Trolls and the Times

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the most popular devices used by propagandists is the selected misleading quote. I’ve seen the method used so often that it can be called standard operating procedure. It’s not limited to the left – you can find it on the right, too – but it’s only on the left that it’s commonplace and becomes nearly constant.

In fact, that discovery was one of the reasons for my political change.

Yesterday we had a good example of the use of the technique in this post, in which I compared the treatment of Tim Morrison’s testimony and opening statement (it is only the latter for which we were allowed to see the text) by The Federalist and the NY Times. Needless to say, quite different things were emphasized by each publication.

Right on cue, our resident troll “Manju” chimed in with this, as a reply to my characterization “The [Times’] headline states ‘White House Aide Confirms He Saw Signs of a Quid Pro Quo on Ukraine.’ …directly contradicts what the Federalist reports.” Manju writes:

From Morrison’s opening statement:

“I had no reason to believe that the release of the security sector assistance might be conditioned on a public statement reopening the Burisma investigation until my September 1, 2019 conversation with Ambassador Sondland.”

The NYTimes characterization is correct. The Federalist’s is propaganda.

But even looking just at the short excerpt Manju offers as proof that the Times headline was correct and the Federalist incorrect, it doesn’t indicate that at all. Morrison isn’t saying that he himself saw any such thing. He has no direct knowledge of anything of the sort. Nor was he asserting that because Sondland said it, it must be the case.

The part of Morrison’s statement that Manju left out provides the context [emphasis and bracketed remarks mine]:

I was not aware that the White House was holding up the security sector assistance passed by Congress until my superior, Dr. Charles Kupperman, told me soon after I succeeded Dr. Hill. I was aware that the President thought Ukraine had a corruption problem, as did many others familiar with Ukraine. I was also aware that the President believed that Europe did not contribute enough assistance to Ukraine. I was directed by Dr. Kupperman to coordinate with the interagency stakeholders to put together a policy process to demonstrate that the interagency supported security sector assistance to Ukraine. I was confident that our national security principals—the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the head of the National Security Council—could convince President Trump to release the aid because President Zelensky and the reform-oriented Rada were genuinely invested in their anti-corruption agenda.

Ambassador Taylor and I were concerned that the longer the money was withheld, the more questions the Zelensky administration would ask about the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. Our initial hope was that the money would be released before the hold became public because we did not want the newly constituted Ukrainian government to question U.S. support.

I have no reason to believe the Ukrainians had any knowledge of the review until August 28, 2019. [that’s long after the Trump phone call in question] Ambassador Taylor and I had no reason to believe that the release of the security sector assistance might be conditioned on a public statement reopening the Burisma investigation until my September 1, 2019 conversation with Ambassador Sondland. Even then I hoped that Ambassador Sondland’s strategy was exclusively his own and would not be considered by leaders in the Administration and Congress, who understood the strategic importance of Ukraine to our national security.

I am pleased our process gave the President the confidence he needed to approve the release of the security sector assistance. My regret is that Ukraine ever learned of the review and that, with this impeachment inquiry, Ukraine has become subsumed in the U.S. political process.

The characterization by the Times and Manju lacks the context in which it can properly be understood. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

What’s more – although this is somewhat tangential to the subject matter of this post, how quotes can work as propaganda – even if Trump was doing exactly what he is accused of doing, so what? Didn’t Biden explicitly do something similar?

Plus, here’s a point made by Trey Gowdy:

Well, you know, that means something for something,” he said of the supposed “quid pro quo” at the center of the impeachment probe. “I need to know what both of those somethings is.”

“If the something is, ‘We’re not going to give you aid until you help us figure out who tried to interfere with the levers of democracy in 2016’ — Margaret, I can tell you if a Democrat did that we’d be adding something to Mt. Rushmore,” he said.

If it was the case that Mr. Trump and his allies inside and outside the administration pressured the government of Ukraine to help the U.S. determine who else, other than Russians, might have attempted to meddle in the 2016 election, Gowdy said the actions would not amount to “high crimes and misdemeanors” — the constitutional standard for impeachment.

“I mean, we spent two years as a country trying to figure out who tried to interfere with our elections. So clearly, it can’t be an impeachable offense,” he added.

But it’s moot, because there are no indications that’s what happened. And in particular, if Ukraine wasn’t even aware of any stoppage of aid, then there could not have been a quid pro quo for anything, and that includes the re-opening of the Burisma investigation.

There are several possible quid pro quo subjects, by the way, and they are often confused: an end to Ukrainian corruption in general, information about Ukrainian interference in the US election of 2016, and re-opening (note the “re”) the Ukrainian investigation into Burisma. IMHO they would all be valid subjects for Trump to insist upon, but I see no evidence that any of these subjects was made a requirement by Trump in terms of foreign aid to Ukraine, for the simple reason that Ukraine didn’t even know there was any disruption in aid.

The thing about this propaganda technique is that it’s generally very effective. That’s true for several reasons, but the main one is that most people will not go back to the original to find the context in order to check. Often it’s because they view the source of the quote as a trusted one. Often it’s because they don’t have the time or the inclination. Sometimes they even lack the knowledge that they can find the original if they try (and of course sometimes the text of the original is unavailable). Often they want to believe the version they read anyway, and aren’t especially interested in challenging it.

And so it continues.

Snap Brexit vote for UK on December 12

The New Neo Posted on by

A UK vote is scheduled for December 12 in an attempt to break the Brexit stalemate.

PM Boris Johnson is gambling that he will win a majority and be able to execute Brexit as promised, without Parliament blocking him as it has so far. The left is gambling that they’ll be the victors and can institute a Brexit vote do-over that will go their way.

And still another possibility is another stalemate in which neither side has a majority and the stalling goes on and on.

Any bets?

No wonder they don’t want us to know who the “whistleblower” is

The New Neo Posted on by

It is allegedly (and almost certainly) Eric Ciaramella, and he’s not exactly what you’d call an objective observer:

Former White House officials said Ciaramella worked on Ukrainian policy issues for Biden in 2015 and 2016, when the vice president was President Obama’s “point man” for Ukraine. A Yale graduate, Ciaramella is said to speak Russian and Ukrainian, as well as Arabic. He had been assigned to the NSC by Brennan.

He was held over into the Trump administration, and headed the Ukraine desk at the NSC, eventually transitioning into the West Wing, until June 2017.

“He was moved over to the front office” to temporarily fill a vacancy, said a former White House official, where he “saw everything, read everything.”

The official added that it soon became clear among NSC staff that Ciaramella opposed the new Republican president’s foreign policies. “My recollection of Eric is that he was very smart and very passionate, particularly about Ukraine and Russia. That was his thing – Ukraine,” he said. “He didn’t exactly hide his passion with respect to what he thought was the right thing to do with Ukraine and Russia, and his views were at odds with the president’s policies.”

“So I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the whistleblower,” the official said.

In May 2017, Ciaramella went “outside his chain of command,” according to a former NSC co-worker, to send an email alerting another agency that Trump happened to hold a meeting with Russian diplomats in the Oval Office the day after firing Comey, who led the Trump-Russia investigation. The email also noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had phoned the president a week earlier.

Contents of the email appear to have ended up in the media, which reported Trump boasted to the Russian officials about firing Comey, whom he allegedly called “crazy, a real nut job.”

In effect, Ciaramella helped generate the “Putin fired Comey” narrative, according to the research dossier making the rounds in Congress, a copy of which was obtained by RealClearInvestigations.

The guy’s been a busy little beaver, hasn’t he? He appears to be one of those Obama holdover moles I described in this post:

Right after the 2016 election, I read some articles describing people in government who had decided to stay put and secretly sabotage Trump. These articles weren’t exposes written by the right; they were proud confessions from the left, part of the righteous Resistance.

We are seeing the fruit of that today.

I hadn’t noted the links to any of those articles at the time, so recently I got curious to see whether I could find one. Here’s an excerpt from one typical article of the type, published in Vanity Fair on February 1, 2017, twelve days after Trump’s inauguration [emphasis mine]:

“Others, however, view resistance as a part of the job. ‘Policy dissent is in our culture,’ one diplomat in Africa, who signed the letter circulating among foreign diplomats, told The New York Times. ‘We even have awards for it,’ this person added, in reference to the State Department’s ‘Constructive Dissent’ award. One Justice Department employee told the Post, ‘You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,’ and added that ‘people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable,’ by whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complaints. Others are staying in contact with officials appointed by President Obama to learn more about how they can undermine Trump’s agenda and attending workshops on how to effectively engage in civil disobedience, the Post reports.”

…And then we have this, from the same article [emphasis added]:

“When asked how the opposition emerging at this stage compares to past administrations, Tom Malinow­ski, who served as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, sarcastically told the Post, ‘Is it unusual? There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.'”

The “nothing unusual” part was sarcasm, of course. But the rest was deadly serious. The plan was in place from the start, and it’s not some wild conspiracy-mongering to say so. This is a clandestine conspiracy, but not a completely secret one in the sense that we were told about its general thrust in advance by the proud perpetrators themselves. An interesting detail from those quotes is that “Obama officials” were apparently in charge of orchestrating this.

And although Russiagate failed, they orchestrated its successor Whistlegate, Ukrainian phonecallgate, impeachmentgate, call it what you will. We are now watching that theatrical production.

This is the sort of thing the Democrats won’t be leaking…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and the MSM won’t be reporting in the same way.

Because it favors Trump:

A top National Security Council (NSC) official who listened to President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky testified to Congress today that he did not believe Trump had discussed anything illegal during the conversation.

“I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” former NSC Senior Director for European Affairs Tim Morrison testified today, according to a record of his remarks obtained by The Federalist.

Morrison testified that Ukrainian officials were not even aware that certain military funding had been delayed by the Trump administration until late August 2019, more than a month after the Trump-Zelensky call, casting doubt on allegations that Trump somehow conveyed an illegal quid pro quo demand during the July 25 call…

Morrison also pointed out key factual inaccuracies in testimony provided by William Taylor, a State Department official who works in the U.S. embassy in Kiev, Ukraine. Morrison said that, contrary to Taylor’s claims, Morrison never met with the Ukrainian National Security advisor in his private hotel room.

Morrison also said Taylor falsely claimed that Ambassador Gordon Sondland demanded a public statement from the Ukrainian president committing to investigate Burisma, a controversial Ukrainain energy company that paid Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter millions of dollars to sit on its board.

So, how does the NY Times tell the story? Like this:

A National Security Council aide testified on Thursday that a top diplomat who was close to President Trump told him that a package of military assistance for Ukraine would not be released until the country committed to investigating Mr. Trump’s political rivals, corroborating a key episode at the center of the impeachment inquiry.

The closed-door deposition by Timothy Morrison, who announced his resignation on Wednesday on the eve of his appearance before impeachment investigators, suggests that a Trump-appointed ambassador proposed a quid pro quo in which security assistance money allocated by Congress would be provided only in exchange for the political investigations the president was seeking. His account confirmed the one given last week by Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, during his Mr. Morrison briefed Mr. Taylor on a series of communications involving the president and his ambassador to the European Union, Gordon D. Sondland, according to his prepared remarks for Thursday’s appearance, which was reviewed by The New York Times.

“I can confirm that the substance of the statement, as it relates to conversations he and I had, is accurate,” he said.

The headline states “White House Aide Confirms He Saw Signs of a Quid Pro Quo on Ukraine.” That directly contradicts what the Federalist reports. What’s more, about 500 words into the slightly-over-1000-word Times story, the text rather abruptly contradicts the thrust of its own headline and opening paragraphs (probably assuming most people have given up on reading the story by then, thinking they’ve already gotten the gist of it) by adding this:

In his opening remarks, Mr. Morrison resisted drawing conclusions about Mr. Trump’s involvement, and in subsequent testimony he made clear he did not view the actions of the president or others involved as illegal or improper. Instead, he characterized their behavior as bad foreign policy of the sort that could potentially squander a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” afforded by Mr. Zelensky’s election.

“Ambassador Taylor and I had no reason to believe that the public release of the security sector assistance might be conditioned on a public statement reopening the Burisma investigation until my September 1, 2019 conversation with Ambassador Sondland,” Mr. Morrison said. “Even then I hoped that Ambassador Sondland’s strategy was exclusively his own and would not be considered by the leaders of the administration and Congress, who understood the strategic importance of Ukraine to our national security.”

So the whole “White House Aide Confirms He Saw Signs of a Quid Pro Quo on Ukraine” headline appears to be referring to what Sondland told him was Sondland’s own opinion on the matter.

And of course, all we have to go on is the word of leakers and reporters writing for various non-objective media organs rather than seeing and hearing for ourselves what Morrison (or any other witness) said.

What a travesty and an outrage the proceedings are. Every American should feel that way, no matter what political side he or she is on. But of course, that’s not the case.

[NOTE: The Times adds this sly dig at the WaPo after the Times finally manages to put in those paragraphs about Morrison’s opening remarks that seem to exculpate Trump: “Mr. Morrison’s intention to corroborate Mr. Taylor’s account was first reported by The Washington Post, though it did not report his opening statement.” In other words, the WaPo left out even that little bit of truth about the opening statement that the Times allowed to sneak in there.]

The Democrats’ Orwellian impeachment vote

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats pretended to do something today, but it was nothing or worse than nothing.

Byron York calls the resolution they passed “The Adam Schiff Empowerment Act.” But Schiff was already informally empowered to do what the act still allows him to do, which is pretty much whatever he and the Democrats want him to do, or not do.

The resolution states that the Democrats can give the Republicans more rights than before in the process – if the Democrats want to do so. Right now they don’t want to. But they hope that by saying they can expand rights for Republicans, the American people will think they have expanded those rights.

And if the American people buy that, they’re just as stupid and malleable as the Democrats and the MSM think they are.

The Democrats say they’re responding to the Republican demand that they vote on an impeachment inquiry. But the Republicans didn’t demand a vote on this particular resolution, which merely states what was already going on and what might happen in the future and confers none of the benefits that an impeachment vote conferred to the defense in the past. This is kind of like that strange modern fiction, a promise ring – without the promise

From York:

The first thing the resolution will do is give the impeachment investigation to the Intelligence Committee. Until now, three committees — Intelligence, Oversight, and Foreign Affairs — have been conducting impeachment interviews. Going forward, Oversight and Foreign Affairs will be out of the interview picture in favor of Intelligence.

Among other things, that would mean that some Republicans who have been persistent critics of the process but who have been allowed into depositions by virtue of their membership in other participating committees — two examples are Oversight Committee members Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Mark Meadows — will no longer be allowed in the interview room.

See how that sleight of hand works?

More:

The resolution also gives Schiff total control over whether transcripts of depositions already completed and those yet to be done will be made public…

The resolution would also give Schiff the authority to call and conduct public hearings on impeachment. Schiff will control the witnesses. Although there has been some discussion about whether Republicans will have the right to call witnesses, the resolution only gives the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Community, Rep. Devin Nunes, the right to ask Schiff to call a witness.

“To allow for full evaluation of minority witness requests, the ranking minority member may submit to the chair, in writing, any requests for witness testimony relevant to the investigation,” the resolution says. “Any such request shall be accompanied by a detailed written justification of the relevance of the testimony of each requested witnesses to the investigation.” Republicans will get nothing that Schiff does not approve.

The resolution received not a single Republican vote. Two Democrats in swing districts – Colin Peterson (MN) and Jeff Van Drew (NJ) – were allowed to vote against it. Justin Amash of Michigan, who once was a Republican (and a pro-impeachment NeverTrumper) but became an Independent last July, voted for it. So you might say that any bipartisanship here was bipartisan support for a “nay” vote.

Doesn’t matter. The Democrats will do whatever they want.

Equivocating on the impeachment vote

The New Neo Posted on by

Will it happen or won’t it?

Steny Hoyer, the House Majority whip, refused to commit to an actual vote on the matter, even though Mrs. Pelosi insists that it is, in fact, happening on Thursday. “We’re going to have to consider whether or not it’s ready to go on Thursday,” Steny said. “I hope that’s the case.”

The fact that Pelosi failed to clear matters with the majority whip, part of whose duties is to arrange things like votes, suggests a level of disorganization that beggars the imagination…

This is simply further evidence, if any was needed, that the impeachment effort is an empty scam, a massive P.R. stunt, with no substance to speak of behind it. It is a Potemkin campaign jimmied up between Pelosi, Schiff, and the anti-Trump media. The rest of the House Democrats, who can read an electoral map (skills that neither Pelosi nor Schiff ever had to develop, both representing rotten Cali districts inhabited by Demunist pod people), are not so much disinterested as terrified. They can clearly see where this is headed.

I would describe it somewhat differently.

I think it’s always been a propaganda exercise in which the Democrats were hoping to do several things. The first was to discover a smoking gun or even several. So far, no dice. The second was to control the pace of constantly negative information about Trump and hope to influence the 2020 election. They’ve done some of that, but so far the information revealed just hasn’t been negative enough.

The third was to impeach, but I think that was a somewhat distant third that was always iffy. But I doubt there was confusion or a failure to communicate on the part of Pelosi. I believe that the Democrats were planning to read the tea leaves and react accordingly. If public sentiment for impeachment didn’t build over time, then they wouldn’t hold a vote – or, they would have one and allow their House members in Trump-leaning districts to vote against it, thus retaining those representatives’ ability to say they are independent of the Democratic establishment and therefore should be re-elected in 2020 (which would also help the Democrats retain their House majority in that election). On the other hand, if public sentiment built for impeachment, they’d hold the vote and those same people would be quite willing to vote “yes.”

That’s the plan as I see it. Trump’s actual removal from office through impeachment and conviction was always an extreme longshot, and they knew it. But the Democrats were never counting on that. They were counting on damaging Trump and causing him to lose in 2020. And if that fails, they’re planning on holding the House.

Politicians and promises: Trump vs. the Socialists

The New Neo Posted on by

An interesting discussion ensued in the “Being a Socialist means you never have to explain” thread. In the post, I had pointed out that both Sanders and Warren were promoting single payer health care and refusing to tell us how such an enormous entitlement would be funded. Commenter “Montage” responded by making two analogies to things Trump had promised when he was campaigning:

Sort of like the ‘wall’. Mexico will pay for it, right? Oh wait well it will get paid for. How? Not important.

Then while campaigning Trump said he would eliminate the debt in 8 years. How? Tax cuts! What? Now the debt has increased by 68%.

Just for starters, it’s true that politicians all make promises they can’t keep. But Trump has kept far more of his promises than most.

Turning to specifics, the Wall was a linchpin of Trump’s campaign. When Trump said Mexico would pay, I recall that the vast majority of his supporters thought it was hyperbole, almost some sort of joke. They wanted a Wall and they wanted him to build one, but they were not actually expecting Mexico to pay. And so far the Wall is being built and is not being funded by Mexico. However, the funding involves no particular increase in taxes but rather the diversion of money from one program to another.

In addition, the amount of money involved in the Wall is relatviely small for a government project and practically irrelevant compared with the utterly enormous and exponentially greater expense of single-payer health care.

Now let’s take the debt. My first response (which is partly tongue-in-cheek and partly not) is that Trump said in eight years, and only two and three-quarters have passed so far. Give him the full eight and who knows.

In addition, as commenter “Art Deco” pointed out, the debt has “only” increased 15% since Trump took office, not 68% as claimed. “Montage” countered by saying he meant the deficit, not the debt.

What did Trump actually promise? Was it about the debt or the deficit? It’s surprisingly difficult to determine, because people so often confuse the two. Here’s an example of the sort of article I found when I Googled it. The headline says he promised to eliminate the deficit in 8 years, but the article (and links) talks about the debt.

As best I can tell, it was the national debt Trump promised to eliminate. And the time frame was eight years. What’s more, although “Montage” seems to think Trump promised it would be accomplished through tax cuts, that’s actually not what Trump said:

The Republican presidential front-runner said in a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post that he’d be able to get rid of the more than $19 trillion debt “over a period of eight years.”

Eliminating that amount of debt in eight years is highly improbable, according to most economists, The Washington Post reported. It could require using $2 trillion a year from the annual $4 trillion budget to pay off holders of the debt.

Trump insisted in the interview that “renegotiating all of our deals” would help pay down the debt by sparking economic growth.

“The power is trade. Our deals are so bad,” Trump said. “I would immediately start renegotiating our trade deals with Mexico, China, Japan and all of these countries that are just absolutely destroying us.”

The Washington Post also refuted that claim, reporting that many economists have said a trade war could cripple the U.S. economy.

So, if Trump does get a second term and eight full years, it will be possible to know the truth or falsehood of the claim. Trump certainly has renegotiated our trade deals, and – contrary to the predictions of “many economists” – so far the US economy is far from crippled.

But the bottom line is that, although Trump’s prediction about the reduction of the debt may end being wrong – for one thing, he doesn’t have control of Congress, which votes on funding – he did not refuse to say how it would be done. Sanders and Warren are refusing to even say what they propose to do to fund an extraordinarily large new entitlement, which is not business as usual nor is it false promises as usual. It is a refusal to even address the issue of finances at all.

What’s happening in Lebanon?

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been protests recently in Lebanon, and Prime Minister Saad Hariri has resigned as a result. What’s it all about?

Well, some is economics:

Lebanon, one of the most heavily indebted countries in the world, already was dealing with a severe fiscal crisis before the protests began, one rooted in years of heavy borrowing and expensive patronage networks run by entrenched political parties.

That sounds a bit…familiar. Elites, unresponsive to the people

A proposed tax on the WhatsApp messenger service, coming on the heels of a deeply unpopular austerity package, sent hundreds of thousands of people into the streets starting on Oct. 17 in the largest protests the country has seen in more than a decade.

Banks have remained closed since then, as protesters have packed public squares and blocked major thoroughfares, bringing the country to a halt in hopes of pressuring the government to resign.

The army reopened roads on Wednesday as the protesters stood down in the wake of their first victory, the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri the night before. The Association of Banks in Lebanon said banks would reopen Friday for the first time since the protests began…

“The cost the political elite have imposed on the Lebanese population is in billions of dollars of public theft and mismanagement of the economy,” said Sami Atallah, an economist who heads the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies…

The sectarian political system put in place after the civil war distributes political power and high offices to Lebanon’s various religious sects.

While it has kept the country from slipping back into armed conflict, it has transformed parties into political machines that maintain loyalty by distributing government jobs, contracts and other favors to supporters. The result is a bloated and costly public sector that struggles to provide even basic services like electricity, water and trash collection.

Basic services like electricity. Hmmm. California, anyone?

And to add to the California analogy (which granted, only involves certain aspects of the situation), we this little detail which will sound familiar, as well:

The trigger was a government proposal to impose a $6 monthly tax on WhatsApp users to raise funds following disastrous forest fires that burned thousands of acres…

The country is also facing electricity and water shortages, and has seen protests in the recent past over garbage pileup in cities.

That first article I linked mentioned the “sectarian political system put in place after the civil war” in Lebanon, but never described the details of that system. The second article explains it thusly:

Lebanon has a confessional system, which was introduced after the 1975-1990 civil war, in which a Christian will be President, a Sunni will be Prime Minister and a Shia Parliament Speaker. Roughly 54% of Lebanon population are Muslims (Shias and Sunnis make up 27% each), 40.5% Christians and 5% Druze.

Before that civil war, Lebanon had been one of the most religiously diverse countries in the Middle East and Beirut an international capital of some renown and influence. Then the tide began to turn:

Lebanon reached the peak of its economic success in the mid-1960s—the country was seen as a bastion of economic strength by the oil-rich Persian Gulf Arab states, whose funds made Lebanon one of the world’s fastest growing economies. This period of economic stability and prosperity was brought to an abrupt halt with the collapse of Yousef Beidas’ Intra Bank, the country’s largest bank and financial backbone, in 1966.

Additional Palestinian refugees arrived after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. Following their defeat in the Jordanian civil war, thousands of Palestinian militiamen regrouped in Lebanon, led by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, with the intention of replicating the modus operandi of attacking Israel from a politically and militarily weak neighbour. Starting in 1968, Palestinian militants of various affiliations began to use southern Lebanon as a launching pad for attacks on Israel. Two of these attacks led to a watershed event in Lebanon’s inchoate civil war. In July 1968, a faction of George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked an Israeli El Al civilian plane en route to Algiers; in December, two PFLP gunmen shot at an El Al plane in Athens, resulting in the death of an Israeli.

As a result, two days later, an Israeli commando flew into Beirut’s international airport and destroyed more than a dozen civilian airliners belonging to various Arab carriers. Israel defended its actions by informing the Lebanese government that it was responsible for encouraging the PFLP. The retaliation, which was intended to encourage a Lebanese government crackdown on Palestinian militants, instead polarized Lebanese society on the Palestinian question, deepening the divide between pro- and anti-Palestinian factions, with the Muslims leading the former grouping and Maronites primarily constituting the latter. This dispute reflected increasing tensions between Christian and Muslim communities over the distribution of political power, and would ultimately foment the outbreak of civil war in 1975.

In the interim, while armed Lebanese forces under the Maronite-controlled government sparred with Palestinian fighters, Egyptian leader Gamal Abd al-Nasser helped to negotiate the 1969 “Cairo Agreement” between Arafat and the Lebanese government, which granted the PLO autonomy over Palestinian refugee camps and access routes to northern Israel in return for PLO recognition of Lebanese sovereignty. The agreement incited Maronite frustration over what were perceived as excessive concessions to the Palestinians, and pro-Maronite paramilitary groups were subsequently formed to fill the vacuum left by government forces, which were now required to leave the Palestinians alone. Notably, the Phalange, a Maronite militia, rose to prominence around this time, led by members of the Gemayel family…

For its part, the PLO used its new privileges to establish an effective “mini-state” in southern Lebanon, and to ramp up its attacks on settlements in northern Israel. Compounding matters, Lebanon received an influx of armed Palestinian militants, including Arafat and his Fatah movement, fleeing the 1970 Jordanian crackdown…The consequences of the PLO’s arrival in Lebanon continue to this day.

The main consequence was the civil war that just about destroyed Lebanon as a successful, functioning economy and diverse state. One of the consequences of all of this was the departure of many of the Christians of Lebanon. You may have noted that 40.5% Christian figure for present-day Lebanon, but all the population figures are suspect:

Lebanon has by far the largest proportion of Christians of any Middle Eastern country, but both Christians and Muslims are sub-divided into many splinter sects and denominations. Population statistics are highly controversial. The various denominations and sects each have vested interests in inflating their own numbers. Shias, Sunnis, Maronites and Greek Orthodox (the four largest denominations) all often claim that their particular religious affiliation holds a majority in the country, adding up to over 150% of the total population, even before counting the other denominations. One of the rare things that most Lebanese religious leaders will agree on is to avoid a new general census, for fear that it could trigger a new round of denominational conflict. The last official census was performed in 1932.

Religion has traditionally been of overriding importance in defining the Lebanese population. Dividing state power between the religious denominations and sects, and granting religious authorities judicial power, dates back to Ottoman times (the millet system). The practice was reinforced during French mandate, when Christian groups were granted privileges. This system of government, while partly intended as a compromise between sectarian demands, has caused tensions that still dominate Lebanese politics to this day.

The Christian population majority is believed to have ended in the early 1960s, but government leaders would agree to no change in the political power balance. This led to Muslim demands of increased representation…

I have read previously that the majority of civil war Lebanese refugees leaving the country were Christians, and that this changed the demographics of the country markedly. But the absence of reliable census figures makes it difficult or impossible to know.

At any rate, the country is a mess. Some of the causes of the mess are unique to Lebanon, and others represent trends common today in the world. What will happen as a result of the present upheaval? I doubt there will be a fundamental change for the better, but one can hope.

This, at least, is encouraging:

The resignation announcement Tuesday by Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri could have been expected to please Hezbollah. After all, Hariri — the son of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was murdered by Hezbollah emissaries in 2005 — is a longtime foe of the terror group.

But in reality, the resignation — like the protests raging across the country, which prompted it — is causing Hezbollah’s top brass a serious headache…

Hezbollah’s negative response to the protests mainly stems from its fear that the unrest gripping Lebanon since October 17 will spiral still further out of control. Criticism of Hariri is one thing, and is welcome as far as the terror group is concerned. But changing the regime system is another thing entirely, and could cause severe tension between the different ethnic and religious groups and potentially even far more violent confrontations.

Hezbollah is comfortable with the status quo and with the current failing system. It manages to rule the country even without its members serving as prime minister or president. It controls the Lebanese army even though the chief of staff is Christian, and it sets the country’s foreign and domestic policies, while leveraging the inter-religious divide to maintain its power.

Hezbollah is of course the Iranian-backed terror group, and if they’re worried it sounds like it could be a good thing.

The mystery of the decline in crime

The New Neo Posted on by

Why did crime fall precipitously in the 1990s? No one knows, but there’s no lack of theories.

The one highlighted in that linked article seems incorrect to me. Increasing cell phone use wasn’t really that much of a factor until later, as best I can recall. My leading theory, for what it’s worth, is that the increasing ubiquity of security cameras has deterred some crime.

As for why certain cities have such high crime rates and others with similar demographics don’t, that’s mysterious too but may have something to do with the way policing is done in each city.

And then there’s this intriguing point:

While most of the researchers above have focused narrowly on the 1990s crime decline, Tcherni-Buzzeo has a different temporal perspective. In her review paper, she showed a broader pattern of centuries of declining human violence. From that view, all the ways the entire world has changed can be summed to more peace, and the real aberration was the spike in crime from the 1960s through the 1980s.

This fits quite well with Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined, which I wrote about in this previous post.

Being a Socialist means you never have to explain

The New Neo Posted on by

How dare you even ask a Socialist to explain?

As Bernie Sanders says:

When pressed by CNBC’s John Harwood on how a Sanders administration would come up with enough revenue for the program, Sanders dismissed the concern.

“You’re asking me to come up with an exact detailed plan of how every American – how much you’re going to pay more in taxes, how much I’m going to pay. I don’t think I have to do that right now,” Sanders asserted.

White House rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who co-sponsored the Sanders “Medicare for All” bill in the Senate and is pushing a nearly identical health plan on the campaign trail, has also dodged questions on how she would fund the program.

Numerous budget experts agree that it would be impossible to fund “Medicare for All” without drastically hiking middle-class taxes…

The approximate price tag for Sanders and Warren’s proposal comes in at an estimated $30 trillion over its first ten years, according to the experts at the Committee for A Responsible Federal Budget. Their study concluded that even introducing the most confiscatory tax rates on high-income families and corporations would only generate $11 trillion, only a third of the required revenue.

What I find especially interesting is that many people are willing to allow the candidates to avoid the question. Perhaps they think it will be done through magic. Or perhaps they merely believe that they themselves will not be the ones paying. Why worry when you’re spending other people’s money and the goal is virtuous?