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“Precision” warfare does not exist

"Israel has long branded itself as a purveyor of the latest and greatest in homeland security. Military spokespeople have held up the blockaded Gaza Strip as proof that innovations in surveilling, shooting, and killing from a distance can make warfare more precise. However, just as the billions of dollars sunk into cutting-edge security solutions did not prevent the ruthless massacre of Israeli civilians, these technologies are not preventing but inflicting wholesale destruction across Gaza. The brute bloodshed has exploded one of militarism’s popular mythologies: technological innovation will deliver more humane warfare. 

Another word for this mythology is techno-solutionism, a worldview that took Israel’s military and political elite by storm at the turn of the twenty-first century, when “technology rather than occupation” became official IDF policy. Amid the bloodshed of the Second Intifada and the disintegration of the Oslo Accords’ always tenuous promises of peace, military leadership purported that aerial warfare coupled with monitoring telecommunications, internet activity, and 24/7 drone reconnaissance would make Israeli military rule easier to sustain in the long-run—while limiting bloodshed. Military innovations promised to replace combat soldiers and institute surgical precision in combat operations. This unwavering faith in the potential of new technologies drew on a global zeitgeist of the 1990s and early 2000s. It was a time when venture capital-oriented technology sectors closely tied to the military and political establishment happily proffered technological solutions to the world’s innumerable ills."

Blunt Force by Sophia Goodfriend

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“I don’t mind being a symbol,” Tommy Douglas once said, “but I don’t want to become a monument.” Monuments can only be toppled, not changed. Canada’s single-payer health system, that grand symbol of Canadian virtue, possesses numerous gaps and vulnerabilities that threaten to undermine it. In order to survive, the system must be examined, questioned, and reformed. Virtue is nice, but virtue without ambition can lead to outcomes that aren’t worth celebrating—a lesson that Canadians frequently ignore.

Where Healthcare is a Human Right, Nathan Whitlock

NYRB

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"I don’t mind being a symbol, but I don’t want to become a monument"

Tommy Douglas

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In Memory of W. B. Yeats

W. H. Auden

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

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Foucault points out that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent. Juridical notions of power appear to regulate political life in purely negative terms—that is, through the limitation, prohibition, regulation, control, and even “protection” of individuals related to that political structure through the contingent and retractable operation of choice. But the subjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures. If this analysis is right, then the juridical formation of language and politics that represents women as “the subject” of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version of representational politics. And the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation. This becomes politically problematic if that system can be shown to produce gendered subjects along a differential axis of domination or to produce subjects who are presumed to be masculine. In such cases, an uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of “women” will be clearly self-defeating.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

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Island by Langston Hughes

Wave of sorrow,

Do not drown me now: 

I see the island

Still ahead somehow. 

I see the island

And its sands are fair: 

Wave of sorrow,

Take me there.

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Between those happenings that prefigure it And those that happen in its anamnesis Occurs the Events but that no human wit Can recognise until all happening ceases.

W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio

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"Women have been trained to think that their emotional intelligence should give them the psychological resources to tolerate men's emotional opacity, to interpret enigmatic clues, to respect (and even to expect) romantic hesitation, to avoid making demands, and to prolong strained intimate connections in the hope that they might eventually right themselves,"

Mari Ruti, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings

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The More Loving One by W. H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.

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Koppelman is attentive to the humiliation and indignity of being refused service because of one’s sexual orientation. Nonetheless, he maintains that the gay community and its allies go too far when they draw an analogy between this kind of treatment and discrimination on the basis of race. His argument starts from the premise that while racial discrimination involves the systematic degradation of its victims and is generally recognized as such by society, this is not necessarily the case with a refusal to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. The meaning of such a refusal is “not universally perceived,” he writes.

Koppelman’s persuasive argument about race is a novel and useful contribution to discourse on LGBTQ rights. To equate opposition to gay rights with racism is a “conversation-stopper,” he writes, that destroys any chance to engage and perhaps persuade. “The racism analogy is malign and destructive insofar as it leads Americans to regard their fellow citizens as hateful demons.” After all, Koppelman writes, “we are going to have to live together.”

Koppelman’s solution to the wedding vendor problem is to grant the religious exemption that the bakers and florists and photographers seek—but at a price. Vendors receiving an exemption would have to provide public notice of their refusal to participate in same-sex wedding celebrations. Such a requirement would serve a dual purpose. It would spare gay couples the humiliation of being turned away, since they would know in advance to take their business elsewhere. And it would deter vendors whose objections are the result of bias rather than religious convictions, since they would lose not only gay customers but others offended by a public acknowledgment of an intention to discriminate: “Those who feel they must do what their religion demands, even at great personal cost, have the strongest religious liberty claims.”

Koppelman’s project is to persuade us that the wedding vendor problem need not be seen as a “zero-sum clash of rights.” “Religious accommodation is a part of the reason for the success of the American regime,” he writes. A question his argument raises is whether not only his specific proposal but also the very notion of accommodation can be seen in today’s America as anything more than a noble thought experiment. It is hard to imagine that Stewart’s “power worshippers” would accept Koppelman’s advance-notice proposal as a victory. It’s easier to imagine that a jurisdiction adopting such a proposal as law would be promptly greeted with a lawsuit challenging the notice requirement as compelled speech in violation of the First Amendment.

Grievance Conservatives Are Here to Stay

Linda Greenhouse

The New York Review

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Today’s  Supreme Court is no longer interested in maintaining Chief Justice  William H. Rehnquist’s idea, put forth in his majority opinion in Locke v. Davey (2004), that the First Amendment requires some “play in the joints”  between its two religion clauses. One of these clauses protects the  “free exercise” of religion, and the other prohibits religion’s official  “establishment.” The built-in tension is obvious: indulging a  free-exercise claim can veer into religious favoritism, which itself can  become a violation of the establishment clause. Rehnquist’s opinion in  the Locke case  navigated deftly between the two, holding that a state that provided  scholarships for postgraduate study could include ministerial study  without violating the establishment clause, but could also choose to  exclude ministerial study without violating the free-exercise rights of  would-be ministers.  In  the rulings of the current Court, the dimensions of the free-exercise  clause have ballooned, leaving the establishment clause all but effaced.  The Court has already overruled Locke v. Davey in practice, in a school funding decision last summer written by  Rehnquist’s successor, Chief Justice John Roberts, in which the Court  found a free-exercise violation in Montana’s exclusion of religious  schools from a state scholarship program,  and it will probably overrule the 2004 decision formally in the near future.

Grievance Conservatives Are Here to Stay Linda Greenhouse The New York Review