honeypuppy
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User ID: 1250
honeypuppy
2mo ago
I think it's notable that every Presidential election since at least 2000 has had large amounts of the opposition believing the election was stolen/illegitimate:
2000 - Florida
2004 - Ohio
2008/12 - Birtherism
2016 - Russia
2020 - "Stop the Steal"
However, the key difference in 2020 is just how far the losing candidate went to contest it.
Part of my concern with trying to "steelman" weak-form versions of the stolen election hypothesis is that Donald Trump was unambiguously pushing for the strong-form version. It was his clearly communicated view that the evidence in favour of a stolen election was so strong that the right and just thing to do would for Pence/Congress to just give him the Presidency.
This wasn't the case for any of the other losers (and neither McCain nor Romney (though not Trump!) endorsed birtherism).
honeypuppy
6mo ago
I think there's a strong parallel between "woke" allegations of racism and white supremacy, and pro-Israel allegations of anti-Semitism.
In both cases there is a real phenomenon, but because it's such a good rhetorical weapon it gets significantly over-diagnosed.
There's even a parallel of the anti-SJW term "Kafka-trapping" - for instance, see how leftist Nathan Robinson complains that Jeremy Corbyn was forced out as UK Labour leader not because of any anti-Semitic comments on his behalf, but because he believed that claims that Labour had an anti-Semitism problem were exaggerated.
I've found it quite interesting to parse polls on intercommunal relations between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews.
There's enough variance in the results that I suspect a fair bit of bias in some or all of the polling (as well as shifts). But those caveats aside, it seems there are a couple of themes:
- There's fairly decent support for the right of Israel to exist (even as a Jewish state) among Israeli Arabs, varying between around 30% and 85% depending on the poll and the exact question. A couple of polls had solid majority support for personally remaining citizens of Israel vs any other country, including a future possible Palestinian state.
- On the other hand, it's quite remarkable (though not really in hindsight) how large proportions of both communities hold views that would be considered way outside the Overton Window in places like the US, especially if you said the same thing about a different ethnic group. For example:
- Multiple polls have about 40% of Arab citizens denying the Holocaust.
- One poll showed 75% of Israeli Jews would not want to live in a building with Arabs, and around half would be in favour of "transferring or expelling" the Arab population.
This seems quite relevant to determining what the consequences of a future peace deal would be, especially one closer to what Palestinian activists might like (e.g. a one-state solution with right of return for Palestinian refugees).
On the one hand, it seems like most Israeli Arabs, while not Israel's biggest fans, are generally pretty okay with it. And presumably, that number would go up if Israel were more conciliatory. So that lends credence to the dove worldview that Israel wouldn't be destroyed by allowing Palestinians to return.
On the other hand, a June 2015 poll had 84% of Palestinians in Gaza with a favourable view of Islamic Jihad, who are responsible for many terrorist attacks. Maybe a more dovish Israel would lower this number somewhat, and maybe this would moderate over time. But I think it's pretty likely that allowing a whole lot of current Gaza residents into Israel would result in at least a short-term significant increase in strife.
Finally, there's no way that a majority of Israeli Jews would be happy with living in a state with a significantly higher Arabic population.
honeypuppy
6mo ago
Reminds me of Scott Alexander's similar list in Too Many People Dare Call It Conspiracy
Should there be a “statute of limitations” for historical grievances?
As I read about the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, I can’t help but feel sympathetic for the Palestinian view that they were unjustly deprived of their land in the “Nakba”. Nonetheless, the entire history of Israel involved the area being constantly passed between empires, and far enough back you have Jews being killed or forced into exile after the Jewish-Roman wars.
If you start the clock today and ignore all history, Israel’s current territory is legitimate (as is any territory, by default). If you start it in 1948, then they look like occupiers. If you start it in biblical times, Israel starts to look legitimate again. If you insist that time passing doesn’t matter at all, you’re forced into a hopeless task of trying to track the very first cases of early humans unjustly taking land in the area from other early humans.
An unbounded “statute of limitations” for grievances that go back thousands of years seems completely impractical. But very short time limits seem undesirable too. I’m opposed to Russia invading Ukraine and I think it is entirely legitimate for Ukraine to try to reclaim Russian-occupied territory now. But I would not, for example, endorse Germany trying to reclaim Kaliningrad today, even though it was annexed and had its German population expelled and replaced mostly with Russians after WWII.
There are many other historical examples. I think it was unjust that American former slaves were not given reparations in their lifetimes, but am much less enthusiastic about reparations for their descendants today. Here in New Zealand, the indigenous Maori population have legitimate historical grievances, and many Maori tribes have received compensation from the government in recent decades. Nonetheless, I would not support the strongest claims by Maori activists today.
I’m influenced a lot on this matter by a paper by Tyler Cowen called How Far Back Should We Go? Why Restitution Should Be Small. He argues that under any multiple different ethical theories, it is difficult to justify large restitution for wrongs committed in the distant past. It becomes impractical even in theory to identify who alive today is better or worse off, the original victims and beneficiaries have died, and intergenerational restitution claims are on much shakier ground.
In the case of territorial integrity, I think it’s a very good thing that we have a norm against expansionist wars, and pushing back against recent conquests (e.g. in the Russia-Ukraine war) should be part of that. But it would be completely impractical to try to correct all current borders that were the result of historical expansionism, even if we limited ourselves to just the past century or so. Even if you could pull it off, it would mostly end up just disrupting the lives of people quietly living their lives for the sins of their forefathers and probably wouldn’t do much to help anyone.
Bringing it back to Israel/Palestine, where does it leave me?
Well, if I’m to be consistent about being sceptical of long-ago restitution claims, anything along the lines of “Jews were exiled from ancient Israel thousands of years ago, so they deserve it back” has to be a non-starter. Consistently applying a similar standard to other groups would radically upend the world, from the descendants of Ghenghis Khan compensating the descendants of his victims, to Native Americans getting the USA back.
For the “Nakba”, we’re talking about claims that are now 75 years old. That puts it right in the marginal zone, in my view. There is a small but rapidly dwindling number of living victims, and more or less all the perpetrators are dead. But it’s far from a Ghenghis Khan-level distant past.
Finally, there are obviously very many recent grievances in the Israel/Palestine conflict, that this line of thought doesn’t apply for.
What happened to the “Covid hawks?”
When was the last time you thought about Covid-19?
Perhaps you or someone you knew had it recently and had to cancel plans or were sick for a while. So perhaps I’ll reword it - when was the last time you thought about Covid-19 in a truly “pandemic” sense? For instance, when did you last wear a mask? Or express a strong opinion about masks or vaccinations (whether for or against?)
Odds are, you probably haven’t done much if any of that for at least 12 months. Though the WHO hasn’t formally declared an end to the pandemic, and a few changes like increased remote work have proved remarkably sticky, “back to normal” has clearly happened for the vast majority of people.
But just six or so months prior to that, Covid was much more of a live issue. Vaccination mandates were highly contentious and stories like the Canada convoy protests and Novak Djokovic’s deportation from Australia were big news. Lots of people cared about Covid and the reaction to Covid, and at that time it seemed far from inevitable that this would quickly dissipate.
In particular, there used to be a sizeable portion of people, whom I’ll call “Covid hawks”, who were strongly in favour of both formal Covid restrictions as well as being personally Covid cautious, even after vaccines had become widely available. Matthew Yglesias talks about them at length in his January 2022 article “Normal”.
The kinds of people who are mad at David Leonhardt have propounded a worldview in which the truly virtuous are those who do remote work, Zoom with family in other cities, exercise at home on their Peloton, and maybe engage in a little light socializing with friends outdoors during the nice weather. You may be allowed to do other stuff, but the truly correct, conscientious mode of behavior is to abstain or minimize.
Covid hawks were very influential in media, in education, and basically anywhere where left-wing views were predominant (including Reddit and Twitter). I personally spent too much time in 2021 and 2022 arguing against them to a fairly hostile reception - even though my own Covid views were if anything a little more hawkish than Yglesias'.
It seemed quite plausible that Covid hawkishness might persist in the long term. Richard Hanaia wrote an essay in July 2021 called "Are Covid Restrictions the new TSA?", arguing that just as the post-9/11 increases in security remained in place, so too could Covid restrictions. This seemed quite plausible to me at the time, especially as I recall many Covid hawks openly being in favour of this. But though some rules did stick around quite a while longer, they’ve more or less all gone now.
Nowadays, the Covid hawks seem to have mostly just… quietly gone back to normal themselves? Sure, there are a handful of holdouts in places like /r/Coronavirus. But I basically never see Covid discussed anymore - even from people who used to talk about it incessantly. This isn’t just anecdotal - Google trends in the US for example show Coronavirus/Covid search results are currently only about 3% of what they were in January 2022.
What happened?
Did Covid pretty much just “go away”?
There’s some element of this. US Daily Covid deaths are now at a pandemic low (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/) at less than 100 a day (though drops in testing may muddy the waters a bit)
But daily deaths have at various times over the past year exceeded the death count seen at various earlier lulls in the pandemic, without seeing a restoration of anywhere near the same reaction. So it can’t be the whole story.
Did Omicron “break the spell”?
January 2022 was the very peak of the Omicron wave in the US (and most of the world), which also produced the highest recorded daily case count of the whole pandemic. It’s hardly surprising that Covid was a relatively bigger issue then.
But I think Omicron had some important features that helped accelerate the end of “Covid hawks”.
Firstly, because vaccines weren’t very effective at preventing infection, the case for vaccine mandates was much weaker, and most places dropped them fairly promptly in early 2022. This took the wind out of the sails of the anti-vax protest movement, which were major villains/points of contrast for the Covid hawks.
Secondly, because Omicron was so infectious, even many otherwise cautious people still got infected by it. This had a few effects. One, it made the “badge of pride” of being Covid cautious less effective if you still got infected anyway. Secondly, a lot of people would have found the illness to be relatively mild and it may have felt their initial fears feel overblown. Finally, the wave resulted in widespread increased immunity, making people feel more comfortable about going back to normal afterward (partly because of cases going down, and partly because of people who felt immune themselves).
Did Covid caution gradually “go out of fashion”?
If you look again at the Google Trends link above, there was a steep fall as the original Omicron wave receded. By March 2022, with cases in a trough, searches were about a third of what they were at the start of the year. But even as subsequent waves of Omicron subvariants reared their heads, resulting in case numbers sharply increasing (though still remaining well below all-time peaks), it appeared to do little to stem back the gradual decline of search interest. Today, search traffic for coronavirus is about a tenth of what it was in March 2022.
So I think Covid “going out of fashion” has to be considered a major factor. My guess is that an “unraveling” of Covid hawkery as a social movement occurred. A number went “back to normal” after vaccination and others after the first Omicron wave passed, but that still left a sizeable enough group for them to feel solidarity with. But the group faced steady attrition as the rest of the world moved on, probably partly due to pandemic fatigue and partly due to becoming an increasingly isolated minority. Being a vocal Covid hawk was still pretty acceptable in certain “blue tribe” circles in mid-2022, but now in mid-2023 you’d probably get funny looks even from many former Covid hawks if you demanded that mask mandates be brought back.
Conclusion
I think the Omicron wave was a precipitating factor in the demise of “Covid hawks”, but it still took a long time to unravel to the tiny minority it is now.
However, this essay might have given the impression that I think the reactions of “Covid hawks” were always too strong, which isn’t the case at all. I’ve always thought that an individual or society’s response to Covid needed to take a cost-benefit analysis into account, and depending on the circumstances that could justify quite strong reactions (e.g. I generally supported (my home country) New Zealand’s lockdowns and border restrictions, if not necessarily every element of their scope or length). Even today, I think the highly vulnerable should be at least moderately Covid cautious, and even the less vulnerable might want to be selectively Covid cautious leading to an event where it could really suck to get Covid (e.g. if you’re about to climb Mt Everest).
Still, I wouldn’t deny it - I’m still a little sore from being heavily attacked on Reddit and Twitter for daring to suggest that some reactions to Covid may go a little overboard. To see that many of the people who used to insist that masking forever would be no big deal are no longer masking themselves does make a feel more justified in my past positions.
While roughly true there's significant variation in just how red or blue the cities or rural areas are. Urbanisation by state correlates with partisanship but only moderately, with notable outliers (Utah is among the most urban and most Republican states, whilst Vermont is among the most rural and Democratic states).
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