Samir’s Selection 05/06/2024 (p.m.)
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Samir’s Selection 04/21/2024 (p.m.)
Samir’s Selection 04/10/2024 (p.m.)
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Opinion | Where Is America’s ‘Rules-Based Order’ Now? – The New York Times
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An enthralling account of Captain Cook’s final, fatal voyage
In fact Cook was neither a slave trader nor much of an imperialist. He was, first and foremost, a brilliant navigator and cartographer. Acting under Admiralty orders, he undertook three pioneering voyages in the Pacific between 1768 and 1779. His mapmaking transformed Europeans’ knowledge of the world’s largest ocean.
An excellent new book draws on Cook’s letters and notebooks to tell the story of his third and final trip. Cook was almost 50 when he set off on hms Resolution in July 1776. Among the crew he took were William Bligh (later captain of the Bounty before the mutiny in 1789) and Mai, a Tahitian prince noted for being painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Cook had secret instructions from the Admiralty not only to claim new territory for Britain, but to search for a north-west passage via the Bering Strait (a task even someone with his navigational experience found impossible).
The author, Hampton Sides, focuses on Cook’s return to Australia and New Zealand—countries the explorer had first encountered almost a decade earlier—his discovery of the Society Islands (today part of French Polynesia) and his time in Hawaii. It was there, in February 1779, that he was killed after a botched attempt to kidnap a local chief in response to the theft of a longboat.
Cook was a man of his times. He believed Europe would have a civilising influence on many benighted folk in the Pacific. He was distinctly cruel in meting out punishments, to his own crew as well as to any indigenous people who opposed him.
Yet Cook also admired many of the people and places he encountered in the South Pacific. Unlike the Spanish, he had no interest in religious conversion. He tried hard to stop his men from spreading venereal disease. For the most part, his land claims were aimed not at promoting a British empire but forestalling grabs by Britain’s rivals, France and Spain.
As the author makes clear, there is a balance to be struck between justified admiration for Cook’s seamanship and a legitimate resentment of the colonialism that followed indigenous peoples’ first contact with Europeans. Today many Western countries are divided over how to think about such vexed legacies. In 2020 half of Britons thought it was right that Colston’s statue was removed (though many disapproved of it being dumped in Bristol harbour). Cook’s statue still stands in central London, as does Clive’s—and Rhodes’s in Oxford. The question is whether they will enjoy their perches much longer. ■
Samir’s Selection 04/04/2024 (p.m.)
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UK Judges’ & Lawyers’ Open Letter Concerning Gaza – UK lawyers’ open letter concerning Gaza
London 03 April 2024 We are UK-based or qualified lawyers, legal academics and former members of the judiciary committed to upholding the rule of law and to protecting fundamental rights; and who share deep concern about the catastrophe unfolding in the Gaza Strip. In a letter dated 26 October 2023, over a thousand members of […]
Samir’s Selection 03/29/2024 (p.m.)
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What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker
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We can end the culture wars >>>
We can make peace in the culture wars. These seemingly unending conflicts about a constellation of race, gender and speech issues may turn out to belong to a limited period of specifically American history: the decade from the police shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 until the ousting of Harvard president Claudine Gay over perceived softness on antisemitism this January.
These arguments have echoed beyond the US. The number of articles in mainstream British newspapers referencing a “culture war” in the UK jumped from 21 in 2015 to 534 by 2020, reported academics at King’s College London. The culture wars have been unnuanced and sometimes intensely stupid. But societies dealing with new issues always get things wrong. Over time, understanding advances. And looking at the US and UK, a surprising degree of consensus is now emerging. The most polarised environments – certain parts of certain US college campuses – are unrepresentative outliers. Here’s what a peace treaty in the culture wars might look like.
On history, large majorities of Republicans and Democrats are far more reasonable about their nation’s past than the other side believes, reports More in Common, an NGO that conducts large-scale surveys of polarisation. For instance, it notes, “about twice as many Democrats believe students should not be made to feel guilty or personally responsible for the errors of prior generations than Republicans estimate (83 per cent versus 43 per cent)”.
Likewise, 83 per cent of Republicans believe “It’s important that every American student learns about slavery, Jim Crow and segregation.” Societies dealing with new issues get things wrong. Understanding advances over time Most Britons are similarly nuanced, says More in Common: “Few favour ignoring historic injustices . . . When asked how we should treat historical monuments and artefacts associated with the slave trade, the majority support the ‘retain and explain’ approach championed by organisations such as the National Trust.” In other words, discuss painful history, don’t erase it.
Few people favour teaching national history as uncritical “heritage”. But the view that a country is forever tarnished by an ineradicable original sin also lacks widespread purchase. As for racism, large majorities want to fight it. In a new joint study by More in Common, University College London and Oxford university, two in three Britons agree that ethnic minorities and women experience discrimination in the workplace sometimes or often.
Britons were “five times more likely to say that equality, diversity and inclusion is a good, rather than a bad, thing”. But the phrase “white privilege” goes down badly. Many white Britons retort, understandably: “I’ve never had privilege in my life.” They oppose discrimination based on social class or regional accents, too. On free speech, there’s general disquiet about censorship. Nearly three-quarters of Britons, including large majorities of every subgroup identified, say “It’s more important that university students are exposed to a range of different views, even if they may find them offensive.”
Most people try to avoid language such as the N-word or misogynist slurs. But they also dislike the constant updating of “correct” terminology, which seems designed to punish those who haven’t kept up. More in Common found that seven in 10 Britons “believe people are made to feel stupid for not understanding the latest way to talk about diversity issues”.
In the debate over trans rights, there’s widespread empathy for transgender people: 64 per cent of Americans support protecting trans people from discrimination in their jobs, housing or public spaces, against just 10 per cent who back discriminatory policies, found Pew Research. On the other hand, another American poll found similar majorities opposing puberty-blocking medications and hormonal treatments for trans-identifying minors. The UK’s Labour Party seems to have decided to dodge the issue, dropping its policy of allowing gender self-identification and disappointing the Tories, who had longed to fight the next election on the question of whether a woman can have a penis.
Even still, today’s culture wars will probably fade away, like the now-forgotten battles about working women or the legalisation of homosexuality. Maybe we can then focus on what matters most: not bathroom usage, but the record 4.33mn British children living in poverty. Britons identify the UK’s biggest issue as the economy, not “woke”, reports YouGov. One day we might even get to climate change.
Samir’s Selection 03/23/2024 (p.m.)
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Without realising it, Britain has become a nation of immigrants
The long-term trend is towards greater acceptance, though. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, when immigration was low by modern standards, huge majorities felt it was too high (see chart 3). Attitudes softened gradually, then more rapidly after the Brexit vote in 2016. And although Britons are sceptical of immigration in general, they are keen on some common types of migrant, such as nurses and care-home workers.
People seem to grow calmer about immigrants (and whites grow calmer about ethnic minorities) the more they bump into them, although some studies find that people in homogeneous places go through an anxious phase when newcomers first arrive. The young are relaxed partly because they went to mixed schools and universities. The University of Reading is certainly diverse. One-fifth of the students are international; among British students more than one-third of those admitted in 2023 are black, Asian or mixed-race.
Given this nonchalant drift, it might seem odd that conservative politicians so often strive to appear more restrictive than their rivals. They do it because they know something of voters’ passions. Alexander Kustov, who studies the politics of immigration at the University of North Carolina, has shown that voters who are relaxed about immigration do not care much about the issue. People who loathe immigration, by contrast, are highly motivated by it. A tough line can sway these voters while leaving liberals unmoved.
Banging on about immigration can hurt conservatives, however. Over the past few years Ms Braverman and Mr Sunak have shown exactly how. The Conservative government has focused on asylum, the bit of the immigration system that is least susceptible to policy changes. And ministers have promised not to exert more control over Channel crossings or to reduce their number, but to “stop the boats” altogether by shipping asylum-seekers to Rwanda.
As a result, the government has been unable to take credit for some useful changes, such as a deal struck with Albania in 2023 that makes it easier to return asylum claimants from that country. Nor does it get much credit for tightening the requirements for work and family visas, which will probably lead to an overall drop in net migration over the next few years. Stopping the boats was the promise. By that measure, the result has been failure.
But failing to keep an unrealistic promise to terminate a kind of migration that is especially hard to control is not the same as failing on immigration in general. Conservative mps seem determined to argue that Britain cannot cope with its foreign-born residents; Robert Jenrick, formerly the immigration minister, wrote on March 2nd of “the age of careless and naive mass immigration to the uk”, which he said had led to “people living parallel lives in segregated neighbourhoods”. He should come to Reading. If the town is a failure, it would be nice to know what success looks like.
Samir’s Selection 03/23/2024 (a.m.)
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The end of the mass-media age is nigh, with big consequences for politics…
For all the angst about polarisation and disinformation, something very different is in fact going on in news consumption: the mass-media age is ending. We’re returning to a time when most people get almost no news. Growing numbers of citizens are oblivious to current affairs, much like most ordinary Britons before the first popular newspaper, the Daily Mail, appeared in 1896. Opinion-formers who lead the political conversation tend to overlook this shift, because they, by definition, care about news. What happens to a society when the majority switches off?
Of course, there never was a golden age when everyone followed the news. George Orwell wrote on May 28 1940, as the British army’s evacuation from Dunkirk began: “People talk a little more of the war, but very little . . . Last night, [his wife Eileen] and I went to the pub to hear the 9[pm] news. The barmaid was not going to have it on if we had not asked her, and to all appearances nobody listened.”
Still, for about a century, people in developed countries bought newspapers. Perhaps they did so chiefly for sport, the weather and cartoons, but they absorbed current affairs by osmosis. Their radios and TV sets gave them hourly news.
Now, the internet’s destruction of media is nearing completion. Many people who moan about “the media” hardly see media any more. In 2023, for the first time, cable and broadcast TV combined accounted for less than half of all television viewing in the US, says the media research company Nielsen. Netflix and YouTube are winning that battle. Fox News has shrivelled to a niche retirees’ broadcaster.
The US has lost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists since 2005. Britain’s former Conservative leader William Hague noted, in a requiem for local newspapers this month, that the once-mighty Birmingham Post, in a city of 1.15 million, now sells 844 printed copies a week. No wonder it took a fictional TV drama to excite the public about the wrongful convictions of British postmasters, after media had reported the scandal fruitlessly for years.
The cliché used to be that people had moved to social media for news. Well, they have moved to social media, but increasingly not for news. After all, why let journalists you don’t trust tell you about politicians you don’t trust? Meta says news now accounts for under 3 per cent of what users see on its biggest platform, Facebook. Instagram, too, has deprioritised news. TikTok won’t even show political adverts.
This suits the growing tribe of people who find the news depressing, boring and repetitive. Brexit, for instance, feels so 2016. Politicians are being outcompeted by rival celebrities in the attention economy. If the Biden-Trump contest were a reality TV show, it would have been discontinued in 2020. Even Trump has lost his shock value, and some of his wit.
Pundits wonder why voters aren’t giving Biden credit for the improved economy. Well, few voters see economic statistics any more. Non-visual events such as the Chips and Science Act attract even less attention than climate change.
Only spectacular news videos break through to apolitical people. This happened at the US-Mexican border and, initially, in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, until the content grew repetitive. The Ukrainian war is a particular international turn-off, says the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report. As for Gaza, the western protesters chanting, “From the river to the sea” and the people who obsess about them are both minuscule unrepresentative minorities. Westerners mostly ignore the war (though when asked by pollsters, people who bother replying express opinions that they hadn’t been thinking about five minutes before).
A few serious news media will survive as special-interest publications, like ham-radio magazines in bygone days. Their content is mostly argued about by well-educated men with polarised views, notes the Reuters Institute. Politicians will disproportionately woo this group, ignoring the apathetic mainstream.
The no-news era will change politics. “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be,” wrote the American founding father Thomas Jefferson. Expect rising abstention at elections, as is already happening in France. Polarisation pushed turnout in the US’s 2020 election to 66 per cent, the highest since 1908, but that should prove a peak. Internet influencers may displace TV personalities such as Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy as election-winners. And with citizens losing interest, leaders will find it easier to dismantle democracy à la Viktor Orbán.
We marvel at Russians, switched off and immobilised while their government commits horrors. That could be us very soon.
Samir’s Selection 03/22/2024 (p.m.)
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The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life >>>
For the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been unsettling American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an earthquake. It concerns the relationship between liberalism and Zionism, two creeds that for more than half a century have defined American Jewish identity. In the years to come, American Jews will face growing pressure to choose between them.
They will face that pressure because Israel’s war in Gaza has supercharged a transformation on the American left. Solidarity with Palestinians is becoming as essential to leftist politics as support for abortion rights or opposition to fossil fuels. And as happened during the Vietnam War and the struggle against South African apartheid, leftist fervor is reshaping the liberal mainstream. In December, the United Automobile Workers demanded a cease-fire and formed a divestment working group to consider the union’s “economic ties to the conflict.” In January, the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force called for a cease-fire as well. In February, the leadership of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the nation’s oldest Black Protestant denomination, called on the United States to halt aid to the Jewish state. Across blue America, many liberals who once supported Israel or avoided the subject are making the Palestinian cause their own.
This transformation remains in its early stages. In many prominent liberal institutions — most significantly, the Democratic Party — supporters of Israel remain not only welcome but also dominant. But the leaders of those institutions no longer represent much of their base. The Democratic majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, acknowledged this divide in a speech on Israel on the Senate floor last week. He reiterated his longstanding commitment to the Jewish state, though not its prime minister. But he also conceded, in the speech’s most remarkable line, that he “can understand the idealism that inspires so many young people in particular to support a one-state solution” — a solution that does not involve a Jewish state. Those are the words of a politician who understands that his party is undergoing profound change.
The American Jews most committed to Zionism, the ones who run America’s establishment institutions, understand that liberal America is becoming less ideologically hospitable. And they are responding by forging common cause with the American right. It’s no surprise that the Anti-Defamation League, which only a few years ago harshly criticized Donald Trump’s immigration policies, recently honored his son-in-law and former senior adviser, Jared Kushner.
Mr. Trump himself recognizes the emerging political split. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” he said in an interview published on Monday. “They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.” It’s typical Trumpian indecency and hyperbole, but it’s rooted in a political reality. For American Jews who want to preserve their country’s unconditional support for Israel for another generation, there is only one reliable political partner: a Republican Party that views standing for Palestinian rights as part of the “woke” agenda.
The American Jews who are making a different choice — jettisoning Zionism because they can’t reconcile it with the liberal principle of equality under the law — garner less attention because they remain further from political power. But their numbers are larger than many recognize, especially among millennials and Generation Z. And they face their own dilemmas. They are joining a Palestine solidarity movement that is growing larger, but also more radical, in response to Israel’s destruction of Gaza. That growing radicalism has produced a paradox: A movement that welcomes more and more American Jews finds it harder to explain where Israeli Jews fit into its vision of Palestinian liberation.
The emerging rupture between American liberalism and American Zionism constitutes the greatest transformation in American Jewish politics in half a century. It will redefine American Jewish life for decades to come.
ImageA photograph of a group of people in front of the Capitol building. One woman holds a sign that says “Jews say: Ceasefire Now.” Another person holds a sign that says “No to war, no to apartheid.”
Credit…Drew Angerer/Getty Images
“American Jews,” writes Marc Dollinger in his book “Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America,” have long depicted themselves as “guardians of liberal America.” Since they came to the United States in large numbers around the turn of the 20th century, Jews have been wildly overrepresented in movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and labor and gay rights. Since the 1930s, despite their rising prosperity, they have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. For generations of American Jews, the icons of American liberalism — Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Gloria Steinem — have been secular saints.The American Jewish love affair with Zionism dates from the early 20th century as well. But it came to dominate communal life only after Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967 war exhilarated American Jews eager for an antidote to Jewish powerlessness during the Holocaust. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which was nearly bankrupt on the eve of the 1967 war, had become American Jewry’s most powerful institution by the 1980s. American Jews, wrote Albert Vorspan, a leader of Reform Judaism, in 1988, “have made of Israel an icon — a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.”
Given the depth of these twin commitments, it’s no surprise that American Jews have long sought to fuse them by describing Zionism as a liberal cause. It has always been a strange pairing. American liberals generally consider themselves advocates of equal citizenship irrespective of ethnicity, religion and race. Zionism — or at the least the political Zionism that has guided Israel since its founding — requires Jewish dominance. From 1948 until 1966, Israel held most of its Palestinian citizens under military law; since 1967 it has ruled millions of Palestinians who hold no citizenship at all. But despite this, American Jews could until recently assert their Zionism without having their liberal credentials challenged.
The primary reason was the absence from American public discourse of Palestinians, the people whose testimony would cast those credentials into greatest doubt. In 1984, the Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said argued that in the West, Palestinians lack “permission to narrate” their own experience. For decades after he wrote those words, they remained true. A study by the University of Arizona’s Maha Nassar found that of the opinion articles about Palestinians published in The New York Times and The Washington Post between 2000 and 2009, Palestinians themselves wrote roughly 1 percent.
But in recent years, Palestinian voices, while still embattled and even censored, have begun to carry. Palestinians have turned to social media to combat their exclusion from the mainstream press. In an era of youth-led activism, they have joined intersectional movements forged by parallel experiences of discrimination and injustice. Meanwhile, Israel — under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu for most of the past two decades — has lurched to the right, producing politicians so openly racist that their behavior cannot be defended in liberal terms.
Many Palestine solidarity activists identify as leftists, not liberals. But like the activists of the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements, they have helped change liberal opinion with their radical critiques. In 2002, according to Gallup, Democrats sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 34 points. By early 2023, they favored the Palestinians by 11 points. And because opinion about Israel cleaves along generational lines, that pro-Palestinian skew is much greater among the young. According to a November Quinnipiac University poll, Democrats under the age of 35 sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis by 58 points.
Given this generational gulf, universities offer a preview of the way many liberals — or “progressives,” a term that straddles liberalism and leftism and enjoys more currency among young Americans — may view Zionism in the years to come. Supporting Palestine has become a core feature of progressive politics on many campuses. At Columbia, for example, 94 campus organizations — including the Vietnamese Students Association, the Reproductive Justice Collective and Poetry Slam, Columbia’s “only recreational spoken word club” — announced in November that they “see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation.” As a result, Zionist Jewish students find themselves at odds with most of their politically active peers.
Accompanying this shift, on campus and beyond, has been a rise in Israel-related antisemitism. It follows a pattern in American history. From the hostility toward German Americans during World War I to violence against American Muslims after Sept. 11 and assaults on Asian Americans during the Covid pandemic, there is a long and ugly tradition of Americans expressing their hostility toward foreign governments or movements by targeting Americans who share a religion, ethnicity or nationality with those overseas adversaries. Today, tragically, some Americans who loathe Israel are taking it out on American Jews. (Palestinian Americans, who have endured multiple violent hate crimes since Oct. 7, are experiencing their own version of this phenomenon.) The spike in antisemitism since Oct. 7 follows a pattern. Five years ago, a study by the political scientist Ayal Feinberg using data from 2001 and 2014 found that reported antisemitic incidents in the United States spike when the Israeli military conducts a substantial military operation.
Attributing the growing discomfort of pro-Israel Jewish students entirely to antisemitism, however, misses something fundamental. Unlike establishment Jewish organizations, Jewish students often distinguish between bigotry and ideological antagonism.In a 2022 study, the political scientist Eitan Hersh found that more than 50 percent of Jewish college students felt “they pay a social cost for supporting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” And yet, in general, Dr. Hersh reported, “the students do not fear antisemitism.”
Surveys since Oct. 7 find something similar. Asked in November in a Hillel International poll to describe the climate on campus since the start of the war, 20 percent of Jewish students answered “unsafe” and 23 percent answered “scary.” By contrast, 45 percent answered “uncomfortable” and 53 percent answered “tense.” A survey that same month by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that only 37 percent of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 consider campus antisemitism a “very serious problem,” compared with nearly 80 percent of American Jewish voters over the age of 35.
While some young pro-Israel American Jews experience antisemitism, they more frequently report ideological exclusion. As Zionism becomes associated with the political right, their experiences on progressive campuses are coming to resemble the experiences of young Republicans. The difference is that unlike young Republicans, most young American Zionists were raised to believe that theirs was a liberal creed. When their parents attended college, that assertion was rarely challenged. On the same campuses where their parents felt at home, Jewish students who view Zionism as central to their identity now often feel like outsiders.
In 1979, Mr. Said observed that in the West, “to be a Palestinian is in political terms to be an outlaw.” In much of America — including Washington — that remains true. But within progressive institutions one can glimpse the beginning of a historic inversion. Often, it’s now the Zionists who feel like outlaws.
Given the organized American Jewish community’s professed devotion to liberal principles, which include free speech, one might imagine that Jewish institutions would greet this ideological shift by urging pro-Israel students to tolerate and even learn from their pro-Palestinian peers. Such a stance would flow naturally from the statements establishment Jewish groups have made in the past. A few years ago, the Anti-Defamation League declared that “our country’s universities serve as laboratories for the exchange of differing viewpoints and beliefs. Offensive, hateful speech is protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment.”
But as pro-Palestinian sentiment has grown in progressive America, pro-Israel Jewish leaders have apparently made an exception for anti-Zionism. While still claiming to support free speech on campus, the A.D.L. last October asked college presidents to investigate their local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine to determine whether they violated university regulations or state or federal laws, a demand that the American Civil Liberties Union warned could “chill speech” and “betray the spirit of free inquiry.” After the University of Pennsylvania hosted a Palestinian literature festival last fall, Marc Rowan, chair of the board of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York and chair of the board of advisers of Penn’s Wharton business school, condemned the university’s president for giving the festival Penn’s “imprimatur.” In December, he encouraged trustees to alter university policies in ways that Penn’s branch of the American Association of University Professors warn could “silence and punish speech with which trustees disagree.”
In this effort to limit pro-Palestinian speech, establishment Jewish leaders are finding their strongest allies on the authoritarian right. Pro-Trump Republicans have their own censorship agenda: They want to stop schools and universities from emphasizing America’s history of racial and other oppression. Calling that pedagogy antisemitic makes it easier to ban or defund. At a much discussed congressional hearing in December featuring the presidents of Harvard, Penn and M.I.T., the Republican representative Virginia Foxx noted that Harvard teaches courses like “Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power” and hosts seminars such as “Scientific Racism and Anti-Racism: History and Recent Perspectives” before declaring that “Harvard also, not coincidentally but causally, was ground zero for antisemitism following Oct. 7.”
Ms. Foxx’s view is typical. While some Democrats also equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the politicians and business leaders most eager to suppress pro-Palestinian speech are conservatives who link such speech to the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda they despise. Elise Stefanik, a Trump acolyte who has accused Harvard of “caving to the woke left,” became the star of that congressional hearing by demanding that Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, punish students who chant slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (Ms. Gay was subsequently forced to resign following charges of plagiarism.) Elon Musk, who in November said that the phrase “from the river to the sea” was banned from his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), the following month declared, “D.E.I. must die.” The first governor to ban Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at his state’s public universities was Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who has also signed legislation that limits what those universities can teach about race and gender.
This alignment between the American Jewish organizational establishment and the Trumpist right is not limited to universities. If the A.D.L. has aligned with Republicans who want to silence “woke” activists on campus, AIPAC has joined forces with Republicans who want to disenfranchise “woke” voters. In the 2022 midterm elections, AIPAC endorsed at least 109 Republicans who opposed certifying the 2020 election. For an organization single-mindedly focused on sustaining unconditional U.S. support for Israel, that constituted a rational decision. Since Republican members of Congress don’t have to mollify pro-Palestinian voters, they’re AIPAC’s most dependable allies. And if many of those Republicans used specious claims of Black voter fraud to oppose the democratic transfer of power in 2020 — and may do so again — that’s a price AIPAC seems to be prepared to pay.
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Credit…Leah Millis/Reuters
For the many American Jews who still consider themselves both progressives and Zionists, this growing alliance between leading Zionist institutions and a Trumpist Republican Party is uncomfortable. But in the short term, they have an answer: politicians like President Biden, whose views about both Israel and American democracy roughly reflect their own. In his speech last week, Mr. Schumer called these liberal Zionists American Jewry’s “silent majority.”For the moment he may be right. In the years to come, however, as generational currents pull the Democratic Party in a more pro-Palestinian direction and push America’s pro-Israel establishment to the right, liberal Zionists will likely find it harder to reconcile their two faiths. Young American Jews offer a glimpse into that future, in which a sizable wing of American Jewry decides that to hold fast to its progressive principles it must jettison Zionism and embrace equal citizenship in Israel and Palestine, as well as in the United States.
For an American Jewish establishment that equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, these anti-Zionist Jews are inconvenient. Sometimes, pro-Israel Jewish organizations pretend they don’t exist. In November, after Columbia suspended two anti-Zionist campus groups, the A.D.L. thanked university leaders for acting “to protect Jewish students” — even though one of the suspended groups was Jewish Voice for Peace. At other times, pro-Israel leaders describe anti-Zionist Jews as a negligible fringe. If American Jews are divided over the war in Gaza, Andrés Spokoiny, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Funders Network, an organization for Jewish philanthropists, declared in December, “the split is 98 percent/2 percent.”
Among older American Jews, this assertion of a Zionist consensus contains some truth. But among younger American Jews, it’s false. In 2021, even before Israel’s current far-right government took power, the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 38 percent of American Jewish voters under the age of 40 viewed Israel as an apartheid state, compared with 47 percent who said it’s not. In November, it revealed that 49 percent of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 opposed Mr. Biden’s request for additional military aid to Israel. On many campuses, Jewish students are at the forefront of protests for a cease-fire and divestment from Israel. They don’t speak for all — and maybe not even most — of their Jewish peers. But they represent far more than 2 percent.
These progressive Jews are, as the U.S. editor of The London Review of Books, Adam Shatz, noted to me, a double minority. Their anti-Zionism makes them a minority among American Jews, while their Jewishness makes them a minority in the Palestine solidarity movement. Fifteen years ago, when the liberal Zionist group J Street was intent on being the “blocking back” for President Barack Obama’s push for a two-state solution, some liberal Jews imagined themselves leading the push to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Today, the prospect of partition has diminished, and Palestinians increasingly set the terms of activist criticism of Israel. That discourse, which is peppered with terms like “apartheid” and “decolonization,” is generally hostile to a Jewish state within any borders.
There’s nothing antisemitic about envisioning a future in which Palestinians and Jews coexist on the basis of legal equality rather than Jewish supremacy. But in pro-Palestine activist circles in the United States, coexistence has receded as a theme. In 1999, Mr. Said argued for “a binational Israeli-Palestinian state” that offered “self-determination for both peoples.” In his 2007 book, “One Country,” Ali Abunimah, a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, an influential source of pro-Palestine news and opinion, imagined one state whose name reflected the identities of both major communities that inhabit it. The terms “‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ are dear to those who use them and they should not be abandoned,” he argued. “The country could be called Yisrael-Falastin in Hebrew and Filastin-Isra’il in Arabic.”
In recent years, however, as Israel has moved to the right, pro-Palestinian discourse in the United States has hardened. The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which dates from the 1960s but has gained new prominence since Oct. 7, does not acknowledge Palestine and Israel’s binational character. To many American Jews, in fact, the phrase suggests a Palestine free of Jews. It sounds expulsionist, if not genocidal. It’s an ironic charge, given that it is Israel that today controls the land between the river and the sea, whose leaders openly advocate the mass exodus of Palestinians and which the International Court of Justice says could plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.
Palestinian scholars like Maha Nassar and Ahmad Khalidi argue that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” does not imply the subjugation of Jews. It instead reflects the longstanding Palestinian belief that Palestine should have become an independent country when released from European colonial control, a vision that does not preclude Jews from living freely alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbors. The Jewish groups closest to the Palestine solidarity movement agree: Jewish Voice for Peace’s Los Angeles chapter has argued that the slogan is no more anti-Jewish than the phrase “Black lives matter” is anti-white. And if the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States calls for the genocide of Jews, it’s hard to explain why so many Jews have joined its ranks. Rabbi Alissa Wise, an organizer of Rabbis for Cease-Fire, estimates that other than Palestinians, no other group has been as prominent in the protests of the war as Jews.
Still, imagining a “free Palestine” from the river to the sea requires imagining that Israeli Jews will become Palestinians, which erases their collective identity. That’s a departure from the more inclusive vision that Mr. Said and Mr. Abunimah outlined years ago. It’s harder for Palestinian activists to offer that more inclusive vision when they are watching Israel bomb and starve Gaza. But the rise of Hamas makes it even more essential.
Jews who identify with the Palestinian struggle may find it difficult to offer this critique. Many have defected from the Zionist milieu in which they were raised. Having made that painful transition, which can rupture relations with friends and family, they may be disinclined to question their new ideological home. It’s frightening to risk alienating one community when you’ve already alienated another. Questioning the Palestine solidarity movement also violates the notion, prevalent in some quarters of the American left, that members of an oppressor group should not second-guess representatives of the oppressed.
But these identity hierarchies suppress critical thought. Palestinians aren’t a monolith, and progressive Jews aren’t merely allies. They are members of a small and long-persecuted people who have not only the right but also the obligation to care about Jews in Israel, and to push the Palestine solidarity movement to more explicitly include them in its vision of liberation, in the spirit of the Freedom Charter adopted during apartheid by the African National Congress and its allies, which declared in its second sentence that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and white.”
For many American Jews, it is painful to watch their children’s or grandchildren’s generation question Zionism. It is infuriating to watch students at liberal institutions with which they once felt aligned treat Zionism as a racist creed. It is tempting to attribute all this to antisemitism, even if that requires defining many young American Jews as antisemites themselves.
But the American Jews who insist that Zionism and liberalism remain compatible should ask themselves why Israel now attracts the fervent support of Ms. Stefanik but repels the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the United Automobile Workers. Why it enjoys the admiration of Elon Musk and Viktor Orban but is labeled a perpetrator of apartheid by Human Rights Watch and compared to the Jim Crow South by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Why it is more likely to retain unconditional American support if Mr. Trump succeeds in turning the United States into a white Christian supremacist state than if he fails.
For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on a contradiction: Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy there. Now here and there are converging. In the years to come, we will have to choose.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also the editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter.
Samir’s Selection 03/14/2024 (a.m.)
Samir’s Selection 03/12/2024 (p.m.)
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Jonathan Glazer’s Brave Oscar Speech Represents the Best of Judaism | The Nation
He is actually reclaiming his culture from the pampered pro-Israel media prizefighters who argue that Judaism and Zionism are one and the same: that a 5,500 year old religion and culture must exist only as the support system for a 76-year-old colonial ethno-state. To call out this lie is a daring and dangerous act, and Glazer should be commended for standing in the tradition of debate—not of calumny and lies.
This is especially fitting given Glazer’s film: a chilling and shattering look at Nazism in the form of an idyllic Nazi officer’s home right outside Auschwitz. There is nothing “banal” about the evil on display in this film; a family frolics in a stream as bones and body parts float past them. It would be easy to read the film as a remembrance of the horror perpetrating on the Jewish people. But Glazer, as he has been collecting awards, has made perfectly clear: The phrase “never again” is not a Jewish slogan but something that must be raised every time a people are subject to genocide. He also said at the Oscars, “All our choices are made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now…. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present.”
Samir’s Selection 03/05/2024 (a.m.)
Samir’s Selection 03/03/2024 (p.m.)
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The history of the West is not quite what you learned in school >>>
The idea of civilisation, Ms Quinn points out, is relatively recent. The word was first used only in the mid-18th century and did not take hold of Western imaginations until the late 19th century. In that imperialist age, historians found that Greek, Roman and Christian civilisations made nice building blocks that could be stacked into a grand-looking construct, which they labelled “Western” or “European” civilisation. To this they attributed a host of inherited “classical” virtues: vigour, rationality, justice, democracy and courage to experiment and explore. Other civilisations, by contrast, were regarded as inferior.It does not take much unpacking by Ms Quinn to expose the folly of this approach. Behold, for instance, John Stuart Mill, a philosopher in the 19th century, claiming that the Battle of Marathon, Persia’s first invasion of Greece in 490bc, was more important to English history than William the Conqueror’s triumph at Hastings in 1066. (Without an Athenian victory, the logic goes, the magical seed of Greek civilisation might never have grown into Western civilisation.) Or consider “Clash of Civilisations” (1996) by Samuel Huntington, an American historian, who declared it impossible to understand history without classifying humanity into mutually hostile civilisations between which, “during most of human existence”, contact has been “intermittent or non-existent”.What is non-existent is any truth to that notion. Ms Quinn’s brisk, scholarly romp across the arc of European history shows that, far from being rare, contact across and between cultures, often over surprisingly long distances, has been the main motor of human advancement in every age. Rather than being prickly and inward-looking, most societies have proved receptive to ideas, fashions and technologies from their neighbours.Ancient Greece, for example, was less a place of origins than of transmission from Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian and Phoenician cultures, which themselves had mixed and exchanged ideas. And rather than being the wellspring of democracy, Athens was “something of a latecomer” to a form of governance that appears to have been first tried in Libya and on the islands of Samos and Chios. Persians, eternally cast as Greeks’ polar opposites, actually imposed democracy on Greek cities that they ruled, suggesting “considerable Persian faith in popular support for their own hegemony”, Ms Quinn notes.This retelling of the West’s story scintillates with its focus on the unexpected and on the interstices between realms and eras rather than on history’s big, solid bits. But it is also an admirable work of scholarship. Ms Quinn’s 100-plus pages of footnotes reveal that she relied not only on a wide range of primary sources, but also on scientific studies on climate change and very recent archaeological research.Even seasoned history buffs will find much that is new and fascinating. “How the World Made the West” joins a growing sub-canon of works that explores the broad sweep of history using new intellectual framings, such as Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” (2011), Peter Frankopan’s “The Silk Roads” (2015) and “Fall of Civilisations”, a forthcoming book by Paul Cooper, a British journalist, based on his popular podcast. Whoever thought history was passé could not be more wrong
Samir’s Selection 03/03/2024 (a.m.)
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Opinion | Israel, Gaza and Double Standards, Including Our Own – The New York Times
Some of the most incisive critics of Israel’s actions are from the very U.N. agencies and human rights groups whose staffs are risking their lives in the field to save lives in Sudan, Ethiopia and other countries.
In any case, there is a reason to focus on Gaza today, for it is not just one more place of pain among many contenders but, in the judgment of Unicef, the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.
Consider that in the first 18 months of Russia’s current war in Ukraine, at least 545 children were killed. Or that in 2022, by a United Nations count, 2,985 children were killed in all wars worldwide. In contrast, in less than five months of Israel’s current war in Gaza, the health authorities there report more than 12,500 children killed.
Among them were 250 infants less than 1 year old. I can’t think of any conflict in this century that has killed babies at such a pace.
Of course Israel had the right to respond militarily to the Oct. 7 attacks. Of course Hamas leaders should give up their hostages. But none of this excuses Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing, in the words of President Biden, and restrictions on food and other assistance.
Because of America’s support for Israel’s invasion and diplomatic protection for it at the United Nations, this blood is on our hands, and that surely justifies increased scrutiny.
Yet here’s another double standard: We Americans condemn Russia, China or Venezuela for their violations of human rights, but the United States supports Israel and protects it diplomatically even as it has engaged in what President Biden has called an “over the top” military campaign.
“How can the U.S. condemn Russia’s bombing of civilians in Ukraine as a war crime but fund Netanyahu’s war machine, which has killed thousands?” Senator Bernie Sanders asked.
So it’s fair to talk about double standards. They are real. They run in many directions, shielding Israel as well as condemning it. And in a world where we are all connected by our shared humanity, I believe we should never let our very human tangles of double standards and hypocrisies be harnessed to deflect from the tragedy unfolding today for the children of Gaza, or America’s complicity in it.
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What Age Should You Retire? What Health Experts Say – The New York Times
From an economic standpoint, a later retirement age perhaps benefits everyone’s bottom line. But putting finances aside, what are the mental and physical implications of raising a national retirement age?
….For people working in knowledge-based jobs, a retirement age in the 70s is reasonable from a cognitive perspective, too, said Lisa Renzi-Hammond, director of the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Georgia. “Our cognitive faculties we’re able to maintain, usually, pretty well into our 70s,” she said. “If retirement age is set based on the capabilities or competence of employees, there’s absolutely no reason to have a retirement age in the 60s.”
Parts of the brain — most notably the prefrontal cortex, which is critical for executive functioning, attention and working memory — do start to lose volume as early as around age 45, but other areas are able to compensate, Dr. Renzi-Hammond said. And other aspects of cognition, such as crystallized intelligence (accumulated knowledge that can be applied to new situations) and social cognition (behaving appropriately in interpersonal interactions), continue to improve for decades.
Many of these cognitive processes are maintained and strengthened by staying in the work force. Consequently, some people decline mentally and physically when they stop working. One study even found that delaying retirement was associated with a decreased risk of death, regardless of health before retirement. Experts speculate that the losses of job-related physical activity and social interactions that come with leaving work are largely to blame for post-retirement declines.
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Could an AI ‘death calculator’ actually be a good thing?
life2vec algorithm
Samir’s Selection 03/02/2024 (p.m.)
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Magical thinking about government needs a dose of reality | Institute for Government
– Be honest with voters about trade-offs
– Base decisions on evidence
– Strengthen the Civil ServiceWith the UK teetering on the brink of recession, the country cannot afford not to run its government as efficiently as possible. As long-term systemic problems and demographic trends manifest in ever lengthening waiting lists, degrading infrastructure and workforce shortages, our public services cannot afford another year of short-term headline-grabbing fixes. With public confidence in politics at a low ebb, our democracy cannot afford a year of the personal attacks, trap-setting and scorched earth tactics that we are told will characterise the election campaign.
UK government needs to reform itself, and we cannot wait until 2025 to begin.
Samir’s Selection 03/01/2024 (a.m.)
Samir’s Selection 02/24/2024 (p.m.)
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Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer: ‘I’m suspicious of people making Holocaust films’
“The interesting thing is that it’s not that they didn’t care about or weren’t moved by things or weren’t emotional. Of course they were; they were human beings. The question is not ‘were they moved?’ but ‘what were they moved by?’ And that’s when you get into this very interesting area of selective empathy which is clearly part of the human condition: how we value certain people over others according to race or religion or political allegiance.”
…
“It’s no different, to someone like her, to buying your steak at Sainsbury’s and going to an abattoir. You know where that steak comes from, but you don’t really want to be around a cow being slaughtered or the smell of it, or have the blood running over your shoes . . . there’s no pang of conscience, no redemption. There’s no salvation in this film, and there can’t be. These characters end the way they start.”
Samir’s Selection 02/17/2024 (p.m.)
Samir’s Selection 02/11/2024 (p.m.)
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Universities are failing to boost economic growth
Why do companies struggle to use ideas produced by universities? The loss of the corporate lab is one part of the answer. Such institutions were home to a lively mixture of thinkers and doers. In the 1940s Bell Labs had the interdisciplinary team of chemists, metallurgists and physicists necessary to solve the overlapping theoretical and practical problems associated with developing the transistor. That cross-cutting expertise is now largely gone. Another part of the answer concerns universities. Free from the demands of corporate overlords, research focuses more on satisfying geeks’ curiosity or boosting citation counts than it does on finding breakthroughs that will change the world or make money. In moderation, research for research’s sake is no bad thing; some breakthrough technologies, such as penicillin, were discovered almost by accident. But if everyone is arguing over how many angels dance on the head of a pin, the economy suffers.
When higher-education institutions do produce work that is more relevant to the real world, the consequences are troubling. As universities produce more freshly minted phd graduates, companies seem to find it easier to invent new stuff, the authors find. Yet universities’ patents have an offsetting effect, provoking corporations to produce fewer patents themselves. It is possible that incumbent businesses, worried about competition from university spin-offs, cut back on r&d in that field. Although no one knows for sure how these opposing effects balance out, the authors point to a net decline in corporate patenting of about 1.5% a year. The vast fiscal resources devoted to public science, in other words, probably make businesses across the rich world less innovative.
If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?
Perhaps, with time, universities and the corporate sector will work together more profitably. Tighter competition policy could force businesses to behave a little more like they did in the post-war period, and beef up their internal research. And corporate researchers, rather than universities, are driving the current generative ai innovation boom: in a few cases, the corporate lab has already risen from the ashes. At some point, though, governments will need to ask themselves hard questions. In a world of weak economic growth, lavish public support for universities may come to seem an unjustifiable luxury. ■
Samir’s Selection 02/10/2024 (p.m.)
Samir’s Selection 01/29/2024 (a.m.)
Samir’s Selection 01/26/2024 (p.m.)
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Gen Z Is Listening to What Netanyahu Is Saying. Is Biden?
“My insistence is what has prevented — over the years — the establishment of a Palestinian state that would have constituted an existential danger to Israel,” Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday. “As long as I am prime minister, I will continue to strongly insist on this.”
There is politics here, as everywhere. A two-state solution is dismally unpopular in Israel. A Gallup poll found backing for it among 25 percent of Israelis. The Israel Democracy Institute posed the question to Jewish Israelis with even more torque: Would you support a two-state solution if it were the only way to continue receiving American assistance? A majority said no.
Perhaps the only thing as unpopular in Israel right now as a two-state solution is Netanyahu himself. A recent Maariv poll found 28 percent of Israelis believe Netanyahu is still suited to be prime minister. If elections were held today, his party would be crushed. There are few paths to victory, much less absolution, for him, but this is one of the few that might work: persuade Jewish Israelis he’s the only leader tough enough to beat back American and European pressure to form a Palestinian state.
But consider Netanyahu’s boast. He is not just saying he opposes a Palestinian state now. He is saying he has opposed it for years. That he has worked to make it impossible. That he has succeeded.
The record backs him up. He allowed Hamas to hold Gaza, and Qatar to finance the group, because its presence kept the Palestinian leadership divided. No one could demand that Netanyahu accept a Palestinian state so long as that state would be governed by Hamas. This was his strategy, and he and his advisers said so.
In the West Bank, Netanyahu allowed settlers to run wild and rendered Hamas’s rival, Al Fatah, feckless. The Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority cooperated on security with Israel, day after day, but rather than raise Al Fatah up as a negotiating partner, he humiliated it. Netanyahu made Al Fatah into a subcontractor of Israeli control and gave Palestinians nothing for it. Instead, he allowed settlers to continue to take the little they had. It is no accident that the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy had collapsed even before the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.
In recent months, I’ve been thinking, as many American Jews have, about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus. And I’ve been thinking, too, about the polls showing that support for Israel, in America, is generational. Look at the age breakdown in the December Times-Siena poll:
Asked whether they sympathize more with the Israelis or the Palestinians, 63 percent of Americans 65 and older said the Israelis. Among those aged 18 to 29, 27 percent sympathized more with Israelis.
Seventy percent of those 65 and up supported additional aid to Israel. Fifty-five percent of people 18 to 29 opposed it.
Asked whether Israel should end its military campaign, even if Hamas has not been fully eliminated, in order to spare civilians, 67 percent 18 to 29 said they should. Only 30 percent 65 and up agreed.
Asked whether Israel is seriously interested in peace, 54 percent over age 65 said it was. Fifty-nine percent 18 to 29 said it wasn’t.
This is crude, but I think there are, roughly, three generations in terms of American sentiment toward Israel. There are older Americans who knew Israel when it was young. They remember the impossibility and wonder of its creation. They remember the wars its neighbors launched to eradicate it and the seeming miracle of its survival and of all that it then built. This generation still feels Israel’s vulnerability. They still feel its possibility. This is Joe Biden’s generation. It is a great gift for Israel that it still, improbably, controls American politics.
Then there’s what I think of as the straddle generation. This is my generation. We only ever knew Israel as the strongest military power in the region. A nuclear Israel. An Israel that occupied Palestinian territories, sometimes brutally. But we also knew an Israel that seemed to be trying to find its way toward peace and coexistence. We knew the Israel of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. We saw that the collapse of the 2000 Camp David summit was met by the second intifada, by years of suicide bombers rather than years of counteroffers. We also watched Israel build settlements across the West Bank, creating a one-state reality even as it spoke of a two-state solution. Polling shows, predictably, that our views of Israel are more mixed.
Then there’s younger Americans. They know only Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. He has, after all, been prime minister almost continuously since 2009. They know an Israel that is the strongest country in the region, by far. They know an Israel where messianic ethnonationalists serve in the cabinet. They know an Israel that controls Palestinian life and land and intends to keep it that way. They see this as simpler: a country that oppresses and a people that is oppressed. They are not entirely right — too little agency is offered to Palestinians in this telling — but they are not entirely wrong.
Is there antisemitism on campuses? Absolutely. But I visit colleges constantly. Antisemitism isn’t what is bringing most of those students out to the rallies. Antisemitism is not why most 18- to 29-year-olds see Israel as the aggressor nation. Antisemitism is not why the images and facts out of Gaza horrify. They are opposed to the Israel they know: an Israel that has no interest in peace — that has actively sabotaged efforts at peace — and that can imagine no security for itself absent the endless control of Palestinian lives.
Which is one reason I think the response to the protests on campus has been misguided. This is not a problem you can solve by firing college presidents or blackballing student radicals. Israel is losing the support of a generation, not a few student groups. And it is losing it because of what it does, not what it is.
Netanyahu’s comments reflect a reality: There is no two-state solution in the offing. This is a region gripped by fury and fear and grief and hate. Gaza is rubble and Israeli hostages remain in captivity and the dead are legion. I am sympathetic to those in the region who rage at Americans who insist on fantasizing about a partition that they themselves will not live within. I would not, as an Israeli, want to live next to a state where most people applauded the massacre of my neighbors. I would not, as a Palestinian, want to live next to a state that had just flattened my home and killed tens of thousands of my countrymen.
But there was nothing inevitable about the seeming impossibility of peace. It was built out of political decisions on both sides. It was built by suicide bombers and Hamas leaders. It was built by messianic settlers and Benjamin Netanyahu. And it is not in America’s interest to support Netanyahu as long as that is the vision he is pursuing, which he freely admits, even now. Biden knows an Israel that Gen Z does not. But Gen Z sometimes seems to be listening more closely to what Israeli leaders are saying than Biden is.
Samir’s Selection 01/14/2024 (p.m.)
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The housing crisis is still being underplayed >>>
https://www.ft.com/content/f21642d8-da2d-4e75-886e-2b7c1645f063
One of the most powerful cultural myths of the English-speaking world over the past century has been the belief that if you work hard, you’ll earn enough to buy yourself a house and start a family.
For a long time, it held true. Between the end of the first world war and the turn of the millennium, rates of home ownership climbed rapidly in both Britain and the US, topping out at about 70 per cent as young adults flew the parental nest and set up homes of their own.
But in recent decades, that trend has not only stalled but reversed. In 1980, almost half of 18 to 34-year-olds in Britain and America lived in their own property with children of their own, making this the most common arrangement for young adults. Today that is true of only about one in five, and the most common set-up for 18 to 34-year-olds is now to be living with their parents.
While some of this is due to the expansion of higher education, the trends hold true even after excluding students. The dream of a family home of one’s own has become just that — a distant dream.
But while the housing affordability crisis gets a fair amount of airtime, it often feels secondary to other leading concerns of the day. The breakdown of a central aspirational belief across the wider Anglosphere is at risk of becoming background noise.
One key reason for the lack of serious attention or action is age, which works in two ways. First, the people most acutely affected by this problem are from an age bracket that still exercises little political clout by voting. Second, few above the age of about 45 — ie virtually all key decision makers — appreciate what it’s like to have this particular key rite of passage postponed, sometimes indefinitely.
The latter point is under-appreciated. We have long-established ways of both discussing and tackling recurring economic shocks such as recessions or inflation. Every tool in the box is thrown at the problem, and the media, politicians and the public alike talk of little else until the worst is over. But the housing crisis is different. There are no recent playbooks to draw from.
Aside from the occasional blip, average house prices were roughly four times average earnings in the UK for 80 years between the 1910s and 1990s. This was a fixed characteristic of British society. Knuckle down, save for a few years and buy in your late twenties: simple. Then the ratio doubled in the space of a decade. The last time it was that high, cars had not yet been invented, Queen Victoria was on the throne and home ownership was the preserve of a wealthy minority.
To put the price-to-earnings ratio into more tangible terms, it now takes 13 years to save a deposit for the average UK property (up from three in the mid 1990s), and 30 years in London (up from four). To state the obvious, nobody spends 30 years saving for a house. The dream is over.
But despite such a historic economic and societal shock, the response from politicians and policymakers has been muted, in sharp contrast to the recent inflation spike.
Economists, central bankers and politicians spent the past two years battling a cost of living crisis that saw prices rise by an estimated 20 per cent in total, largely offset by pay increases. Whereas a 100 per cent real-terms increase in the unaffordability of perhaps the single most important good in modern western society has generally been treated as a young person’s issue with politicians paying only lip service to solutions.
The breakdown of the housing conveyor belt has huge and diverse impacts. Studies show that the inability to afford a home causes people to postpone starting a family or simply not have children at all. High housing costs also divert individuals away from productive places and activities, and dramatically increase inequality in wealth and between regions.
With big elections on the horizon on both sides of the Atlantic, politicians are relieved that they can point to encouraging signs about inflation’s possible return to normal levels. The housing affordability crisis shows no signs of following suit. It should be at the top of the agenda as the political campaigns get under way.
Samir’s Selection 01/12/2024 (p.m.)
Samir’s Selection 12/30/2023 (p.m.)
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Just One Thing – with Michael Mosley * Sleep Special – with Prof Russell Foster * Podcast Addict
1. Don’t worry if you don’t get 8 hours a night – or that you wake up in the middle of the night 2. Sleep on a big decision. Don’t take big decisions when tired3. Train your chronotype to suit your lifestyle (lark/dove/owl)4. Don’t have difficult conversations when you’re tired – at night5. A good night’s sleep from when you wake up–Professor Russell Foster – Director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford
Samir’s Selection 12/27/2023 (p.m.)
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From whatever perspective one chooses to view it, the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. Three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. Israelis call it “The War of Independence”; Palestinians call it the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The most horrific event in the suffering-soaked history of the Jews was the Holocaust. In the history of the Palestinian people, the most traumatic event is the Nakba, which is not in fact a one-off event but the ongoing process of the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland that continues to this day, in the unspeakable horrors being visited by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on Gaza.
The United Kingdom was the original sponsor of the Jewish state, going back to the Balfour declaration of 1917. But by 1948, the United States had replaced the UK as the principal backer. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state, although they themselves had enabled and empowered the Zionist takeover of Palestine. The conditions that gave rise to the Nakba were made in Britain. Yet no British government has ever accepted any responsibility for the loss and suffering it brought upon the people of Palestine.
In the period since 1948 the western powers, led by the US, have given Israel massive moral, economic and military support, as well as diplomatic protection. The US has used its veto power in the UN Security Council 46 times to defeat resolutions that were not to Israel’s liking. America also gives Israel around $3.8bn in military aid each year, with more this year to enable Israel to sustain its military offensive in Gaza. The trouble with American support for Israel is that it is not conditional on Israeli respect for Palestinian human rights or international law. As a result, Israel gets away, literally, with murder.
…The real purpose behind the move was to redraw the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority, but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen as the Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land. This did not stop Israeli spokespersons from making the preposterous claim that by quitting they gave the Gazans a chance to turn the strip into the Singapore of the Middle East.
In December 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, in breach of a six-month ceasefire that Egypt had brokered. This was not a war in the usual sense of the word but a one-sided massacre. For 22 days, the IDF shot, shelled and bombed Hamas targets and at the same time rained death and destruction on the defenceless civilian population. In all 1,417 Gazans were killed, including 313 children, and more than 5,500 wounded. Eighty-three per cent of the casualties were civilians.
War crimes were investigated by an independent fact-finding mission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and headed by Richard Goldstone, a distinguished South African judge who happened to be both a Jew and a Zionist. Goldstone and his team found that Hamas and the IDF had both committed violations of the laws of war. The IDF received much more severe strictures than Hamas, on account of the scale and seriousness of its violations. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups were found guilty of launching rocket and mortar attacks with the deliberate aim of harming Israeli civilians. The Goldstone team investigated 36 incidents involving the IDF. It found 11 incidents in which Israeli soldiers launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal outcomes (in only one cause was there a possible “justifiable military objective”); seven incidents where civilians were shot leaving their homes “waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so”; an attack, executed “directly and intentionally” on a hospital; numerous incidents where ambulances were prevented from attending to the severely injured; several attacks on civilian infrastructure with no military significance, such as flour mills, chicken farms, sewage works and water wells—all part of a campaign to deprive civilians of basic necessities. In the words of the report, much of this extensive damage was “not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”.
In conclusion, the 452-page report noted that while the Israeli government sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of the right to self-defence, “the Mission itself considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”
Under the circumstances, the mission concluded that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.” Goldstone later published an op-ed in the Washington Post, saying that while Hamas had committed war crimes (its rockets were “purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets”), “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel. The other three members of the fact-finding mission said that they stood by the conclusions, which were “made after diligent, independent and objective consideration of the information related to the events within our mandate, and careful assessment of its reliability and credibility.”
Neither Israel nor Hamas was held to account nor made to pay any price for its war crimes. The Israelis resorted to a character assassination of the report’s author rather than engaging with any of its findings. Although it did not lead to any action, the Goldstone report offers a deep insight into the pattern of Israeli behaviour in Gaza in this and all subsequent operations. The absence of sanctions also explains why Israel was able to continue to act with utter impunity and, yet again, to get away literally with murder.
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While committing war crimes, Israel claims to be exercising its inherent right to self-defence, and its western cheerleaders repeat this claim parrot-fashion. In this most recent and most devastating attack on Gaza, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, outdid even Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak by stating that Israel’s right to defend itself justified the denial of water, food and fuel to the civilian population. All three leaders persisted for eight weeks in their refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire, contenting themselves with feeble pleas to Israel for pauses in the fighting to allow humanitarian aid to reach the besieged civilian population.
Like most of its claims in this savage war, Israel’s claim that it is simply exercising its right of self-defence is baseless—or at least hotly disputed. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, has noted that under international law this right is only relevant in the case of an armed attack by one state against another state, or if the threat comes from outside. The attack by Hamas, however, was not by a state, nor did it come from outside. It came from an area for which, under international law, Israel is still the occupying power because after its withdrawal it continued to control access to Gaza by land, sea and air. Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies. In this case, therefore, the self-defence clause, Article 51 of the UN Charter, has no relevance. It is the people under occupation who have under international law the right to resist, including the right to armed resistance. And the Palestinian people are in a unique position: they are the only people living under military occupation who are expected to ensure the security of their occupier.
Taken together Israel’s attacks on Gaza reflect a profoundly militaristic outlook, a stubborn refusal to explore avenues for peaceful coexistence, habitual disregard for the laws of war and international humanitarian law, and utter callousness towards enemy civilians. Israeli generals talk about their recurrent military incursions into Gaza as “mowing the grass”. By this they mean weakening Hamas, degrading its military capability and impairing its capacity to govern. This dehumanising metaphor implies a task that must be performed regularly and mechanically and with no end. It also alludes to indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and inflicting the kind of damage on civilian infrastructure that takes several years to repair.
Under this grim rubric, there is no lasting political solution: the next war is always just a matter of time. “Mowing the grass” is a chilling metaphor but it provides another clue to the deeper purpose behind Israel’s steadfast shunning of diplomacy and repeated resort to brute military force on its southern border.
Under this grim rubric, there is no lasting political solution: the next war is always just a matter of time. “Mowing the grass” is a chilling metaphor but it provides another clue to the deeper purpose behind Israel’s steadfast shunning of diplomacy and repeated resort to brute military force on its southern border.
The current Israeli bombardment of Gaza is a response to the Hamas attack on Saturday 7th October, or Black Saturday. This was a game changer. In the past, Hamas has fired rockets on Israel or engaged with Israeli forces inside its territory. On 7th October, Hamas and the more radical group Islamic Jihad used bulldozers to break down the fence round Gaza and went on a killing spree in the neighbouring kibbutzim and settlements, murdering about 300 soldiers and massacring more than 800 civilians, 250 of whom were at a music festival. They also captured 240 hostages, including some military personnel. The brutal, murderous attack on civilians was a war crime, and it was rightly denounced as such by international political leaders.
Whether the Hamas attack was totally unprovoked, as Israel and its friends claim, is another matter. The attack did not happen in a vacuum. The backdrop was 56 years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories—the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times. It constitutes daily violence against the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and a daily violation of their basic human rights.
Hamas is not a terrorist organisation pure and simple, as Israel and its western allies keep insisting. It is a political party with a military wing whose attacks on civilians constitute terrorist acts. Indeed, Hamas is more than a political party with a military wing. It is a mass social movement, a prominent part of the fabric of Palestinian society which reflects its aspiration to freedom and independence. It is the failure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to achieve freedom and statehood that largely explains Hamas’s growing influence.
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In 1993 the PLO signed the first Oslo Accord with Israel. Mutual recognition replaced mutual rejection. For the Palestinian national movement this was a historic compromise: it gave up its claim to 78 per cent of Palestine as it existed between 1920 and 1948 under the League of Nations Mandate, in the hope of gaining an independent state in the remaining 22 per cent, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with a capital city in east Jerusalem. But it was not to be. The Oslo Accord turned out to be not a pathway to independence but a trap.
Following the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the hardline nationalist party Likud came back to power under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spent the rest of his political career in a relentless and so far successful effort to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. He has never been a partner for peace with any Palestinian faction. His game is to play them off against one another in order to frustrate the Palestinian national struggle. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told his Likud colleagues in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” By weakening and discrediting the moderates in the West Bank, Netanyahu inadvertently assisted the rise of Hamas.
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The 1988 Hamas Charter is antisemitic, denies Israel’s right to exist and calls for a unitary Muslim state in the whole of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea” as the slogan goes. But like the PLO before it, Hamas gradually moderated its political programme. Perhaps realising that the suicide bombings it carried out during the Second Intifada were both morally wrong and politically counter-productive, it opted for the parliamentary road to power. In January 2006, Hamas won an absolute majority in an all-Palestine election, in both Gaza and the West Bank, and proceeded to form a government. This was a more moderate, pragmatic government and it offered to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel for 20, 30 or 40 years. Although the Charter was not revised until 2017, in a long series of speeches Hamas leaders indicated that they would accept a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders.Israel refused to recognise the democratically elected Hamas government and turned down its offer of negotiations. The US and EU followed Israel’s lead and joined it in measures of economic warfare designed to undermine it. The western powers claim to believe in democracy but evidently not when the Palestinian people vote for the “wrong” party. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, if the Israeli and western governments are dissatisfied with the Palestinian people, they should dissolve the people and elect another.
With Saudi help, the rival Palestinian factions managed to reconcile their differences. On 8th February 2007, Fatah and Hamas signed an agreement in Mecca to stop the clashes between their forces in Gaza and to form a government of national unity. They agreed to a system of power-sharing, with independents taking the key posts of foreign affairs, finance and the interior. And they declared their readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel.
Israel did not like this government either and again refused to negotiate. Worse was to follow. Israel and the US secretly plotted with Fatah officials and Egyptian intelligence to undermine the national unity government. They hoped to reverse the results of the parliamentary election by encouraging Fatah to stage a coup to recapture power.
In 2008, a leak of memos from the Israel-Palestinian Authority negotiations showed that Israel and the US armed and trained the security forces of President Mahmoud Abbas with the aim of overthrowing the Hamas government. (Later, the “Palestine Papers”, a cache of 1,600 diplomatic documents leaked to Al Jazeera, would reveal more.) American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Hamas pre-empted a Fatah coup with a violent seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007. At this point the Palestinian national movement became fractured, with Fatah ruling the West Bank and Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip.
Israel responded to the Hamas move by declaring the Gaza Strip a “hostile territory”. It also enacted a series of social, economic and military measures designed to isolate and undermine Hamas. By far the most significant of these measures was the imposition of a blockade. The stated purpose of the blockade was to stop the transfer of weapons and military equipment to Hamas, but it also restricted the flow of food, fuel and medical supplies to the civilian population. One American senator was outraged to discover that pasta was on the list of proscribed items. The boycott applied not only to imports but, perversely, also to some exports from Gaza. Why prevent the export of agricultural products, fish and other non-lethal goods? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the hidden motive was to cripple Gaza’s economy and to inflict poverty, misery, and unemployment on its inhabitants.
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In its non-military aspects, the blockade constituted a form of collective punishment that is clearly proscribed by international law. Given the scale of the suffering inflicted by the blockade on the inhabitants of the strip, if Israel were a person it could be considered guilty of “depraved indifference”, a concept in American law (its equivalent under English common law is “depraved heart”) that refers to conduct that is so wanton, so callous, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the lives of others and so blameworthy as to warrant criminal liability.The Israeli bombardment of Gaza since 7th October may undoubtedly be described as “depraved indifference” on account of the indescribable suffering it is inflicting on civilians. While the main enemy is Hamas, Israel keeps targeting civilian infrastructure, residential buildings, schools, mosques, hospitals, ambulances and UNRWA food depots. By the end of November, the death toll has risen to more than 15,000 dead and more than 30,000 injured—more than the total of the previous military offensives combined. An estimated 6,150 of the dead are children and 4,000 are women. Slaughter of civilians on such an industrial scale may well have taken Israel to the verge of committing genocide, “the crime of all crimes”.
There is one other aspect of this campaign that was not present in previous ones: the danger of ethnic cleansing. In previous campaigns Israel brought death and destruction to the people of Gaza but kept them cooped up in the enclave, “generously” allowing them to stay in their homes. This time Israel ordered the residents of the northern part of Gaza, nearly half the total population, to move to the southern part of the enclave. Some of those who obeyed the order were subsequently killed in Israeli air strkes. At the time of writing more than 1.8m, out of a total of 2.3m, have been internally displaced. As the Israeli military offensive moved into southern Gaza, the refugees were ordered to move out of the area to which they had fled. This amounts to a forced transfer of civilians: a war crime.
The upshot is that nowhere in Gaza is safe. Stretching the laws of war beyond credulity, Israel argues that civilians who disobey its orders and stay put in their homes in the north become legitimate military targets. In addition, Israel seems to be working on a plan to transfer people permanently from Gaza into northern Sinai. In a leaked document dated 13th October, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence drafted a proposal for the transfer of the entire population of Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian government has expressed strong objection to the plan as well as its determination to keep the Rafah crossing firmly closed—apart from to allow some aid into Gaza during the ceasefire. But the combined pressures of the massive bombardment by the IDF and its medieval-style siege on Gaza may result in a human avalanche across the border. One thing is certain: any civilians who leave Gaza will not be allowed to return to their homes. More than half of the houses in Gaza have already been destroyed or damaged in indiscriminate Israeli bombing. So nearly half the population do not have homes to return to. No wonder that the bleak legacy of 1948 haunts the Palestinian community.
While the martyrdom of over two million innocent Palestinian civilians continues, despite the temporary ceasefire and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, a bigger question looms: who will run what remains of the Gaza Strip after the guns fall silent? Netanyahu has declared that he wants the IDF to keep indefinite security control of the strip but no one in Israel wants to assume all the responsibilities of an occupying power again. Meanwhile, his own grip on power at home is weakening. He faces strong popular opposition for his failure to prevent the horrendous Hamas attack and, more generally, for making Israel the most dangerous place in the world for Jews to live. He is also embroiled in a corruption trial on charges—all of which he denies—including fraud, breaching public trust and accepting bribes. Politically speaking, he is a dead man walking. His days in power are numbered and there is a chance that he will end up in prison. But he is still the prime minister, and his clearly stated aim is to eradicate Hamas and to prevent it from returning to power ever again. So, who will govern the Gaza Strip after the Israeli army leaves?
…Early signs suggest that the Americans and the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, favour the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. This is a totally preposterous proposition. The problem is not Hamas—which did not exist until 1987—but the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Moreover, the Hamas that committed the massacre of 7th October is far more extreme than the Hamas that won the 2006 elections and formed a national unity government. By blocking the path to peaceful political change, Israel and its western supporters are largely responsible for this regression to fundamentalist positions. Hamas may not be to their liking, but it still commands broad popular support. If an election were held today, Hamas would almost certainly beat its Fatah rival again.
And what about the sclerotic Fatah-led Palestinian Authority? It is docile, weak, corrupt and incompetent, and can barely govern the West Bank. It receives funding from the EU and to a lesser extent from the US, essentially to serve as a subcontractor for Israeli security in the area. It has shown itself to be utterly incapable of resisting the expansion of Israeli settlements, the escalation of settler violence, the slow but steady takeover of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the flagrant encroachment by fanatical religious Zionists on the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. Fatah also lacks legitimacy because no parliamentary elections have been held since January 2006. It has stalled on holding another parliamentary election precisely because it realises that Hamas would win.
Samir’s Selection 12/24/2023 (p.m.)
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How science fiction helped write AI’s first rule book >>>
Like Isaac Asimov before us, we have to work out how to benefit from the new technology while staying safe
Samir’s Selection 12/17/2023 (p.m.)
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Lessons from an international school report
https://www.ft.com/content/72edbf80-2518-4c96-bf93-c26b514d061b
The long-term drop in attainment, however, is not all about funding. The Pisa data suggests that above $75,000 total spending per student, the link between investment and performance weakens.
The falling availability and quality of teachers is a core factor. A UN study suggests 4.8mn teachers are needed across Europe and North America to secure quality primary and secondary education. Low salaries are part of the problem.
But so is the broader status, wellbeing and training of teachers, which support retention and attraction to the profession. In Singapore, which tops the Pisa tables, teachers are more likely to report feeling valued by society.
Student mindsets, which can be shaped from an early age, matter too. Low expectations, weak social relationships with teachers, and social media-sapped attention spans hold back performance. This can be assuaged through teacher training and standard setting.
As for distractions, one in four countries has already placed restrictions on smartphones in the classroom, according to UN estimates.
Samir’s Selection 12/09/2023 (p.m.)
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E.U. Agrees on AI Act, Landmark Regulation for Artificial Intelligence – The New York Times
Makers of the largest general-purpose A.I. systems, like those powering the ChatGPT chatbot, would face new transparency requirements. Chatbots and software that creates manipulated images such as “deepfakes” would have to make clear that what people were seeing was generated by A.I., according to E.U. officials and earlier drafts of the law.
Use of facial recognition software by police and governments would be restricted outside of certain safety and national security exemptions. Companies that violated the regulations could face fines of up to 7 percent of global sales.
“Europe has positioned itself as a pioneer, understanding the importance of its role as global standard setter,” Thierry Breton, the European commissioner who helped negotiate the deal, said in a statement…
Yet even as the law was hailed as a regulatory breakthrough, questions remained about how effective it would be. Many aspects of the policy were not expected to take effect for 12 to 24 months, a considerable length of time for A.I. development. And up until the last minute of negotiations, policymakers and countries were fighting over its language and how to balance the fostering of innovation with the need to safeguard against possible harm.
…Regulating A.I. gained urgency after last year’s release of ChatGPT, which became a worldwide sensation by demonstrating A.I.’s advancing abilities. In the United States, the Biden administration recently issued an executive order focused in part on A.I.’s national security effects. Britain, Japan and other nations have taken a more hands-off approach, while China has imposed some restrictions on data use and recommendation algorithms.
At stake are trillions of dollars in estimated value as A.I. is predicted to reshape the global economy. “Technological dominance precedes economic dominance and political dominance,” Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s digital minister, said this week.
Europe has been one of the regions furthest ahead in regulating A.I., having started working on what would become the A.I. Act in 2018. In recent years, E.U. leaders have tried to bring a new level of oversight to tech, akin to regulation of the health care or banking industries. The bloc has already enacted far-reaching laws related to data privacy, competition and content moderation.
A first draft of the A.I. Act was released in 2021. But policymakers found themselves rewriting the law as technological breakthroughs emerged. The initial version made no mention of general-purpose A.I. models like those that power ChatGPT.
Policymakers agreed to what they called a “risk-based approach” to regulating A.I., where a defined set of applications face the most oversight and restrictions. Companies that make A.I. tools that pose the most potential harm to individuals and society, such as in hiring and education, would need to provide regulators with proof of risk assessments, breakdowns of what data was used to train the systems and assurances that the software did not cause harm like perpetuating racial biases. Human oversight would also be required in creating and deploying the systems.
Some practices, such as the indiscriminate scraping of images from the internet to create a facial recognition database, would be banned outright.
The European Union debate was contentious, a sign of how A.I. has befuddled lawmakers. E.U. officials were divided over how deeply to regulate the newer A.I. systems for fear of handicapping European start-ups trying to catch up to American companies like Google and OpenAI.
…Enforcement remains unclear. The A.I. Act will involve regulators across 27 nations and require hiring new experts at a time when government budgets are tight. Legal challenges are likely as companies test the novel rules in court. Previous E.U. legislation, including the landmark digital privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation, has been criticized for being unevenly enforced.
Samir's Selection 