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If the Supreme Court’s rulings are clearly at odds with our history, our constitution, and American jurisprudence, are they even binding? Can’t the other two branches of government check the rogue one? Are there no Republicans still in office with sufficient moral fibre to join this fight?
The current moment reminds me of how desperately we need to teach the contested and often fraught history of human rights. We need better literacy on the subject. I’ve done this in a required Western Civ course at GMU.
SCOTUS would do well to remember what revolutions tend to do: they eat their own.
“Like ‘Being Friends with a Hurricane’": Fintan O’Toole looks at DJT and those who surround him through the unlikely, but illuminating lens of friendship and love. NYRB, 7/18/2024, archive.ph/KIRhG.
Stunned but not surprised by SCOTUS’s DJT immunity ruling. Do these people really think that breaking the Constitution is going to make any of their “achievements” lasting?
Reading about Israel's Inequitable Application of Military Conscription
In Thursday’s Hareetz, Ofer Aderet offers some useful background on the exemption of yeshiva students from military service. In 1948, there were only some 400 yeshiva students. Preserving their schools seemed a priority in the wake of the destruction of so much Jewish learning. The exemption was supposed to be temporary, but it still exists. Nowadays, there are more than 60,000 yeshiva students, and the religious and cultural situation of 1948 improved decades ago. Given Israel’s current security situation, there is enormous societal pressure to make the burden of mandatory military service equitable. The current government, which includes ultra-Orthodox Jews, has avoided doing so, but the High Court of Justice ruled it has to. John Strawson talks about what this means for Netanyahu in a question-and-answer piece in The Conversation. This second piece assumes less background knowledge on the part of the reader, while also going a bit deeper into the current political context.
Links to developments closer to home: Conscription, what Americans call “the draft,” is a powerful tool for war, but it requires a broad political consensus about the justness of the war and a sense that conscription’s implementation is fair. The U.S. Army and its political masters learned this lesson the hard way during the Vietnam War, after which the country moved to a volunteer force. By contrast, the Federal Republic of Germany held onto conscription until 2011 because its political leadership valued the link between military service and citizenship, a liberal tradition with roots in nineteenth-century political, military, and constitutional developments. Conscription is still in the country’s Basic Law, but the number of people being called up made conscription inequitable and therefore untenable, at least during a time when a major war in Europe no longer seemed likely.
World War I Poster: How to Act during an Air Raid
Air raids were a new danger in the Great War, and people within range of enemy aircraft needed to know what to do. The main caption of this related instructional poster reads, “How should I behave during an air raid?” Five captioned cartoons in the top row show what not to do. Below each of these is the recommended life-saving response.
- “Get away from the window! Curiosity is death!” The sketch shows a terror- or awe-stricken family looking out, many mouths wide open. Instead of gawking, the poster commands readers, “Stand individually behind pillars!”
- “Never remain standing on an exposed road!” “Always seek cover!”
- “Don’t stand behind the door!” This is followed by more advice about strong pillars or load-bearing sections of the wall.
- “Panic is worse than an air raid!” Pictured are people hurrying down the stairs, one person holding a candle, another an oil lamp. Underfoot is a small child who has fallen down, and ahead of these residents is an old man with a cane, about to be trampled. Instead of panicking, the readers are told, “Don’t worry about an attack at night!” Pictured is a man under a duvet sleeping soundly.
- “Never stand in the middle of the room!” The picture below this final warning shows a domestic space in which a man in bare feet and a nightshirt has behaved correctly: He is standing in a corner, an empty bed nearby, but the middle of his floor has disappeared.
The apparent repetition and contradiction in this anonymously produced poster suggest that the poster was less a product of foresight and more an ad hoc response to recent events or rumors.
Source: “Wie verhalte ich mich bei Fliegergefahr?,” poster from the Kriegsbilder exhibit of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, https://ausstellungen.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/kriegsbilder/items/show/28. Physical object: Hessisches Landesarchiv. License: CC BY 4.0 Attribution.
So that’s Perplexity’s real innovation here: shattering the foundations of trust that built the internet.
Elizabeth Lopatto, “Perplexity’s grand theft AI”, The Verge, June 27, 2024.
😠 Shameless: “Israel blames U.N. for Gaza aid crisis amid fresh reports of starvation” (Washington Post) archive.ph/qSSPf
PSA: If you are posting a screenshot to a microblogging platform of some sort, please remember that these platforms are also mobile. And there are disparities in screen size and eyesight. If you use an iPhone or iPad, much of this is solved by an app called Linky by Pragmatic Code.
Death, destruction, refugeehood, humanitarian crises – those are the things we’re used to accepting as part of the reality of war… But in Gaza I also saw the death of the human soul. The Gazans are zombies. Death of souls on that scale, psychological wreckage at that level, I’ve never seen anywhere. At a certain point, I went through Rafah, and the streets were filled with refugee tents, and people, and booths, and there were hardly any vehicles, because there’s no fuel, so transportation is via carts and donkeys, and people move between them slowly. It took us two hours to cover a distance that normally would take 10 minutes. And all this time I looked at the faces of the people who were passing by us and I was shocked because they just looked dead.
Arwa Damon, quoted in “As a CNN War Reporter, Arwa Damon Thought She Had Seen Everything. Then She Went to Gaza” by Shany Littman, Haaretz, June 21, 2024.
Shared Notes: Why I'm Dropping Bear.app
Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation
"How Black Librarians Helped Create Generations of Black Literature" by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, June 19, 2024.
This is a fascinating short history that references the scholars whose work the cultural reporter draws on.
Teaser: “Recent scholarship is uncovering the role of the women who ran libraries during the Harlem Renaissance where they built collections and, just as important, communities of writers and readers.”
Agents of change: The necessary activism required of librarians in oppressive contexts will sound familiar to people today in the context of bans related to race and sexuality. For example, the only significant collection in the Jim Crow South was in Roanoke, Virginia. When the librarian there, Virginia Lee, was eventually told to get rid of the books, she moved them to the basement instead and continued to discretely circulate them.
Knowledge formation: The seemingly banal work of collection, classification, and organization required the creation of new knowledge. For instance, cataloging using the Dewey scheme required the addition of new subjects because that system only foresaw shelving Black-authored and Black-themed books in two limited spaces: under the headings of “slavery” and “the Negro question,” the latter a subset of “colonization and migration.” Dorothy Porter added entirely new categories, including for slave insurrections, the blues, and passing. She also reorganized American political history by situating presidents in topics important to Black readers. Andrew Johnson’s tenure was filed under “emancipation” and Rutherford B. Hayes under “Ku Klux Klan”.
Knowledge, culture, and sociability: This article has some wonderful photographs, including of the women in groups.
Addendum: The New York Public Library and, within it, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture have digitized some of their materials. That’s where I found a powerful pastel by Morris Schulman titled “The Writing Lesson”.
I noticed the GHI’s History of Knowledge blog was crashing this week. Apparently they solved the problem but had to disable the display of the blog’s categories. 🫤 Automattic, you disappoint me. I hope the GHI comes up with a workable, long-term fix soon.
Images of Returned POWs
I just saw images in The Telegraph of emaciated Ukrainian POWs recently traded back from Russia. These stark images were taken after the men had regained some 10 kilograms of their lost weight. If you look closely, you’ll actually see life in the photographed eyes. How did the same eyes and severely weakened bodies look before the exchange?
Starved and no contact with the International Red Cross—I’m trying to grasp what this intentionally extreme mistreatment means. After all, the Ukrainians are holding Russians. As far as I know, food as such is not in short supply in Russia. Was this the result of extreme mistreatment in one location? Or was it more widespread, systematic? Was it about torture with specific mission-related objectives? Was it zeal, resentment, sadism, corruption, indifference? Will this have any impact on Russian POWs in Ukraine? Or will Ukraine’s leadership continue striving to keep the higher ground?
Reading about Netanyahu's Clusterfuck of a War
"Amid the Fighting in Gaza, the Bitter War Between Netanyahu and Israel's Generals Is Intensifying" by Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz, June 17, 2024.
"Netanyahu and the IDF Top Brass Fight Over Gaza Cease-fire While Spiraling Towards Total War With Hezbollah" by Amos Harel, Haaretz, June 16, 2024.
Anshel Pfeffer’s analysis draws on the time-tested framework of civil-military relations. First and foremost, there is the conflict between the prime minister and his generals. Netanyahu is right to insist on the primacy of civilian political control of the army, but he has apparently never learned the value of taking counsel from his generals. Worse, he is resorting to using a stab-in-the-back conspiracy theory about the generals. People familiar with fascist takeovers will get very uncomfortable with this rhetoric.
Besides the conflict between the civilian and military leadership, there is the army itself, the IDF, whose ranks include conscripts and men and women called back because of their obligations in the reserves. There might be people who escape military service in Israel, but its army is more closely linked to civilian society than any in countries that use all-volunteer professional militaries. That places limits on how irresponsibly it can be used.
🫤 Why don’t I have any muscle memory for where the # key is when my keyboard is dark? I guess hashtags are still a relatively recent phenomenon, as far as my typing fingers are concerned.
Reading about Evidence of Russia Using Starvation as a Weapon in its War on Ukraine
"New Report: 'Deliberate Pattern' of Starvation Tactics against Ukrainian Civilians by Russian Forces in Siege of Mariupol City" by Global Rights Compliance, June 13, 2024. (Summary in Ukrainian followed by English)
Full report in English (PDF) — "The Hope Left Us": Russia’s Siege, Starvation, and Capture of Mariupol City
Full report in Ukrainian (PDF) — "Надія залишила нас": Облога, моріння голодом і захоплення Маріуполя Росією
I still need to process this report, but its outline already lines up with the reporting presented in the prize-winning Frontline/AP documentary, “20 Days in Mariupol” (available in full on the Internet Archive). Its chapters include:
😀 Historian Daniel Bellingradt has been growing a thread "of screaming and horrified city gates" in Europe. Here's the first image in the series at @[email protected].
Reading Aryeh Neier on Israel, International Humanitarian Law, and Justice
Aryeh Neier, “Is Israel Committing Genocide?”, The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2024.
The author, who has seen much as one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, has long been “sparing” in his application of the term “genocide” to state-committed atrocities over the past several decades. Initially he did not think of Israel’s indiscriminate, even criminal violence against civilians as genocide, because Israel had a clear right to defend itself against the barbarous acts of Hamas.
I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory."