Public Media's Shameful Bias

As the old saying goes, if it bleeds it leads.

We can't turn away from tragedy because our Darwinian brains are genetically programmed to pay extra attention to potential threats and dangers, even to exaggerate them. It's not just morbid fascination. Social media takes advantage of this with their algorithms to keep us watching and sell us things. If we accept that it's in our genes to be drawn to danger, and I think it's undeniable, people can't be held entirely responsible for their difficulty in resisting this tendency. But the purveyors of information certainly can.

I'm talking about this because I'm disgusted by the mainstream media's coverage of Israel's current military actions in Lebanon. Especially disappointed by public broadcasters such as PBS, BBC and CBC, who I typically prefer to watch. They've interviewed citizens on the streets of Beirut and emergency room physicians treating the injured. They've shown the destruction of homes and buildings in Southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah is embedded, and from where they have been launching rockets at the communities of northern Israel for decades, but particularly since October 8th. What they haven't shown are the abandoned towns of northern Israel, because there's not much to see. They haven't shown the damage done by the thousands of rockets fired into Israel, because frankly, there hasn't been that much (although there has been some). Israel has spent decades and billions of dollars building the Iron Dome missile defense system and it has proven extremely effective. That's a great story, but protection against destruction (as opposed to actual destruction) isn't terribly exciting. 

The mainstream profit-driven media can be forgiven for their morbid obsession with covering tragedy and destruction, but not public broadcasters. If money isn't the reason, then why the obvious bias? The answer is found in the mission of taxpayer-funded media, which typically centers on telling the stories of the marginalized, the under-represented and minorities. In some ways this makes public media even more susceptible to a certain kind of oversimplification, one that characterizes some people as victims and others as victimizers. It's quite astonishing to witness how readily public broadcasting has fallen into the trap of creating a moral equivalence between the State of Israel and terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas. One side a democratic state accountable to its citizens and the rule of law, the other side outlaw non-state actors accountable only to their patron. One side whose mission is to protect its constituents from harm, the other who exploit their constituents by promoting harm to them. The country defending itself against terrorism is thus portrayed as the aggressor and the homicidal/suicidal terrorists are depicted as aggrieved. It would be absurd if it wasn't so shameful.    

The consistent media bias against Israel, I don't believe, is due to systematic anti-Semitism, and I'm very wary of calling everything and anything anti-Semitism. There are plenty of stories about Jewish people that are fair and positive. The bias of public media against Israel is more closely related to the impetus of publicly-funded agencies (whether in Canada, the UK or the US) to apologize for being associated with power. It's about having guilt for regrettable historical injustices, and wanting to makes amends by acting as an agent of contemporary social change. The result is the predominance of stories that elevate perceived victims. In Canada it's noticeable in the way stories about our indigenous minorities feature so heavily in public media. These are stories that implicitly romanticize the aggrieved and portray them as inherently righteous. But so much of the truth gets glossed over and whitewashed in the narrative. 

And so it is with Israel. Because Israel has an army dedicated to the defense of its citizens and borders, and because it is effective, it is seen as the aggressor, and the terrorists that use innocents as human shields and embeds in civillian communities are seen as victims. The latter is the war crime, not the former. The latter is genocidal, not the former. It's mindboggling that public media can't or refuses to figure this out.

Sweet Tea

The late morning sky 

is blue

soft as a mattress -

we sit together  

on the 7th floor balcony 

enjoying a sip of sweet tea

       the sunshine

            golden

the clank of spoon

against ceramic cup

stir            scream

                                 F-35

                point

    wait

Beirut.

Paging Sanity

It's my 60th birthday today, so I have to say something - "speech, speech" isn't that what they cheer after you've blown out the candles on the cake? As if you have some new wisdom to impart at your advanced age...

No guarantees here. But I do remember that I made a blog post about turning 50. It's interesting to look at again. It was a short, lighthearted, humourous list of reflections and observations. Nuggets like "I appreciate a good pair of shoes," and "I believe more in fate, intangibles, positive energy, karma." Clearly I wasn't getting any wiser with age. I can only assume I am less so now, by a decade. But I will say one thing about my 50 year old self - I seemed content. My post ends with "I am happier to be exactly where I am." 

These days I'm feeling grumpier.

I can only assume it's because since turning 50 I've experienced 10 years of chaotic politics and social media madness. Actually, I officially retreated from social media in the summer of 2019, when I deleted my FB account. But even with minimal exposure on my personal devices, the social media ecosystem has a way of making an unavoidable impact wherever you are.  

And so it was last night. Of course the talk of the house was the stunning, ingenious and lethal Mossad attack on Hezbollah targets. Thousands of pagers suddenly exploding on the hips and in the hands of militants and operatives all over Lebanon and Syria. At last reporting there were as many as 3000 casualties from the attack, with 31 dead, including 19 members of Iran's RGC, and 3 children (plus reports today of 9 more killed and 300 injured from exploding walkie-talkies.) The media went nuts about it, calling it James Bond spy movie stuff etc. Surveillance camera footage of pagers detonating went viral. We see them blowing up in market places, stores, at fruit and vegetable stands, on the street and in cars. People were killed and injured inside their offices and homes. 

The unprecedented ingenuity and craftiness behind the attack is certainly something to marvel at. In the grander political scheme, Israeli intelligence had to do something jaw-dropping to reestablish deterrance after the catastrophic failure of Oct 7th, and this certainly fit the bill. Like the assassination of Haniya in Tehran, it demonstrated a capability no one predicted.

Today I'm feeling disheartened. 

As we spoke about the attack last night, my wife checked her phone and laughed. What's so funny I asked. She showed me a 'witty' comment made by someone online, along the lines of "That took some balls!" Another one was, "We were inside Haniyah's bedroom and now we're inside Nasrallah's pants." I shook my head, and asked her why she found this funny. She said, well, they deserve it (I paraphrase). I said that I didn't find it funny at all, which elicited some tension between us. She said she understood why people wanted to make light of the attack, and celebrate a moment of 'look how good we got them!' I told her that bombs detonating in public places, killing, injuring and maiming thousands of people (many totally innocent) wasn't something to joke about. As I left the room I added, "This is a war." 

Actually, I felt shame and disappointment that glee was the response of so many Jews online. 

Since October 7th, each time the Jewish community has gathered to publicly demonstrate against the war in Gaza, the message has been to bring the hostages home. It hasn't been against Palestinians, or to kill Hamas militants, or even to get the mastermind Sinwar. It's been all about the safe return of our brethren. We have used our public voice to show our resilience in this time of great heartache, not to drum up anger and hate against anyone (as others have done). This has made me very proud of my community.

With this on my mind, I listened to the first part of Sam Harris's latest podcast called "Where Are the Grown-Ups?" My question exactly. In it, Harris talks about his latest dip into social media (like me, he swore it off a few years ago). What he finds scrolling through X (formerly Twitter) is a carnival of racism, violence (mostly by 'immigrants'), and conspiracy. He comments: "If I had to summarize the intent of X's algorithm at this point, it would be twofold: First, to make Elon Musk more famous than he already is, and second to make every white user of the platform more racist." 

The conventional wisdom is that social media has made us more angry, callous, impolite, racist, unsympathetic, tribal, aggressive and ignorant. It is not by sheer coincidence that someone like trump ascended to political power in this environment. I have been feeling encouraged that Kamala Harris's more positive approach to politics has been gaining traction. People are getting tired of the hostility and divisiveness. 

I think I will revive my 50-year-old self's sentiment - "I believe more in fate, intangibles, positive energy, karma."  Let's hope that includes, justice for trump after November.

Jihadism Is Psychosis

"We care more about the lives of their children than they do, and they weaponize that." A corollary is Golda Meir's famous statement, "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." Still so true.

The line is from an interview with Sam Harris on Dan Senor's indispensible Call Me Back podcast, and it has stuck with me. I've commented about this paradox before, in a blog talking about dying as a political tool. I'm thinking about it now as more than just a despicable military tactic.

It sums up so much of the moral dilemma and paradox faced by Israel, and by extension the west. It sums up how fanatical and nihilistic the enemy's ideology is. How contrary to basic morality and humanity it is. How the stakes of this battle are actually so much greater than just territorial or political, it's civilizational. And it summarizes how the enemy uses our values against us, to destabilize our society and in some cases, like mine, family relationships, not in spite of, but because of our empathy, sympathy and decency. Our morality is the fuel for their iniquity and that's a problem.

I think of my daughter who asks, rightly so, why don't you care as much about the reported 41,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza as you do about the Israelis? I'm proud of her for asking that question. It's the right question for anyone with any basic sense of human decency and empathy to ask. I'd be worried if she didn't ask it. 

My first response is obvious, we're Jewish. We need to care about our own. And as the global response to this war shows, we have plenty of enemies, people who want to do us harm, anti-Semitism is alive and well. But as justified as that answer is, that sort of tribalism also feels like part of the problem. It offends even my own sense of humanity, something I learned from being Jewish, which is also presumably why so many Jews are so sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. (Tellingly, we aren't seeing any Arab sympathy for the Israeli victims of Oct. 7th.) 

What my daughter is implicitly saying with her question is; even if the enemy doesn't care about their own women and children, it's morally incumbent upon us to care about them. If they intentionally put them in harm's way, it does not negate our basic moral responsibilities to our fellow human beings. We can't sacrifice our decency and humanity in a fight against their indecency and inhumanity. If we are like them, or if we are worse, according to the scale of carnage and destruction that we are inflicting upon them, then they win. 

Yes and no. 

Our problem as a society is that we think of them in 'normal' terms. We have sympathy for them on that basis, which is only natural. We say, look at the squalor they live in, the oppression, Gaza is overcrowded, an 'open-air prison' (no mention of the border with Egypt.) Is it any wonder they are angry and will go to such extremes to fight for their 'freedom' and self-determination? This is 'normal' thinking. But if they were normal in their thinking, if their goals were the security of their families and a better way of life, would they have launched a suicidal attack against an obviously superior military? Would there be such pride in sacrificing their women and children for their cause? Would there have been such maniacal glee in their Go-Pro filmed brutality and bloodlust?

The only possible answer is that this is a type of madness. 'Normal' does not apply. Jihadism is a form of psychosis. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, "Psychosis refers to a collection of symptoms that affect the mind, where there has been some loss of contact with reality... a person's thoughts and perceptions are disrupted and they may have difficulty recognizing what is real and what is not." Jihadism is a mental illness like other types of pervasive delusional thinking, dangerously divorced from reality, and with homicidal/suicidal tendencies. That's the proper framework within which to view it. Can a society, or large swathes of a society, be psychotic? (the clinical term is 'Mass-psychosis') I think history has proven definitively that the answer is yes.   

It's 'normal' to have sympathy for those suffering from mental illness. But only if they can and want to be helped. The delusional, psychotic, unrepentant, murderous Jihadist is a danger to his loved ones and society, and needs to be either put away or, if armed and rampaging, neutralized. No one can live with a murderous psychopath next door, or god-forbid in their own house. And what we know about dealing with psychopaths is that they will not stop until they destroy themselves, their loved ones, and everyone around them. And that's when sympathy becomes at best enabling and at worst self-destructive. That's what we're dealing with. 

Is The Fever Breaking?

Is this what happens when the fever is breaking?

That was my first thought after hearing that there was another attempt on trump. I was not surprised to hear that the suspect of this attempt had voted Republican. When they don't like something, Democrats tend to carry protest signs, Republicans tend to carry guns. 

Trump's singular achievement as a politician is that he activated and initiated the lunatic fringe into mainstream American politics. The guys (they are mostly white guys) who existed on the margins of society, the portion of the electorate who were rural, depoliticized and preferred to hate the government from their well-stocked and well-armed Doomsday bunkers, had a champion in the White House for a time. They became Trump's personal power base and the most ardent Republicans, elbowing out the centrist establishment normies. After his defeat in 2020, rather than step down as most losing candidates do, trump did the opposite, he consolidated his base of support and his takeover of the Party was complete. The only problem is, now that you are the Party, you own whatever happens to it. What happens when the promises you've been making all these years start being replaced by excuse after excuse? What happens when your supporters get tired of the familiar, old, boring, racist tune you've been singing, and you don't know any other lyrics to sing? And worse, what happens when you keep losing, and they stop believing your claim that every loss is actually a win?

First, they stop coming to your shows. Then they stop buying your merch. Finally, the most ardent of your supporters want you out of the picture for good. Trump is not only running to stay out of jail, he's literally running to stay alive. 

So what happens after trump loses (again)? Trump will say the election was rigged (again), as he is already doing. But this time no one will listen. He is not the president so this time he can not leverage that position for the purposes of disruption. There might be some protests, but there won't be riots in the streets. Chances are it will be like the protests he called for when he was in court in New York, meh. The only civil war we are likely to see will be in the Republican Party. Trump won't let go of the Party, he can't. It's his main family business. He's been trying to diversify the business for a while (bibles, sneakers, NFTs), mainly with the media division, and now a cryptocurrency (?), which suggests a pivot away from politics to some degree. The politics has always only ever been about the money. But he's never gone gently into that good night, ever, and he will fight to keep control of the Party because it's a formidable marketing infrastructure, and he has money problems on the horizon too. Unfortunately for him, his legal problems will eventually catch up with him, both financially and in terms of his liberty. Trump still has a few years of court ahead of him with appeals etc. before he is remanded into custody. But his legal problems will ultimately end his political career once and for all, if a heart attack or one of his followers doesn't end it permanently first. 

Since narrowly being elected to the Senate, JD Vance has seen himself as trump's heir apparent. That's what being trump's running mate has always been about for him. Trying to figure out how to take hold of the trump base with trump's blessing has been his objective. I can't see how that happens, even if trump is in jail. At best, he will become trump's mini-me,  and trump will make sure everyone thinks that he is calling all the shots, no matter what. But the normie faction of the Republican Party is still around. They were the Nikki Haley voters in the primary. Plenty of them will either vote for Harris (to vote against trump, like Adam Kinsinger and Lynne Cheney) or just stay home this election. They will reemerge after the election, and my guess is that they will get behind Nikki. She will come out of this political cycle well positioned to battle for leadership. Between her and trump/Vance, my money would be on her. But it will be a bloody, ugly fight. 

Harris vs. Haley in 2028. Another unprecedented election, but in a good way.

What we never learned from Plato

Everything is power. Whether we like it or not. It’s hidden in the pretext, subtext and context of every relationship, every book, every great work of art. No place for beauty or truth. No place for love or virtue. No such thing as an ideal. And so we sit around the fire in cold darkness of our cave, scratching ourselves, thinking of the next hunt, what meat will fill our bellies. And in our spare time, we fight over the shape and meaning of the shadows reflected on the wall of our cave, created by the figures who stand outside in the light near the entrance. We argue about whether they are friend or foe, we talk of our fears, and even our words are corrupt and deceptive. Sometimes, when the disagreement and distrust has reached a heightened pitch inside the cave, we fashion tools of power to gain the upper hand, and use them to bloody each other for the sake of our mistaken beliefs, convictions and desires. In our ignorance, of our ignorance, we forever fail, each other and ourselves. 

Political Frankenstein

It's been almost 10 years since that man rode the golden escalator down to the awaiting commoners to announce that he was running for President of the United States and I still can't get my mind around it. 

Realizing that he would be the most destructive and divisive president in modern American history, I came to grips with the possibility of his election in 2015, because he was the new thing, and Americans love a new thing. The desire for change is a powerful force. So they voted for a lying, gutter-talking, sex offending (on tape), draft-dodging, tax-cheating, pseudo-celebrity businessman, with a record of bankruptcies, stiffing suppliers, and conning customers, and who never did a day of public service in his life.   

But it's 2024 now. Haven't we had enough of his chaos and innumerable outlandish lies? After all, it's post pandemic debacle, in which over a million Americans perished (by many estimates, half needlessly), post two impeachments, post January 6th in which he fomented a violent insurrection against the Capitol and attempted a government coup, post stealing classified documents, post 36 felony convictions for covering up his affair with a porn actress, and, and... I haven't even mentioned post stripping away women's reproductive freedom by a Supreme Court he appointed. 

And this race is still neck and neck? Within the statistical margin of error? Is there nothing that disqualifies a person from becoming the President of the United States? Tax evasion? Bankruptcy? Adultery? A criminal record? Insurrection? I mean he's running while out on bail.

But all this doesn't actually say much about the candidate. It says much more about the electorate.

As I've mentioned before, I started reading Allan Bloom's 1988 book The Closing of the American Mind to try and understand how our standards have sunk so low during my lifetime. I sensed that the story begins way back, around the time I was born in '64, and came to fruition around the time I graduated university in '86, which is exactly the period that Bloom writes about. This is from a chapter in the last quarter of the book: "The professors, the repositories of our best traditions and highest intellectual aspirations, were fawning over what was nothing better than rabble; publicly confessing their guilt and apologizing for not having understood the most important moral issues, the proper response they were learning from the mob; expressing their willingness to change the university goals and the content of what they taught." You'd be forgiven if you thought he was describing the way universities (mis)handled, actually tolerated, the anti-Semitic and destructive pro-Palestine encampments on the university campuses this past year. Actually, he was writing about a chaotic 1968 civil rights demonstration at Cornell that he witnessed.

Reading Bloom made me realize something. We've been primed for a candidate like the Monster From Mar-a-lago for at least 50 years. I realized that this candidate isn't an anomaly. We've been creating him for decades. He's a composite, a political Frankenstein that we've stitched together from the unsavoury and unseemly characteristics of almost every president we've had since LBJ, just more so. Think about it. He is corrupt like Nixon, contrived like Reagan, adulterous like Clinton, clueless and inarticulate like Dubya, and inexperienced like Obama. Left off this list are Ford, Carter and GHW Bush. And that's because they are the exceptions that prove the rule. They were decent, honest, and forthright presidents. They paid their taxes, served their country honourably in war, and ran scandal free administrations. And they were all one term presidents. In other words they weren't really presidential material, at least not in the way my generation seems to prefer occupants of the Oval Office. 

I guess we'll see soon enough if standards have changed. The debate looms and the thought of the deformed ugly creature of our making once again standing behind a podium and being respectfully asked serious questions that concern all of us, as if a genuine answer can be reasonably expected, is to my mind an indictment. But not of the politician. The monster was never the creature, it was always his creator. 

Plato predicts the internet

"O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for the discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories, they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

Plato, Phaedrus, circa 370 BC

The Candidate Who Laughs

Fellow citizens of this great nation, I give you the candidate!

He is the very image of leadership. Tall, well-fed, well-dressed, with a head of carefully coiffed hair. He is not a career politician. He knows nothing about governance or how government actually works, and like most everyday citizens, has contempt for career politicians. He is a wealthy businessman, and relishes the symbols of his status. He cultivates a 'self-made' image, even though his wealth was entirely inherited from his father, but in our great and wealthy nation there is nothing wrong with intergenerational wealth. Like all citizens he is addicted to media and craves fame. He even starred in his own television show based on the image of success he publicly cultivates. In other ways he is quite common. He loves making money. In fact, making money is the only thing he really understands or cares about. He enjoys all the trappings of celebrity and power, living in a large house, having a private jet, a limousine and servants, in other words, he is the embodiment of every American's idea of success and he understands the power of projecting this image, and relishes the limelight. He has only one genuine skill, how to sell things, which is quintessentially American. He holds only one credo - everyone and everything can be bought for a price. He understands that to sell you must speak plainly but always with utmost confidence no matter what you are saying. His sentence structure and grammar are elementary-school level and filled with hyperbole to demonstrate force of expression, also an American trait. He uses a lexicon of simple words that he repeats over and over. His words are never meant to explain or clarify, rather they are meant to obscure, so he can deny what he has said before, or say the opposite and declare he was previously misunderstood. He never communicates to convey any particular idea or belief, because his aim is to never commit to anything. His only commitment is to himself. He communicates to leave an impression, not to be understood. He lies repeatedly, about everything and anything, no matter how small or big, because outside facts don't matter when your only objective is self-interest. Repeatedly lying is an effective way to inure people to all lies, and muddy the truth. He thinks people are lazy, ignorant and uninformed, because he is lazy, ignorant and uninformed. His most devoted supporters are exactly like him in this respect, and this is why he has contempt for them. What his supporters love about him is his authenticity, and by authenticity they mean his capacity to say anything he wants without any regard to the facts. They wish they could live like that. His world is a world of make-believe, like a child's, no matter how absurd or ridiculous. His adolescent existence extends to a total lack of responsibility. Like a child he thinks he is the center of the universe, and at the same time, like a child, he is completely incapable of accepting any responsibility. Whatever happens it's always someone else's fault. He has no sense of accountability, someone else is always to blame, he is the victim. Because his world is make-believe, the media is his main ally, because they also trade in make-believe. They either fabricate drama out of whole cloth or amplify it into a crisis because it's good for ratings. The candidate is skilled at tailoring his messaging to attract and hold the media spotlight. Maximizing attention, through the media and at political events, is the only metric of performance that matters to him. When he performs for his supporters he tells jokes, usually to insult or demean the opposition. His supporters love him for that. They wish they could live without consequences too. But he never laughs. He is incapable of laughter because laughter shows vulnerability. Nothing is more threatening to him than showing vulnerability, because he knows deep inside that he is fragile and weak.

You can vote for this candidate, or the one who laughs.