Saideman's Semi-Spew

 While waiting for a delayed flight (some kind of emergency messed up Newark tonight), I got miffed at a smart piece on the state of US-European relations.  In the second paragraph, it makes reference to the US Department of War.  There is no Department of War.  Just because Trump or Hegseth say something does not make it so.  As an agency created by Congress--twas a big deal merging Dept of War (yes, that is what it was called way back when as it was the Army's department) and Dept of Navy with a great book on aspects of its creation and consequences by Amy Zegart--can only be renamed with legislation.  Despite what he may think, Trump can't legislate.

The Department of War fits into the same category as Gulf of America--just more expensive and dumber.  It is more expensive because, yes, these insecure overcompensating actors have spent a heap of money on new letterhead, signs, and the like.  Can't have a stupid, counterproductive branding exercise without a heap of branding.

Why is it stupid?  Hegseth's justification is that the military is for warfighting, not for defense.  Besides the annoying belligerence and, again, faux alpha males peacocking, it is also just wrong.  These guys are not overcompensating for having small penii, they are overcompensating for being the bully/cowards that they are.  The US military can and does war, but it also defends.  Indeed, the most successful exercise of American power since the end of World War II has been the power of the US armed forces deterring aggression and, yes, limiting nuclear proliferation.

On the former, note that no country has conventionally attacked an American ally (a real ally with a treaty and everything, not countries that are referred to as a non-NATO ally--Pakistan doesn't count).  South Korea was attacked only after the US mistakenly left it outside of the security perimeter it had established.  West Europe remained free despite the Soviet military having far more strength in Europe.  Indeed, Putin refuses to hit NATO countries even as they funnel large amounts of weapons to Ukraine, even as Putin seems to have Trump on a leash.  Defending other countries via the threat of awesome American military power has been great for the US.  The postwar prosperity was built partly on this foundation.  The US fought two bloody wars, belatedly, before it provided security guarantees to Europe.  Since then?  None.  So, defending others is good for the US. And note, yes, no country has attacked the US conventionally either.  

On the latter, defending other countries via American deterrence--the tripwire of American troops whose deaths could trigger a nuclear response--has also reassured countries so they don't develop their own nuclear weapons.  Again, this is the US military providing defense that ultimately improves US security.  

And that gets at it--security is not just about fighting.  Critically, it is about not fighting.  It is about defending via deterrence.  So, the Department of Defense is aptly named and good branding.  Now, the US military has been used offensively in a number of ways over the decades, but a lot of that didn't go very well--Vietnam (quibble with that and I will bring up Cambodia and Laos) and Iraq to name two.  So, perhaps stick with what works?

Most fundamentally, autocrats like to create reality from, well, bullshit.  They call a gulf by a different name and demand obedience.  Same with this--don't obey the mad ravings of the autocrat.  If Trump wants to call it the Dept of War, then serious analysts will call it the Department of Defense until Congress changes it.  Many of Trump's executive orders have no basis in law or reality, so let's not give them any legitimacy or support.  And it is a really simple decision rule--call things by their legal names. 

 

 Last night, I ended one of the very longest relationships in my life: I unsubscribed from the NY Times.  My family will gasp while progressives will wonder why it took me so long.  The short answer to that: recipes and identity.  I will explain why it took a while and then I will explain why and why now.

Lately, I have been mostly using my NYT subscription to check out new recipes and find old ones that worked well for me.  

More importantly, the NYT has been a part of my life since I was a little kid.  My parents, as New Yorkers, subscribed wherever they lived, and getting the paper each morning and especially the mammoth Sunday paper was just a part of our lives. When we moved away from my parents, their visits to us, especially in Lubbock, involved quests for the NYT.  It simply must reading.  I read the news, the op-eds, the minimal sports, entertainment, and mostly skipped the business stuff.  When my mother died recently, my family was quite intent on getting her obituary in the NYT, where you can also found marriage announcements and my uncle's obituary as well.  My sister Ellen had several letters to the editor published there, and, yes, just one time, I got quoted there.  I am pretty sure my family was thrilled more by that than any other media appearance. 

Why drop my subscription and why be so loud about it?  Because this paper, the newspaper of record, with the credo "All the News That's Fit to Print" has thoroughly betrayed itself.  My displeasure started with so much false equivalence that I made a meme about it, treating in 2016 Hillary Clinton's flaws as equivalent to Trump's.  I got into the habit of ranting on twitter when I saw a tweeted headline that was problematic.

Worse, the imbalance in much of the coverage. They didn't pursue his obvious and thorough corruption pre-presidency because it was too easy?  Instead, it was all about her emails.  And then it was the trend for its reporters to hold onto key bits of news for their books years after the news was relevant--so not all the news that was fit to print made it into print in the paper until it was promoting Maggie Haberman's book or my freshman year roomie's (Peter Baker) book.  But I kept on subscribing.

Then the paper became obsessed with trans people, repeatedly amping up a moral panic about what be happening to those kids who transition too soon.  Given how vulnerable the trans folks are, especially the kids, one might think that caution would be in order.  Instead, it was really punching down.  Why?  Damned if I know, but it certainly was not "fit to print," at least at the volume and tilt of the stories.  

I stopped reading its op-ed page as they ended up using not just "conservatives" but truly awful people to put out disinformation.  Yes, the NYT became a vector of disinformation, which I am pretty sure is the opposite of its mission.  

Its coverage of the current presidential race is maddening where it has been essentially pro-Trump, so focused on Biden's flaws and not spending that much page space on Trump's criminality.  It is replay of 2016 but with personal animus: the publisher is miffed that Biden didn't do an interview with the NYT.

The paper has embraced the era of bad faith.  The exemplar that finally got me to drop the paper was an op-ed written by a guy trying to discourage people to vote despite the fact that, yes, the shithead votes.  On the Fourth of July?  On that day, how about focusing on an imperial Supreme Court that is gutting not just the Constitution, but the entire revolutionary project?  The end of the rule of law?  How about that?  Nope, instead, they encourage folks not to vote in the most pivotal election in American history.  [I was talking with a smart pal last night, and she helped me realize that the Civil War might have ended the Union if the South had seceded, but it would not have ended American democracy.  This election?  The whole enchilada is at stake]

I have been arguing lately that the paper is pro-Trump despite its long dated reputation as a liberal paper, and the idea of not voting cinches it.  Who is that message for? Biden voters.  So, I am done.  As many folks online pointed out, I can get recipes elsewhere.  And, no, this is not a matter of me retreating into a left wing bubble, as I will not be reading left-wing outlets more.  I will just try to get my news from as many non-disinformation sources as possible.  The NY Times?  Until it revises its current approach, it is dead to me.

 My piece in the Globe and Mail has gotten a bit of traction and, yes, feedback.  It is a much more political piece than usual in that I don't usually target a party and its strategy in my op-eds.  Looking at my recent op-eds, the theme is mostly "hey, there's something wrong with Canadian civil-military relations."  Which means, yes, I can be critical of the Liberals.  Indeed, an op-ed two years ago in the same paper was focused on calling for the firing of the Liberal Defence Minister because he didn't seem to understand his role at all.  Anyhow, I thought I would go through some of the stuff I have seen on twitter, the comments section of the paper (yes, I dared to go there), and emails.

Folks point at the Liberals politicizing the military.  This has happened (although not where/when/how they think), and two wrongs don't make a right.  So, making retired LTG Andrew Leslie a very visible part of their campaign in 2015 was not good.  Appointing a former military officer to be Minister of National Defence was not good--indeed, he was truly awful, and, to repeat, I called for him to be fired, but Trudeau waited until after the next election to shuffle Sajjan to a less relevant/influential position (one that does not really have a ministry!). 

What these critics of me and of the Liberals get wrong is that "inclusiveness/diversity = politicizing."  Yep, I saw plenty of pics of the military at Pride events.  Is that the Liberals politicizing the military?  Not really.  It is the military itself noting that the next generation is much less rigid about sexuality, and so if the military wants to recruit younger people, it will need to demonstrate to them that the military is an inclusive environment.  Making inclusion a partisan thing is, well, a tell that fans of the Conservatives are hostile to the stance of a majority of Canadians--that one's sexuality should not be a barrier in any way.  

Some of these folks argue that the personnel crisis is due to "wokeness" in the military--but that is not backed up by the data.  We have no evidence that young folks are avoiding the military or older folks are leaving because there is an effort to make it a more inclusive place.  What we do know is that the excellent job market, the pandemic (which greatly interrupted recruiting), archaic recruiting practices, and a severe misconduct and abuse of power crisis (by the least woke generals/admirals) have challenged recruiting/retention.  Plus there is a generational change going on--40 years ago, a guy would join the military, and his wife would go with him wherever he was deployed because the women were expected to sacrifice their career.  Now, we have men and women joining the military who have partners who have jobs that are hard to move.  We still have a military that expects people to move every 2-3 years, but the reality of today (including rising housing costs) make that kind of career unattractive.  

One more thing on the inclusiveness thing: if some men are uncomfortable joining an organization that treats women better and that treats LGBTQ2S+ better, then it is better off that these men don't join or don't stay.

Other responses to my piece were focused on Liberal defence policy--being too slow to procure equipment for the military.  Sure.  Cutting spending?  Not yet.  The Liberals have spent more money on defence, just not enough to catch up to the 2% metric.  But the Conservatives were the last ones to cut the defence budget in a big way as Harper sought to balance the budget.  And, yes, the Liberals cut defence before Harper.  Defence spending is not politicizing, whether it goes up or down.

Which means I could have done more to define what is politicizing, but op-eds are not really the place for lots of definitions.  In this piece and generally, I am referring to making the military a partisan actor--by making folks think that the military prefers one party by platforming a guy who represents the old guard. 

Some say that Maisonneueve is retired and can say what he likes.  Absolutely, but my piece was aimed at the Conservatives for giving him a platform.  No one is entitled to a platform, and Maisonneueve likes to complain about being cancelled usually in op-eds he writes for the National Post--hardly cancelled.  The thing is folks will confuse what a retired general says for what the military thinks.  Which means he should have some caution, if he were a responsible individual, but, again, I was aiming at the party.

One last thing--I could have written all of this into the piece, but then the piece wouldn't have been picked up.  Only so much one can say in 700 words.  And, yes, no matter how much data one might throw at this, folks are going to believe what they want, like DEI forcing white men out of the CAF simply for being white men.  With such a personnel shortage, there really aren't quotas of any real kind in the CAF.  But people can believe what they want to believe.

 I spent part of this afternoon being interviewed by television outlets about the missiles that hit

Poland today and NATO might do.  This is one time where TV is going to get it much more right than the newspaper.  Why?  Because the major paper of record in Canada got it spectacularly wrong:

 

 

This is looking like a grave and possibly deliberate provocation by Russia, but it does not mean that NATO countries must, or will, become militarily involved, even if Poland invokes Articles 4 or 5. It’s worth actually reading the North Atlantic Treaty https://t.co/Y9TNNoUmFK pic.twitter.com/kztaPvF3Lb

— Doug Saunders (@DougSaunders) November 15, 2022

FFS!  NATO is a collective organization--one country cannot wave a magic wand and shout "Accio alliance!  Tada, Article V is invoked!!!"  Nope.  What any country in NATO can do is call a meeting so that the alliance could consider invoking these famed article.  A5 is the "an attack upon one is equal to an attack upon all."  The Dave and Steve book on NATO explored how obligatory that is (it's not) and what explains how countries behave when asked by the alliance to do something.  

But getting back to that attacked thing: it only counts as an attack that deserves a collective response if a consensus among the members.  Everything at NATO operates by consensus--no one is ordered to do anything by any specific country or any sub-group of countries.  This means there is a lot of lowest common denominator kind of decisions with opt out clauses (did you read the Dave and Steve book yet?).  

So, one of the first things Poland (or anyone else seeking to invoke A5) has to consider is: can they get consensus?  If not, don't ask because it is more than a bit embarrassing to ask and then be denied.  Ask Turkey about that.  It is kind of like going up for Full Professor when you don't know what the result will be--it only ends in pain and sadness (and moving which then leads to joy).  Can Poland get damn near all of the alliance (Greece or Hungary or Turkey can agree not to be too disagreeable but not support the decision and then not deploy troops)?  Um, no.  France, Germany, and Italy, to name a few obvious, more powerful members, have been just a wee bit ambivalent all the way along, and they certainly don't want to be involved in a shooting war with Russia.

One of the other things Poland has to consider is: would A5 be good for Poland?  Um, no.  Because if NATO would go to war with Russia, which is what invoking A5 means, that would mean that Russia is no longer restrained from attacking the supply lines leading from the West to Ukraine through ... Poland.  

The existence of A5 in the treaty is working--for both the alliance and for Russia.  Until today, after nine months or so of war, Russia had refrained from hitting any NATO country and specifically Poland.  And today was probably an accident.  An accident that may have been made more likely by a loosening of Russia's rules as they hadn't attacked border cities all that often.  But Kherson and other developments may have changed the risk calculus for Russia.  Anyhow, A5 has been good for NATO's eastern members as it has restrained Russia.  It has also been good for Russia since it has restrained NATO from engaging in direct violence.  

So, no, Article 5 is not going to be invoked.  Article 4, which is a way to indicate the need for serious discussions against a threat, will be.  Poland will get reinforcements as will other NATO allies, Ukraine will get more anti-aircraft equipment, but Ukraine will not get what it wants for an early Christmas present--a NATO intervention.  This would be great in the very short term, but might also lead to nuclear war, which would be bad for a very long time.  As I said at the start of this, rule #1 of avoiding nuclear war is for nuclear powers not to fight each other directly.  India and Pakistan have made us all very nervous.  US and Russia have stuck by rule number one, and that is not going to change now.

So, as I told CBC Kids last month, no, Virginia, there will not be a nuclear war.  

But then again, some elements of the media want to scare folks for sales and market share and ratings, I suppose.  For shame, Globe and Mail, for shame.  

 Pat Reilly, the NBA coach and then general manager, apparently would talk about the disease of me or of more--that after winning a championship, repeating becomes hard because players focus more on themselves and less on the team.  This is not what I am discussing today, but this is where the phrase came from.

 Today, the disease of MOAR is the nearly constant demand for leaders to do more than are currently doing.  The status quo can never be quite good enough--leaders must do more. The media often ask: there is this thing you are doing, why aren't you doing more?  The opposition, if they like a policy, can argue that it is insufficient and demand MOAR.  The two, the opposition and the media, feed off each other as they demand more.

Why am I thinking about this now?  Because folks are demanding that the US, Canada, and NATO do MOAR to help Ukraine.  Let's see...they have cooperating more than we thought possible two weeks ago to levy and enforce very painful sanctions.  They have almost competed with each other to arm the Ukrainians.  They have reinforced the defenses of neighboring countries.  They have engaged in much diplomacy both to build the cooperation on this side and to try to get Russia/Putin to relent.  They have given Ukrainian President Zelenskyy heaps of platforms.

BUT WE NEED TO DO MOAR!!!  We need to do a no fly zone, we need to intervene directly.  I have written about the NFZ and memed as well [here's my very blunt tv hit on this]. I won't get into it now except to say that it is quite normal for Ukrainians to demand that the west does more including getting involved quite directly via a NFZ that would lead to Americans and Canadians and Germans and Brits and French and others killing Russians in Ukraine and in Russia.  This certainly would be MOAR, but given that Ukraine is facing horrific assaults, these folks can demand MOAR.

The media?  Probably not. They should be aware that certain steps on the escalation ladder are more risky than others.  We have spent nearly 80 years trying not to engage in wars with nuclear power states because we don't know that they will stop at the conventional level.   In this crisis, we are very close the threshold where MOAR means a real risk of nuclear war.  Which means that asking for MOAR is pretty damned irresponsible (unless you are Ukrainian).  

But it is so easy and tempting to ask for MOAR because it puts the government on the defensive, having to explain that having the technical ability to do MOAR does not mean that MOAR is a good idea.  The good news is that in this case, MOAR is so very bad that it isn't going to happen.  Biden won't do it, and he won't be pushed by Trudeau and others to do it.  

I just wish folks would take seriously that MOAR is not always better and be critical of those who demand MOAR.

 Someone asked me today why I am talking to the media about Afghanistan: aren't there better people to talk about this stuff, especially Afghan women?  The answer is: essentially, yes, there are other voices that need to be heard.  So, I have started asking the media to ask those folks, and a TV thing I am doing tomorrow already has someone else on the panel who is covering that perspective.  For all of these other hits?  Why do I say yes?

I have been feeling uncomfortable for a few reasons:

1. I wrote a lot about Afghanistan, but not recently.  I have not been studying the country closely as my work shifted to other topics.
2. What I did write was on the outsiders--on NATO and on Canada--not domestic dynamics.  
3. Many of the questions focus on what is going on right now at the airport in Kabul, and, well, damned if anyone in Canada can speak to that except the intel and ops folks in the CAF, and they aren't going to be doing any media anytime soon.

So, why do I talk anyway?  Primarily because many of the questions are about the big context--why are we there, what did we try to do, why did it fail, what does it mean for now and the future?  Those are questions I can try to answer.   This podcast for one of my better outings.  

Baseball advanced analytics came up with a measure to value players--VORP--value over replacement player.  The idea is how much more valuable is a player than the average one that could fill that spot.  The question when it comes to speaking to the media is whether I have a positive or negative VORP--value over replacement pundit. 

When the sexual misconduct/abuse of power crisis became a media story this winter, I sent the media to the women I know who study this stuff--Megan McKenzie, Maya Eichler, Charlotte Duval-Lantoine, Stéfanie von Hlatky, CDSN Post-doc Linna Tam-Seto, and others.  When the story shifted to focusing more on the civil-military relations aspects--what is parliament doing, why isn't the Minister of Defence doing his job (what is his job), I agreed to do the media hits because that is what I have been studying lately.  My VORP when it comes to sexual misconduct is negative--there are plenty of folks who can talk about that stuff far better than I.  My VORP when it comes to civ-mil is positive, in my not so humble opinion.  I can provide a comparative perspective, informed by research around the world including in Canada, for Canadian civilian-military dynamics.  

For Afghanistan, it really depends on the questions that are asked and how well I can dance towards once I can answer.  The challenge is that the questions I am told they will ask (if they tell me) are often not ones that the anchor/host actually ask.  I have gotten better as the week has gone along to asking them what they want to talk about and declining if it is out of my range.  Should they be talking about the situation facing the women of Afghanistan?  Yes.  Should I be the one answering that?  No.  Should they be talking about the other stuff?  Yes, and I can speak to some of it.  

I also feel obligated--that the grants I have applied for usually include "knowledge dissemination plans" of some kind.  So, if I get public money to study stuff, I should engage the public on that stuff.  The media's attention to these issues is episodic at best, so when the media finds an issue I have spent much public money studying, I tend to agree to talk.  Because the media will focus somewhere else soon enough.  So, in one sense, I am trying to make the governments' (and other grant agencies) money worthwhile beyond the academic enterprise.

But yeah, none of this feels good, mostly because we are talking about defeat and the consequences of losing. 

 The week started with Father's Day and ended with mild side effects from the second shot, so a better week than most.  My daughter has not been with me the last several Father's Days, but I get to see her soon, so that is a good enough present.  My wife helpfully bought a few silly presents for the day--aprons given the past year of cooking and baking.  

And, yes, I went overboard on the baking this week to celebrate Father's Day and then the vax day.  First was the Irish Cream Pound case, which had, yes, a heap of Bailey's.  It was pretty terrific.

And then I made this after I got vaxxed.  To thank Dolly Parton for the miracle that is Moderna.  It was a funfetti cake with more sugar in a cake than Mrs. Spew has had since ... she was a kid?  Super sweet just like Dolly and the prospect of breaking quarantine.

 

 

 

So, yeah, we went to Carleton, got in line, the nurse at the front was cheerful and super-organized, and then it was easy peasy from there to the end.  The only hard part was finding our way out of the building since we were directed through the a back way so that we didn't encounter the un-vaxxed.  It was smart, but kind of reminded me of that scene from Spinal Tap where the band could not find the stage.

The big question is: what next?  The Canadian health folks put out the rules or guidelines yesterday, which are not nearly as wide open as those the CDC put out.  In terms of my own behavior, in two weeks, once the vaccine has been processed by my bod, I will continue to wear masks inside in stores and such.  Partly because I don't want to send confusing signals, partly because that seems to be the rule for being among the unvaxxed, and partly because catching an non-fatal, non-hospitalized case of COVID is still not pleasant.  And we don't know enough about the long term effects of mild cases of COVID in those who are fully vaxxed.  It will also depend on the local rate of infection.

I will get a haircut (floofy no more?), I will go to the movies (without Mrs. Spew since she is a bit more nervous than I), we will start going to patios and then eventually inside restaurants.  And, yes, I will go to the US to see my family in August.  That is the big one--seeing my mother, my siblings, and, yes, Hollywood Spew!  I will probably call my weekly reports something else in two weeks, as I will no longer be "in quarantine."  Of course, breakthroughs, new variants, another virus may cause us to return to this state of being.  And that would suck, so I am not throwing away the masks (which I will wear now when I have a cold, Asia-Pacific style) or the sanitizer stuff.  I do hope that stores can stop practicing hygiene theory--wiping everything down after every client--and I hope schools focus on improving ventilation.

This week was busy in both expected and unexpected ways.  The CDSN Personnel Team held a workshop on the Power of Diversity on Friday/Saturday.  It was really interesting, with most of the focus on the status of immigrants (previous workshops had focused more on women and on historically excluded people).  I chaired on session and served as a breakout room moderator as well despite not knowing much about this stuff.  The upside, of course, is that I learn a lot. 

The unexpected busy-ness involved a bunch of media hits as there was much attention by the journalists on the end of this term of parliament.  The timing was perfect for me as I had a meeting with Dave and Phil for our project on legislatures and oversight over the armed forces.  So, that stuff was fresh in my mind as I was observing that our initial stance that the Canadian House of Commons Defence Committee is less relevant than most was perhaps an understatement.  What I learned this week is that a minority government still controls the agenda of the committee, so, yeah, the committee didn't issue a report about the Vance/Sajjan mess.  This video has most of my rants in one place as Dale Smith, fellow fan of Nigella Lawson, asked good, triggering questions. I did dodge some media hits by recommending people who have far more expertise on the stuff, such as maritime disputes.  I was asked by Matt Gurney, a radio host, whether there will be any real change in the Canadian Armed Forces and Department of National Defence with the media soon to be distracted by the possibility of an election.  I suggested that post-election, there will be a new Defence Minister, so they will likely be attentive to that choice (please no more senior military types), and the report by retired Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour will serve to energize the media.  I do think there are many folks in the CAF now are motivated and interested--but the old boys network remains powerful, and culture is hard to change.  So, no easy, instant fixes.

The meeting with Dave and Phil led to a surprising division of labor with me focusing on the short term article and the two of them focusing on writing the start of the book.  It is late in the summer (it is nearly half gone!), so my teammates are skeptical we can finish the book by the end of the summer.  However, I think we will have a bad draft of a good book by then.  While we are doing that, Phil and I are finally working on the Canadian case, so I interviewed the Conservative Defence Critic, James Bezan.  He was struck that the questions we wrote were written six years ago as he thought they were most relevant now.  So, woot for us!  

In the big picture, things are getting much better in Canada and the US and much worse in much of the rest of the world.  We have to keep that in mind--that the planet needs to be vaccinated, not just our immediate neighbors.  We also have take seriously what our countries have done.  The finding of perhaps 750 Indigenous kids' graves at a second residential school (kiddie concentration camps may be offputting, but it should be) is just a start of Canada coming to grips with its history.  Having an Indigenous Secretary of Interior in the US, Deb Haaland, will mean that the US may look at its own legacy of similar policies of stealing kids from their families and putting them into awful circumstances.  One of the bright spots of Canada's pandemic response has been that the First Nations have been in the front of the line for vaccines, and there has been much effort to help them deal with ... damn ... crappy health care infrastructure.  So much more to do.  

As we turn to the big national holidays--Canada Day and Independence Day--we need to reflect what the values of our countries are, how we have fallen short, and how we can do better.  We sure as hell need some Critical Race Theory, precisely because the party of bad faith and of white supremacy is pushing against it.  

Be well and get your vaccines!

Listening to the latest Pressbox podcast, Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss a question from a listener--how will the media react to a slow roll out of results if there is voting by mail?  Their guess and mine: not well.  Bryan and David remind us of GOP criticism when California in 2018 took a week for some of the closer legislative races to announce winners.

Imagine that in a much bigger way in November.  The one thing I would recommend to the media outlets is not to treat GOP accusations of fraud with any seriousness if the only problem is speed.  The GOP is proven to be the Party of Bad Faith especially when it comes to elections.  So, it would be swell if the mainstream media simply covers the counts, maybe does the exit polling thing to guess who is likely to win, but not give much attention to wild accusations about fraud. 

Is that likely?  Hell no.  We see the NYT engaged in the daily dance of false equivalance.  I can see them saying: "Trump says mailed votes are being miscounted; Democrats disagree."  Instead of: "Mailed votes taking longer to count." Of course, Fox will do the best to damage American democracy to keep the GOP in power, but the other outlets should (but will not) learn to speak the truth rather than both-sides-ing the story. 

So, this is just a short depressing post.  If anyone has any recommendations, let me know.

The US-Iran crisis reminds us that, well, not all lives matter the same:

This is so dehumanizing. “Move along, it was just Iraqis.” https://t.co/JKSGTOeHEP

— Asad Dandia (@DandiaAsad) January 8, 2020

Should we be surprised at how irrelevant the casualties suffered by the Iraqis might be?  No.  Appalled? Always.  This led me to think about how various kinds of people and their suffering varies in the eyes of the media, in the calculations of governments, and in public opinion.  To be sure, there is variation across outlets and countries, but the patterns below seem to be fairly robust.

First, one's own soldiers/sailors/aviators matter much, much more than anyone else.  At least, that is what I have gleaned from both US and Canadian media.  Incidents involving one's own troops get covered, discussed, etc, usually pretty extensively.

Second, one's allies matter a smidge.  Their efforts, their suffering get a bit of coverage, some mention in the overall totals, but far less.  The exception may be that other countries may cover when Americans get hit for the simple reason that if the Americans get hit hard, two things may happen--they may escalate or they may leave.  In either case, their reactions affect both the vulnerability of one's own troops and the viability of the mission.

Third, the locals--Afghans, Iraqis, Vietnamese--their suffering hardly matters.  The idea that the Iranian response was no biggie since it didn't hit Americans even if it hit Iraqis (it didn't turn out that way, I think, but that is what folks seemed to say at first) typifies this attitude.  I am not saying the allied troops do not care about minimizing civilian casualties (although the allies vary in how concerned they are about collateral damage), but that in the media coverage, we tend not to be given the numbers, and in the calculations of leadership about whether to deploy or to engage in a specific operation, these numbers matter far less, if at all.

Fourth, private contractors count for more and less than the locals.  Less in that concern about collateral damage does arise, whereas I have yet to see politicians even utter any concern about the costs paid by private contractors in these wars.  The big exception, of course, is that when one or two or four get very visibly killed.  Then that can trigger a bigtime response--Fallujah in 2004, recent events in Iran.  Private contractors fall into the Stalin logic: one death is a tragedy, thousands are a statistic (see here for a discussion of the origins of what I am paraphrasing). 

Of course, this gets to a key dimension--how visible are the deaths of the troops?  Are the bodies dragged through streets or hung versus just left where they died?  Emotive reactions matter here greatly. 

Which gets to the other key dynamic: killed in action versus wounded.  Most media folks know the total number of their country's troops killed in theatre or a ballpark number.  Same for politicians.  But wounded?  Even if we forget for a second of those suffering non-visible wounds (brain trauma due to concusion, PTSD), the visibly wounded are still largely invisible.  One of the key hidden dynamics of recent wars has been the dramatic improvement in medical care.  This has changed the ratios of wounded and killed.  And it is partly a product of policy--that in Afghanistan, a case I know best, troops were not allowed to operate more than an hour from a major allied medical facility.  Why? Because chances of surviving are greatly enhanced by being treated within the golden hour.  What happens when there are not enough helicopters available to guarantee a less than hour flight back to base?  Either no operations or operations within an hour's drive, which means the mission is covering far less territory.

The point here is that we tend to be quite callous in our coverage and our conversations because not all lives and not all suffering seems to matter.  It is important to remember that there are other folks in harm's way besides one's own troops.  That the use of force can implicate not only one's own troops but others as well, and one might want to care a bit about this.  And no, this is not a subtweet of Trump's inability to remember that he put both allies and locals in harm's way when he decides to whack an Iranian officer in Iraq.  But that too.

Hitler was really bad.  Like really, really bad. 

That's it.  There is no "hey, he was a man with a plan that got out of hand" b.s.

I may have alienated a media outlet today.  Just one, you may be asking?  I was asked to be on a radio station to discuss some of Trump's statements, and I agreed although I was not sure what I wanted to say.  Well, it turns out I had something I wanted to get off my chest: that perhaps the media should not chase for comments and coverage every time the President talks about stuff.

That is, I was questioning why they were talking to me about this stuff.  The "story" du jour was Trump raising the possibility of closing the border with Mexico.  I argued that the media paid way too much attention to the caravan of refugees before the midterms, playing into Trump's hands, not unlike how they spent heaps of time on HRC's emails (I will attack HRC's tragically awful comments about populism another time) rather than focus on how corrupt Trump was.  

The radio guy said that I was asking for the media to edit the President, that they should doing more than covering the president but editorializing him.  No, I said, every media outlet is constantly editing--choosing what to cover, what not to cover, what to spend a lot of effort on, what to spend a little effort on, what to put on the front page or the top of the show, etc.  I was just asking them to:

Rather than just chase ratings and clicks.  Please?  I didn't even get into the false equivalence machines that much of the media has become.  Sure, it was idealistic.  But it felt good.  Don't know if it will mean fewer media opportunities down the road--either because I pissed them off or because they reduce how often they seek comments on Trump's tweets/rants.

Anyhow, maybe I will stop agreeing to comment on Trump's comments... tis hte very least I can do.  How about you?

The search for a master narrative has already begun, so let's take heed not just of me but of smart folks who study American politics that there is not a single master narrative.  The pundits will try to make it so, but there is not.

However, we can consider whether this election is different--are things worse now?  This morning's conversation went thusly:

and misogyny and racism and homophobia.

The irony of White nationalism/supremacy is that tends to be inclusive.... in targeting anyone but white Christian males. https://t.co/3oyx8TiNLN

— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) November 6, 2018

all those came way earlier (or at the very latest, c'mon we all saw 2016). Heck, even @speechboy71's tweet implies it isn't a _resurgence_ of anti-Semitism in American politics. America needs to own its history.

— Kevin (@a_more_on) November 6, 2018

 And so I pondered--are there more mentions of Soros, a signal by anti-semites to anti-semits, than before?  I was thinking it would be, but nay:




Interesting--Soros is searched for during election cycles.  Hmmm, I wonder why?  Well, my original thought was not about Soros mentions by everyone or searches by everyone but by prominent GOP mainstream types, like the President, like members of the Congress, etc.  I don't have time to do that search--I have faith that folks will do that content analysis for their papers for the next American Political Science Association meeting.  What we do have instead is, I think, a record number of GOP ads that feature the combo of Jewish candidates and handfuls of $.

A recurring theme in GOP attack ads this year: Jewish Democratic candidates clutching fistfuls of cash. https://t.co/nTZEAbqhR8 pic.twitter.com/a1qL72uwKN

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) November 6, 2018

So, yeah, Trump and others have normalized anti-semitism and all the rest of the hates.  While white supremacy/nationalism may not be the only factor at work in this election and thus not THE master narrative, it is far more prominent and far more destructive than in recent elections.  The GOP has always played with this stuff to divide the Democrats and because it helps to turn out an important segment of their base. But they are far more shameless.  And that, alas, gives permission and encouragement to those who have imagined grievances and a willingness to hurt people.  First you hurt the women in your life and then you hurt those who are demonized by politicians and media (thanks Fox!). 

This election is different in many ways and similar in others.  A blue wave will be read as a repudiation of white nationalism, and a failed wave will be read as support for Trump's normalization of hate.  There will be more to it than that and lots of this is traditional stuff--what happens to the party of the President in midterm elections, the fact that most of the Senate seats were won by Democrats 6 years ago in a very pro-Democratic elections, that candidate emergence is a dynamic thing (GOP stalwarts dropped out knowing that they would be in minority, stronger Dems ran not just because of Trump disgust but because they saw this as a favorable election), etc.

What is the message here?  Hate is bad and getting worse but beware of the master narrative.  These elections are fought one district and state at a time.  And this post is appropriately incoherent--because it has no master narrative either.

I finally saw the big Nike ad.  When I first heard about it, I thought the uproar was about Kaepernick, but this reaction poll makes it clear that Nike really hit the racist nerves. Yeah, the Kaepernick anthem thing is about race, but so much discussion of it confuses the issue.  The figures in this article make it abundantly clear what is going on.

First, watch the video with the reaction info:


Note that the big dips are not just when Kaepernick shows up but when the ad features Lebron James and Serena Williams.  Why would they cause people to feel less positive?  One could guess it is about Lebron's political efforts but Serena? 


Then, look at the breakdowns:

Yowza.


 Turns out Gen x is nearly as racist as the boomers...  Not great.

And yes, our partisan polarization may just be about race:


 Deplorable, you might say. 

Clarifies things mightily.  The noise about Kaepernick is not about patriotism and the troops but part of a larger divide in our society.  I would like to see a similar analyses of Obama's speech yesterday, but I am pretty sure most of the lines would be so flat as to make the exercise pointless.

I don't think Nike was super-brave to do this ad, but I do appreciate the company for being smart enough to now where its market is (young and diverse).  The Democrats have a similar market, and I hope they are smart enough to figure out how to message to it.