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.
When I wrote yesterday about my critique of Kat Grant’s “What is a woman?” piece, a critique published on the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s (FFRF) website, I had no idea that what I wrote was being removed by the FFRF at that moment! I’m not going into a long exegesis here, as I’ll have more to say about this affair elsewhere. But here are the relevant links:
“What is a woman?“: The original FFRF post on Freethought Today! by Kat Grant, an intern with the FFRF. (Article is archived here.)
“Biology is not bigotry“: My response to Grant’s piece on Freethought Today!. The link is an archived one because the original post is gone. You can also find it archived here. Also, because a reader suggested that archived pieces could be removed, I’ve added a transcript of my final published piece below the fold of this article.
When some readers pointed out yesterday that “Biology is not bigotry” was no longer online, I had no idea what happened, and assumed they had relocated the post. I was unable to believe that they would actually remove my post, especially because FFRF co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor had given me permission to write it and approved the final published version.
I emailed Annie Laurie inquiring what had happened to my piece. I never got a response—or rather, they didn’t have the human decency to write me back personally. They still have not done so, and now they shouldn’t bother. Instead, they sent out the following notice to all FFRF members (it’s also archived here):
Note first that when they refer to my piece, they mention neither who wrote the piece or what it was about. If I’m to be cancelled for what I wrote, dammit, I want my NAME and TOPIC mentioned!
Several things are clear, including a point I’ve made before: the FFRF has a remarkable ability to place any kind of antiwoke ideology under the rubric of “Christian nationalism.” That’s why I wrote in my now-expunged piece, “As a liberal atheist, I am about as far from Christian nationalism as one can get!” And of course I support LGBTQIA+ rights, save in those few cases where those rights conflict with the rights of other groups, as in sports participation. I doubt that even the FFRF would think that women should be boxing, professionally or in the Olympics, against men or biological men who identify as women. So in terms of “LGBTQIA-plus rights,” I’m pretty much on the same plane as the FFRF, even though they imply I’m not.
But it’s the last six paragraphs of the FFRF’s post where they explain why they took down my piece. It is because it caused “distress” and “did not reflect [the FFRF’s] values or principles.” I’m not sure what values or principles my piece failed to reflect. Does the FFRF think that sex is really a spectrum, that there are more than two sexes in humans, or that the most useful definition of biological sex doesn’t involve gamete size? I don’t know, nor do they say.
As for my words causing “distress,” well, I’m sorry if people feel distress when I explicate the biological definition of sex or estimate how few people fail to adhere to the sex binary. But this is all material not for censorship but for back-and-forth discussion, especially on a site called “Freethought Now!” (Should it be called “Freeethought Not!” instead?)
And that is what disappoints me most: not just the “mission creep” instantiated by the FFRF’s incursion into partisan politics or dubious ideology, but the fact that they will not allow free and civil discussion about an article that they published, an article that concludes by saying, “A woman is whoever she says she is.” If that is not a statement ripe for discussion, then what is? It is only fear that would make an organization take down a rational discussion of such a contentious statement. I don’t know what the FFRF is afraid of, but I am just a biologist defending my turf, and am not by any means bent on hurting LGBTAIA+ people.
I’m distressed that it’s come to this, as I’ve always been a big supporter of the FFRF and its historical mission, which is, I suppose, why they made me an honorary director and gave me the Emperor Has No Clothes Award. And I will always support their activities that genuinely try to keep church and state separate. But when they start censoring my words because, though biologically justifiable, they are ideologically unpalatable, that is just too much. All I can say now is that this is not the end of this kerfuffle, and that I stand by what I wrote before.
How sad it is that one of the nation’s premier organizations promoting “freethought” won’t permit that kind of thought on their website, but instead quashes what they see as “wrongthink.”
Click “continue reading” to see a transcript my original published piece.
I didn’t think Mossad admitted its involvement in “Beepergate“: the dissemination among Hezbollah of pagers and walkie-talkies that exploded on a signal last September. It was key in demoralizing Hezbollah as well as eroding its power, and was cleverly targeted to avoid collateral damage. Apparently now we know that Mossad did this, since two ex-Mossad agents admitted it, and their story was shown on “60 Minutes” this week. It’s also recounted in the Times of Israel.
Here’s the 60 Minutes episode. What’s new: the walkie-talkies were disseminated ten years ago, but weren’t triggered until a few months ago. Since walkie-talkies are used only in battle, Mossad began to weaponize pagers as well. A series of shell companies in Taiwan and Hungary were set up to sell the devices to Hezbollah (they had exploding batteries) while completely masking Israel’s involvement.Multiple tests were done by Mossad to ensure that only the carrier of the pager (a Hezbollah fighter) would be injured. A big internet campaign was mounted to tout the advantages of the exploding beepers, which were larger and thus more cumbersome than conventional beepers.
To get the pagers only into the hands of Hezbollah, Mossad hired the woman who usually sold pagers to the terrorists. In toto, 30 Lebanese died and 3,000 were injured, almost all of them fighters. Yes, a few civilians were hurt, including children. But the vast majority of those injured were terrorists. All in all, the targeted episode was quite successful. It didn’t single-handedly bring about the cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel, but Hezbollah and its controlling state, Iran, have been set back on their heels.
The Toi article pretty much replicates what’s in the video, but I’ll emphasize one bit:
the psychological effect the attack had on Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was a “tipping point of the war,” Gabriel said.
He asserted that the veteran Hezbollah leader saw pagers exploding and injuring people who were right next to him in his bunker. Asked how he knows that, Gabriel said, “It’s a strong rumor.”
Two days after the attack, Nasrallah gave a speech.
People watch the speech of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as they sit in a cafe in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
“If you look at his eyes, he was defeated,” Gabriel said. “He already lose the war. And his soldier look at him during that speech. And they saw a broken leader.”
In the days after the attack, Israel’s air force hit targets across Lebanon, killing thousands. Nasrallah was assassinated when Israel dropped bombs on his bunker.
By November, the war between Israel and Hezbollah, a byproduct of the deadly attack by Hamas-led terrorists in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, ended with a ceasefire.
Even given all the precautions, Leslie Stahl has the moxie to ask one of the ex Mossad agents whether this episode might make Israel worry about its “moral reputation.” Some question!
It’s another slow day as the year creeps snailwise to its end, and I’m feeling dolorous and had another bad bout of insomnia last night. The good news is that there’s nothing intellectual afoot that I feel compelled to write about. The other good news is that you get to take a QUIZ, one pointed out in the NYT but located another site that’s free. Here’s what the NYT says (archived here):
Now, from IDR Labs, comes the social media-friendly Food Social Class Test, a casual online survey based on a data-driven academic report published in 2020 by Silvia Bellezza and Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania. That work was broadly derived from research into the connections between social class and the things we choose to put in our mouths — a link explored in the early 1980s by the French academic and intellectual Pierre Bourdieu.
Mr. Bourdieu’s work sharply skewered myths of social mobility in a postindustrial society. He found, unsurprisingly, that in many ways those at the top of the capitalist food chain go to considerable lengths to safeguard and maintain social privilege and generational wealth.
Which brings us to the twice-baked potato topped with melted Cheddar and bacon bits: Reader, I took the test.
In it, each of the 35 menu options is offered as a silhouetted photo with a bar beneath it for rating a selection. Users are encouraged to rate such things as a Cheddar-topped baked potato by indicating the degree to which they “agree” or “disagree” with it. Though there are plenty of things with which this reporter quibbles on a daily basis, seldom has a baked potato provoked him to argument.
. . .Simply select menu items with caloric values in the low triple digits and you are quickly aligned with high-class culinary ways. If it is true that you can never be too rich or too thin, as the Duchess of Windsor is believed to have remarked, it goes without saying that you cannot achieve the latter benchmark by scarfing down Sloppy Joes. We live, after all, in an Ozempic era.
So never mind the fried fish sticks, the potato chips, the defrosted pizza, the chicken nuggets, or the hot dog with all the trimmings. Forget the Mac ’n Cheese or even the Truffle Mac ’n Cheese, presumably featured on the survey as a snob trap. Adding two small discs of fragrant fungus to a dish that is otherwise a gloppy, glutinous cholesterol nightmare does not significantly elevate it on the class scale.
That seems rather snobbish to me; I just like food that tastes good, and that’s how I rated them.
Here’s the site and the first example. Click on the “Food Test” icon below to take the quiz (and you know you will!):
One example: here’s the first of 35 items I chose. You have five choices for each item: really bad, bad, so-so (leave it in the middle), tasty, and REALLY tasty. Just move the cursor to one of the four spaces or leave it in the middle:
And here’s my result: I have “upper middle class” food choices. I don’t know what to think about that (I added the arrow).
In truth, I liked nearly everything, but somethings more than others (I wasn’t keen on the truffle mac ‘n’ cheese, which is like putting a pig in a fur coat, or on the tuna tartare tacos, a bad concept). Take it yourself and let us know how you did in the comments below. I wonder if anybody will come out “lower class”. I urge readers to take the test because I want to know how people do!
Kongen af Danmark (“King of Denmark”) are Danish candies containing anise, sugar and beetroot juice. They were originally invented to persuade the king of Denmark to take the medicine he had been prescribed, as he did not like the anise’s strong flavour.
I guess the medicine was anise rather than beet juice. If you’re a Dane and have tried this, let us know how they are.
Orf3us, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s also National Emo Day (do they still exist?) and not much else.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 19 Wikipedia page..
Da Nooz:
*Speaking of books, as we did yesterday, the NYT lists “62 books ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ guests recommended this year” (archived here), and of course good-book lists are like catnip to me. These are the six I’ve read. Most recommendations are nonfiction and, to be sure, they don’t turn me on. Of the ones below, I was least keen on “In Praise of Shadows” and “Rosalind Franklin”. I found the former dull, and as for the latter, an engaging biography of Franklin has yet to be written, as I found Maddox’s prose somewhat leaden.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, recommended by Dario Amodei
In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki, recommended by Kyle Chayka
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, recommended by Salman Rushdie
Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox, recommended by Ari Shavit
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, recommended by Jon Stewart
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, recommended by Gia Tolentino
As usual, Rushdie gets it right on the money, and had I read Rushdie “Midnight’s Children” this year, I would have recommended that, as it’s an all-time classic, the Booker of Bookers.
*Over at his Substack, site Yascha Mounk writes “Dear Journalists: Stop trying to save democracy” (subtitle: “Journalists who turn themselves into political activists inadvertently undermine democratic institutions”), arguing that the job of journalists is not social reform, but simply to report the news. It’s an old message, but one worth repeating. An excerpt (h/t Peter):
All of that [journalistic neutrality] went out of the window when Donald Trump first entered politics. Political scientists like myself were sounding the alarm that authoritarian populists may represent a genuine danger to democracy. Other commentators were going even further, claiming that Trump should be understood, simply, as a fascist. Faced with what they regarded as a genuine emergency, many younger and more progressive journalists came to believe that they needed to revolutionize their profession’s traditional conception of its mission. Rather than eschewing the spirit of party, they now openly advocated for taking the side of the angels. And far from striving for objectivity, they resolved to offer their readers “moral clarity.” The Washington Post was merely formalizing the emerging consensus when, in February 2017, it adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
The new self-conception adopted by a large share of American journalists was at once less demanding and more self-aggrandizing than the one it replaced. It was less demanding because it provided them with the perfect excuse for indulging in their own biases: giving favor to your own side was recast from being a failure of professional ethics to being a brave act of resistance. Simultaneously, it was more self-aggrandizing because it seemingly transformed journalists from humdrum stenographers of the first draft of history to key actors in a grand historical battle for the preservation of democracy.
I have some sympathy for this new self-conception. Democracy really is embattled around the world. And as citizens, we really do have a civic obligation to do what we can to shore up principles like free speech and the rule of law. Democracies need citizens to be engaged—and if some citizens need to adopt an inflated sense of their likely efficacy to keep them going, then let them enjoy their delusion.
But while all of us, including journalists, may have a civic obligation to fight for the preservation of our political system in our role as citizens, it is a category mistake to assume that journalists should place that aspiration at the center of their professional identity. Democracies depend on having a few widely trusted news outlets that can objectively inform the public about current affairs. The trust which citizens have traditionally placed in these outlets was premised on a belief that their journalists are at least striving to present events in an even-handed manner. The moment they recognize that this is no longer the case, that trust is shattered—and any hope of building political life on a basis of shared facts vanishes.
In light of the last four years, I’d go one step further. The aspiration of many journalists to save democracy has not just proven counterproductive because it drove a big part of their readership away from mainstream outlets. It has also deprived Democrats of key facts they would have needed to make good strategic decisions—which, ironically, has helped to strengthen the very political forces that the journalists who were self-consciously striving to preserve democracy were trying to contain.
One example Mounk uses is the media’s criticisms of Kamala Harris–up to the point when Biden anointed her as his successor, whereupon the media fell in line proclaiming what a great candidate she was (how could people fall for that bunk?) Mounk adds:
In retrospect, the cost of these lies layered upon delusions is painfully clear. If the Harris campaign had reckoned with the fact that she was not on the way to winning the election, they could have taken some rhetorical risks and encouraged her to appear on a much wider range of shows and podcasts. Instead, lulled into a false sense of complacency, they played it “safe.”
The irony is palpable. At each step, the mainstream media was careful not to emphasize facts which might make it harder for Democrats to beat Trump. But at each step, this created a bubble of “elite misinformation” that made it impossible for Democrats to make the hard strategic choices they needed to win the election. The cognitive costs of partisanship in the media are high—in this case, arguably sufficiently high to have gotten Trump reelected.
*The House Ethics Commitee report on the investigation of Matt Gaetz is now going to be released. Gaetz, nominated by Trump to be Attorney General, withdrew when the weight of opprobrium became too great (see the charges below), and then resigned his House seat, which he’s not going to try to keep. Instead, he’s becoming an anchor on a conservative news channel (not Fox):
The House Ethics Committee secretly voted this month to release an investigative report into the conduct of former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
The panel’s vote, which was reported earlier by CNN, paved the way for the release of the report after House members cast the final votes of the Congress this week and have left Washington to return to their districts, two of the people said.
The haggling on Capitol Hill over the report intensified after President-elect Donald J. Trump announced last month that he had chosen Mr. Gaetz to lead the Justice Department, prompting anger and concern among members of both parties on Capitol Hill who were aware of serious allegations against him.
Since the spring of 2021, the Ethics Committee had been investigating Mr. Gaetz over an array of accusations, including that he engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use and accepted gifts that violated House rules.
Mr. Gaetz has denied the charges.
On Wednesday, he decried the news of the report’s impending release and noted that he had already been investigated by the Justice Department, which brought no charges against him.
“The Biden/Garland DOJ spent years reviewing allegations that I committed various crimes. I was charged with nothing: FULLY EXONERATED,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on the social media site X.
The Justice Department made the decision not to prosecute Mr. Gaetz after investigators concluded they could not make a strong enough case against him in court, in part because of a concern that some potential witnesses might not have stood up well under cross-examination, according to people familiar with the case who spoke about it at the time on the condition of anonymity.
In his post on Wednesday, Mr. Gaetz denied some of the central allegations against him, including that he had paid an underage girl for sex and solicited prostitutes, dismissing them as a distortion of youthful indiscretions.
*I’ve been disappointed with my Bluesky experience: it’s too “progressive” and too “nice” for my tastes, and it’s hard to find something amusing that is not too anodyne to reproduce here. Jesse Singal, however, found hatred when he started posting on that site, hatred documented in a new Free Press piece, “Jesse Singal: Bluesky has a death threat problem.” (The subtitle is “It was supposed to be a gentler, left-wing alternative to X. My grim experience proves that just isn’t the case.”)
Recently, like a lot of journalists, I joined Bluesky, a social media platform that is enjoying a burst of postelection growth and positive press attention. It’s been lauded as a “kinder, gentler”—and, perhaps most importantly, more left-wing—alternative to X, which is increasingly seen as infested with what a Bluesky user might call “MAGA chuds.”
While I thought some of the critiques of X were overstated, over the last six months or so I’ve increasingly soured on it. It felt like an ever more hostile, hateful place, the technology seemed more broken every day, and I am not a fan of owner Elon Musk’s recent conspiracy theorizing and all-in support for Donald Trump. It seemed like time to scope out a potential alternative.
This was a mistake.
On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.
There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.
But given what I’ve learned about Bluesky’s “moderation” over the last week, I feel compelled to inform the site’s users—and potential users—about its staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing.
The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and TheEconomist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”
Here’s one example of an exchange—before Singal even joined the site!
And a thread after he joined (Singal’s complaints yielded no action by moderators. I thought the place was supposed to be free of this stuff.):
Singal documents a lot of that hatred, which is real. The thing is, the hatred on Bluesky comes from progressives or those on the far left, and that’s okay there. On Twitter, the hatred came from all sides, and that’s the way I prefer it. One thing is for sure, Singal doesn’t deserve this opprobrium, and though it’s free speech, it reflects my own experience that Bluesky is a place where you demonstrate your virtue (hatred against those who violate progressive dogma is still virtue) or show pictures of cats. To me, that’s what Facebook is for!
*I guess I was naive, but I thought that Freedom of Information requests were free. I should have realized that somebody has to pay for going through the documents to find requested ones. This amount, however, as reported by the Free Press, is absurd:
Elizabeth Clair, the mother of a seventh grader in suburban Detroit, wanted to find out whether her local school district had mended its ways after it lost a lawsuit for improperly tracking disgruntled parents. Instead, she’s the one who learned a lesson: Prying information out of local governments can be very expensive—and state transparency laws don’t always help.
Back in 2022, the Rochester Community School District settled a lawsuit for nearly $200,000 with another mom who accused the district of keeping a “dossier” on parents critical of Covid lockdowns. Clair said she wanted to know what the district was doing to stem future retaliation against parents. So she filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for six months’ worth of emails containing the word anti-retaliation.
A few weeks later, she heard back from the district’s FOIA coordinator: Her request had been granted. All she had to do was pay $33,103,232.56. That’s right. More than $33 million.
The district explained that it would take an employee 717,000 hours at a rate of over $46 per hour to review the 21,514,288 emails related to her request.
“It’s just absurd,” Clair, a financial analyst for a local automotive company, told The Free Press. “For one person making, like, $83,000 a year, it would take them, like, 400 years to fulfill that FOIA request.”
. . . . “As taxpayers in the community, as parents who send our kids and entrust our children to these institutions every day, I think everything should be transparent,” Clair said. “I fail to understand why this district puts up such a fight against us.”
“It just leads me to think,” she continued, “what are they hiding?”
Remind me never to file a FOIA request.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Gaia Weiss, who is the daughter of Andrzej’s niece, paid a surprise visit to Dobrzyn and paid her due to the Princess. Gaia is a French actress and starred in, among other things, Vikings.
From Masih. Read this poor guy’s tortuous road to capital punishment. In the end, he was just “a member of an opposition party”:
The regime in Iran wants to execute him.
Security forces have informed the parents of #Saman_Mohammadi_Khiare that they can visit their son for the last time today, Tuesday, December 18, 2024, in Ghezel Hesar prison. Saman has also been told he is allowed a phone call before his… https://t.co/yI86d2eDQ5
God, no. I won’t even let my eldest daughter (who’s a tech genius) sort out my phone, the sight of which drives her completely mad, though I’m not sure why – maybe because I never update any apps. Or it could be the 13,000 unanswered emails. https://t.co/QRykDBOXq6
Happy Tuesday; it’s December 10, 2024, and Coynezaa is just around the corner. There’s another holiday, too, but it celebrates a myth, whereas I am real.
It has been a hectic three days, but also fun: giving two talks (I fell off the stage during the first one), touring around Katowice, and eating large quantities of hearty Silesian food. I have a gazillion photos, but, as I’m cooling my heels in the airport in Frankfurt, I have no time to post them—save one. And that is the picture below, showing yours truly eating a classic German comestible in the airport.
If I look a wreck, I am. My plane left Katowice for Frankfurt at 6 a.m., which meant boarding at 5:30, which meant getting up at 2:00 a.m. and leaving my hotel, some distance from the planes, at 3 a.m.
I went to bed at 9, hoping for five hours of sleep, but woke up at 12:15, soon after midnight, and what with the excitement of impending travel it was clear that I wasn’t going back to sleep. So I watched CNN instead (the only English t.v. channel) to discover, via Anderson Cooper, that the police had actually caught the man accused of shooting health executive Brian Thompson. When the law caught up to him, the suspect, one Luigi Mangioni of New Jersey, was chowing down at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. And it doesn’t look good for him:
The Altoona officers who took Mr. Mangione into custody found that he had several telltale items that might tie him to Mr. Thompson’s killing, a crime that has riveted the nation while exposing Americans’ deep-seated anger toward the U.S. health insurance industry.
Mr. Mangione, officials said, had a gun and a silencer similar to the ones used in the Dec. 4 shooting, and a fake driver’s license that matched one used by the man suspected in the killing.
He also carried with him a three-page handwritten manifesto condemning the health care industry for putting profits over patients.
“These parasites had it coming,” it said, according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document. It added: “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
The document specifically mentioned UnitedHealthcare, the insurance giant where Mr. Thompson was chief executive, noting its size and the amount of revenue it takes in, the official said.
Yes, he’s presumed innocent until found guilty, but I’m here to tell you that the probability of any other verdict seems nil. He’s 26 and will surely, if convicted, spend the rest of his natural life behind bars.
Read more about the pinch at the archived link here. It was a nifty bit of police work, made easier by Mangione pulling his mask down just one time, when he was flirting with a woman at a hostel. But once was enough: look at the hostel picture and compare it to the many circulating pictures of Mangione. I’m glad he’s caught, for nobody deserves vigilante execution, which is capital punishment without a trial. In fact, I don’t believe anybody deserves execution at all. Life without parole is more than enough, and remember that some people can reform.
But they’re very sad about the arrest over at P********a, where the fulminating miscreants are not only delighted, but have been egged on in their hatred by the Chief Miscreant himself, who urges his baying hounds before pulling the trigger to first find out who heads healthcare corporations that deny claims. Then, as the capo says, “After you’ve followed the chain of decisions, then you can consider terminating some rich a-hole. It’s the polite thing to do.”
Indeed, nothing makes you look better to “progressives” than urging your readers to murder rich people, preferably CEOs of healthcare corporations.
In other news, where is Bashar al-Assad? Is he dead, as some suspect? Or has he fled to his pals in Russia?
Paul Krugman has written his last column for the NYT, and, over in France, the right-wing Marine Le Pen is plotting to topple the French government and replace it with one far more to the right. Sound familiar?
There are reports of continuing peace talks between Israel and Hamas, but I don’t think they’ll amount to much. If they result in releasing thousands of convicted Palestinian terrorists from jail, while not letting all the hostages go—indeed, if a settlement leaves anything of Hamas to govern Gaza, Israel will have lost.
And that’s the nooz till I get home and take a day to recover.
The measure failed miserably on the Senate floor, with none of its three provisions garnering more than 19 votes. But of course I wrote to Senator Durbin, expressing my dissatisfaction as a constituent, and chastising him for giving succor to Israel’s enemies and impeding the self-defense of Jewish state in its attempt to root out Hamas.
Yesterday I got this weaselly response from Durbin:
December 4, 2024
MY ADDRESS REDACTED
Dear Dr. Coyne:
Thank you for contacting me about measures to block weapons shipments to Israel. I appreciate hearing from you.
On September 25, 2024, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced six measures that would block a proposed $20 billion in arms sales to Israel. These sales include joint direct attack munitions and launchers, mortar and tank cartridges, F-15s, and other defense articles. Under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (P.L. 87-195) and the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 (P.L. 94-329), the president must notify Congress of a pending arms sale. These statutes also give Congress the authority to suspend such a sale by passing a joint resolution of disapproval through both the House of Representatives and the Senate. All six of these measures were referred to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
On November 20, 2024, the Senate considered whether to discharge three of Senator Sanders’ joint resolutions of disapproval, S.J. Res. 111, S.J. Res. 113, and S.J. Res. 115, from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. While I voted in favor of discharging these three measures from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, all three of these measures were rejected by the Senate. S.J. Res. 111 was rejected by a vote of 18-79, S.J. Res. 113 was rejected by a vote of 19-78, and S.J. Res. 115 was rejected by a vote of 17-80.
My reason for supporting these measures is straightforward. More than 43,000 Palestinians have died in the conflict in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and 60 percent of them have been women, children, and elderly. The denial of humanitarian aid to Gaza threatens the lives of so many more.
I believe that Israel has not only the right to exist, but the right to defend itself in the face of threats such as from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. I consistently have voted for security assistance to Israel throughout my career to protect it from these threats. But this war must end. I will stand by Israel, but I will not support the devastation of Gaza and the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians.
For too long, this protracted conflict has inflicted untold suffering on innocent Israelis and Palestinians alike. I hope out of the ashes and pain of this current crisis that there can be a renewed focus on a two-state solution.
Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to keep in touch.
Sincerely,
Richard J. Durbin
United States Senator
I sent this response to Malgorzata, and when I woke up this morning she had written a response, one that I reproduce here with permission. Durbin is apparently as dumb and uninformed about the Gaza conflict as many Americans.
Malgorzata’s response is indented.
Durbin’s figures are taken directly from Hamas, figures that have been debunked many times.
Hamas doesn’t count combatants and civilians separately. In this fictitious number of dead are the non-existent 500 people allegedly killed in a strike on the hospital Al-Ahli. As was discovered and confirmed by independent authorities (and admitted by the real perpetrator: Palestinian Islamic Jihad), it was a misfired PIJ rocket that fell short, creating the strike. Instead of killing Israeli civilians, the rocket fell on the hospital’s parking lot (NOT THE HOSPITAL). It killed several people, but far less than 100—not to mention 500.
How many other Palestinian civilians killed by rockets from PIJ and Hamas rockets have been counted by Hamas’s Ministry of Health as having been killed by Israel? After previous wars between Gaza and Israel, when there was really time to count the dead and ascertain their identities, it always turned out that Hamas had counted everybody (including combatants killed in war as well as people who died in Gaza of natural causes) in their earlier communicates about people “killed by Israel”.
The percentages of women, children, and elderly given by Durbin (and Hamas) are also false. According to the IDF, up to 19,000 Hamas combatants were killed. Moreover, both Hamas and PIJ use teenagers as fighters. Everybody killed when he/she is under 18 is counted as a child. A 17-year-old fighter killed when shooting a rocket at Israelis is counted as a child. Even if you accept the false numbers given by Hamas, the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths is the lowest ever achieved in urban warfare by any army.
Further, not one person in Gaza would have been killed by the IDF if Hamas and PIJ didn’t invade Israel on October 7, 2023, didn’t kill, rape, torture, and burn 1200 Israeli women, men, children and the elderly, and didn’t take 252 hostages, including women, children and the elderly. There are still 101 hostages somewhere in the dungeons of Hamas, among them baby Kfir (9 months old at the moment of kidnapping) and his older brother Ariel (4 years at the moment of kidnapping).
From Jerry. I would add this. Besides credulously adopting Hamas’s misleading figures that count dead combatants as “innocent Palestinians”, Durbin implicitly calls for a cease-fire and explicitly for a “two-state solution,” something that, if implemented now, would be a disaster for Israel.
We already know that the ratio of civilians killed to combatants killed is far lower than seen in other conflicts in which the U.S. has engaged, including World War II and the more recent battles in the Middle East. Durbin of course ignores that, just as he ignores what happened on October 7 of last year. In his attempt to look evenhanded, Durbin has proven himself a useful asset for Hamas. And I will communicate this to the misguided Senator.
UPDATE: I thin this issue is fixed now. Let me know if you encounter any further problems.
Some readers, including me, have reporting getting a “time out” message, a 429 saying “too many requests made in a short period of time.” If you can’t access the site or leave a comment because of this, try again immediately, or wait a bit.
I have asked y tech person to look into this; it doesn’t really seem to be based on time.
