Monday: Hili dialogue

November 4, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to to the first Monday in November: to be exact, Monday, November 4, 2024, and National Candy Day. Here’s the way they make one of my favorite candy bars—Milky Ways:

It’s also National Chicken Lady Day (honoring Dr. Marthenia “Tina” Dupree), King Tut Day (his tomb was discovered on this day in 1922), and National Skeptics Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The WSJ pinpoints a key group, they say, that may swing the upcoming election–only two days away! It’s young men.

Donald Trump is pinning his political future on winning the votes of disaffected young men. But persuading them to get off the couch to cast ballots is no easy feat.

Young men vote at far lower rates than many other demographic groups. They are more likely than older generations and their female peers to be disconnected from politics, and they are increasingly disillusioned with the country’s institutions, according to researchers and election analysts.

Youth voting increased in the 2020 presidential election, but it paled compared with the share of older voters who showed up at the polls. In 2020, 18- to 24-year-olds were the least likely age group to vote, with just over half of that cohort voting that year, according to U.S. Census Bureau surveys. In that age group, fewer men than women said they voted in 2020. In contrast, about three-quarters of Americans ages 65 to 74 reported voting in 2020.

“I’ve had to ask a couple of my friends to come out and vote,” said Joompit Nakhapakorn, 23, a consultant in Milwaukee who attended Trump’s rally there on Friday evening. “They’re like, ‘Do I have to vote? Is it a good use of my time?’ ”

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has taken pains to appeal to young men, from showing up at a sneaker convention in Philadelphia and an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in New Jersey, to appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast. On Thursday, he received the endorsement of the social-media influencer and boxer Jake Paul, who has 20 million subscribers on YouTube. The strategy could help offset Kamala Harris’s big advantage with female voters—but risks widening that gap should Trump’s macho rhetoric and crude comments alienate women.

. . .In interviews with dozens of young men around the country in recent months, some said they don’t see a place for themselves in today’s Democratic Party. Others said they are drawn to Trump’s politically incorrect approach. Many said they were focused foremost on their finances—with several arguing that Trump would do more to benefit their stock portfolios. Others said they appreciated the former president’s pledge to crack down on illegal immigration.

Luke Meihack, 25, a high school physical education teacher in the Milwaukee suburbs, said he didn’t used to be a Trump supporter, but changed his mind during Joe Biden’s presidency, and said many men his age are moving in the same direction.

“It’s mostly guys. Guys are more big into Trump,” he said. “He’s a guy that speaks in a way that demands respect, and that appeals to a lot of guys.”

Well, I agree with one or two of the young men’s concerns, especially immigration and the cost of living, but by and large this doesn’t speak well for those of us having small, mobile gametes.  And if young men don’t vote as often as other groups, then their approbation of Trump shouldn’t worry Kamala Harris.

*If you wonder whether Harvard President Claudine Gay should have been fired, read this report from the NYT about Harvard’s response to the Hamas attack.  Apparently Harvard didn’t know what to do! (Article is archived here.)

Two days after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel last year, senior administrators at Harvard University wrestled with how to respond. Drafting a public statement, they edited out the word “violent” to describe the attack, when a dean complained that it “sounded like assigning blame.”

They debated whether to explicitly disown a declaration by some Harvard student groups that Israel was responsible for the violence, but ultimately decided not to.

The internal debate among Harvard leaders including Claudine Gay, then the school’s president, played out furiously in emails and text messages that were released in a report on Thursday by the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The report, part of a nearly yearlong inquiry by House Republicans investigating antisemitism on university campuses, offers a rare window into the discussions at multiple universities and how difficult judgment calls made by a small handful of people were scrutinized around the world.

The committee report accuses the schools’ leadership of permitting rampant antisemitism as pro-Palestinian students organized demonstrations at campuses across the country.

What is clear is that administrators struggled to find consensus on delicate moral judgments — like whether certain behavior constituted antisemitism — and how to take a stand on portentous affairs dividing the world.

Often, they seemed lost.

. . .The Republican staff report releases 400,000 pages of documents from Harvard, Penn, M.I.T., Yale, Columbia, Barnard, Rutgers, Northwestern, George Washington, Berkeley and UCLA (the documents from Harvard and Columbia were obtained in part through subpoenas). It argues that the schools may have violated civil rights law that requires universities receiving federal funds to address a hostile environment against Jews.

“How could you be somebody with a job at a university and not recognize antisemitism and move to do something about it?” Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and the chairwoman of the House committee, said in an interview on Thursday. “It is not complicated, and it wasn’t complicated on these campuses.”

It would have been easy if Harvard and other schools were institutionally neutral, in which case they didn’t have to say anything (the University of Chicago didn’t). As for allowing an anti-Semitic atmosphere to impede learning on campus, that’s a different issue entirely, and one admittedly hard to handle, even though cases of individual harassment and discrimination are not that hard to adjudicate. But right after October 7 this was not a problem. If Harvard abided by the Kalven Principle, they could simply be quiet. Instead, Claudine Gay had to issue three separate statements, each one clarifying her previous statement.

*As if the BBC weren’t biased enough against Israel in its reportage, now, according to The Independent, over 100 of its staffers have petitioned the BBC demanding that it is biased against Palestinians and will have to become more slanted towards Palestine.

More than 100 BBC employees are accusing the corporation of providing favourable coverage toward Israel and are calling on the broadcaster to “recommit to fairness, accuracy, and impartiality” over its reporting on Gaza.

In a letter sent to Tim Davie, signed by more than 230 members of the media industry, including 101 anonymous BBC staff, the corporation is criticised for failing its own editorial standards by lacking “consistently fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza”.

Seen exclusively by The Independent, the letter, which has also been signed by Sayeeda Warsi and the actor Juliet Stevenson, calls on the BBC to report “without fear or favour” and to “recommit to the highest editorial standards – with emphasis on fairness, accuracy, and due impartiality”.

The letter also calls on the broadcaster to implement a series of editorial commitments including “reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza; making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims; making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines; including regular historical context predating October 2023; and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews”.

The BBC has denied these claims, insisting it “strives to live up to our responsibility to deliver the most trusted and impartial news”.

. . . Other signatories on the list include the historian William Dalrymple, Dr Catherine Happer, a senior lecturer in sociology and director of media at the University of Glasgow, Rizwana Hamid, the director at the Centre for Media Monitoring, and the broadcaster John Nicolson.

I’m surprised at this given the number of times that both I and others have accused the BBC of palpably slanting the news against Israel (see here, as well as the report on the Torygraph analysis here), But, as we found out from The Nation‘s interns damning the magazine for endorsing Harris (she was too pro-Israel, they said), you can’t be sufficiently anti-Israel to satisfy some people.  Below is a 3.5-minute video featuring Tom Gross, who’s pro-Israel, discussing this latest BBC kerfuffle (thius bit starts at 1:15):

*Again from the WSJ, we have a piece on why grocery prices seem so high. In fact, they don’t just seem high: they ARE high. How did that happen? It is, you know, one of the things voters are concerned about (along with the cost of housing). Their article, “The mysterious fees inflating your grocery bill,” suggests some answers:

The price of a bag of coconut-cashew granola at Whole Foods jumped last year from $5.99 to $6.69. Why that happened defies simple explanation.

The granola maker, Wildway Foods, said the cost of making the cereal hasn’t gone up that much, and that it isn’t pocketing more profit. It jacked up the price, it said, in large part to offset fees that piled up from a little-known link in the supply chain: grocery distributors. There were charges for processing grocery promotions, others for potential spoilage and still more related to alleged shipping glitches.

Rising prices, especially in the supermarket, have vexed consumers, drawn scrutiny from regulators and emerged as a central issue in the presidential race. Donald Trump has blamed Kamala Harris and the Biden administration, and Harris has pointed a finger at grocery chains and food companies. 

George Milton, who runs a hot sauce business in Austin, Texas, said consumers are frustrated because it isn’t clear to them why many food prices are so high. “Is that price gouging or costs going up for distributors or retailers or farmers? I have no idea,” he said. “Nobody does.”

That can’t be true. What manufacturers and middlemen charged is a matter of record! But let’s proceed:

Big food companies have increased prices in recent years for everything from cereal to ketchup to potato chips, citing higher costs for ingredients and labor, among other things. Many small manufacturers that have raised their prices have another explanation. They say they also are being squeezed by the distributors who act as gatekeepers to many supermarkets.

Distributors are the middlemen of the grocery business. They buy products from food makers—many of them too small to run their own distribution networks—then store, sell and ship them to supermarkets. A small number of them, including KeHE Distributors, C&S and United Natural Foods, or UNFI, sell to grocery stores nationwide.

. . . . Distributors operate on razor-thin profit margins, with limited ability to offset rising operating costs. Food executives said grocers have enormous power to dictate terms with distributors, and that small food companies can be naive about the costs involved in building a brand and getting it to store shelves.

The situation reflects a struggle for profit throughout the grocery sector. Big food manufacturers that account for the bulk of sales have pushed through hefty price increases and notched some of their biggest profits in years. That is adding pressure on grocery chains to find other ways to keep consumers’ grocery bills from rising too much.

Well, this doesn’t bring us much closer to the truth, except that it’s either the manufacturers or the distributors. Who to blame?

*Finally, from the AP, we have the candidates making their final appeal on Sunday. Did you know that, according to Harris, America has a “divine plan”?  (I think Trump is an atheist, even if he says otherwise):

 Kamala Harris told a Michigan church on Sunday that God offers America a “divine plan strong enough to heal division,” while Donald Trump gave a profane and conspiracy-laden speech in which he mused about reporters being shot and labeled Democrats as “demonic.”

The two major candidates took starkly different tones on the final Sunday of the campaign. Less than 48 hours before Election Day, Harris, the Democratic vice president, argued that Tuesday’s election offers voters the chance to reject “chaos, fear and hate,” while Trump, the Republican former president, repeated lies about voter fraud to try to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote and suggested that the country was falling apart without him in office.

Harris was concentrating her Sunday in Michigan, beginning the day with a few hundred parishioners at Detroit’s Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ. It marked the fourth consecutive Sunday that Harris, who is Baptist, has spoken to a Black congregation, a reflection of how critical Black voters are across multiple battleground states.

“I see faith in action in remarkable ways,” she said in remarks that quoted the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. “I see a nation determined to turn the page on hate and division and chart a new way forward. As I travel, I see Americans from so-called red states and so-called blue states who are ready to bend the arc of history toward justice.”

I favor Harris over Trump, of course, but seriously, I cannot abide this God talk. At least I don’t think that Harris will promote a theocracy in America, which is a real worry with Trump.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is once again pessimistic:

A: What do you see?
Hili: Lame luck.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tam widzisz?
Hili: Kulawe szczęście.

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

From Cat Memes:

From Jesus of the Day:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy (this is clearly a sign for visitors):

From Masih, an impossibly brave Iranian woman, not only sans hijab but stripped to her undies.  Ceiling Cat bless these Iranian women! As the tweet says, she’s since been arrested.

From Simon. I may have posted this before but you can’t see it too many times.

The odious Francesca Albanese, mouthpiece for Hamas who works for the UN, says that Yayha Sinwar was killed “in a way that was quite inhumane.”  For crying out loud, he was with a group of Hamas militants who were firing at the IDF!

Three from my feed from a thread of great photos:

2. Racism is taught , not innate pic.twitter.com/9Ze4M9opTp

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

 

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, one he calls “a good Nazi,” and it’s true!

. . . and this is the reason why Matthew forgot to post Hili the other day:

25 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Two days after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel last year, senior administrators at Harvard University wrestled with how to respond. Drafting a public statement, they edited out the word “violent” to describe the attack, when a dean complained that it “sounded like assigning blame.”

    Maybe, if being violent is blameworthy, that should tell you how to react? The ethical base upon which these people operate is entirely ideological.

  2. I think the most salient point about young men choosing Trump is that the Democrats are pretty hostile to that demographic – especially if they come in the white variety.
    Why should they cast their vote for a group that shows more or less veiled disdain for them? In case of actual violent conflict, their societal stock would actually rise…

    1. An’ it’s “Tommy this!”, and “Tommy that!”, an’ “Kick ‘im out, the brute!”
      But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot.
      — Rudyard Kipling

      (Pedantic note. I didn’t check to see if my orthographic attempts to render Cockney are in the original. I’m just recalling how the poem is recited at our local Remembrance Day service.)

    2. That’s the thing. When “inclusion” seems to mean “include everyone except white males, ’cause fuck them, they’re the problem”, the obvious reaction (ESPECIALLY from young men) is to extend both middle fingers and look for any alternative.

      1. Yes indeed, Mr., Metzler. This has been fairly (maybe not enough) documented in recent years (I think the book is The Boy Crisis)
        The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It Hardcover – March 13, 2018
        by Warren Farrell Ph.D. (Author), John Gray (Author)
        ——————————–
        Society is now deeply feminized, particularly the therapy/psych world. Which has very good advantages and is a huge improvement over earlier eras, but it is a trade-off. I read but can’t confirm two percent of all female workers in the US work in H.R., the vector of woke.

        We seem to have immunity and push back from toxic male behavior but not so much against female coded bad behavior. There being two sexes, differently evolved, female bs is different from male bs and perhaps due to the recency of the “gynocracy” we haven’t developed anti-bodies to this phenon yet.
        Just spitballing here. (I’m safe, my wife doesn’t read WEIT) 😉

        D.A.
        NYC
        (former unpaid lawyer volunteer for the Hillary campaign)
        column: https://themoderatevoice.com/author/david-anderson/

        1. David, when you consider that H.R. exists mostly because there are women doing other things in the labour force who demand exacting sexual protection that men do not, and that one of the main external tasks of H.R. is to document compliance with government human-rights regulations crafted by mostly female civil servants and prosecuted by female lawyers in front of female judges, you can see how that 2% vector leverages itself in a positive feedback loop of feminization (and inflationary waste.) But you’re right that feminization is mostly a good thing. Women in the military can have first dibs on the rear-echelon trades out of the line of fire (else the Services won’t make their numbers), freeing up men to do the jobs where they can get shot and blown to bits*. Women in medicine can do the family-friendly work, leaving the night call and long hours in the neurosurgical operating rooms to the men. Women in both walks of life can still accuse the men of toxic behaviour and expect to be believed, another positive feedback loop.

          The National Lampoon did a parody of the fictitious National Association of School Guidance Counsellors, whose slogan was, “A guidance counsellor for every job. A job for every guidance counsellor.” Prescient.
          ————————
          * The Israeli Defences Force being a shining, heroic, if partial, counter-example.

          1. This must be a US phenomenon. In my country, large companies and government institutions have a HR just to administer the personnel files. Also, there is no division of labor among male and female doctors.

  3. “I think Trump is an atheist, even if he says otherwise.”

    I’ve got to disagree. I’m absolutely certain Trump thinks he IS god.

    2. Kirilov, a character in Dostoyevsky’s Demons, claimed that if God does not exist, then he (Kirilov) is God. I admit I never understood his logic.

  4. The cost of living is up because we had inflation! Higher prices due to excessive spending and supply disruptions. But real wages are also up. People complain about grocery prices but not about their wage increases. Looking at the costs of individual goods to explain inflation is an error we usually try to correct in introductory economics. This is the intelligent design methodology applied to economics.

    Prices are a nominal category, prices relative to wages explains well-being.

  5. I can report that a very large grocery chain I use (Ahold-owned, I believe) made a big promo a few weeks ago about lowering hundreds NO thousands of prices!! It was true, there were lots of products on sale for lower prices. Maybe not $1 lower, but ok.

    They closed a handful of stores the other day.

  6. It’s really sad that at a time where we would need a well-functioning UN, the organization has become utterly morally bankrupt and useless, but I’m not sure if that is just an issue of perception. Can I get some perspective from readers knowledgeable in international politics if it was ever any better? I mean, it’s in the nature of the UN to be divided over the issues that actually divide its member, but for whole suborganizations to be hijacked by terrorist agendas seems… worse than would be excusable.

  7. BBC: another day, another defamatory headline about Israel.
    Francesca Albanese: not helping.

  8. On university administrators – I wonder if PCC(E) regrets not turning his retirement efforts into the university politics game? There’d surely be a seat at that table for him.

    He obviously has some pull there still – his own office, for some reason? – and his word is law at Botany Pond and various duck related issues. As a WEIT reader I’m glad his efforts are devoted to WEIT rather than battling petty social justice issues with beurocrats.
    I don’t know how the “Emeritus” system works though. Just speculating.

    On the Tehran sports bra and panties heroine: she kind of puts into perspective late feminism complaints about The Patriarchy in the US. Or “Trans Genocide.
    “And we could be heroes, just for one day” – David Bowie.
    I hope the media keep on her case and she and her sisters are the ruin of the ayatollahs.

    D.A.
    NYC
    column: https://themoderatevoice.com/author/david-anderson/

  9. This just in: composer and record producer Quincy Jones, who worked with everyone from Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson, died last night.

  10. Franny Albinese. For a terrifying moment I once thought she was the wife of the Aussie PM who has that name. Phew.

    She is an unserious fanatic – a credit to today’s broken and embarrassing UN which itself is a set art piece in institutional disfunction and decay. Sorry for shouting this nearly ever day at WEIT but some once great institutions can decay and become useless and unfit for purpose: Time Magazine, the BBC, Pan Am. The UN. Time and scale alter institutions, not always for the better.

    These western stans (like her) for terrorism should not be listened to at all.

    It demeans us to take the moral claims of these useful idiots and the entire Palestinian cause seriously.
    Don’t be demeaned.

    Onwards Israeli heroes.

    D.A.
    NYC
    column: https://themoderatevoice.com/author/david-anderson/

  11. Guys are more big into Trump,” he said. “He’s a guy that speaks in a way that demands respect …

    Oh, thanks for the laugh!

    Someone on X recently offered a small reward for anyone who could provide a clip of Trump speaking in an informed, measured way on a political topic, so that anyone listening would think “wow — he really knows this stuff.” Last I saw, the reward was unclaimed.

  12. On the Blighty side of the pond, the “BBC being pro-Israel” story has resulted in some giggles. This is the same BBC that struggles to describe Hamas and Hezbollah as “terrorists”.

  14. More from the NYT report:

    Northwestern University’s president, Michael Schill, testified before the committee in the spring. The report said Mr. Schill had appointed as university negotiators “radical” faculty members, who helped advance the protesters’ agenda. One proposed to “quietly find an alternative” to Sabra-brand hummus to placate protesting students. “It’s a very sore spot for Palestinians because it’s an Israeli hummus brand that’s penetrated most college campuses,” he said in a text message.

    The provost responded, “I’m all for making a deal. Bargaining in action!”

    Jon Yates, a spokesman for Northwestern, said the report “focused on events that were fully debated in the committee hearing last spring, and it ignores the hard work our community has put in since then” to create a safer learning environment.

    He said it was “patently false” that Northwestern had “ever seriously considered” boycotting any Israeli company.

    – I don’t believe him.

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