summer, when the school’s vice chancellor, Deborah Prentice, promised a “thorough and transparent” investigation into Dr. Arday’s appointment.
Dr. Arday died last month amid intense scrutiny of his biography and a deluge of personal, sometimes racist, taunts online. No official cause of death has been released, but his family said that the “campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason.”
The change in investigative focus means that Cambridge may never publicly address questions about how it vetted Dr. Arday for a senior teaching job and why it repeatedly downplayed concerns about his work and biography.
That has upset some professors, who are circulating a letter demanding full institutional accountability and an examination of how the university promoted Dr. Arday’s personal story, according to a draft seen by The New York Times.
. . .Cambridge has appointed a respected former prosecutor to lead the review but has narrowed the scope. The investigation is “not about the allegations made against Professor Arday or about his academic record,” the former prosecutor, Nazir Afzal, said recently. “It’s about his welfare, his care, his well-being.”
It will go “deep on a narrow question rather than broad on all of them,” Mr. Afzal, who is also chancellor of the University of Manchester, noted in a post. A second, broader inquiry by an expert panel may touch on Dr. Arday’s years at Cambridge but will not focus on him.
The second review “will consider the wider context of Professor Arday’s time at the University of Cambridge” by examining policies on hiring and academic misconduct, along with “the support available to academics who are subject to extraordinary public and media scrutiny,” a university description of the inquiry reads.
A university spokesperson declined to explain the change or answer questions about it
The reason for the change is pretty clear. First, Arday is dead, so one could say that there’s no point to investigating him, which could lead to his demotion or firing. But that investigation would lead to Cambridge being accused of racism. Second, if the investigation does reveal a form of antiracist or DEI hiring, whereby a deficit of merit can be made up by a surfeit of pigmentation and claimed handicaps, it would also look bad for Cambridge, despite the rest of us wanting to know why he was hired. The benefits accrue to us and to academic, and none to Cambridge.
*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: I am the code.”
→ Claudine Gay is back: Former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who resigned after six months amid criticism over her handling of campus antisemitism as well as plagiarism allegations, has returned to teach a seminar called “What Is a University?: Purpose and Politics in Higher Education.” The 16-person course examines institutional power struggles, donor influence, and Harvard’s controversies, with students ultimately proposing their own vision for university reform.
I love this for her. She gets to teach a whole class on how she got fired. The final exam will be to throw darts at the head shots of Harvard board members. It’s a practicum on why the hell she ended up teaching that class. I hope they bring in donors and scream at them. Enroll me, please!
Don’t forget that Claudine Gay’s salary as a professor is a total of about $1.55 million per year, including $1,397,749 base compensation and $150,802 for “other compensation”, mostly university housing. How can she deserve that much, which is far more than regular Harvard professors make?
→ Sunny Hostin once served on a jury: This week on The View, Sunny Hostin said that when she was on a jury in the early ’90s, she was the holdout juror who prevented a good, if ill, man from going to prison. That’s right: She claims to have been the holdout in the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” trial (which might not be true but let’s go with Sunny). Here’s Sunny on his crime: “He did not mean to kill her and once he killed her, he panicked. He chopped up her body, yes, boiled her body parts, tried to commit the perfect crime,” she continued, talking over the other panelists to make one final important point: “And he fed her body parts to the unhoused.” So crucial. He fed her body parts to the unhoused. She really wants to be sure you heard that part. Because, well, that’s honestly admirable. The unhoused are famously hungry. If someone slaughters your mother but then feeds her flesh to the homeless, it’s morally neutral. What? You want to starve our unhoused community of human flesh? You’ve never panicked and accidentally chopped up, boiled, and served human body parts? Okay, Ms. Perfect!
→ Oh, Lauren Boebert: Boebert is facing a House ethics complaint alleging sexual relationships with three staffers, including a four-year relationship with a woman to whom she allegedly paid $200,000 after it ended. Boebert—who has promoted “Christian values,” criticized Major League Baseball for “forcing” players to promote “the LGBTQ agenda,” and was famously caught vaping and groping a male companion in a theater—called the allegations “utterly false” and “politically motivated,” adding: “I’m not a lesbian or bisexual, and I have never, ever been in any inappropriate relationship, nor have I ever been sexually involved with any staff.” I want to believe her. And I typically am suspicious of allegations. But I saw that theater grope video. And just knowing how she presents to the world as a sort of sexed-up secretary. . . I don’t know, my gut says this one may be real. Boebert swinging both ways is extremely believable. Based on no knowledge, I’m gonna say it probably happened.
In the weeks after Passover each year, Israeli-New Zealander Daniel Rosenbaum is already at work preparing for Sukkot, a Jewish festival six months away.
As the incoming chairperson of the Wellington Jewish Community Center, Rosenbaum spends months navigating the legal and administrative requirements to import sets of the Four Species — plants that Jews are biblically commanded to gather together and wave on the Sukkot holiday.
The country’s approximately 5,500 Jews, a pittance among a broader population of 5.3 million people, face an enormous challenge getting supplies for the festival of Sukkot each year because New Zealand has some of the world’s strictest biosecurity laws.
Any natural materials, leaves, plants or fruits are considered a biosecurity hazard to New Zealand’s fragile island ecosystem, and their import into the country is tightly controlled. The lulav and etrog, or palm frond and citron, along with the myrtle and willow branches used on the festival of Sukkot, are caught under these strict restrictions.
This year, Rosenbaum is overseeing the legal import of 14 sets of the Four Species for all of New Zealand, some of which will be sent to the Auckland Hebrew Congregation. Under him, there are two teams. One looks after compliance and legislation, and the other acts as the importer.
“We have to go through the same rigmarole as a massive company, like one that brings in 1,000 tons of tomatoes from Spain,” said Rosenbaum.
To get import approval, the Wellington Jewish Community Center and Auckland Hebrew Congregation separately review their biosecurity risk management plans, submit them to the Ministry for Primary Industries for review, and undergo individual biosecurity verification audits.
MELBOURNE, Australia — In the weeks after Passover each year, Israeli-New Zealander Daniel Rosenbaum is already at work preparing for Sukkot, a Jewish festival six months away.
As the incoming chairperson of the Wellington Jewish Community Center, Rosenbaum spends months navigating the legal and administrative requirements to import sets of the Four Species — plants that Jews are biblically commanded to gather together and wave on the Sukkot holiday.
The country’s approximately 5,500 Jews, a pittance among a broader population of 5.3 million people, face an enormous challenge getting supplies for the festival of Sukkot each year because New Zealand has some of the world’s strictest biosecurity laws.
Any natural materials, leaves, plants or fruits are considered a biosecurity hazard to New Zealand’s fragile island ecosystem, and their import into the country is tightly controlled. The lulav and etrog, or palm frond and citron, along with the myrtle and willow branches used on the festival of Sukkot, are caught under these strict restrictions.
This year, Rosenbaum is overseeing the legal import of 14 sets of the Four Species for all of New Zealand, some of which will be sent to the Auckland Hebrew Congregation. Under him, there are two teams. One looks after compliance and legislation, and the other acts as the importer.
“We have to go through the same rigmarole as a massive company, like one that brings in 1,000 tons of tomatoes from Spain,” said Rosenbaum.
To get import approval, the Wellington Jewish Community Center and Auckland Hebrew Congregation separately review their biosecurity risk management plans, submit them to the Ministry for Primary Industries for review, and undergo individual biosecurity verification audits.
The government ministry checks the community building protocols and its plans for managing the sets. It then prepares a report indicating whether the synagogue’s proposed management of the biosecurity risk is acceptable or whether anything must be adjusted.
Anyone handling the Four Species must undergo “staff training” on how to handle the restricted plant material, so in Wellington, the synagogue includes a reminder of the community’s biosecurity protocols at their annual meeting and in the weekly synagogue newsletters leading up to the festival.
The sets of the Four Species are grown in Israel, but are imported via the nearest large Jewish community, Australia. Before the plants reach New Zealand, each synagogue’s biosecurity team puts up posters at all synagogue entrances, reminding congregants that they are entering a secure facility authorized under the Biosecurity Act.
Posters at all exits also remind people not to take the sets outside the synagogue. A green and red line is drawn around the synagogue’s secure and non-secure zones, and the sets cannot cross the red line, including into the sukkah, where they are traditionally waved in other communities. Although in other parts of the world many Jews purchase their own sets, no one in Wellington or Auckland may have one in their own home; the synagogue stores all sets in its secure facilities.
The process is extremely expensive. After all is said and done, the cost of a set — usually the cheapest and simplest available for purchase — comes out to around $1,200 to $1,700. In other communities around the world, such sets can often be obtained for as little as $40.
Well, such is religion. I have no truck with this minutely observed form of worship, but I do applaud the New Zealand government for applying its biosecurity laws to everything. And of course because Jews control everything, including the banks, they have the dosh to pay these enormous fees.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has an exchange with her nemesis Kulka. Is Kulka being insulted?
Kulka: Does absolute emptiness exist?
Hili: Some suspect it can be found in many heads.
In Polish:
Kulka: Czy istnieje absolutna próżnia?
Hili: Niektórzy podejrzewają, że jest w wielu głowach.
You seem to have found common ground in your recent meeting. So I have one request: can you find a common ground on this too help us stop the execution of these innocent Iranian protesters?
From Brianna Wu, a trans-iudentified male whom I much admire, not only because she walks the walk but because she’s a liberal who dunks on progressives. And here she explains that in her case she was compelled to transition. That’s certainly true.
It’s not choice to transition. Do you have any idea how well I did with gay men? I must’ve prayed 1000 times for God to just let me be a gay man instead.
If I were one of these helpful otters, I’d demand fish instead of no stinking ice cube:
Em um aquário no Japão, após o horário de fechamento, alguns filhotes de lontra espertinhos ajudam seu avô a arrumar os brinquedos deles. Como recompensa, ele dá cubos de gelo a eles. pic.twitter.com/5a3llyhCjq
Three Dutch Jewish siblings were likely murdered in a gas chamber together with their mother. One of them would have been 90 today. https://t.co/zJ0wQB1byi
The new prickly pal needs a name! 💖Our prehensile-tailed porcupette is doing really well, gaining weight (now 2 lbs), and trying solids. She also loves hibiscus! The one-month-old wasn’t getting enough milk from her mom, so staff is hand-rearing her to ensure she continues to grow and thrive. 1/2
Keepers have selected three name options: Amora, Bristle, and Bramble. Voting is open now and closes on Wednesday, September 30. We'll announce the winning name later next week.VOTE: pdza.org/name-the-porcupette
Music today: a new feature that may be transient. This is the famous melange of songs on the second side of Abbey Road. I’m not sure of the occasion, but the video notes “Music for MONTSERRAT 15th September,1997”. Besides McCartney, there’s Phil Collins on drums, and Mark Knoepfler and Eric Clapton on guitar. Besides that, the orchestra is conducted by George Martin.
About ten days ago I reported on the first public showing of the anti-Israel film “NAZA,” made by two Israelis. Its premise was the IDF had, during the Gaza war, engaged in the deliberate targeting of civilians using AI, not caring about how many civilians they killed and, in fact, killing as many as possible (the “genocide” trope). The movie apparently used information from 24 anonymous IDF sources, and showing of the movie has been highly restricted. In fact, I wasn’t sure whether it had been shown beyond the Venice Film Festival, where it got not only a prize but a standing ovation that was 24½ minutes long: the longest in the history of the festival. Grok now tells me that it’s been shown at a festival in Bologna as well, and there are plans for a wider release. But most people haven’t seen it, including the IDF. Some of its approbation comes from the fact that it was directed by two Israelis, who, of course, couldn’t possibly be showing stuff that was wrong or distorted.
Nevertheless, you can tell a lot about the movie’s premise from this short , 83-second trailer, which has English subtitles. And some of the film’s contents have leaked.
The premise is that there was an IDF program to deliberately kill civilians, whether directly or as “collateral damage” (the meaning of the word “Naza”), and in some strikes up to 500 Gazan civilians were killed. The video by Natasha Hausdorff and the two articles in the Times of Israel below vigorously dispute this allegation, though you can dismiss them, if you wish, because those sources are either Israeli or sympathetic to Israel. But before you join the Stalinesque-wave of applause for NAZA (remember from The Gulag Archipelago that the first person who stopped applauding for the Russian leader was arrested), hear them out.
The 26-minute take by Hausdorff, who hasn’t seen the movie, is based on what has been made public about the movie and its trailer. She clearly explains the rule of proportionality as obeyed by the IDF and the ways the IDF warned civilians of imminent attacks. NAZA apparently ignores Hausdorff’s point: estimating “collateral damage” before a strike is a legal obligation, not a nefarious exercise. As she says:
“And what the filmmakers do is present the modeling of incidental harm to a lay audience as though it were some cold Israeli invention devised for the purpose of justifying slaughter. Well, it isn’t an Israeli invention—it’s the law. And it’s precisely intended to minimize excessive harm to civilians. Pre-strike collateral damage estimation is the standard practice in every law-abiding Western military—that includes Americans and NATO forces. It’s the procedural tool that compels a commander to confront the presence of non-combatants before a weapon is ever released.”
She goes on to explain what kind of civilian assessment and damage do and do not constitute war crimes. As for the “death of 500 civilians” accusation in NAZA, it’s been strongly denied by the IDF; indeed, no attack was approved to eliminate a Hamas commander, however powerful he be, that would kill more than 100 civilians. Hausdorff also denies that decisions about where and who are attacked by the IDF are made by machines rather than humans; here the IDF has already published its protocol, which involves three different groups of people.
As for the anonymous IDF souces, Hausdorff avers that, “From an evidential standpoint, these accounts are unverified in every respect that actually matters. We don’t know who these individuals are. We don’t know what roles they had. And we don’t know they are who the filmmakers say they are.” This means that neither Israel nor anybody else can establish whether the accounts are true.
Second, this Times of Israel by Sarit Zehavi (click to read) also casts strong doubt on the film’s premise, for Zehavi, who was willing to be interviewed but wasn’t asked, helped construct the very system of estimating civilian casualties. (She is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Israeli IDF reserve.) Click the headline to read.
An excerpt:
The creators of the recent documentary, “NAZA,” about “Naza” (a Hebrew military acronym for Nezek Agavi – collateral damage) did not have to work too hard to discover the truth.
They could have simply interviewed me. I would have stood in front of the camera, without hiding my identity, on the roof of my house nine kilometers (5.6 miles) from Lebanon, where we endured endless barrages of rockets, and explained the reality on the ground.
A little less than 20 years ago, I was one of the founders of the unit within the IDF that deals with warning populations on the other side of enemy lines and preserving civilian lives.
We built the processes that define how to issue evacuation warnings, and how to track evacuations. I was personally involved in formulating target approval processes and operational discussions.
If they had spoken with me, I would have explained that the chart shown at the beginning of the film’s promotional material is not a “killing chart,” but rather a planning chart for a target identified as being used by Hamas.
Its purpose is to determine whether to strike at all, who in the command echelon is authorized to approve the strike, with what munitions, and under what conditions. In stark contrast to the way it is presented in the promotional material, when the words “Naza 500 – collateral damage estimated at 500” appear in the approval process, it means that action must be taken to reduce the collateral damage.
There are a variety of ways to do this, such as issuing an evacuation warning, using precision munitions, or canceling the strike entirely. Noting the collateral damage on the target sheet does not signify an intention to kill civilians or commit “genocide”; it is intended, first and foremost, to prevent civilian deaths.
Our enemies, both Hamas and Hezbollah, deliberately place their rockets and headquarters in the heart of civilian areas, in tunnels under Beirut or in high-rise residential buildings in southern Lebanon. Hamas in Gaza does the same, operating in civilian areas and using children as human shields. They do this on the working assumption that if Israel strikes without warning, hundreds of civilians will be killed. That is exactly their goal. But Israel chooses differently: there are hundreds of soldiers and officers in the IDF whose sole role is protecting civilians in enemy territory. That is what they think about from the moment they wake up in the morning.
I would have expected a serious examination of this subject to include the perspective of former IDF personnel, like me, as well as serving soldiers and officers who are familiar with these procedures and could explain the professional meaning of collateral-damage assessments. Based on the promotional materials I have seen, that perspective is absent.
The promo for the film claims that the IDF “never checks the number of civilians killed.”
The truth is that checking the exact number of casualties in enemy territory in real time is a complex and nearly impossible task. This is exactly why the collateral damage assessment process takes into account factors such as the size of the structure and the estimated number of civilians routinely in its vicinity.
. . .According to IDF officials quoted in the Israeli media, the filmmakers did not seek the military’s response before the film was released, and the IDF learned of its claims through the media. The IDF spokesperson later publicly asked to view the full documentary in order to respond to its allegations. If the filmmakers, both of them investigative journalists, have declined to disclose their film or findings to the IDF, that would be contrary to basic journalistic ethics.
Without knowing more about the film’s anonymous sources, it is impossible to know what roles the interviewees held within the system, and whether their accounts, assuming they are authentic, are even relevant to understanding the chain of approvals and actions taken prior to striking a target.
The promotional materials released so far present the story from a very narrow angle: they rely on anonymous sources whose level of involvement, rank, and understanding of the process are unclear, while completely omitting the experts who built these systems with one goal: preserving human life. There are such experts. I was one of them.
Shem Tov was a hostage kidnapped on October 7, and recounts the lengths Israel went to not to kill him by accident:
Shem Tov, who was kidnapped on October 7, 2023, from the Nova music festival near the Gaza border, recounted an instance when the mother of one of his captors received a phone call from the IDF warning her of an imminent airstrike.
“Hamas knew where I was and left me to die. Israel didn’t know my location, but it knew where my captor’s mother was and called to make sure she wasn’t killed accidentally,” he wrote. “There I was — kidnapped, starved and tortured by her son — while my army was trying to keep his mother alive.”
He said his captors in Gaza celebrated death and destruction on both sides: “For Hamas, destruction itself could be victory. As long as there was death on either side, Hamas could win.”
Shem Tov said that “Israel desperately wanted me home. But not at any price. There were Palestinian civilians between Israel and me. So Israel dropped leaflets, sent messages, made phone calls and ordered evacuations. It tried to minimize NAZA, or collateral damage.”
. . The freed hostage suggested that Israel “paid a price” for its efforts to reduce civilian casualties: “They gave Hamas time. They exposed Israeli soldiers to greater danger. And they left hostages like me waiting longer.”
“If Israel had cared less about NAZA, perhaps I would have come home sooner,” he added. “Fewer Israeli soldiers might have died. Fewer hostages might have died. But more Palestinians would have.”
Shem Tov wrote that he is troubled by reports about the documentary film, which he notes that he also hasn’t seen in full.
“In Venice, the film received a standing ovation that lasted more than 24 minutes,” he said. “As a former hostage, those minutes felt like a shower of knives. Not because the film shows Palestinian suffering, which is real and deserves to be seen. What hurts is that the film, as it has been reported, doesn’t seem to see me.”
The former captive said that to the filmmakers, “perhaps I am NAZA too. Collateral damage. A Jewish hostage who could have been left to rot in a Hamas tunnel, or murdered alongside my friends at Nova, because fighting to free me, and to protect Israelis from the people who did this, is itself treated as morally suspect.”
The lengths that Israel went to to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties—the dropping of leaflets, the phone calls to civilians in buildings scheduled for bombing, the “knock on the door”—an innocuous bomb dropped whose noise would alert people to evacuate—and the announcement of “safe areas” for evacuation—all this has been announced publicly and not contested, even by the New York Times. And it gives the lie to the idea that the IDF wanted to kill as many Gazans as possible. If they really wanted to perpetrate a genocide, why the delivery of food and polio vaccine to Gaza? Why these warnings? Why no bombing of the West Bank? What army engaged in a war has ever taken these precautions? And now this film, which apparently stimulates huge approbation by Israel- and Jew-haters everywhere.
I never even thought much about anti-semitism before October 7 three years ago, but now that it’s apparently stimulated a huge outpouring of belief in Big Lies, like the Genocide Myth, I have no choice but to conclude that antisemitism is ubiquitous, and simply was repressed until the Hamas attack gave it an excuse to emerge.
No, it’s not all about Netanyahu (Israel will be hated no matter who becomes Prime Minister), and no, it’s not all about Zionism (“Zionist” has become a euphemism for “Jew”). It’s about hatred of Jews, pure and simple. As I’m a nonbelieving Jew and never banged on about antisemitism before October 7, I am confident in these conclusions. You will never find a purveyor of the Genocide Lie who will admit that they’re wrong, but the evidence shows they are wrong. And the makers of NAZA, and those who so fervently applaud that film, also perpetuate the Big Lie. As does the British Government with its chowderheaded boycott of Jewish products in false hopes that it will bring about the impossible: a “two-state solution.” I agree with Bill Maher that those who spread the Genocide Lie are at the same time spreading antisemitism.
There are but 16 million Jews in the world, with about half of them in Israel, yet that tiny country, the only democracy in the Middle East, and a the only place where women, gays, and ethnic minorities have equal rights, seems to be the focus of the world’s damnation. The explanation is clear.
