Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 10, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, October 10, 2024, and National Angel Food Cake Day; as a kid, I got this cake every year on my birthday with either coffee icing or strawberries-and-cream icing (my choice).  But I haven’t even seen an angel food cake in years, even though it stands high in the hierarchy of cakes. May I please have some? Here’s an angel food cake just baked and before being iced. It makes my mouth water:

boviate from Buffalo, NY, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Metric Day, National Depression Screening Day, World Porridge Day, National Tic Tac Day, Squid and Cuttlefish Day, World Day Against the Death Penalty, and World Mental Health Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*This WSJ article is aimed at the people about to lose power and perhaps cellphone service in Florida, but it’s useful to know for everyone. But you need an iPhone 14 or later. If you have one, it has satellite phone capabilities:

Starting with the iPhone 14 line, has quietly turned its popular handsets into satellite phones. First, people could use them to contact emergency services. With the latest software update, you can text family and friends, too. In the aftermath of Helene, many relied on iPhones. The Journal’s Rachel Wolfe, reporting from Asheville, used satellite texting on her iPhone 14 Pro to send her story updates to her colleague.

Whether or not you’re in the path of Hurricane Milton, here’s how to enable satellite messaging on your iPhone:

The hardware needed to connect to satellites is in all iPhone 14, 15 and 16 models. Not sure which phone you have? Go to Settings, then General > About > Model Name.

The emergency SOS capability should just work. But to enable satellite texting, you have to be on iOS 18. Check or update your software under Settings > General > Software Update. If you’re up-to-date, you can send iMessage or SMS texts to anyone when you don’t have cellular or Wi-Fi coverage.

All iPhone users receiving your messages should be running iOS 18, too. And it works best if you add anyone you might need to reach to your Family Sharing or emergency contacts, in the Health app.

. . . If you are out of cellular range, a pop-up will ask if you want to use Messages via satellite. You need to be outside with a clear view of the sky and horizon. (Clouds won’t block signals, but trees will.) The iPhone’s software guides where to point your device. Once connected to a satellite, it may prompt you to move left or right—or turn around—to maintain the connection.

. . .Apple says you can’t send pictures, videos or audio messages. (More details here.)

Have an android phone? Fuggedaboutit.  And it won’t work at all on my iPhone 13, which I’ll continue to use (getting new batteries as required) until it becomes completely obsolete.

*The NYT has picked up the Free Press‘s scoop about reporter Tony Dokoupil being chastised by CBS News for asking hard questions of Ta-Nehisi Coates (see video of the interview and my report here),  Bari Weiss must have at least a frisson of pleasure having her former employer piggybacking on her stories. Some excerpts:

The episode began last Monday when Mr. Coates visited “CBS Mornings” on a publicity tour for his book “The Message,” which in one section compares Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Jim Crow laws of the American South. In describing what he witnessed on a 10-day trip to the region last year, Mr. Coates criticized other journalists for “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.”

From the start of the interview, Mr. Dokoupil directly challenged this framing, telling Mr. Coates that “the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” The anchor added, “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place?”

“There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state; I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are,” Mr. Coates replied. The men parried for several minutes in a tense but civil manner, with Mr. Coates at one point saying: “Either apartheid is right or wrong. It’s really, really simple.”

Their exchange concluded on a light note, with Mr. Dokoupil, who is Jewish, telling Mr. Coates that he was “still invited to High Holidays” to a chorus of laughter on the set.

. . .The interview created a social media uproar. Fans of Mr. Coates accused Mr. Dokoupil of bias, with one writer for Vox calling his questions “hostile, combative and rude.” Others took a more sanguine view, including a Washington Post reporter who wrote that the conversation had been “impassioned but calm” and had brought rigor to the typically breezy realm of morning TV.

Late last week, a group of CBS News employees approached executives with their concerns about Mr. Dokoupil’s handling of the interview, according to two people with knowledge of the events, who requested anonymity to share internal discussions.

Mr. Dokoupil met for an hour with members of the CBS News standards and practices team and the in-house Race and Culture Unit, which advises on “context, tone and intention” of news programming. The conversation focused on Mr. Dokoupil’s tone of voice, phrasing and body language during his interview with Mr. Coates, one of the people said.

Mr. Dokoupil, who joined CBS News in 2016 and became a morning anchor in 2019, is a rising star at the network who recently took on an extra hour on “CBS Mornings.” He is continuing to appear on the air.

Well, at least the NYT didn’t fire a good reporter, as they have (twice) in the last couple of years. But to call somebody on the carpet for asking tough questions in a polite manner is unconscionable (watch the interview). The only explanation is an unsavory one: a white reporter isn’t allowed to ask hard questions of a black icon.  And it’s ridiculous for Coates to criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestine without mentioning terrorism or Hamas. I will be reading his essay when the book arrives, but Coleman Hughes has read it and he seems to think that Coates is historically ignorant.

*The Free Press also discusses other fallout from their article (archived here), and it doesn’t make CBS look good.

. . . . two days later it’s still not clear what Dokoupil did wrong, other than ask tough but substantive questions.

In our world, we call that journalism.

But the fallout over the sin of Dokoupil’s questions continued on Tuesday morning during a meeting for the morning show staff.

Originally, CBS News had invited a self-described “mental health expert, DEI strategist, and trauma trainer” named Dr. Donald Grant to moderate a conversation on the issue in an all-staff meeting on Tuesday. That plan was scrapped after old social media posts from Dr. Grant surfaced—including one where he referred to South Carolina senator Tim Scott as “Uncle Tim” (a reference to “Uncle Tom”) and another of him describing a possible second Trump term as “MAGAcide” and the “death of a nation.” Seems like just the guy you should call when you want to smooth things over. (A source close to the drama told The Free Press that the network was “humiliated by his Instagram.”)

The meeting went ahead without Grant—staffers were not able to join from outside of CBS offices in order to prevent leaks. One source familiar with the proceedings suggested it was a “shit show,” with various employees “yelling.” Shawna Thomas, the show’s executive producer, was in tears. So was Dokoupil.

There was an open debate in the meeting about whether it is “fair to talk about whether Israel should exist at all.” There are some people at CBS who think that “Israel’s existence as a state should be part of fair conversation,” said one CBS source. Can you imagine journalists having that conversation about any other country?

No wonder Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of CBS’s parent company Paramount Global—at least until its merger with Skydance goes through some time next year—is not happy. A source close to Redstone told The Free Press that Redstone thought that “Tony gave a great interview and modeled what civil discourse should look like. And she disagreed with the action the company took. She’s working with the CEOs to address this issue.”

Meanwhile, Coates himself spoke about the controversy for the first time Tuesday. In a trailer for an appearance on Trevor Noah’s podcast, he accused Dokoupil of “commandeering” the interview. “I don’t think he did Nate and Gayle a service, and I’m really, really sorry for them,” said Coates, referring to Dokoupil’s co-hosts Gayle King and Nate Burleson.

But Coates also revealed a detail that caught our eye. As he was praising King as a “great journalist and a great interviewer,” he said that “Gayle came behind the stage before we went [on] and she had gone through the book, and I’m not saying she agreed with the book. She was like, ‘I’m gonna ask you about this. I’m gonna ask you about that.’ ”

So let’s get this straight: One journalist is raked over the coals for asking tough questions, while another journalist—if Coates’s recollection is correct—previews her questions and faces no repercussions. (King did not respond to a request for comment.)

Which poses a few questions. Chief among them: Are there different rules for different journalists at CBS?

*Amidst all the anti-Israel bias of the MSM and the NYT, which repels me more every day, we have a “heterodox” Bret Stephens defending Israel in yesterday’s column, “We should want Israel to win“, archived here. (Note: the NYT wants Israel to lose.)

Those who hope for an independent, free and peaceful Palestinian state had better hope Israel wins.

An Israel that allows Hamas to remain in power in Gaza is never going to give up the West Bank for the sake of Palestinian sovereignty, lest Hamas take over there, too, and replicate its strategy of rockets and tunnels on a grander scale. Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, or his heirs would continue their well-documented reign of Stasi-like surveillance over those they rule, not least by brutalizing Palestinians who dare to oppose them. And the feeble but authoritarian Palestinian Authority would remain unreformable if Hamas, rather than more moderate Palestinian groups, remains its principal political competition.

Those who hope for an independent, free and peaceful Lebanese state had better hope Israel wins.

Hezbollah likes to present itself as a Lebanese resistance force. In reality, it’s an Iranian occupation force. It has repeatedly, and often violently, imposed its will on the country’s elected leadership. It has been implicated in the assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri. It has dragged the country into ruinous wars with Israel. It has turned Lebanese civilians into human shields by emplacing itself in dense Beirut neighborhoods. It has taken advantage of the country’s weakness to establish lucrative sidelines in drug trafficking, weapons smuggling and money laundering.

Hezbollah is disliked, if not hated, by most Lebanese. But they will never be free of its tyranny if there is nobody to destroy its ability to violently dominate the political landscape. If a world that claims to care for Lebanon’s interests doesn’t want Israel to do it, perhaps someone else should volunteer. How about the French?

. . . The American people had better hope Israel wins.

Since it came to power in 1979, Iran’s Islamist regime has declared itself at war with two Satans: the little one, Israel; the big one, us. This has meant suffering for thousands of Americans: the hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran; the diplomats and Marines in Beirut; the troops around Baghdad and Basra, killed by munitions built in Iran and supplied to proxies in Iraq; the American citizens routinely taken as prisoners in Iran; the Navy SEALs who perished in January trying to stop Iran from supplying Houthis with weapons used against commercial shipping.

The war Israelis are fighting now — the one the news media often mislabels the “Gaza war” but is really between Israel and Iran — is fundamentally America’s war, too: a war against a shared enemy; an enemy that makes common cause with our totalitarian adversaries in Moscow and Beijing; an enemy that has been attacking us for 45 years. Americans should consider ourselves fortunate that Israel is bearing the brunt of the fighting; the least we can do is root for it.

Those who care about the future of freedom had better hope Israel wins.

*America’s Electoral College system, which makes votes in some states count more than in other states, is reflected in the candidates’ campaign stops, concentrated in the “swing states.” (I’ve never understood why we need an Electoral College). From the AP, as is the map below:

This year’s presidential battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — represent 18% of the country’s population but have dominated the attention of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and their running mates.

Click to enlarge. Look at all the campaigning in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania!

Through Tuesday, they have had just over 200 total campaign stops — three-quarters of which have been to those seven states, according to a database of campaign events that is based on Associated Press reporting. Pennsylvania alone has been visited 41 times, the most of any state.

But it’s not just the state visits: The presidential campaigns are tailoring their appearances to specific counties they believe are crucial to their success. The AP’s database shows their campaign events in the seven battleground states have been concentrated in counties with 22.7 million registered voters — just 10% of all voters registered nationally for this year’s presidential election.

The issue with the Electoral College is that it’s outmoded. Established to confect a compromise between voters electing the government and Congress electing the government, it now has the power of the Constitution behind it–even though it’s not really in the Constitution (it’s an interpretation of a few words). Thus, to change the system you’d need to adopt a Constiututional Amendment, and that takes forever. For the time being, we’re stuck with a system that’s palpably unfair. Why should one person’s vote count more than another’s?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej have a long intellectual discussion about “ways of knowing”:

Hili: What is rationalism?
A: Respect for facts and documented cause and effect relationships.
Hili: And if we don’t know them?
A: Then we usually use intuition based on tradition and superstitions.
In Polish:
Hili: Co to jest racjonalizm?
Ja: Respekt dla faktów i udokumentowanych związków przyczynowo-skutkowych.
Hili: A jeśli ich nie znamy?
Ja: To na ogół używamy intuicji opartej na tradycji i przesądach.

*******************

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Richard:

 

From Cat Memes:

Masih didn’t post again today, so here’s one from Luana. Bad news for Denmark, and a downside of immigration:

A post from BlueSky (my first) courtesy of reader Susan:

For anyone wondering what porcupines sound like, here’s a clip of a smol porcupine called Kemosabe chomping on a piece of banana

— Adam Sharp (@adamcsharp.bsky.social) 2024-10-04T17:06:21.548Z

One I tweeted:

And other one showing CBS’s editing of Harris’s scattered answer, making it look more coherent (h/t coel and others). This is ideologically-biased journalism:

From J. K. R., who has a great sense of humor.

One from my feed. Sound up.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

A tweet from Matthew, who has moved out of his office and sent his huge collection of Stegosaurus models and toys to a worthy recipient:

And Metthew’s collection at the receiving end:

16 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The number of Electoral votes scales with number of seats in the U. S. House of Representatives.

    The number of seats in the House scales with U. S. Census count. This is independent of citizenship, only residency.

    That is called Apportionment, and accounts for changes in number of Electoral votes over the years. The calculation has adapted since starting :

    http://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/congressional-apportionment/about/computing.html

    The Electoral College is a constitutional layer of protection from direct “democracy” — “people rule” — “tyranny of the majority” (de Tocqueville et. al.) :

    “though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.”
    -Thomas Jefferson, 1801

    http://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/congressional-apportionment/about.html

  2. As I listened to the CBS post-mortem on the TFP audio link, I could not believe that the anemic conversation I was hearing was from a world-class, top of the line, business of any type. What whining! This is a corporate newsroom? Kindergarten kops. Maybe they will wind up doing a group hug, followed by a nice shopping trip to the mall. Glad to have Dokoupil, Bari and colleagues at TFP, McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, and of course our own WEIT to call out hucksters like Coates and Kendi. Shame on the soft, pernicious racism of CBS corporate.

    1. +1
      And Coates called King an excellent interviewer after she told him what questions she was going to ask. Although maybe that’s sop for interviewers?

    2. Excellent comment. It’s not just CBS corporate, so I hope the embarrassment this tawdry nonsense brings will make them and others reflect on their contributions to the profession. That is, of course, if they are embarrassed. Blinkered, obstinate idiocy is, unfortunately, a common trait among activists.

  3. The Electoral College was, more than anything, a compromise over how the States would participate in the election of a national executive. Smaller States were concerned that, if voting were done purely based on population, larger States (such as Virginia, which had the largest population at the time) would have a disproportionate say in choosing the President. The concern is still valid. The largest ten States have a great population than the remaining forty. If people suggest abolishing the Electoral College, they need to address the original problem.

    1. My comment is in moderation (apologies for the trouble – two links to census dot gov) – but yes – and as I recall, the Electoral college was never really brought out on the chopping block until recently.

      1. The Electoral College is resented by whichever side loses the election if it won the irrelevant popular vote. This can happen (and has, of course) only if the popular vote margin is very narrow and breaks the “wrong” way. I wonder if this has been occurring more recently, as you suggest, because as the country becomes more polarized, over-all turnout declines. Moderates stay home leaving only the partisans to come out and vote. Is there a political science theory, or actual evidence, that hyperpartisanship should lead to narrow vote margins in a national popular vote and in battleground states individually? (They are battlegrounds because the vote split is predicted to be narrow.). Maybe if one partisan side won 70:30, the losing side would give up on politics and do something else. Narrow splits keep the dream alive.

        Complicating this is that the Electoral College has the effect of suppressing the Republican vote turnout in populous blue states. If millions of Republicans in California alone were motivated, through a popular vote system, to cast ballots, that could tip the popular vote easily to the GOP. The Democrats would also, of course, try to maximize turnout in those states they now easily win but my sense is that Dem turnout in blue states is already maximized. (I have no evidence, I admit.). Campaigning in populous blue states would motivate the GOP to develop policies to attract a better class of voter than the unemployable left-behinds in the Rust Belt version of Alabama, as Barack Obama described Pennsylvania between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

        Richard Hanania discusses this here:

        https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-conservative-case-for-abolishing

        1. Appreciate that –

          Hanania does not define the Electoral college – the links and my comment point to the actual calculations from census dot gov, which in a word amounts to :

          Apportionment

          I also note tyranny of the majority (De Tocqueville, and others) – that relates to Hanania’s note about direct democracy.

          [ WEIT fans only : “apportionment” was noted today as an idea developed by Richard Lewontin in a totally different domain : genetics! ]

    2. Yes, it is a problem. A similar “problem” is with the Senate. It’s designed so that people from a state whose population is smaller than many cities in other states, have the same vote. The thinking is, of course, the Senate is a way for states with small populations to not be over run by larger states. But is does mean someone from Wyoming will have louder voice in the Senate than someone from New York

  4. Decades ago, before he got into politics, Al Franken went on the David Letterman show and announced that he was “a lesbian in a man’s body.” At the time, this was a joke.

    Today, as in J.K. Rowling’s post, there are people with penises who identify, not just as women, but as lesbians and say that “other” lesbians are “transphobic” if they will not date them. Demanding that other people have sex with you is considered sexual harassment when men do it.

    1. I definitely contributed at least one stegasaur to Darren Naish’s new collection, after a talk Matthew gave at the RI many years ago.

    1. I also requested angel food cake on the few birthdays I spent with my family.
      Coates is a most unpleasant man. I read his first book and have never forgotten his description of a white boy on a tricycle “commandeering” the sidewalk as he and his family stepped aside. Funny to hear him use the exact same word about the interviewer who had the temerity to ask him a fair question. I heard him (on a radio interview) take issue with the Arab/Israeli conflict being called “complicated” when, to him, it was simple. He is a simple whiner.

  7. On 18th September, PZ Meyers had yet another moaning article about the “New Atheists”, this time, citing crazed online stalker and promotor of genocidal antisemites – Eiynah (NiceMangos). The article praises “the anti-racist Ta-Nehisi Coates”.

    Less than one month later, and Coates is talking about how he would probably be murdering Jews if he was given the chance.

    Yet another indicator of how the peeps at Pharyngula and FreeThoughtBlogs really do know how to pick ’em!

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