Anti-Trumpism, Counter-Terrorism & Tikkun Olam
Here’s your weekly(-ish) roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, February 3–10, 2024.
Preaching to the Converted: Anti-Trumpism in 2024 by Jon D. Schaff in Current:
A lot of anti-Trump commentary is elites telling each other how awesome it is to be smarter and morally better than the peasants. If your commentary isn’t really going to persuade anyone, I conclude that your motivations are largely performative.
To Stop a Shooter: Why Would an Armed Officer Stand by as a School Shooting Unfolds? by Jamie Thompson in The Atlantic:
As further massacres underscored how quickly people could be killed—most incidents are over within about five minutes—the recommended approach changed yet again, calling now for a solo-officer response. This is a Navy SEAL–level degree of difficulty: asking one officer to advance alone and take on an active shooter, in many instances one who is much better armed.
We condemn them, and it gives us someone to blame for the failure to protect innocent children.
A Self-Enforcing Protocol to Solve Gerrymandering by Bruce Schneier in Schneier on Security:
It’s trivial to explain: One party defines a map of equal-population contiguous districts. Then, the second party combines pairs of contiguous districts to create the final map.
How Australian Undercover Police ‘Fed’ an Autistic 13-Year-Old’s Fixation With Islamic State by Nino Bucci in The Guardian:
Counter-terrorism police encouraged an autistic 13-year-old boy in his fixation on Islamic State in an undercover operation after his parents sought help from the authorities.
The boy, given the pseudonym Thomas Carrick, was later charged with terror offences after an undercover officer ‘fed his fixation’ and ‘doomed’ the rehabilitation efforts Thomas and his parents had engaged in, a Victorian children’s court magistrate found.
From Descendants of the Dragon to Heirs of God by Sean Long in Christianity Today:
In the ancient Near East, ancient Greece, and historic Western culture, dragons symbolize evil, violence, disaster, and destruction. But in China and East Asia, dragons symbolize sacredness, nobility, auspiciousness, and blessing.
History Has No Lessons for You: A Warning for Policymakers by Joseph Stieb in War on the Rocks:
Lesson-learning faces a major paradox. Highly specific lessons provide little value for applying to new cases. Nevertheless, general lessons that might be applicable across cases are usually so banal that they offer no insight.
History does not provide answers to contemporary strategic questions, but it nurtures the ability to think outside of the parameters of the present while challenging assumptions.
Does Tikkun Olam Mean What You Think? by Susannah Black Roberts with Zohar Atkins on PloughCast (podcast):
They discuss the mystery of how this legal concept became the contemporary vision of tikkun olam as, essentially, a progressive vision of social justice.
Lost in the Mountains by David Owen in The New Yorker:
The critical moment, he said, occurred on the tenth or eleventh day, when he had become so weak that he wondered if he was going to die. He said a brief, silent prayer, in which he promised that if he was rescued he would dedicate his life to God. Almost the moment he finished, he saw a white helicopter flying along the valley from his left. “It wasn’t a hallucination,” he told me. “I asked my dad later if there really was a white helicopter, and he said yes, it was a Bell Huey, hired for the search.” Bill felt certain that God was answering his prayer—and at the same moment, in a panic, he took back his promise. “When you’re in the presence of God, you can’t lie,” he said. “It was like my whole heart was exposed to myself. I was a hypocrite. I realized that I didn’t want to serve Him, and the helicopter flew past.”
He later recognized that his troubles as an adult were related to his experience in Colorado. “Because I had turned my back on God,” he told me. “That’s how I can interpret it now.”
Weeping, grieving. Call me. Free me. Save me. From eternal death, set me free. At the day of terrible wrath, call me. Free me.
Sweeter than honey from the comb are your words; they're finer than gold, the rarest treasure of my life. Only your word could make my spirit shine. So may the meditations of my heart be pleasing to you, my God.
2024 News Audit
I use AdFontes’ Media Bias Chart and Media Bias/Fact Check to assess my news sources identify less-biased, less-opinion-oriented, more-factually correct sources. I currently rely on the following open source services:
Wire/News Services on Twitter: @CTV News, @ReutersWorld, @UPI
News Aggregators: Ground News, Tangle
News Podcasts: Reuters World News, WSJ What’s News
Fragment
On Unbiased News
When I say unbiased, I don't mean news that doesn't have any biases writ-large. You need certain biases to even have an interest in the news to begin with, and those biases will open us to perspectives and close down others because we have an limited capacity to process information. So I speak of “less-biased” news, rather than “un-biased” news.
For example, the news podcast I listen to recently reported on new business regulations in the UK. That's an expression of bias. But that podcast, by presenting the up and down sides of the regulations wasn't trying to get me to take a certain side on a contested issue via their reporting. The latter is the kind of reporting on major national and international events that I am trying to avoid.
The media reviews I consulted classify news sources according to left/right ideological bias, because so much national and international news is free precisely because part of the value proposition for those funding it is to garner political support. I don't understand the intuition many seem to have have that the solution to media bias is to lean into media that caters exclusively to their own biases. I'm most interested in news sources that don't tell me how to feel. I think people, myself included, are better at detecting intellectual manipulation than emotional manipulation.
I almost never watch the news—unless something that I am interested in is happening live—because video gives news sources the most opportunities to insert emotional hooks. Audio gives fewer, and print the least. So I have adjusted my news sources accordingly.
Of course, I do read a variety of opinion sources from different perspectives, and they try to persuade me to take their view of events. I also read, in a more comprehensive way, reporting on more niche issues that interest me. For example, I follow on Twitter nearly all the religion news outlets and reporters I can find, regardless of their ideological bent.
But with the exception of select issues, I don't have the time to follow national and international news that way. However, not only is it possible to efficiently obtain open-source news reporting on major events of general interest that doesn't simultaneously seek to persuade, it seems to me that is highly desirable to go to these less-biased news sources in order to separate basic news intake from the opinion commentary.
Why? Because mere exposure to the other viewpoints doesn't actually make most of us reconsider our perspective and judiciously consider where we ought to come down among the various positions. Rather, it can have the opposite effect, especially when our news sources wear their biases on their sleeve. In other words, reading more-biased news from different sides can have the subtle effect of making me (I don't consider myself immune to this) want to chose sides. And so, because I don't want to be any group's ideological serf, I attempt to formulate my own view after reading less-biased reporting before I turn to the opinion and analysis of writers who expose my view their critique.