A New Series: Substack Election Dialogues

Plus: Nasrallah's Death, TNC v Israel, Longshoremen Strike, Social Media Suicides, Matt Taibbi

Sep 30, 2024

I’m pleased to be part of this new announcement from Substack of Election Dialogues, a series of conversations with a slew of interesting writers from a wide variety of newsletters. Stay tuned for more details, but I do know I’ll be talking to Kmele Foster in a few weeks discussing the state of play in the 2024 election, the fallout from an incredibly chaotic summer in politics, and the media’s approach to covering Kamala Harris among other things. I also want to ask him about effective communication and ads in the era of partisan divide — maybe we’ll talk about this one:

Hassan Nasrallah’s and the Death of Hezbollah

Lee Smith at Tablet.

Friday evening in the Levant, Israel targeted buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut killing Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. This operation represents a dramatic shift in Israeli strategy. Not only have they finally liquidated an adversary they’ve long been capable of killing, they’ve also turned a deaf ear to their superpower patron of more than half a century. But at this stage, heeding Washington’s advice in war is like taking counsel from the angel of death. Just as the U.S. is no longer willing or able to win the wars it commits Americans to fight, the Joe Biden administration won’t let U.S. allies win wars either.
By ordering the strike on Nasrallah while attending the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored the Jewish state’s independence from the global consensus that has resolved not to confront terrorists but rather to appease them, whether they’re plotting in the Middle East or living among the local populations of Western nations, including the United States. Israel’s attack also shows that almost everything U.S. and other Western civilian and military leaders have believed about the Middle East for the last 20 years was simply a collection of excuses for losing wars. The questions that senior policymakers and Pentagon officials, think-tank experts and journalists have deliberated over since the invasion of Iraq—questions about the nature of modern warfare and the proper conduct of international relations in a multipolar world, etc.—can now be set aside for good because they have been resolved definitively.
The answers are as they ever were—at least before the start of the “global war on terror.” Contrary to the convictions of George W. Bush-era neoconservatives and the pro-Iran progressives in Barack Obama’s camp, securing a nation’s peace has nothing to do with winning narratives, or nation-building, or balancing U.S. allies against your mutual enemies for the sake of regional equilibrium, or any of the other academic theories generated to mask a generation’s worth of failure. Rather, it means killing your enemies, above all those who advocate and embody the causes that inspire others to exhaust their murderous energies against you. Thus, killing Nasrallah was essential.
Taking down officers demoralizes a force. Wiping out its chain of command cripples it. Hezbollah is a function of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and if allowed to survive the Lebanese militia will be replenished and trained by the IRGC to replace the fallen. Nasrallah issued from a different source. He was the protégé of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Their tenures—until now—were roughly coterminous: Khamenei replaced the founder of the Islamic Republic Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 and chose Nasrallah to lead Hezbollah in 1992. The Iranians built around Nasrallah not only a network of proxies stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf but also a comprehensive worldview—permanent resistance. Killing him marks a defining moment capping the end of a 30-year reign of terror.

More from Kyle Orton at Unherd, and in The National Interest from Aykan Erdemir and Carole Nuriel on the last months of Nasrallah.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Returns to Attack Israel

Tal Fortgang reviews in City Journal.

Last fall, a week after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the New York Review of Books ran a short open letter from “writers and artists who have been to Palestine to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature.” The authors described their “fear” that they were “watching an ethnic cleansing on a scale unseen in decades.” Not in Israel—where a Hamas-led horde had just massacred everyone it could find—but in Gaza, where “Israel is executing the largest expulsion of Palestinians since 1948 as it bombs Gazans without discrimination.”
What precipitated this “terrifying escalation”? The professional writers employ a passive construction so shameless it would give my seventh-grade English teacher an aneurysm: “On Saturday, after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza. More than 1,300 Israelis were subsequently killed with over one hundred more taken hostage.” The authors’ styling leaves the critical question—by whom?—to our imagination. Moreover, it fails to acknowledge that Israel is even fighting an enemy—much less one that expresses its grievances, legitimate or not, by burning families alive. Bad things can happen, by chance or comeuppance, to Israel, but only Israel does bad things—in fact, the worst things possible. Its enemies, by contrast, are not just victims but blameless.
This is no mere moral inversion. It is childish. And it should come as no surprise that the letter’s first named author is Ta-Nehisi Coates.
A glowing New York cover story on Coates and his forthcoming book has put the award-winning author of Between the World and Me and “The Case for Reparations” back in the spotlight. Though his new book is broadly about oppression, “Palestine,” the de-Judaized name for the territory on which Israel sits, is “his obsession.” So it is for many conspiracy theorists.
Israel is the natural endpoint for today’s most popular conspiracy theory, a vulgar form of intersectionality that considers all conflict the product of overlapping forms of oppression. College students call for smashing capitalism by supporting Iranian-sponsored terrorists. Climate activist Greta Thunberg has reinvented herself as a keffiyeh-clad banshee. Coates, who speaks neither Hebrew nor Arabic and took one trip to Palestinian areas, casts his lot with them. “That kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb sh[**] they’re saying,” he says, “they are more morally correct than some motherf[***]ers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards.”
Apparently, maximalist anti-Israel demonstrators are “morally correct” for demanding Israel’s elimination, and, as Columbia students like to tell their Jewish classmates, insisting that Jews “go back to Poland.” Yet Coates’s musings seem stuck in the pre-October 7 era, a quaint time in which many pretended that the “occupation” referred to Israeli control of particular disputed areas, not to Jewish sovereignty over any part of Israel. “What is the experience that justifies total rule over a group of people since 1967?” Coates asks, rhetorically, referencing not Israel’s 1948 founding but the year when it conquered the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and other territories. But the discourse has raced past him, pivoting from a focus on what Israel does to what Israel is. The question now, for the “morally correct” brigade, is how to justify expelling Jews from their ancestral homeland.
There is no answer, of course, least of all from Coates. New York nevertheless insists, in one its many dubious claims, that “many are now eager for Coates to lend his considerable influence to the deadlocked public conversation on Israel and Palestine.” “Influence” is the right word here, as opposed to, say, insight—there is nothing of that in Coates’s overwrought entry into the discourse.

Risk of Longshoreman Strike Rises

AP reports:

With a dockworkers’ strike threatening to close ports on the East and Gulf coasts beginning this week, Chris Butler is growing worried.
Butler is CEO of the National Tree Company, and, like many businesses, his is counting on shipments that are en route from Asia but won’t reach their ports before an expected strike by longshoremen starting at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday.
The company, based in New Jersey, is an importer of artificial Christmas trees and other holiday decorations. If a strike were to last just a few days, there might be time afterward to unload the trees, transport them to warehouses and have them ready for customers this season.
Yet if a strike were to keep ports closed until, say, November, about 150,000 trees might not arrive in time for the peak shopping season, imposing costs on National Tree and other businesses. In a worst-case scenario, those costs, multiplied across industries, could fuel inflation and pressure the U.S. economy.
“Definitely not an ideal situation,” Butler said.
National Tree already has stockpiled or delivered most of the roughly 2 million artificial trees it sells each year. But it would lose revenue if 150,000 of the trees got stuck in the pipeline.

Social Media and Mental Health

The New Yorker on the suicide questions surrounding social media.

Between 2007 and 2021, the incidence of suicide among Americans between the ages of ten and twenty-four rose by sixty-two per cent. The Centers for Disease Control found that one in three teen-age girls considered taking her life in 2021, up from one in five in 2011. The youth-suicide rate has increased disproportionately among some minority groups. Rates are also typically higher among the L.G.B.T.Q. population, teens with substance-abuse issues, and those who grow up in a house with guns.
Rates of depression have also risen sharply among teens, and fifty-three per cent of Americans now believe that social media is predominantly or fully responsible. Most American teen-agers check social media regularly; more than half spend at least four hours a day doing so. A 2019 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University reported that spending more than three hours a day online can lead adolescents to internalize problems more, making it harder to cope with depression and anxiety. The authors of a 2023 report found that reducing social-media exposure significantly improves body image in adolescents and young adults. If you cannot distinguish between the “real” world and the virtual world, between what has happened and what is imagined, the result is psychic chaos and vulnerability to mental and physical illness. Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, stated in 2017, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
Social media acts on the same neurological pleasure circuitry as is involved in addiction to nicotine, alcohol, or cocaine. Predictable rewards do not trigger this system nearly as effectively as unpredictable ones; slot-machine manufacturers know this, and so do social-media companies. “Teens are insatiable when it comes to ‘feel good’ dopamine effects,” a Meta document cited in the attorneys general’s complaint noted. Instagram “has a pretty good hold on the serendipitous aspect of discovery. . . . Every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit.” Judith Edersheim, a co-director of the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, at Harvard, likens the effect to putting children in a twenty-four-hour casino and giving them chocolate-flavored bourbon. “The relentlessness, the intrusion, it’s all very intentional,” she told me. “No other addictive device has ever been so pervasive.”
Social-media platforms harness our innate tendency to compare ourselves with others. Publication of the number of likes, views, and followers a user garners has made social-media platforms arenas for competition. Appearance-enhancing filters may make viewers feel inadequate, and even teen-agers who use them may not register that others are doing the same. Leah Somerville, who runs the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab, at Harvard, has demonstrated that a thirteen-year-old is likelier to take extreme risks to obtain peer approval than a twenty-six-year-old, in part because the limbic system of the adolescent brain is more activated, the prefrontal cortex is less developed, and communication between the two areas is weaker.
In 2017, the Australian discovered a Facebook document which, seemingly for advertising purposes, categorized users as “stressed,” “defeated,” “overwhelmed,” “anxious,” “nervous,” “stupid,” “silly,” “useless,” and “a failure.” The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Meta’s internal documents indicated that management knew that “aspects of Instagram exacerbate each other to create a perfect storm”; that nearly one in three teen-age girls who felt bad about their bodies said that “Instagram made them feel worse”; that teen-agers themselves “blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression”; that six per cent of U.S. teens reporting suicidal ideation attributed it to Instagram; and that teen-agers “know that what they’re seeing is bad for their mental health but feel unable to stop themselves.” Last year, a former director of engineering at Facebook, Arturo Béjar, told Congress that almost forty per cent of thirteen-to-fifteen-year-old users surveyed by his research team said that they had compared themselves negatively with others in the past seven days.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, recently announced a set of safeguards designed to protect younger users, including making their profiles private and pausing their notifications at night. Still, social-media companies have been slow to enact meaningful overhauls of their platforms, which are spectacularly profitable. A notorious leaked Meta e-mail quoted in the attorneys general’s lawsuit announces, “The lifetime value of a 13 y/o teen is roughly $270 per teen.” Public-health researchers at Harvard have estimated that, in 2022, social-media platforms generated almost eleven billion dollars of advertising revenue from children and teen-agers, including more than two billion dollars from users aged twelve and younger. Proposed reforms risk weakening the grip on young people’s attention. “When depressive content is good for engagement, it is actively promoted by the algorithm,” Guillaume Chaslot, a French data scientist who worked on YouTube’s recommendation systems, has said. The Norwegian anti-suicide activist Ingebjørg Blindheim has described the dynamic as “the darker the thought, the deeper the cut, the more likes and attention you receive.”
In most industries, companies can be held responsible for the harm they cause and are subject to regulatory safety requirements. Social-media companies are protected by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which limits their responsibility for online content created by third-party users. Without this provision, Web sites that allow readers to post comments might be liable for untrue or abusive statements. Although Section 230 allows companies to remove “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable” material, it does not oblige them to. Gretchen Peters, the executive director of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online, noted that, after a panel flew off a Boeing 737 max 9, in January, 2024, the F.A.A. grounded nearly two hundred planes. “Yet children keep dying because of Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok,” she said, “and there is hardly any response from the companies, our government, the courts, or the public.”
One may sue an author or a publisher for libel, but usually not a bookstore. The question surrounding Section 230 is whether a Web site is a publisher or a bookstore. In 1996, it seemed fairly clear that interactive platforms such as CompuServe or Usenet corresponded to bookstores. Modern social-media companies, however, in recommending content to users, arguably function as both bookstore and publisher—making Section 230 feel as distant from today’s digital reality as copyright law does from the Iliad.
No court has yet challenged the basic tenet of Section 230—including the Supreme Court, which last year heard a case brought against Google by the father of a young woman killed in the 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris. The lawsuit argued that YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, was “aiding and abetting” terrorism by allowing ISIS to use the platform. Without addressing Section 230, the Justices ruled that the plaintiff had no claim under U.S. terrorism law. This summer, the Court declined to hear another case involving Section 230, though Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented, indicating that they thought the section’s scope should be reconsidered. “There is danger in delay,” Thomas wrote. “Social-media platforms have increasingly used §230 as a get-out-of-jail free card.”