Loose Tabs [Draft File]

This is a safe space for collecting items that may eventually go into a Loose Tabs post.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared ? days ago, on November 24.

I'm trying a experiment here with select bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

Topical Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent thmes of the following section.

Thanksgiving:

  • Jane Borden [11-26]: The Pilgrims were doomsday cultists: "The settlers who arrived in Plymouth were not escaping religious persecution. They left on the Mayflower to establish a theocracy in the Americas."

  • Kali Holloway [11-27]: Make Thanksgiving radical again: "The holiday's real roots lie in abolition, liberation, and anti-racism. Let's reconnect to that legacy."

Major Threads

Israel: Worse than ever, but main news story as been "Trump's Peace Plan," which (without much research yet, I can safely say) doesn't show much understanding of "peace" or "plan," and is probably just a deniable, insincere feint by Netanyahu. Still, it's hard to imagine Israel accepting any measure of peace without strongarming by the US, so hopeful people are tempted to read more into this than is warranted. Many articles scattered below. I'll try to sum them up later.

  • Jonah Valdez [11-25]: Gaza humanitarian foundation calls it quits after thousands die seeking its aid: "The aid group oversaw relief in Gaza during a period defined by the killings of Palestinians seeking food during famine." This is "the U.S. and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation." When I saw this headline, I assumed that the foundation was legit, and the headline reflected some sort of Israeli win against the world's humanitarian impulses. Now it looks like "aid" was really just bait. And sure, not just to kill Palestinians, which Israel was already doing regularly and could have escalated without resorting to such tactics. Rather, the point was to psychologically bind seeking food to the experience of terror. With the ceasefire, the need for aid is undiminished. If aid was GHF's purpose, it would still have much to do. That they're quitting suggests that their real purpose was something else.

    Rather than maintain the existing model of bringing food and supplies to individuals with most need by delivering goods directly to communities, GHF established four distribution sites. The foundation also hired two American logistics and security firms — UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, led by a Green Beret veteran and former CIA officer, respectively — to oversee distribution. The result was the funneling of thousands of desperate people who traveled long distances into aid sites where long lines often devolved into stampedes. Gunfire from Israeli soldiers, or private American contractors, largely former U.S. special forces, was a near-daily reality. While some of those who survived the deadly queues managed to bring home boxes of food, the supplies failed to slow the famine conditions across Gaza which only worsened. The food provided by GHF was widely criticized by nutritional experts and aid groups as inadequate to prevent hunger and difficult to prepare (most items needed water to boil, itself a scarce resource in the territory).

  • Marianne Dhenin [11-27]: International tribunal finds Israel guilty of genocide, ecocide, and the forced starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza: "The International People's Tribunal on Palestine held in Barcelona presented striking evidence of Israel's forced starvation of the Palestinian people and the deliberate destruction of food security in Gaza." The tribunal is sponsored by ILPS (International League of Peoples' Struggle), which of course would find that, not that the evidence can really be interpreted any other way.

  • Mitchell Plitnick [11-27]: Israel is violating ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, and Trump is allowing it: "Israel's goals are clear enough: endless war." The Trump administration's goals, to the extent one can speak of them coherently, were to win a couple immediate news cycles, free the hostages, and set up negotions to make amends to Qatar and sell more arms to Saudia Arabia. Netanyahu, as he has so many times before, chose to bend to America's will rather than risk a break, confident that he will soon enough rebound, because Trump is just another fickle American fool.

    Israel had never heeded the ceasefire to begin with. More than 340 overwhelmingly non-combatant Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire was put in place, and over 15,000 more structures in Gaza have been destroyed, just as flooding, overflowing sewage, rains, and the cold weather of approaching winter start to hit the already battered population.

    In just the past few days, though, Israel has killed more than 60 Palestinians in Gaza, a sign of escalation. It is no coincidence that this uptick comes on the heels of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman's (MBS) visit to Washington where he once again insisted, much to Trump's annoyance, that if Donald Trump wanted to see a normalization deal between his kingdom and Israel, there would need to be a clear, committed path to a Palestinian state with a timeline. Whether MBS was sincere about that or not, Netanyahu has no intention of making even the slightest gesture in that direction, and the escalation in Gaza was, at least in part, his response to that part of the Trump-MBS confab.

  • Qassam Muaddi

  • Huda Skaik [11-28]: Gaza's civil defense forces keep digging for 10,000 missing bodies: "Members of Gaza's Civil Defense force describe pulling decomposing bodies from collapsed buildings, and digging in hopes that someone remains alive."

  • Connor Echols:

  • Craig Mokhiber [12-01]: How the world can ressist the UN Security Council's rogue colonial mandate in Gaza. This offers "several ways that states and individuals worldwide can challenge its illegality." I'm far less concerned about the legal issues, which get an airing here, or even the political ones. The resolution is inadequate, and probably doomed to failure, but do we really want to "block the implementation"? The pre-resolution baseline was genocide. The only path away was to get Israel and the US to agree to stop, which could only happen on terms favorable to those powers, and therefore far short of justice. While a better resolution would ultimately be better for all concerned, the immediate need is to hold Israel and America to the terms they've agreed to — starting with recognition of Israel's violations of the ceasefire, and Israel's continued aggression elsewhere (beyond the scope of the Gaza resolution). Moreover, even if Israel relents and honors the ceasefire, the delivery of aid, etc., Israel still merits BDS due to its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and within the Green Line.

  • Philip Weiss [12-02]: The Israel lobby is melting down before our eyes: "The American Newish community is in open crisis over its support for Israel after two years of genocide in Gaza. A key issue in this crisis is a topic once considered too taboo to criticize the Israel lobby."

  • Ramzy Baroud [12-02]: The US-Israeli scheme to partition Gaza and break Palestinian will: "United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 is destined to fail. That failure will come at a price: more Palestinian deaths, extensive destruction, and the expansion of Israeli violence to the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East."

  • Matt Seriff-Cullick [12-02]: Stop calling right-wing criticism of Israel 'anti-Zionism': "Recent comments by Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have drawn more attention to right-wing critiques of US support for Israel., However, it is a serious mistake for those on the left to see this anti-Israel criticism as 'anti-Zionist.'" Response to pieces like Jeet Heer [11-07]: The return of right-wing anti-Zionism — and antisemitism. While it's generally the case that antisemites support, or at least endorse, Israel — it's local Jews they hate, and Israel offers a convenient option to rid themselves of Jews — while leftist critics of Israel are almost never antisemitic (we see diaspora Jews as our natural allies, and indeed many are among us). The primary motivators here are domestic politics, although the more Israel acts like a fascist state, the more consistent the left-right differences become. The subject here is the small schism of right-wing critics of Israel, who may well be antisemitic, but could just as well be driven by something else: especially the notion that Israel has been dragging the US into wars and/or globalization that impinges on their "America-first" fetishism. In this it helps to distinguish between pro-Israel (which is mostly about military dominance and alliance) and Zionist (which is about Jewish immigration to Israel). Right-wingers can favor Zionism while rejecting the notion that we need to send arms to Israel.

  • Joe Sommerlad [12-03]: Hilary Clinton claims TikTok misinformation is influencing young people's views on the Israel-Palestine conflict: "unreliable media on TikTok, making it difficult to have a 'reasonable discussion' about events in the Middle East." This is pretty short on details, but Clinton's remarks were delivered at "Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom's New York City summit," so her complaint seems to have less to do with "pure propaganda" than with whose "a lot of young Jewish Americans who don't know the history and don't understand" are exposed to.

  • Michael Arria:

Russia/Ukraine:

Trump's War and Peace: We might as well admit that Trump's foreign policy focus has shifted from trade and isolation to war and terror.

  • Vijay Prashad [12-02]: The angry tide of the Latin American far right. I know little about this, but the news, especially from nations that had leaned left of late (like Bolivia and Chile) seems grim. Popular anger against the establishment should favor the left, but periods of ineffective power only seem to revitalize right-wing politicians whose own period of power should have thoroughly discredited them.

  • Elie Mystal [12-03]: Pete Hegseth should be charged with murder: "Nop matter how you look at the strikes on alleged 'drug boats' — as acts of war or attacks on civilians — Hegseth has committed a crime and should be prosecuted."

  • Blaise Malley [12-04]: Trump's USIP [United States Institute of Peace] rebrand wields an olive branch as a weapon: "Trump's name was added to the independent institute after his administration purged staff." It's now the "Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace," in honor of "the greatest dealmaker in our nation's history."

  • Andrew Ancheta [12-04]: Washington's gallery of puppets: "From Venezuela to Iran, the United States can always find ambitious would-be leaders willing to advocate regime change. But they don't have their countries best interests in mind."

Trump Regime: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

Donald Trump (Himself): As for Il Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal peccadillos -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious incidents from more fanciful ones.

Democrats:

Republicans: A late addition, back by popular demand, because it isn't just Trump, we also have to deal with the moral swamp he crawled out of:

  • Roger Sollenberger [12-04]: 'George Santos with a gun': The untold story of Cory Mills, a mercenary in Congress: "The Florida Republican has tried to leverage his legislative role to the benefit of his arms business. With that business now in foreclosure proceedings, Mills has little to show for it."

  • Sarah Jones [12-06]: The right's post-Trump civil war is already underway: "And Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts is betting on the extremists." He's defending Tucker Carlson, who is promoting Nick Fuentes, who is "king of the groypers" — I had to look it up, too; journalistic shorthand, close enough for practical purposes, is "nazis," mostly because Jews feature prominently among the many people they hate. Other right-wingers draw the line just short of gross Judeophobia, especially since they can whitewash their antisemitism by expressing support and admiration for their fellow right-wingers in Israel. One phrase that crops up among those who tolerate ideologues like Fuentes is "no enemies to the right." I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the notion of "no enemies to the left," but I can be picky about who's actually on the left.

Economy and technology (especially AI): I used to have a section on the economy, which mostly surveyed political economics. Lately, I run across pieces on AI pretty often, both in terms of what the technology means and is likely to do and in terms of its outsized role in the speculative economy. I suspect that if not now then soon we will recognize that we are in a bubble driven by AI speculation, which is somewaht masking a small recession driven largely by Trump's shutdown, tariffs, and inflation. In such a scenario, there are many ways to lose.

  • Ronald Purser [12-01]: AI is destroying the university and learning itself: "Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education." I'm not sure this is the right analysis, and not just because I don't have much love for the old meritocracy that is being wrecked, and not just becuase it never secured much merit in the first place. The "system" has always been crooked, which is something folks with the right skills or hunches have always been able to take advantage of. AI changes the rules, which means that different strategies and different people will win, and some of that will seem unjust. I personally know of a recent case in Arkansas where an AI program was used by a school to detect possible AI use and falsely accused the bright daughter of a friend of cheating. We had a long and fruitless discussion after this on how can someone so charged prove that the AI program is wrong, but the more important question is why does it matter? Which gets us back to politics: in your hypothetical meritocracy, do you want the "merit" (for more people) or the "ocracy" (to empower and enrich the few)? The stock bubble behind the AI companies assumes that AI can be monopolized (kept artificially scarce) allowing its masters extraordinary powers over everyone else. Does anyone but a few monomaniacal entrepreneurs actually want that? Much more that can be unpacked here.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro [10-18]: The culture wars came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is staying the course. Interview, airs out numerous political attacks on Wikipedia, mostly from people who don't understand facts, or who understand them all too well. Kurt Andersen linked to this, and commented: "Reading this Jimmy Wales interview reminded me in our Fantasyland age what a remarkable and important creation it is. True pillar of civilization. Runs on only $200 million a year. Requires out support. So I'm finally donating." By the way, Wales has a book, The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last.

Pete Tucker [12-04]: How the game is played: Pull quote talks about how the Koch network put Antonin Scalia's name on the George Mason law school, and added something called "the Global Antitrust Institute" ("which works to ensure that Big Tech isn't broken apart like the monopoists of over a century ago"). But the article itself starts with a long prelude on Stephen Fuller, a Washington Post-favored pundit whose "quotes came cloaked in academic objectivity, owing to his dual titles as an economics professor at George Mason University and leader of the school's Center for Regional Analysis" (later renamed the Stephen S. Fuller Institute).

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [12-05]: Roaming Charges: Kill, kill algain, kill them all: Starts with this:

    Pete Hegseth is a producer of snuff films. The media-obsessed, if not media-savvy, Hegseth has produced 21 of these mass murder documentary shorts in the last three months, featuring the killings of 83 people — if you take his word for it. Hegseth introduces these kill shots like Alfred Hitchcock presenting an episode of his old TV show — without the irony, of course. There's no irony to Pete Hegseth. No intentional irony, that is. It's all bluster and protein-powder bravado to titillate the Prime-time Fox audience as they nibbled at their TV dinners. . . .

    The irony, lost on Hegseth, is that these are the precise kinds of videos that ethical whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning used to scrape from the secret vaults of the Pentagon and ship to Wikileaks. Videos of crimes committed by US forces. In his dipsomaniacal mind, Hegseth seems to believe these snuff films are proof of the power and virility of the War Department under his leadership. In fact, each video is a confession. The question is: will he be held to account and who will have the guts to do it?

Music end-of-year lists:

Books:

  • Sven Beckert: Capitalism: A Global History:

    • Nelson Lichtenstein [12-04]: Sven Beckert's chronicle of capitalism's long rise. Review provides what looks like a good summary of the book, which is huge and sprawling. Most interesting point to me is that he starts early and looks everywhere:

      "There is no French capitalism or American capitalism," writes Beckert, "but only capitalism in France or America." And there is also capitalism in Arabia, India, China, Africa, and even among the Aztecs. In his narrative of merchants and traders in the first half of the second millennium, Beckert puts Europe on the margins, offering instead a rich and, except for specialists, unknown account of how the institutions vital to commerce and markets, including credit, accounting, limited partnerships, insurance, and banking flourished, in Aden, Cambay, Mombasa, Guangzhou, Cairo, and Samarkand. These are all "islands of capital," a recurrent metaphor in Beckert's book. For example, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Aden was host to a dense network of merchants who played a pivotal role in the trade between the Arabian world and India. It was a fortified, cosmopolitan city of Jews, Hindu, Muslims, and even a few Christians.

      Capitalism spread from these "islands of capital," initially through trade but increasingly through war, especially where forced labor proved advantageous for producing fungible goods.

  • Harriet Malinowitz: Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara:

  • Olivia Nuzzi: American Canto: A journalist of some fame and ill repute, wrote a memoir, teasing dirt on an affair with RFK Jr.

    • Scaachi Koul [12-02]: Olivia Nuzzi's book has the audacity to be boring: "Never mind the dogshit writing, the self-mythologizing, the embarrassing metaphors. How can you make this story so incredibly dull?"

      Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can write a book: Look at this, it's just not that hard to do. Three hundred pages with no chapter breaks, it swerves back and forth through time, from Nuzzi's interviews with Donald Trump over the years to her combustible relationship with fellow annoying journalist Ryan Lizza to her alleged affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he was running for president himself. Reading it is like spending time with a delusional fortune cookie: platitudes that feel like they were run through a translation service three times.

Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings. Last time I did such a trawl was on July 20, so we'll look that far back (although some names have appeared since):

  • Tom Stoppard:

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

Current count: #^c