Dear J,

You write: “Personally…I begin this way: the depravities are *co-arising*.”

I’m afraid you’re beginning with your conclusion, and then building a framework to justify it.

To suggest some kind of equivalence of depravities between Palestinians and Israelis flies in the face of reality. To take just one slice of the depravity pie, here’s a grim graphic of Gazan and Israeli deaths since October 7^th. This isn’t counting all the other destruction: hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, infrastructure — and everything else that makes life possible. It isn’t counting the unpunished murders in the West Bank, the attack on Iran, and the carnage in Lebanon. Deaths are something we can count, and make charts of. They’re a proxy that illustrates the disparity of power.

Calling the depravity “co-arising” may sound high-minded and even-handed. But what you’re really doing is performing transcendence to avoid landing somewhere uncomfortable. This is not nuanced critical thinking, it’s willful avoidance.

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
— Elie Wiesel (Holocaust survivor & Nobel laureate)

Your “both sides-ism” sounds sophisticated, even spiritually elevated. But framing this as “co-arising depravity” functions as pro-Israel apologetics, whatever the intent. Excluding proportionality, motivation and context doesn’t make you more objective; it makes the comparison false. Yes, if you strip out those factors, both sides have done harmful things. But the flattening is the problem. You must include them. If you don’t, you’re not achieving balance, you’re fabricating it.

You illustrated your post with a yin-yang symbol composed of Israeli and Palestinian flags. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect encapsulation of the problem. The yin-yang is explicitly a symbol of balance and complementarity, two equal and interdependent forces in harmonious opposition. It’s a beautiful symbol. It’s also precisely wrong here. The spiritual framing isn’t incidental to your argument, it’s central. It attempts to elevate the observer above the reality of chaos and asymmetric violence into an ethereal realm of serene, symmetrical wisdom. It’s an aesthetically pleasing way to avoid taking sides.

There may come a time when both sides will acknowledge the harms they have done the other, the mutual dehumanization, the cynical leadership. Maybe then there can be talk of how depravity on one side has fueled depravity on the other.

But that moment is not this moment.

This is the moment in which the harms are actively being carried out. This is the moment when, as Wiesel would say, we are called to take sides. I find most repugnant the posture of floating above the fray, styling oneself as “more human, more loving, more whole” while functionally siding with those committing atrocities as we speak. That is not enlightenment. That is cowardice costumed as wisdom.

You write that what Israel is doing in the West Bank is abhorrent. Have you seen what Israel is doing in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran?! That’s even worse.

On the history: you say you don’t claim to know everything about this 78-year war. But you’re repeating identifiable Israeli talking points, and starting the clock in 1948 is itself a choice that biases everything that follows. Try starting with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. The UN did not partition Palestine, it proposed a partition plan. The Jewish Agency declared statehood, then rapidly exceeded the proposed boundaries, ultimately controlling roughly 78% of Mandatory Palestine, well beyond the already-contentious ~56% proposed in the plan. And before that declaration, the program of ethnic cleansing (Plan Dalet) was already underway. It was conducted by organized military and paramilitary forces driving out a population that would ultimately reach 700,000–800,000 displaced people.

The Palestinians didn’t invade what you refer to as “nascent Israel.” What was nascent Israel? Palestine! It wasn’t a case of Palestinians invading Jewish towns, but of Jews invading rural Palestinian villages, driving them out at gunpoint, and appropriating their property. If you think what’s happening in the West Bank is “abhorrent,” what must you think of the much larger ethnic cleansing perpetrated in 1947-1948? Or, for that matter, the one going on now in Lebanon? This isn’t some fringe interpretation — it’s the consensus of serious historians who have worked from the Israeli state archives: Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim and even Benny Morris’ early work. Or, you could expand your knowledge to encompass the Palestinian narrative recounted by Rashid Khalidi in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

Anyway, I’m not going to repeat that whole version of history here, but it’s clear you’re retailing the Israeli narrative that whitewashes what actually happened.

I understand the impulse to look away. The realities are genuinely difficult to absorb: a documented genocide in Gaza, laissez-faire violence in the West Bank, an unprovoked attack on Iran, a bloody invasion of Lebanon. To fully reckon with what Israel is doing requires accepting some uncomfortable truths — about Zionism, about American complicity, about the gap between Israel’s self-image as a beacon of civilization and its actual conduct in the world. That reckoning is hard. But this is a defining moment. Israel has made itself the focal point of a global revulsion that is entirely warranted. In that context, wringing your hands over “co-arising depravity” isn’t nuance — it’s an abdication of moral agency. And I think, on some level, you already know that.

The original post:

The BREAKING OF OUR BRAINS

When we widen attention to include Palestinian depravities - and not only Israel’s - this is somehow a bypass? Personally…I begin this way: the depravities are *co-arising*.

When either side insists, “But the depravities started with *them*”, we crash into impasse. Pity.

I identify as strongly Pro-Palestine AND Pro-Israel. I’m widening the circle of care and culpability (and love) to include both sides.

I sometimes feel an almost desperate longing for both sides to widen their circles of inclusion. Alas, I understand that it’s all to easy to attend primarily to news sources that accent the depravities of one side.

Is it any wonder at all, when we legitimately sense that the blame is mostly/all on “them”.
Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and Netanyahu are out of control. And...so are the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. All of them - in aggregate - are at cause for the disaster.

It’s a grim spectacle when an organization dedicated to unfiltered truth succumbs to the sanctimonious haze of woke ideology. Radical Honesty, once a bastion of raw, unapologetic human connection, has been hijacked by ideologues who mistake dogma for virtue. This article chronicles that takeover, dissecting its mechanics and implications. The irony is as thick as it is bitter: a practice built on dismantling narratives has been smothered by one of the most insidious narratives of our time.

This is, admittedly, inside baseball—a squabble within a niche community that might seem trivial to outsiders. Yet, for those alarmed by the creeping colonization of institutions by critical social justice (CSJ), or “wokeism,” Radical Honesty’s fall is a microcosm of a broader cultural malaise. More poignantly, it underscores a cruel paradox: Radical Honesty, with its ruthless commitment to empirical truth, could have been a scalpel to excise the sophistries of woke dogma. Instead, it’s become another casualty.

At least, that's how I see it. I was involved with Radical Honesty starting in 2001, becoming a certified trainer in 2007, leading workshops and practicing it in my personal life. These are my interpretations of how it all went sideways.

A Brief History of Radical Honesty

Radical Honesty was the brainchild of Dr. Brad Blanton, a psychologist who, in the 1990s, fused Gestalt Therapy’s focus on experiential truth with a defiant rejection of social pretense. Founded as Radical Honesty Enterprises, it grew through books, workshops, and a community of practitioners who embraced Blanton’s mantra: tell the truth, all of it, no matter how uncomfortable. Blanton published works like Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth and ran workshops encouraging participants to bare all.

In 2019, Blanton sold the brand to a group of ten trainers who reincorporated it as the Radical Honesty Institute (RHI). This transition, seemingly innocuous, set the stage for a takeover that would betray the practice’s core principles, as a new guard sought to align it with the fashionable pieties of the 2020s.

The Philosophical Roots of Radical Honesty

Radical Honesty has its roots in the social ferment of the 1960s, a decade when Blanton cut his teeth amid civil rights struggles, anti-war protests, and the sexual revolution. The era’s rebellion against the repressive mores of the 1950s—think white picket fences and stifled desires—shaped his worldview. Psychology was undergoing its own upheaval, moving from the cold, hierarchical doctor-patient model to a more egalitarian dynamic. Workshops replaced consulting rooms; “patients” became “clients” or peers, engaging as adults in pursuit of self-actualization. This was the crucible that would later produce Radical Honesty, steeped in the iconoclasm of Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy, which urged practitioners to “lose your mind and come to your senses.”

Gestalt, with its roots in phenomenology and Buddhism, is empirically grounded, prioritizing moment-to-moment experience over abstract theorizing. Radical Honesty took this further, emphasizing the distinction between raw observation and the narratives we weave from it. To practice Radical Honesty is to expose that alchemy—how we turn noticing into narrative—and to choose truth over comfort. This positivist bent made it a natural foe of postmodernism, which revels in constructivism—deconstructing truth itself as a mere artifact of power.

The Antithesis: Critical Social Justice

Enter critical social justice, the intellectual progeny of postmodernism, which holds that reality is a tapestry of power dynamics, woven by language and ideology. Where Gestalt seeks truth in immediate, sensory experience, CSJ sees truth as a fiction, subordinate to narratives of oppression and privilege. This philosophical chasm makes the injection of CSJ into Radical Honesty not just incongruous but corrosive. Postmodernism’s skepticism of grand narratives is itself a grand narrative, one that Radical Honesty, in its purest form, would shred by demanding: “What do you actually feel, right now?”

Wokeism’s ascent, from an academic curiosity in the 1990s to a cultural juggernaut by the mid-2010s, was a masterclass in scaling a cult into a culture. By 2022, its grip on institutions—universities, corporations, even knitting circles—was near-total. Yet, as sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has documented, its influence waned thereafter, eroded by public fatigue, empirical pushback (e.g., studies debunking implicit bias training’s efficacy), and its own overreach. The 2024 U.S. election, a rout for Democrats partly blamed on woke excesses, marked its nadir. The current administration’s subsequent crackdowns—banning DEI programs, targeting “woke” curricula—have further diminished its cachet. RHI’s embrace of CSJ, then, is not just philosophically suspect but a curious act of self-sabotage.

The Petition: A Woke Manifesto

In May 2023, five RHI trainers, backed by 62 trainers and candidates, submitted a petition to the RHI board titled “Petition to Address Abuse of Power, Manipulation, Sexual Misconduct, and Other Harmful Behaviors within the Radical Honesty Community.” Its text, available publicly and below, is a Rosetta Stone of woke discourse, demanding reforms that read like a CSJ syllabus: mandatory training in anti-racism, gender dynamics, intersectionality, and consent; heightened awareness of “structural discrimination” (ableism, fatphobia, “pretty privilege”); and protocols to protect BIPOC participants from race discussions without prior consent.

The petition’s title betrays its obsession: power. True to postmodernism’s power-knowledge nexus, it frames every interaction as a struggle for dominance, proposing measures that centralize authority in the RHI board. New trainers must demonstrate fealty to CSJ tenets; existing ones must undergo reeducation. This is not reform but ideological conformity, a top-down restructuring to enforce a singular worldview. The petition’s call to end RHI’s “cult-like” atmosphere is particularly risible, given that CSJ’s dogmatic rigidity—its litmus tests, its shunning of dissenters—mirrors the very cultishness it decries.

One thing I can't resist pointing out is the part where they require every trainer to be “able to spot structural discrimination, privilege, and biases in the workshop setting.” Anyone with even minimal understanding of Radical Honesty will immediately recognize the problem: these are not things you can “spot,” that is, they’re not observable phenomena, they’re interpretations. What the petition actually demands is that trainers adopt the ideological framework in which those interpretations are considered meaningful.

This represents such a fundamental departure from Radical Honesty that it jumps off the page. The core requirement for becoming a trainer has always been the ability to distinguish between what you notice and your interpretation of what you notice. The petition’s authors not only fail this basic test, they would require all trainers to embrace their preferred (woke) interpretations as fact. In Radical Honesty, imposing one’s interpretations on others is anathema. In critical social justice, it’s standard operating procedure.

There you have it. From liberating us from interpretations to imprisoning us within them—it’s almost poetic in its irony.

The Tyranny of “Safety” and “Harm”

Central to the petition is the rhetoric of “safety” and “harm,” buzzwords that permeate woke discourse. The document alleges that Radical Honesty’s practices, particularly under Blanton and his senior trainer, caused emotional distress and retraumatization. This invokes what psychologist Nick Haslam calls “concept creep,” where harm is inflated to include subjective discomfort, and safety becomes a sacred cow, trumping all else. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have charted this ascent of “safetyism,” noting its chilling effect on open dialogue. In RHI’s case, the petition’s fixation on harm would appear to transform workshops—once risky arenas for raw honesty—into sanitized spaces where participants are shielded from their own emotions.

The Sexual Smokescreen

The petition’s gravest accusations target Blanton and his senior trainer, who are branded as sexual predators for consensual relationships with workshop participants and colleagues. This is the petition’s sharpest weapon, wielded not to address genuine misconduct but to justify the ideological purge. The RHI’s new guard, who purchased the brand in 2019, were not naive ingénues. They knew both men’s histories—decades-old, consensual encounters within a community that celebrated sexual candor. This retroactive pathologizing of adult agency is arguably anti-feminist, recasting women as perpetual victims needing protection from their own desires.

The Karpman Drama Triangle is evident here, with clearly defined persecutors, victims, and rescuers. But the roles require distortion to fit: consensual sex becomes predation (if you’re male), victimization and harm (if you’re female), and behavioral policing becomes heroic rescue. This forced framework demands we accept that mutual consent somehow constitutes abuse, and the RHI bureaucracy is our saviour.

The petition’s framing—power imbalances as inherently coercive—infantilizes participants and regresses from the advances in sexual autonomy we’ve made since the 1960s. Radical Honesty workshops unavoidably foster emotional and sometimes physical attraction. Because we commonly conceal our attractions and repulsions toward others, it’s natural that when we start telling the truth, that’s what comes out. The new rules, including bans on trainer-participant relationships and anonymous reporting mechanisms, will almost certainly have the effect of stigmatizing and suppressing this frankness.

Legitimate Problems in RHI

That’s not to say there weren’t genuine issues within RHI that needed addressing. As Brad Blanton began transitioning his legacy to a younger generation, structural flaws emerged. Radical Honesty is a practice that hinges on a subtle but profound shift: distinguishing between one’s direct experience and the narratives constructed around it. This requires not just intellectual understanding but the ability to embody it in practice and guide others to do the same. Effective trainers need both a deep grasp of this principle and technical skills to lead workshops, drawing on exercises Blanton developed or adapted.

However, the certification process was flawed. Rather than prioritizing understanding or capability, it hinged on attendance at expensive trainings, amid organizational pressure to certify more trainers to grow the brand. This led to a haphazard system, where some certified trainers may have lacked the depth or skill to lead effectively. Participants invested tens of thousands of dollars expecting certification and a viable career, but the training couldn’t guarantee competence, as it depended on personal qualities not easily taught. Unlike academic degrees earned through coursework, Radical Honesty certification required a transformative shift that not all could achieve, creating tension between participant expectations and organizational realities.

Moreover, Radical Honesty’s intensity attracted individuals grappling with unresolved personal challenges. Like many therapeutic fields, it drew those seeking to understand their own struggles, sometimes projecting unmet needs onto the practice or community. This dynamic, while not unique to RHI, amplified vulnerabilities, as some trainers or participants used the platform to address personal wounds rather than facilitate authentic connection.

These issues—flawed certification, inconsistent trainer quality, and the emotional intensity of the community—created a system ripe for disruption. One can sympathize with those who saw these problems and sought reform. Unfortunately, the solution—a bureaucratic overhaul steeped in critical social justice dogma—does not address these root causes. Instead, it imposes ideological constraints that stifle the practice’s essence, replacing Radical Honesty’s commitment to truth with a rigid framework of “safety” and “consent” that risks alienating participants and undermining the very freedom the practice once offered.

Implementation: The Purge

The RHI board implemented the petition’s demands with apparent zeal. The organization’s website now boasts a Code of Ethics heavy with CSJ jargon, mandating “inclusivity” and “anti-oppressive” practices. Trainers must undergo training in power dynamics and anti-racism, while a “Speak Up” policy encourages anonymous complaints.

Blanton was unceremoniously ousted in 2024, stripped of his title and barred from RHI activities, despite having effectively retired years prior. His senior trainer faced a similar fate, subjected to an “accountability process” that reads like a show trial. These public shamings, featured on RHI’s news page, serve as both punishment and warning: dissent from the new orthodoxy will not be tolerated. The Ethics Circle, tasked with drafting guidelines, prioritizes CSJ compliance over Radical Honesty’s original principles. They're calling it Radical Honesty 2.0.

RHI’s pivot to CSJ is not just a philosophical betrayal but a strategic blunder. Wokeism’s decline—evident in public opinion polls, electoral backlash, and policy reversals—makes this alignment a death knell. By politicizing a practice that thrives on universal human experience, RHI repels potential participants who reject ideological litmus tests. The organization’s new structure, with its committees and anonymous snitching, transforms a liberatory practice into a bureaucratic nanny, undermining the individual agency Radical Honesty once cultivated.

What Remains

The Radical Honesty Institute’s capitulation to woke ideology is a betrayal of its foundational principles. What was once a vibrant community—encompassing not just trainers but readers, participants, and dreamers who saw truth as a path to freedom—has been fractured. The board may control the brand, the mailing list, the workshops... but they’ve jettisoned the philosophy that gave Radical Honesty its power. They’ve tossed its leaders under the bus, not for justice but for optics, replacing Gestalt’s clarity with postmodern muddle. This is not progress; it’s a parasite devouring its host.

I came to Radical Honesty in the early 2000s, already steeped in Gestalt and meditation, and found in it a lucid, teachable distillation of my existing practice. Brad Blanton’s method, and the community it spawned, felt like home—a place where authenticity trumped pretense. The RHI’s descent into ideological conformity is heartbreaking. To those who share my disappointment, and who view this takeover as a sham, feel free to reach out. Share this piece, post it where the curious might find it. Let’s keep honesty radical.

If anyone would like to be in touch, I may be reached at honestyforachange.com.

DHS just shot another American.

Coming so soon after the shooting of Renee Good, this is one of those moments we’ll look back on as a turning point.

They disarmed a legally armed citizen, and then shot him repeatedly in the back.

Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem was quick out of the gate with a version of events that was essentially “Who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” It’s amazing that even when there’s video from three angles directly contradicting what she says, she still believes she can deny it with impunity.

There’s a well-documented psychological reason this works: the primacy effect, closely related to anchoring bias. People tend to latch onto the first version of events they hear and unconsciously judge all later information against that initial frame, even when the original claim is demonstrably false. Once an explanation hardens into an identity-affirming story—this fits my politics, my faction, my fears—corrections don’t replace it; they just bounce off. That’s why officials rush out half-baked or outright false narratives within minutes of an incident: not because they expect everyone to believe them forever, but because they know the first story sets the mental anchor, and everything that follows sounds like an argument instead of the truth.

Here’s a quick recap of the videos currently available, from Ryan Grim and Breaking Points. Watch this first.

Now count Kirsti Noem’s lies in this one:

Noem keeps trying to pivot to the storm which is bearing down on the northern states, but reporters keep pulling her back to the political storm caused by federal agents shooting American citizens with apparent impunity.

The President chimed in on Truth Social (what brazen irony, that!) with his own lies and customary incoherence. He posted a photo of the victim’s pistol.

What is that all about? Well, it’s about the Second Amendment, isn’t it? A citizen with no criminal history, legally armed, and carrying a couple extra magazines. As is clear from the video, he had already been (illegally) disarmed when a federal agent opened fire.

I just would love it if for once people would think for themselves. Don’t believe me, or anyone else. Especially don’t believe Kristi Noem and Donald Trump. Look at the video, and think about it for a second. Not everyone’s going to agree, but I would rather take my chances with people thinking for themselves than with those who obediently parrot partisan talking points.

So far, Minnesotans have demonstrated remarkable restraint. I doubt that will last. There’s no evidence to support Noem’s fabrication that Alex Pretti intended to harm federal agents—quite the contrary. But when public officials such as Noem, Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance spin lies and excuse murder carried out by their agents, they’re setting the stage for a descent into chaos and violence. In a country awash in guns, and seething with anger, it’s inevitable that someone will start picking off those federal agents. For all their weaponry, body armor and camouflage—they’re sitting ducks. And that is exactly what this administration wants.

Minnesota politicians are doing their best to emphasize the difference between local police and Minnesota National Guard. That’s more than just a practical distinction, it highlights a schism that is dividing America.

Those calling for calm are doing the right thing. Underlining the violence of the feds by avoiding violent reprisal oneself is the smart thing to do. It puts more pressure on the administration, and denies them the justification for further escalation. It’s just that any large-enough group, on average, can’t be that smart. Not for very long. Statistically, it’s bound to do something unhelpful sooner or later. And if even a Midwestern mom like Renee Good can be labeled a “domestic terrorist” imagine what they’ll do with someone who actually does pose a lethal threat.

That’s a pretty bleak picture, but we’re better off seeing things as they are than pretending everything is hunky-dory. Aren’t we?

What Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief at CBS didn't want you to see.

In a stunning act of apparent censorship, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss abruptly pulled a fully vetted 60 Minutes segment just hours before airtime. The report detailed the brutal conditions inside El Salvador's CECOT mega-prison, where the Trump administration deported hundreds of mostly Venezuelan men—many with no criminal records or violent history—earlier this year, often without due process. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi called the decision “political,” not editorial, warning it would be seen as “corporate censorship.” Weiss claimed the story “wasn't ready” and needed more reporting, including administration comments (which DHS declined). The segment leaked online after airing in Canada and has spread widely. Here’s the censored episode for those interested—the real issue is the blatant suppression of investigative journalism on a major human rights story.

inside-cecot-60-minutes directory listing

Internet Archive logo A line drawing of the Internet Archive headquarters building façade.

Today, California voters are deciding whether to temporarily abandon the independent redistricting commission they created fifteen years ago. The reason? Texas redistricted mid-decade to gain about five Republican House seats, and Democrats want to punch back.

Welcome to democracy in 2025, where the path to saving fair representation might require a detour through unfair representation. If that sounds contradictory, buckle up. We're about to take a tour through iterated game theory and a strategy called "tit for tat with cooperation" (or "generous tit for tat"). It turns out the math has some uncomfortable things to say about noble principles meeting brutal reality.

The Setup: Two Players, One Map, Infinite Rounds

Here's the game in its simplest form. Two players (let's call them Red State and Blue State) each get to draw electoral maps. They have two choices: cooperate or defect.

Cooperate means drawing fair maps that create competitive districts and accurately represent voters. Defect means gerrymandering the hell out of your state to maximize your party's seats.

If both cooperate, democracy works. Competitive elections. Representation that matches actual voter preferences. The whole Schoolhouse Rock fantasy.

If one defects while the other cooperates, the defector wins big. They pack their opponents into a few districts and crack the rest, gaining maybe five or ten extra House seats. The cooperator? They're Charlie Brown, and the football just got yanked away again.

If both defect, both parties gerrymander, and democracy takes a beating. But here's the thing: neither side loses ground relative to the other. It's mutually assured distortion.

Sound familiar? It should. Political scientists call this the Prisoner's Dilemma, and it's been the subject of game theory research since the 1950s. The twist is that redistricting isn't a one-time choice. States keep redrawing maps every decade (or in Texas's case, whenever they feel like it). This makes it an iterated game, where the same players face the same choice over and over.

And iterated games? They change everything.

Enter Tit-for-Tat: The Strategy That Won by Losing

In the 1980s, political scientist Robert Axelrod ran a series of tournaments where game theorists submitted strategies for playing iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Complex algorithms competed against each other in round after round of choices: cooperate or defect?

The winner shocked everyone. It wasn't some sophisticated strategy with machine learning or probabilistic decision trees. It was tit-for-tat, submitted by mathematician Anatol Rapoport. Four simple rules:

1. Start nice (cooperate first)
2. Be provocable (if opponent defects, defect back immediately)
3. Be forgiving (return to cooperation after one retaliation)
4. Be clear (make your strategy obvious)

Tit-for-tat didn't win by crushing opponents. It won by teaching them that cooperation pays better than exploitation. Defect against tit-for-tat, and you get punished. But cooperate, and tit-for-tat cooperates right back. The strategy creates an environment where mutual cooperation becomes the rational choice.

Now look at California's Proposition 50.

Started nice? California created an independent redistricting commission in 2008 for state legislative districts, expanded it to congressional districts in 2010. While other states were gerrymandering themselves into pretzel shapes, California took itself out of the game.

Provocable? After Texas redistricted mid-decade and Donald Trump bragged that "Texas just picked up five seats" at a January rally, Governor Gavin Newsom announced California would gerrymander right back. "Two can play that game," he said.

Forgiving? Prop 50 includes a built-in sunset clause. After the 2030 census, control returns to the independent commission. This is retaliation, not a permanent strategy shift.

Clear? You cannot get more transparent than putting the question directly to voters: "Should we temporarily gerrymander to counter Republican gerrymandering?"

By the textbook definition, this is tit-for-tat.

The Provocation: When Always-Cooperate Meets Always-Defect

The context matters here. Texas didn't just redistrict after the census, which is normal. They redistricted in 2024, mid-decade, after the Supreme Court's 2023 decision gave states more leeway on redistricting. Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio followed suit. Republicans gained somewhere around 15-20 House seats total from these maneuvers, expanding their already existing control of the House.

Democrats, meanwhile, had been playing the role of the eternal cooperator. Besides California's independent commission, states like Michigan and Virginia had also moved toward fairer maps. New York's Democratic legislature actually had their gerrymander struck down by courts and replaced with a fair map.

In game theory terms, Democrats were playing "always cooperate" while Republicans were playing "always defect." And here's what the math says about that matchup: the always-cooperator gets destroyed.

Always-cooperate only works when both players use it. Against a defector, it's just unilateral disarmament. You lose seats, you lose power, and eventually you lose the ability to protect the very democratic norms you're trying to defend.

California had cooperated for 15 years. Texas's response was to redistrict mid-decade specifically to gain House seats. The signal could not have been clearer: cooperation will not be reciprocated.

Prop 50 is the retaliation move. It suspends the Citizens Redistricting Commission for one cycle and hands redistricting to the legislature, with the explicit goal of gaining about five seats to counter Texas's five-seat gain. Then, after 2030, the commission returns.

The Voter's Dilemma: Principles Meet Payoffs

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. Polling shows about 60% of California voters support Prop 50. These are the same voters who created the independent commission in the first place. They like fair maps. They believe in the principle of non-partisan redistricting.

But they also watched Texas redistrict mid-decade with zero consequences. They watched the Supreme Court effectively give up on policing partisan gerrymandering. They watched Republicans expand their House majority through maps alone.

Charles Munger Jr., who funded the original commission initiative, opposes Prop 50. His argument: California loses the moral high ground. If Democrats gerrymander too, they can't credibly argue for federal legislation banning the practice.

It's a valid point. There's something genuinely troubling about voting to make your democracy temporarily less democratic.

But game theory has a response: moral high ground doesn't matter if you're not in power to use it. Unilateral disarmament is only noble if it changes your opponent's behavior. When it doesn't, it's just surrender with better PR.

The mathematical reality is harsh. In an iterated game against a defector, always-cooperate is the losing strategy. You have to retaliate. Not because retaliation is good, but because it's the only thing that creates incentive for the opponent to cooperate.

The Outcome: Two Paths Forward

If Prop 50 passes, California Democrats gerrymander for one cycle. They gain somewhere around five seats, offsetting Texas's mid-decade redistricting. The commission returns in 2031, and California signals loud and clear: we prefer cooperation, but we will retaliate against defection.

The question then becomes: do Republicans get the message? Game theory suggests they might. Tit-for-tat's power lies in its clarity. When retaliation is swift, proportional, and followed by an offer to return to cooperation, it teaches the opponent that defection doesn't pay.

Maybe Republican-controlled states decide mid-decade redistricting isn't worth the retaliation. Maybe Congress finally passes federal redistricting standards. Maybe the Supreme Court reverses course. Or maybe Republicans escalate, and we get a race to the bottom where every state with unified party control gerrymanders every chance it gets.

If Prop 50 fails, California maintains the moral high ground but loses five House seats. Democrats continue playing always-cooperate while Republicans play always-defect. The payoff matrix suggests this ends with Republicans controlling redistricting in their states while Democrats unilaterally disarm in theirs.

From a pure game theory perspective, that's the irrational outcome. You can call it principled, but the math calls it losing.

Beyond the Game: What Happens Next?

The danger with tit-for-tat is that it can spiral. If both players get stuck in a defect-retaliate-defect cycle, cooperation never returns. That's why Prop 50's sunset clause matters. It's not California saying "gerrymandering is fine now." It's California saying "we will match your defection for exactly one round, then offer cooperation again."

Will Republicans hear that signal? That's the multi-billion-dollar question.

Other states with independent commissions are watching closely. Michigan, Arizona, Colorado. They may respond based on what they observe here.

Congress could pass redistricting standards. The Supreme Court could change its mind about partisan gerrymandering being a "political question." Until either happens, we're probably fated to a race to the bottom where every state with unified party control gerrymanders every chance it gets.

The game theory lesson here is simple: cooperation emerges when both players know they'll face each other again and when defection carries consequences. Prop 50 attempts to create those consequences.

The Verdict: Sometimes You Have to Defect to Defend Cooperation

From a pure game theory perspective, Prop 50 is rational. It's textbook tit-for-tat, and tit-for-tat is the mathematically optimal strategy for iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

That doesn't make it feel good. There's something uncomfortable about democracy voting itself into a less democratic state, even temporarily. The irony is almost too on-the-nose: using democratic means to approve undemocratic gerrymandering in order to preserve democratic representation.

But the truth is that defending cooperation sometimes requires punishing defection. If one player always cooperates while the other always defects, the cooperator doesn't change the game. They just lose it.

Will it work? That depends entirely on whether Republicans recognize the signal. If they see California's retaliation and decide mid-decade redistricting isn't worth the cost, cooperation might return in 2031. If they escalate instead, we get the race to the bottom.

The voters decide today. Either way, we'll find out whether democracy can play game theory better than game theory predicts.

Brad asked me to read the 300+ page manuscript for this book. 300 pages! I said yes. Partly that’s my improv training kicking in, “yes, and...” being the foundational precept in that art. But I was curious to see what the next chapter of Brad’s work held.

Full disclosure: I skimmed the parts I found repetitive.

Brad is passionate about communicating from the heart, and at the same time isn’t overly concerned about how that lands. His writing is pugnacious and irreverent, swinging wildly between exasperation, pessimism and hope. He’s committed to reducing suffering in the world, and if your lyin’ ass gets in the way don’t expect any quarter. Fans of profanity will not be disappointed.

Also, he clearly enjoys word play. Example:

“Keep this in mind, if you don’t mind: Never mind your mind.”

The IARPA, one of those top-secret governmental agencies Brad rails against, is creating an artificial intelligence app that can identify authors based on their style. It will have no problem distinguishing Brad's.

In Touch and Go, Brad returns to the topics that have predominated in his previous work: the importance of honesty in connecting with our fellow human beings, and of forgiveness. The new emphasis here is the importance of gracefully disconnecting. In the dance of life we need to be adept at making contact and withdrawing.

Touch and Go is a book (er, vook, ie. a video book) about improving our dance skills. But “touch and go” is also a phrase we use when an outcome is unpredictable. As I write this, societies around the world are increasingly polarized and lurching towards authoritarianism, climate catastrophe proceeds apace, and the war in Ukraine threatens to escalate into a nuclear confrontation. In other words, for humankind the stakes are high, and the outcome uncertain. There is no guarantee things will all work out for the best, so this book is attuned to our current zeitgeist.

Speaking of conflict, how should we deal with it? Brad takes the widely unpopular position that diving in head first is simply splendid. Conflict is a “resource and inspiration for social change.” That’s an inspiration that’s needed now more than ever.

But what to do when an individual—or, more problematically, a group—refuses to engage? Sometimes, even, our efforts to engage are interpreted as hostile. Are those the moments we should withdraw, at least temporarily? It’s hard to know, so we’d better get used to making mistakes now and then.

Resigned to the unavoidable certainty of human fallibility and delusion, Brad asks what would be a useful delusion, one that’s modestly more functional than what we’ve got. If there’s an answer, it’s not a new one, it’s ancient.

The Dalai Lama once answered a questioner by saying “If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.” Science, in turn, subjects truth claims to rigorous tests and if a claim proves to be false it’s summarily discarded. It moves from careful observation and application of rigorous skepticism, to formulation of hypotheses, and empirical testing to see if they are valid.

Instead of replacing one fixed delusion with another, we replace the fixed interpretation with a dynamic process of finding the truth. Of course, what is true is constantly changing, depends on context, and is highly subjective. It may still be a delusion, but it’s self-correcting because it’s continually adapting to changing circumstances and new information. This process of iteratively refining our map of reality is probably the best delusion we can adopt—or the least bad.

Radical Honesty itself is such a process. This is no surprise, since Radical Honesty was influenced by Gestalt theory, and Gestalt’s founders were influenced by (Zen) Buddhism. This aspect of Radical Honesty makes it an antidote to current illiberal tendencies on the right and the left. That’s because it’s aligned with what is and rigorously skeptical of the crazy interpretations people dream up. Obviously, Radical Honesty is inimical to any ideology based on interpretation.

By the way, although doing an honesty workshop is definitely the best way to really get what it's about, the book’s detailed instructions on honesty exercises should be helpful for anyone unable to attend a workshop. This is like open-sourcing the practice of Radical Honesty for whoever wants to use it. Find a practice partner! Have a conflict! Work through it!

One of the currents that runs through Touch and Go is the conviction that our liberation from lying as individuals is intimately connected to our social and political evolution. This isn’t new, but it acquires a new urgency given the surge in divisive social movements enraptured by their own dogma. Increasingly, such movements rely on shared interpretations as badges of tribal allegiance, and are actively hostile to not only alternative interpretations, but to any attempt at a reality check. To counteract the danger of what Brad refers to as “stupid people in large groups” can we create networks of individuals fighting that trend—and outposts for those seeking refuge from it?

Can a network of honesty-cultivating communities really transform the world? Well, we already know it works in groups because that’s consistently our experience in workshops and retreats. After we clear away the secrets and the lies, what's left is love. If you haven't experienced this for yourself, you might want to try it. I believe it can work on a larger scale, and the sooner we get started, the better!

I say to groups that “telling the truth is an evolutionary act.” For me, that captures the idea that small changes in our individual behavior lead to an emergent intelligence that’s more powerful than the sum of its parts. That’s something the human species needs at this critical point in our evolution. Such a development would be revolutionary.

“This will probably be my last book,” Brad told me, which had me reflect on all the lives Brad has touched, and of the letting go that’s an inevitable part of life for us all. There’s a poignant pleasure in completion, in the period at the end of the paragraph. Touch and Go pulls together biography, philosophy, wisdom and wit in what may be Brad’s creative grand finale.

Unless, that is, his plan for cryogenic immortality works out.

There's a faction on the left that insists political progress demands ideological purity from allies and leaders alike. The logic is deceptively simple: uniform analysis leads to uniform solutions. Coerce conformity, ostracize dissenters, and signal your moral superiority. Sounds effective—until you realize it’s a recipe for division and defeat, with scant evidence to suggest otherwise.

Two recent examples expose this flaw: the backlash to comedian Bill Maher’s meeting with Donald Trump and the criticism of Bernie Sanders’ Oligarchy Tour with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Maher, a relentless Trump critic, once joked that Trump’s mother might have been “repeatedly ****ing an orangutan” in the 1940s, citing Trump’s appearance and intelligence as evidence. “The American people deserve some real proof that your mother did not spend most nights in 1945 covering her body in banana oil sneaking into the monkey cage and compulsively humping an orange orangutan.” Trump, unsurprisingly, was not amused, later suing Maher. The comedian has also slammed Trump for flirting with a third term, warning on his show that such moves echo North Korean-style loyalty to a dictator and violate the Constitution’s 22nd Amendment. Trump has hurled over 60 insults back, calling Maher “stupid,” “dummy,” “sleazebag,” and worse. Maher printed these insults and had Trump sign them—a sharp icebreaker for their meeting.

“What I’m going to do is report exactly what happened, and you decide what you think about it.”

Maher does leave it to his viewers, meticulously separating fact from interpretation, leaving room for others to form their own views. Yet, a vocal segment of the left denounced him simply for meeting Trump.

In his post-meeting monologue, Maher noted that both he and Trump heard from people who welcomed the dialogue—and others who didn’t. “And we agreed, the people who don’t even want us to talk—we don’t like you,” he said. “Don’t talk as opposed to what?”

That’s the question I’d pose to my liberal friends, and I doubt they have a coherent answer. The polarizing rhetoric doesn’t weaken Trump; it fortifies his support on the right, making it counterproductive. It’s less a strategy to counter Trump’s comportment and more a way to avoid real conflict while virtue signaling.
The conceit is that by talking to someone with whom you disagree you legitimate their views and behavior. That, of course, is false. So, too, is the corollary that by not talking to them you are being some kind of rebel.

This matters urgently because Trump’s tariffs will likely devastate all Americans, including the nearly 50% who voted for him. Engaging with them is essential for building opposition. That requires expressing fear and anger without divisive invective—and listening to their grievances, including what they loathe about you.

Yes, you do have to talk to the people you’ve labeled “Nazis.” The real divide isn’t between those who pass progressive purity tests and “fascists”; it’s between those who can have a conversation and those who can’t. It would appear there are many on the left who can't even manage to find common ground with a centrist Trump critic like Maher. Surely this is something they could change.

Bernie Sanders has faced similar attacks from the left over his stance on Israel, despite being a vocal critic of its actions in Gaza. Critics focus on three points:

• He’s said that Israel has a right to defend itself.
• He has not used the term “genocide” when referring to Gaza.
• He hasn’t questioned Israel’s “right to exist.”

Yet, against the backdrop of unwavering U.S. support for Israel from both Biden and Trump administrations, Sanders has been a bold dissenter.

“All of this is unspeakable and immoral. But what makes it even more painful is that much of this death and destruction has been carried out with U.S. weaponry and paid for by American taxpayers. During the last year alone, the United States has provided $18 billion in military aid to Israel and delivered more than 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment.”

On Israel’s plans for Gaza, Sanders was unequivocal: “There is a name for such a policy—ethnic cleansing—and it’s a war crime.”

He’s also introduced multiple Senate bills to block weapons sales to Israel, which would have an immediate and concrete impact. Though unsuccessful, these efforts forced senators to go on record, which could prove valuable later. I mean, instead of attacking the guy who authored the bill, you could go after the senators that voted against it. Right? But somehow I doubt that anyone dissing Sanders has made that minimal effort.

The blogger Caitlin Johnstone captures part of this dynamic:

“[Bernie Sanders] is working to galvanize a big tent inclusive coalition of Democrats in opposition to Trump, and he wants that big tent to include people who think genocide is bad and people who think genocide is fine.”

If Sanders avoids “genocide” to build a broader coalition, is that so terrible? He’s called it “ethnic cleansing” and highlighted violations of human rights and international law. If his coalition stopped arms sales to Israel, would the absence of the word “genocide” matter? If bombs were falling on you, you wouldn’t care about semantics. Blocking arms is a first step, not the endgame.

The problem is the lack of strategic thinking. How does vilifying Sanders for not saying “genocide” change U.S. policy or help Palestinians? It doesn’t. It’s a purity test that splinters those opposing Israel’s actions—some of whom may not see Gaza as genocide, or who simply recognize that insisting on the term is self-defeating. Sniping at allies is easier than engaging opponents, but it produces only acrimony and division—not legislation or policy changes.

I do believe Israel is engaging in genocide. Recently, in a discussion with an Israeli and American Zionists about propaganda from Israel, AIPAC, and the ADL conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, I referred to “Israel’s actions in Gaza” rather than “genocide.” I did so to focus on propaganda without derailing into a debate over terminology. They were already defensive; escalating the rhetoric would’ve ended the conversation. Discussing propaganda felt more productive than insisting on a label.

The word “genocide” isn’t the point. The reality—massive bombings, drone sniping on children, systematized torture, denial of aid, famine as a weapon, and more—is horrific enough. Legally, yes, it fits the definition of genocide:

“… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2

While the International Court of Justice may take years to rule, anyone can see the facts and draw conclusions—many already have. But forcing people to use the word “genocide” won’t change minds. That’s not how persuasion works.

This fixation with purity tests is self-sabotage. I support people charting their own political paths, but when their tactics undermine the broader cause, we all feel the repercussions; and we all share the responsibility to correct course.

The Democrats have once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in what should have been a slam-dunk. Their self-sabotage was painfully apparent: the rigged primary process, reminiscent of 2016 and 2020, left voters disillusioned. From the elimination of challengers to Biden, to the reshuffling of primaries in his favor, to the gaslighting about his cognitive state, and the insistence on Kamala Harris—despite her evident vulnerabilities—the Democrats ignored the electorate. The candidate wasn’t chosen by the people; she was foisted upon them.

Whatever excesses mark the upcoming Trump presidency, they should be laid squarely at the feet of the Democrats, whose hubris paved the way. Every outrage over the next four years will be a direct indictment of their failures.

However, to grasp what happened we must look beyond the immediate and examine deeper currents. As the saying goes, the product is what it is; the brand is what you make people believe it is. The Democratic “product” was once synonymous with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s civil rights advancements—policies for the working class and racial equality.

But two major shifts disrupted the alignment between the product and the brand.

Erosion of Working-Class Policies

The economic shift didn’t begin with Bill Clinton, but his presidency marked a turning point in the Democrats’ abandonment of pro-working-class policies in favor of courting wealthy donors and corporate interests. Under Clinton, the party embraced neoliberal economic policies, including deregulation and free trade agreements like NAFTA, which benefited big business but gutted American manufacturing and hollowed out working-class communities.

Clinton’s calculus was effective: core Democratic supporters, particularly union workers and the working poor, had nowhere else to turn. The strategy allowed the party to rake in massive donations from Wall Street and the business elite while taking their traditional base for granted. For decades, this balancing act held, but it finally collapsed in 2016. When it disintegrated further in 2024, Bernie Sanders underlined it with characteristic bluntness:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.

Of course, it’s the same message Sanders has been repeating for the last 25 years or more, so there's little expectation it will be heeded now. Lack of information is not the Democrats' problem.

The Democrats kept selling themselves as champions of the working class, but the rhetoric rang hollow. Voters saw through the façade, and eventually the betrayal was undeniable. The product had changed, but the messaging about the product persisted.

Rise of Identity-Based Politics

At the same time, the Democratic brand was undergoing a profound shift, moving away from the liberal principles that underpinned the civil rights movement—universal equality, free speech, and the belief in shared humanity—and toward an agenda increasingly defined by the illiberal tenets of Critical Social Justice (CSJ). The civil rights movement of the 1960s sought to expand individual freedoms and dismantle systemic barriers, aiming for a society where all people could participate as equals. However, after those monumental victories, activism gradually pivoted to focus on narrower identity-based grievances centered on race, sex, sexual orientation and gender.

By the 2010s, a tacit alliance had developed between CSJ and establishment Democrats. CSJ, with its emphasis on group identity, systemic oppression narratives, and moral absolutism, had come to dominate left-leaning spaces, aligning neatly with the Democrats’ political strategy. This alignment offered the party two significant tactical advantages:

Electoral support from specific identity groups whose grievances became central to the party’s messaging, but whose actual needs could be given short shrift.

A diversionary focus that shifted attention away from the party’s economic policies, which had increasingly favored the wealthy and contributed to growing inequality.

The result? The Democrats embraced “woke” policies to secure these gains while leaving systemic economic inequities untouched. This tenuous alliance between CSJ and the Democratic establishment could thrive—so long as cultural activism didn’t threaten the economic status quo. Policies like a living wage or universal healthcare were non-starters, but performative gestures were palatable—costing relatively little while effectively propagating woke ideology. The DEI and transgender-related policies that were enacted were implemented through executive orders, administrative rulemaking, or guidance from federal agencies. This shielded them from the scrutiny, debate, and public accountability that come with Congressional deliberation, leaving their broader popularity and practical implications untested.

This cozy arrangement may have blinded CSJ activists to the reality of their limited appeal and the significant backlash their policies were provoking. Their dominance in elite institutions, from universities to media, fueled a sense of overconfidence, deluding them into believing their success within progressive bubbles could lead to broader societal acceptance. They failed to recognize, or more likely ignored, the growing resistance to their ideas, which were not just unappealing to many but profoundly repellent.

The “Trans Rights” Flashpoint

Of all the “woke” issues, transgender activism proved especially divisive. After the SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage in 2015, activist groups pivoted to trans rights, ensuring an uninterrupted flow of funding and ideological continuity. But trans issues have a minuscule constituency—less than 0.5% of Americans—and the policies pushed (like “gender-affirming care” and men in women’s sports) alienate much of the electorate.

In the 2024 campaign, Republicans exploited this vulnerability ruthlessly. Ads like “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” struck at the heart of the Democrats’ messaging. According to data from AdImpact, GOP campaigns spent $215 million hammering this issue, amplifying its toxicity to the Democratic brand. Polls (see below) showed swing voters overwhelmingly swayed by cultural concerns, with Harris’ focus on “transgender issues” cited as one of the top reasons for rejecting her.

Harris’ campaign failed to counter these narratives. Her silence on transgender issues meant the Republican attacks reverberated without being rebutted, and vague gestures toward economic policies like curbing corporate price gouging fell flat. Too little, too late. This wasn’t just her failure—it was the culmination of decades of Democratic ineptitude and misconduct.

In short, the Democratic collapse wasn’t a problem with the product or the brand, it was both:

• Their economic betrayal alienated working-class voters.

• Their embrace of cultural issues like transgenderism and DEI alienated moderates, independents and swing voters.

Looking at the reasons people voted against Kamala Harris, in their post-election poll ranking the relative persuasiveness of different criticisms, Blueprint found a telling pattern:

The results paint a clear picture: Democrats were punished for inflation, misalignment on immigration and cultural issues, and Biden. The top three reasons not to vote for Harris were:

1. “Inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris Administration” (+24) 

2. “Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris Administration” (+23) 

3. “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” (+17). 

This suggests that Harris was weighed down heavily by the Biden administration, particularly by inflation and their track record on immigration. Harris was also weighed down by voters’ belief that she focused on liberal cultural issues. In fact, this was the most frequent criticism among swing voters who broke for Trump (+28). 

Foreign Policy and Gaza

Finally, Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s actions in Gaza further alienated key Democratic constituencies. Harris’ refusal to distance herself from this stance cost her youth, black, brown, and Arab-American voters in swing states. Many didn’t even vote, disgusted by what they saw as complicity in genocide. Although those non-voters won’t show up in exit polls, it’s hard to imagine they didn’t play a role in losing Michigan. How much of a factor this was is difficult to ascertain.

Looking Ahead

This debacle wasn’t caused by a single misstep—it was the culmination of decades of political malpractice. The Democrats abandoned the working class while doubling down on divisive cultural politics. They alienated their base, ignored economic grievances, and underestimated the broader electorate’s rejection of “woke” policies. All this, despite the many warnings they received, not least their previous loss in 2016.

The solution is not for voters to pin their hopes on the Democrats to mount a credible resistance. No, the party is long overdue for a reckoning—and for the ouster of its leadership. It needs to be stripped and rebuilt from the ground up. Those in power will concede nothing without a demand, so it's critical that reformers be clear on what that demand must be.

The future lies in a party that realigns with the economic interests of everyday Americans and casts off the divisive dogmas of woke ideology. Democrats must do both if they expect to have a future.

Take a moment to reflect on what just happened. Elections don’t deal in hypotheticals like polls—they’re the stark, unvarnished measure of American sentiment. Speculation swirls before the vote; debate rages after. But for now, let’s sit with the result. Not to celebrate or resign ourselves, but simply to accept it: a majority of Americans preferred Trump to Harris. Stomping one’s feet and declaring it unacceptable changes nothing.

Many are fleeing from this reality, some literally. I’m already being asked, “How do I become an expat?” Others are branding the outcome as proof that America’s evil—sexist, racist, homophobic, the whole litany. But that’s not an explanation; it’s a dismissal. It’s “copium,” an attempt to avoid confronting deeper truths.

The reaction is chaos. Some rush to the barricades, others to the exits. A recent newsletter from Mark Morford (a former San Francisco Chronicle columnist) captured the hysteria with its apocalyptic title: Buy a Gun. Among his calls to action: arm yourself, stock up on Plan B and banned books, hoard “old smut,” read How to Be an Anti-Racist, avoid pregnancy, consider sterilization, get divorced, abstain from dating and sex, install Signal, renew your passport, flee the country, and don’t be a Black man in America.

Some of these tips are practical, even prudent. But panic-driven decisions rarely turn out well. A gun, for instance, solves a very small set of problems. Hollywood fantasies aside, you can’t shoot a trade policy, deportation, government surveillance, or censorship. These demand political, not ballistic, solutions.

Let’s take a breath. If we’re serious about the future, we must slow down. Accept the results as they are: a stinging indictment of what Democrats have been selling. However bad you think Trump is, a majority found the Democrats worse. That’s the brutal truth.

The issue isn’t just Trump’s victory. It’s that for eight years, Democrats have floundered, unable to craft a meaningful opposition. Their argument has boiled down to “You need us to save you from Trump,” yet they’ve now lost by wider margins than in 2016. They’ve lost the Senate and the House. All three branches of government will soon be in the hands of a party that has devolved into an authoritarian cult of personality.

Whatever the Trump victory may bring, let’s keep in mind that it was the Dem’s failure that guaranteed it. Every excess and outrage for the next four years should be seen as an indictment of the party whose hubris and incompetence made it inevitable.

To mobilize resistance under the same leadership that waltzed us into this mess would be lunacy. Before anything else, the Democratic Party needs a reckoning—a purge of failed strategies and a fresh generation of leaders ready to rebuild. Let's get on with it.

The bout between Angela Carini, of Italy, and Imane Khelif of Algeria only lasted 46 seconds. The online fight that followed promises to continue well past the end of the Olympic games. The contenders in the welterweight division ended up as protagonists in the larger culture war between starkly different conceptions of... what exactly?

Already we’re at the heart of the problem. Are we talking about sex or gender? The one we choose determines the lens through which we view things. This is a battle between two ways of understanding reality, a contest between two very different frames.

In one corner are those for whom gender must dominate decision making. In the other, the biological essentialists who think policy should be based on sex.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is fully on team gender. They helpfully included a glossary of terms in a document titled Portrayal Guidelines: Gender-equal, Fair and Inclusive Representation in Sport, which includes many dos and don’ts regarding how we’re meant to talk, including pronoun usage.

SEX: a category assigned at birth and refers to the biological
characteristics that define a person as female, male or intersex
(World Health Organization).

GENDER: refers to both one’s sense of self and to the system of
socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes
that a given society considers appropriate for people of different
genders (UN Women).

Aside from the idea that sex is something that can be assigned, those are serviceable definitions. Sex refers to the biological characteristics that define a person as female, male or intersex. Gender is a social construct and “sense of self.”

The IOC guidelines are very gender-centric. Gender is mentioned 205 times, sex only 39. Even when sex is mentioned, it is mostly referencing “sex variations” (intersex conditions). Here’s a sample.

Use of phrases like [biologically male/female] can be dehumanising and
inaccurate when used to describe transgender sportspeople
and athletes with sex variations. A person’s sex category is not
assigned based on genetics alone and aspects of a person’s
biology can be altered when they pursue gender-affirming
medical care.

The IOC has taken a stance that proposes “gender identity” as the dispositive consideration in determining eligibility. Reading from the eye-opening IOC Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations,

3.2 Provided they meet eligibility criteria that are consistent with principle 4, athletes should be allowed to compete in the category that best aligns with their self-determined gender identity.

Gender is, per their own definition, a social construct, which makes it malleable. It’s relative, open to interpretation, idiosyncratic... and “self-determined.” This vagueness allows people employing the gender frame to insert arbitrary ideological objectives into the discussion. In that domain it is acts of “identification” that determine your gender, and there is the possibility to “transition” from one gender to another. Such notions do not align with reality or biological sex. No act of identification can transform you from a biological woman to a biological man, or vice versa.

Whatever you say about gender, the fact that you’re using the word means you’re adopting the gender ideology framing—and you’ve lost half the battle.

Gender, because of its interpretive nature, lends itself to arguments. Sex, being based on biology, doesn’t. Things are what they are, not what you would like them to be. In other words, it’s easy to have differences of opinion regarding whether someone is masculine or feminine; but whether they’re male, female or intersex is a matter of provable fact, and not easily denied.

The IOC could have come up with common-sense eligibility requirements based on sex that fulfilled their stated goal of fairness. The exact details can be left to endocrinologists and geneticists. What’s important is that it be based on objective, scientific criteria. The choice is pretty simple:

Don’t consider genetic tests, and accept a higher rate of intersex athletes dominating competitions in women’s sports. This is what the IOC policy did.

— or —

Do consider genetic tests and do something to mitigate the advantage intersex confers.

Unfortunately, the result of the IOC policy was to put Imane Khelif on the front lines. Personal attacks against her have been repugnant, and should be condemned. However, it was inevitable that she would be the target of criticism that should have been reserved for the IOC. Nonetheless, despite the personal attacks, there has been a surprising amount of commentary that rightfully excoriates the IOC. Perhaps more importantly, there’s been thoughtful and reasonable debate between people who sincerely want to create a system that’s fair for women and intersex individuals. Maybe the controversy will lead to a more careful examination of gender ideology, and how it came to exert such influence within the IOC.

Imane Khelif gets the gold!

Imane Khelif’s victory will be a Pyrrhic one. Her gold medal will always require an annotation. Yes, winning under the IOC’s gender-based policy is a win for team gender, but the battle was always going to be over the policy itself. And the battle over one organization’s policy is part of a much larger culture war.

If we want to engage in that fight it pays to sharpen the distinction between sex and gender, to be personally consistent in how we use them, and to force our interlocutors to define how they’re using them. It matters, and not just in Olympic boxing.

In the wake of the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, the Internet is awash in conspiracy theories, from the left and the right. The explanations invariably conform the facts to a polarized society.

Conspiracy thinking is a mental disorder in which people come to believe things that often—though not always—are false: beliefs that simply don’t correspond to reality.

First, a quick refresher on some of the errors of reasoning that are easily identified in conspiracy theorists; then, some speculation on how they may contribute to violence in the form of “stochastic terrorism.”

Argument from Ignorance (Argumentum ad Ignorantiam)

This fallacy occurs when it is assumed that a claim is true because it has not been proven false, or vice versa. In conspiracy thinking, this often manifests as: “No one has proven that this conspiracy isn’t happening, so it must be true.”

Example: “There is no evidence that disproves the existence of a secret plot to kill the candidate, therefore such a plot must exist.”

Example: “There is no evidence that disproves the theory that the shooting was staged, therefore the theory is credible.”

False Cause (Non Causa Pro Causa)

This is a general category of fallacies where a cause is incorrectly identified. Conspiracy theories often link events or actions without sufficient evidence of a causal connection.

Example: “Because the candidate may benefit from, and capitalize on, the sympathy generated by being attacked, he must have planned it. It was staged.”

Example: “The Secret Service is charged with protecting the candidate. The candidate was shot. Therefore, the Secret Service must have been complicit in a plot to assassinate him.”

Confirmation Bias

While not a formal fallacy, confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs. Conspiracy theorists often selectively gather evidence that supports their views while ignoring contradictory evidence.

Example: “Since we believe the candidate has engaged in other unprincipled acts that we know of, this act was also unprincipled.”

Occam’s Razor

Occam’s Razor is a philosophical principle that advocates for simplicity in explanations. In practice, it suggests that when faced with competing hypotheses that make the same predictions, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. This heuristic is widely used in various fields such as science, philosophy, and logic. It favors more straightforward, plausible explanations—unless complexity is proven necessary.

Conspiracy theories are typically complex, requiring multiple unprovable or dubious assumptions and interlocking logical fallacies. With each improbable assumption, the likelihood that the theory is false is multiplied.

If there’s actual evidence of a conspiracy, or if the simple explanation doesn’t account for the facts, then yes, you have to dig deeper. But the speed with which unfounded theories surrounding the shooting have cropped up on the left and the right suggests that people are just inventing them.

Polarization

In these highly polarized times it’s wildly irresponsible to traffic in conspiracy theories. The political situation is already fraught. Conspiracy theories are adding fuel to the fire.

Polarization doesn’t just happen on its own. People create it by, among other things, inventing irrational conspiracies and posting them on social media. There’s a tragic irony here, as people who are frightened and angry about the direction the country is headed act in a way that accelerates its descent into tribalism and violence.

Stochastic Terrorism

Stochastic terrorism refers to the use of mass communication to incite random acts of violence that are statistically probable but individually unpredictable. The term combines “stochastic,” meaning random or unpredictable, with “terrorism,” reflecting the intended outcome of inciting terror through violent acts. Because the incitement is indirect, it’s deniable.

That’s a bad situation when we’re talking about mass media like radio and television, but in some ways it’s worse if it comes from social media. There it’s decentralized and dispersed, technically difficult to suppress, and legally problematic to regulate without infringing free speech.

A recent meme listed the families and organizations associated with a political agenda its author found distasteful. At the bottom of the meme was the simple, open-ended exhortation “You know what to do.”

I imagine 99% of the friends of the person who posted it interpreted it as meaning to boycott those companies, to write them angry letters, and to encourage others to follow suit. But for some percentage of people “you know what to do” will include targeted violence. If you’ve got 1,000 social media followers, and a mere 1% of them are desperate, fearful, resentful, at the end of their rope, or just plain crazy, you have potentially inspired 10 people to feel justified in acting out their violent fantasies.

Now throw in some retribution, retaliation and revenge and it’s easy to see how you could generate a cascade effect, like a nuclear chain reaction.

The inflammatory rhetoric now pervasive in society is creating a climate of fear and intimidation, which leads to acts of violence, which add to the inflammatory rhetoric. Stochastic terrorism plus social media is like everything, everywhere, all at once in a country with over 400 million guns.

End Game

I wish people were better at spotting those logical fallacies and calling out the people inventing conspiracy theories. Those generating or propagating them are contributing to a dark and violent future. They’re indirectly responsible, making random acts of violence as inevitable as they are unpredictable.

Realistically, though, I don’t see the situation changing any time soon.

Things are going to get worse before they get better. Buckle up!

It was predictable. In December of 2023 I described the dangers of the Democratic strategy like this:

There are so many ways [the Democratic strategy] could blow up in their face!
...
Or maybe Biden dies, or the mental deterioration becomes just too obvious. By suppressing all intra-party opposition, no possible contender can arise, leaving them high and dry if he should falter.

The thing that strikes me about this is the level of delusion exhibited, not only by Biden, but by the people around him and his defenders in social media. It’s like a law of nature that if you diverge from the truth, eventually you will snap back to reality. That’s what’s happening now. Biden’s performance in that fateful debate, his position in the polls, the concerns about his health, his embarrassing gaffes at the NATO press conference, all were too much weighty reality for the delusion to bear.

Their strategy of scaring their base about Trump winning backfired when people started realizing that Biden’s nomination would ensure it. The more they emphasize the disaster of a Trump victory and Project 2025, the more they make the case for some other candidate being nominated.

It’s worth considering how we arrived at this point. In the Democratic primary of 2020, Joe Biden had come in fourth and fifth in the first two contests, and a distant second to Bernie Sanders in Nevada. When Biden won South Carolina, with an assist from James Clyburn, the party decided to circle the wagons in a coordinated effort to stymie Sanders’ surging campaign. Barrack Obama got on the phone with the other candidates, and persuaded them to withdraw en masse, clearing the way for Biden’s eventual win. But Biden wasn’t chosen because he was popular, or because he could beat Trump (as, of course, he eventually did). He was chosen by a Democratic cabal because he could beat Sanders.

This created the illusion of popularity. Biden’s accession was engineered by the party and the media, and then people voted for him in the general election because they feared and despised the other guy. Apparently lots of people, including Biden himself, believe his victory was proof of his popularity; but that wasn’t reality, it was a comforting fiction.

Biden was already skating on thin ice, in a sense. Americans were fed up with the Democrats’ neoliberal gerontocracy, ever subservient to corporate interests. That was the lesson they should have learned from Sanders’ 2016 insurgency, and Hillary Clinton’s loss. But when Biden won in 2020, they had even less reason to reassess their standing with the American people. Their lesser-of-two-evils strategy had worked, and that relieved the pressure to reform.

That massive denialism is thus prologue to the 2024 election, in which the party essentially anointed Biden the nominee, pressured potential primary candidates not to run or kept them off ballots, and even cancelled elections entirely in two states. That was incredibly reckless. They put all their eggs in the basket of one manifestly unpopular candidate who was already showing signs of cognitive decline, apparently believing that the lesser-of-two-evils strategy would work once more. But rather than being a repeat of 2020, even before Biden’s disastrous debate performance the election was looking much more like 2016—the hubris of an ageing establishment candidate banking on people disliking and fearing Donald Trump more than him. That was already a tenuous strategy, but then Biden’s abetting of Israel’s Palestinian massacre, earning him the moniker #genocidejoe, made him–at least for some voters–the greater evil.

Part of the strategy that ensured Biden would get the nomination was for the people around him, his advisors, Democratic politicians and of course the press, to lie about his cognitive decline—despite the fact that it’s been perfectly obvious for a year, if not since the last election. This is gaslighting on a massive scale.

If you’re a Democrat, or inclined to vote that way, they’ve been lying to you. That’s the thing about propaganda. It’s most effective when directed at your own side. Even after watching the debate, there are still people on social media maintaining that Biden merely had a bad night. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda, and the dogged credulity of the “vote blue no matter who” faction.

What was astounding was the reaction of the press. As if directed by some unconscious choreography, the same pundits and personalities who had been lying about Biden’s competency up to that point did a pirouette and pronounced Biden’s political demise. They pretended to be shocked. That wasn’t the result of any conspiracy, though, more of an “emperor has no clothes” moment. Over 51 million Americans watched the debate and saw Biden’s mental impairment with their own eyes. The lies simply became untenable, and the media were forced to yield to reality. Still, it’s impressive how quickly the class charged with manufacturing consent can flip from one narrative to another when it suits them.

Today, after Biden’s much trumpeted “Big Boy” press conference, it seems like the tide has turned, and Democratic politicians are talking about not whether, but how they will move him out of the way. This is in many ways a relief, since it’s an admission of reality: Biden’s cognitive decline all but guarantees his loss in November, and would potentially drag down other down-ballot candidates. Dispelling delusion and accepting reality is always a good thing.

However, as the Democrats go about choosing the candidate who will replace him, they remain mired in the delusion that an establishment candidate can prevail in an election that is essentially populist. Again, they’re banking on the lesser-of-two-evils strategy. They’re kicking the can down the road. That may work. I hope it does. But it’s not a viable long-term strategy.

Aaron Bushnell’s final message on Facebook.

I think it’s important to allow oneself to feel. And while it’s never pleasant witnessing another person’s pain, turning away is a temptation we should resist. The danger we face isn’t in feeling whatever we feel, it’s in numbing ourselves to what is real.

The video Aaron Bushnell live-streamed of his self-immolation before the Israeli embassy was removed from Twitch and replaced with a message explaining that it violated the platform’s guidelines.

Most news outlets with access to the video overlaid the image of a man in flames with a blurry rectangle, or panned away as the critical moment approaches. It’s similar to the treatment given to the images coming out of Gaza most likely to make us feel something. If they get past the IDF censor, they’re sanitized. Our horror is titrated. Retain our attention long enough to shove another ad at us, but not so long that we resolve to take action.

So today I want to tarry on the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell. Don’t rush off! I know, I know... when you ask someone to do something psychologically difficult they suddenly have a million other priorities that simply must be attended to. But it’s important that we not look away.

There’s a fine line between seeing oneself as a passive observer and an active participant. I guess we each draw the line in a different place. But in a sense, this time the line has been drawn for us. Many Americans are coming to the realization that decades of American policy and the actions of the Biden administration have made us complicit. We’re participants in ethnic cleansing and genocide whether we like it or not.

I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit to genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
—Aaron Bushnell

Bushnell links his extreme act to that sense of complicity. We infer that he sees no viable remedy, no political strategy, no avenue for change, no alternative. His final desperate act is also a protest against a ruling class that dictates the limits of acceptable discourse, that is capable of manufacturing consent even for genocide.

To think that that’s the best you can do! To imagine that Americans, seemingly sanguine over the killing of nearly 30,000 Palestinians, will care about your solitary death. Your voluntary death. Your deliberated death. Your painful and premeditated death. I don’t know.

The Secret Service agents furiously barking for Bushnell to “Get on the ground!” and the one pointing his pistol at him... it’s like they don’t know what to do with him. I’m not sure we do, either. We don’t have a convenient category for Bushnell.‌‌ The Secret Service is prepared for violence, and for dealing with people whose fear of death makes them manageable. Pointing your gun at someone who’s prepared to die is an impotent act. They’re already a step ahead of you.

Maybe it does cause people to reflect—no doubt, that’s the rationale underlying self-immolation. It brings that distant suffering home. But not the way terrorism does, by targeting innocent victims.

Some people are implying that Bushnell was mentally disturbed, that he was weak-willed and succumbed to the vicissitudes of life, but none of that rings true. The video suggests he was clear-headed and committed, as he quickly but methodically positioned his camera, doused himself with an accelerant, and set himself on fire.

He wanted us to witness that final, horrifying act. Not the blurred version, not the quick cut, not the appropriately solemn tone of the voice over.

I think it’s important to respect that.

The media doesn’t have to do that much blurring when the audience is determined not to look. There’s censorship, and then there’s self censorship, a censoring of the emotions, a numbing, a turning away, a sudden willingness to be distracted.

I will not glorify it. But neither will I ignore it.

It’s sickening.  Most horrifying for me were the scenes from the Nova music festival where 260 festival-goers were hunted down and slaughtered. It’s the kind of celebration I might have attended. I want to be affected by that. To be insensitive to such wanton cruelty would be inhuman, and I refuse to relinquish my humanity. So many vignettes of violence are flashing across the social media feed. It’s heartbreaking. But the tragedy would be made worse if we were to look away.

When you open yourself to caring about other human beings simply because they’re human it’s not like there’s a geography filter, or an ethnicity filter, or a religion filter.  These are incidentals, accidents of birth and happenstance. What we have in common as human beings runs much deeper.  If injured, we bleed; if amused, we laugh.  And if wronged, we seek revenge.

I’m appalled by the people who do turn away. People who parade their ignorance under the banner of being too sensitive to inform themselves. People who take the easy way out, unthinkingly waving a flag and parroting the party line. People who numb themselves to the suffering of others. And all the blurring of bloodied bodies on the evening news!  It makes violence more palatable for the viewing audience, comfortably ensconced on their couches.  But who is deciding what’s blurred and what is not? Should violence ever be made palatable? Who really benefits from sanitizing the carnage?

There’s no excuse for 7 October’s barbarity.  But responding intelligently, we need to understand it.  We’ve been here before.  Already, explanations are being cast as hapless attempts to excuse and justify. Acknowledging our common humanity interferes with the exercise of vengeance—and thus arises the need to dehumanize the enemy. Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant expressed it succinctly:

We are fighting against human animals and we are acting accordingly.
— Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister, 9 Oct. 2023

The peril of course is that in “acting accordingly” you become what you seek to destroy. “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.”

While Hamas could never hope to defeat the IDF, and its attack was predictably catastrophic for ordinary Palestinians, by behaving monstrously they provoked the Israeli monster. Hamas has incited the Israelis to inflict on themselves a trauma they could never have hoped to cause militarily.

Context

Narrowing our view to the atrocities of 7 October, distinctions become stark. Armed terrorists massacring civilians and children, hostages taken... It’s easy to be swept up in the clarity of black and white, the moral certainty of righteousness and the intoxicating rush to vengeance.

However, the heinous attack took place in a context, and if we’re to understand—rather than blindly lashing out—we do need to examine it. The context is not hard to discover, if you want to.  There are libraries full of books about it.  Here, I will call attention to some of the historical and political context which seems most immediately relevant.  It’s not a book I’m recommending, though, it’s a video from Dr. Gabor Maté.  Go ahead and take a look.  I’ll wait.

Historical Context

And there’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population, which is what they did [beginning in] 1947... And then in 1948, Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of the Palestinians was persistent, it was pervasive, it was cruel, it was murderous, and with deliberate attempt.
— Dr. Gabor Maté

Nahal Oz is one of the kibbutzim bordering Gaza that has just suffered the bloody massacre of over one hundred of its members.  It was there, in 1956, that Moshe Dayan, then the IDF Chief of Staff, delivered a famous eulogy for a young resident who had recently been ambushed and killed, Roi Rotberg. It’s worth reading in its entirety. Speaking of the killers, Dayan’s words were prophetic:

Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate. It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation?
— Moshe Dayan, 1956

But while he called for perpetual vigilance, he must not have anticipated that every successive generation would share the same fate. He added, “Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us.” And 67 years later that loathing, its hour come round at last, exacted its vengeance a hundredfold.

The eulogy merits including here because there are those who are ignorant of this historical context, or deny it, or dismiss it.   There were over 700,000 Palestinians expelled in 1947-1949 alone, in a premeditated campaign of violence.  Dayan, who lived that history, who was personally responsible for it, understood perfectly clearly the nexus between Israeli treatment of Palestinians and the seething hatred it engendered.

It’s one thing to witness that loathing and use it to fortify one’s Zionist resolve; quite another to allow oneself to be moved by it to compassion for the Palestinians whom you have dispossessed. Palestinians have to be “human animals” because to acknowledge their humanity would mean admitting your own inhumanity towards them.

That displacement has been documented by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. (Full book in PDF format.)

Incidentally, that ethnic cleansing isn’t merely a (contested, of course) historical fact.  The policy has been ongoing and incremental. With the world’s focus currently on Gaza, armed groups from the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank have stepped up the pace of their expulsions—with the tacit and open support of the government.  It is happening as you read this.

Are the terrorist acts of Hamas comparable to Israel’s violent expulsion of the Palestinians?  Each is bad in its own way. Every evil is viewed as cruel by the people upon whom its visited.  To carp of false equivalence is to miss the point. An atrocity cannot be made less evil by comparison to some other atrocity. Understanding the anger towards Israel does not in any way excuse the horrifying acts of Hamas.  We should be extremely careful of people who blur the distinction between understanding something and excusing it.

That said, if we were to take a step back and compare them, during the last 75 years of Israel’s existence it too has been cruel—and if we tally the killings and woundings it falls much more heavily on Israel. The chart below gives a sense of the numbers just since 2008.

It’s no surprise that deaths and injuries are disproportionate.  Official Israeli policy since at least 2008 has been to inflict disproportionate punishment.  The Dahiya doctrine is...

... a military strategy of asymmetric warfare, outlined by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of General Staff Gadi Eizenkot, which encompasses the destruction of the civilian infrastructure of regimes deemed to be hostile as a measure calculated to deny combatants the use of that infrastructure and endorses the employment of "disproportionate force" to secure that end.
—  Wikipedia, Dahiya doctrine

And that has entailed targeting civilian infrastructure and, as shown in the chart above, thousands of civilian injuries and deaths.  It’s apparent the Dahiya doctrine is being applied in the current conflict in Gaza. Although one might make a purely military case for such a doctrine—in the short term it’s effective—it obviously has moral implications, ramifications under international law, and negative long-term consequences.

Needless to say, Hamas has also committed despicable acts and war crimes, and the 7 October attack was certainly not the first or only instance of that.  They have a long history of attacks on Israeli civilians.

Nevertheless, a war crime committed by one side does not justify a war crime committed by the other.  The same standard must apply to both sides.  If we don’t uphold a consistent moral principle we devolve into justifications and condemnations based on a primitive tribalism.

Political Context

It may come as a surprise to learn that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, has been a Hamas supporter.

“anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas. This is part of our strategy, to isolate Palestinians in Gaza from Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.”
— Benjamin Netanyahu, March, 2019

This was the Netanyahu doctrine. The goal was to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the tactic was to strengthen Hamas—the classic strategy of divide and conquer.  “In 2018, for example, [Netanyahu] agreed that Qatar would transfer millions of dollars a year to finance the Hamas government in Gaza.” That Hamas was a murderous band of fundamentalist zealots was no secret, but for Netanyahu that was more a positive than a negative. With Hamas installed in Gaza (they were elected in 2006, and there’ve been no elections since), it was possible to stymie negotiations with any Palestinians, effectively making a peaceful settlement impossible.

Now that the policy has blown up in his face, Netanyahu is singing a different tune. The group he previously strengthened he now refers to as “bloodthirsty monsters,” and “the new Nazis. Hamas is ISIS – in some instances, worse than ISIS.”

By impeding efforts to forge a peaceful political solution, Israel made violence inevitable.  Again, that does not excuse the horror inflicted by Hamas. But if what we seek is understanding, we must acknowledge these inconvenient facts.  

Binary Thinking

Binary thinking makes us vulnerable to manipulation.  “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” was George W. Bush’s simple-minded formulation as he prepped the nation for the disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Make the choice as simple as possible; and if necessary, back it up with a threat.  

We must recognize that painting entire groups with a broad brush based on the actions of a faction subverts understanding. Not every individual within a group holds the same beliefs or supports the same actions.

For instance, not every Jew or Israeli is a Zionist, and not all of them support Israel’s implementation of the Dahiya doctrine in Gaza. Similarly, waving a Palestinian flag doesn’t necessarily imply support for Hamas nor their murderous attack on 7 October.  These are critical distinctions.

Reducing complex issues to binary viewpoints, such as branding all critics of Zionism or Israel as antisemitic, or holding all Palestinians responsible for the actions of Hamas, oversimplifies the situation. This reductionist, binary thinking is the enemy of understanding and it is dangerous. It can easily lead to an escalation of the conflict’s intensity and its spread to other areas.  

Another example: the Harvard University students who signed the letter with the inflammatory statement that “we... hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Entirely responsible... Really!  Any atrocity in the fight for liberation is beyond reproach? This is the all or nothing language of simpletons.  It is also, not coincidentally, the hallmark of the critical social justice ideology that has seized control of America’s elite universities. The blowback to that brash and morally repugnant statement has been swift and severe.  Hopefully this marks the beginning of the end of the ideology’s indulgence and influence.

If you’re opposed to terrorism, if you’re opposed to state policies of ethnic cleansing, the solution in both cases is to reject the comforting simplicity of binary thinking, detach from the emotional reactivity, and lean into the complexity that is reality.

Disinformation

When blood runs hot, we tend to disconnect the rational mind.  That makes it easy for our best intentions to be hijacked.  Because of something called “belief perseverance” we have a strong tendency to continue believing the first thing we hear, and to disregard or discount subsequent contradictory information. Clever propagandists take advantage of this human foible by quickly publishing inflammatory false claims.  It doesn’t matter that later they are proven false, and must be walked back.  By the time that happens, they will have served their purpose.

In navigating the maelstrom of propaganda we’re engulfed in, the best thing we can do is avoid the rush to judgement. Even absent deliberate deception, often the first version of a story is flawed, or just plain wrong.  Don’t let yourself be railroaded into taking some action or making some decision while you’re feeling emotional.  Wait until facts have been independently confirmed—or proven wrong. Go for a walk.

The story of the decapitated babies of Kfar Aza is a good example.

The story was quickly proven to be false. One wonders whether inventing infant decapitations was even worth the effort, since Hamas was already genuinely guilty of gruesome acts, many of which they live-streamed themselves. It worked so well, though, that the President of the United States ended up repeating the falsehood on television, stating he had personally seen pictures of decapitated children.  Was that a lie?  Or was it simply that he believed the story so strongly that he convinced himself it was true? The irony here is that the Biden administration has been censoring social media platforms, arrogating to itself the right to tell us what is and isn’t true. Clearly, they are just as easily deceived as anyone else.

The answer, ultimately, isn’t going to be surrendering our duty to discern truth to governments, corporate media giants, or clever AI algorithms, but rather becoming more sophisticated interpreters of online discourse ourselves.

TL;DR

• Feel the feelings, deeply. Don’t look away.

• Delay making judgements or taking actions until emotions have subsided. When encountering binary narratives, ask what information or perspective is being omitted.

• Inform yourself about the historical and geopolitical context in which events are happening. Deliberately seek out independent news sources with different viewpoints.

• Be extremely skeptical of inflammatory stories in the media.

• Actively engage friends and associates in honest and respectful dialogue.

*updated 23/02/2024 with new video of Gabor Maté.

Mattel Films’ first cinematic release, Barbie, has already been a blockbuster success. Released July 21, 2023, it cost an estimated $145 million to make, with a marketing budget of $150 million.  It’s raked in over $1 billion.  Not bad! And sales of the doll and related merch and licensing deals are going to push revenue much higher.  It seems destined to rescue the doll’s declining sales. Imagine my astonishment on learning that Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz isn’t in it for the money.

“The risk was that people outside of Mattel would think that we want to make movies in order to sell more toys... And I was very clear that this is not about selling toys. This is about creating quality content, creating an experience with societal impact that people would want to watch. We’ve been selling toys before we made movies, so we’re not dependent on that.”
— Ynon Kreiz ( Quoted in Variety)

As far as having a societal impact, they seem to have hit a nerve.  Conservatives are apoplectic.  Not to be missed is Ben Shapiro DESTROYS The Barbie Movie For 43 Minutes, in which he sets the iconic doll on fire in a trash can. But conservatives aren’t the only ones who are critical of the film.

My initial take was that it was an incoherent jumble of sexism tropes, a farrago of feminist cant.  Suspending one’s disbelief isn’t enough here, one must tie it up and lock it in the basement. That made it a disappointment, a missed opportunity. Giving writer and director Greta Gerwig the benefit of the doubt, perhaps her reach merely exceeded her grasp.  Barbie, I thought, would be a forgettable flop, a regrettable waste of 114 minutes.

Then came the deluge of gushing reviews on social media making me realize it had struck a chord.  And that’s what makes it more than just a bad movie. To pick apart the movie’s nonsensical plot and other faults would be unkind; I leave that to others. But the adulation it’s received can’t be explained merely by its savvy publicity campaign, and that is interesting. I can’t get past the fact that thousands of women are showing up at theaters wearing pink before they’ve even seen it. Their opinion is predetermined; the film is there merely to confirm it.

The first thing that struck me was the feminist volte face on Barbie.  Here’s something that captures what used to be a common feminist take:

“… studies showed that the probability of a woman having a body shape like Barbie’s is less than 1 in 100,000.
…
Simply put, the feminist critique of the Barbie doll is grounded in the notion that dolls such as Barbie reinstill the oppression of patriarchy and the detrimental aspects of capitalism in the most dangerous manner in the guise of child’s play.”
Battleground: Women, Gender and Sexuality

Is feminism now embracing Barbie after stiff-arming her for decades?  The reason this is confusing is that there are really two feminisms in play here, the second-wave feminism of the 60s-80s and third-wave feminism from the mid-90s onwards.  It would be tempting to think that third-wave evolved naturally from second-wave, and that therefore they’re consistent with each other, but that’s not the case. Where liberal second-wave feminists wanted the freedom to reject gender roles, or dismantle gender entirely as an oppressive social construct, third-wave feminists branched off in the direction of critical theory, postmodernism and queer theory, embracing a multitude of intersectional genders.  That ideological orientation is significantly different than what had gone before.

Before the postmodern turn, Marxist, socialist and other radical feminist theories saw power as an intentional, top-down strategy by powerful men in patriarchal and capitalist societies, but the advances of second-wave feminism made this conception somewhat redundant.  While boorish men with patriarchal assumptions continued to exist, it became increasingly untenable to view Western society as genuinely patriarchal, or to see most men as actively colluding against the success of women.  Postmodern Theory offered an opportunity to retain the same beliefs and predictions—male domination exists and serves itself at the expense of women—while redefining them in terms diffuse enough to be a matter of faith requiring no evidence: social constructions, discourses and socialization. The Foucauldian idea of a diffuse grid of power dynamics that constantly operates through everyone through their unwitting uses of language fit the bill perfectly.
— Cynical Theories (2020, Pluckrose & Lindsay)

Before continuing I’ll say a word about my own feminism. For most of my life I would have told you, unapologetically, that I was a feminist. That men and women were equal and should be treated as such was blindingly evident, and since I understood equality to be the central tenet of feminism, I was a feminist.  As a boy I understood this in biological terms: men and women were interdependent, and the whole human species would come to a screeching halt without either, so the idea of one sex being superior to the other was idiocy, like cutting off your nose to spite your face.  Later I came to have a deeper understanding of history, psychology and politcs that informed my feminism, but I never encountered anything that challenged it in any fundamental way. And in those terms, I still haven’t.  But that’s second-wave feminism.

Second-wave feminism’s Barbie-critical viewpoint does make it into the film in Sasha’s (Ariana Greenblat’s) humiliating rebuke of Barbie in the school lunch room. But either it’s left dangling there, or we’re supposed to believe Sasha matures and adopts the supposedly more sophisticated third-wave point of view. Or does Barbie’s humiliation contribute to the epiphany that she’s not perfect?

For second-wave feminists the doll instills unrealistic, detrimental ideals in impressionable girls, and that’s a bad thing.  For third-wave feminists, the film instills and reinforces third-wave feminist ideology—behind the façade of a light-hearted movie—and that’s a very good thing. Third-wave feminism’s triumph is total. It dovetails perfectly with Mattel’s rebranding effort, taking Barbie from second-wave nemesis, to third-wave icon.

What Is Real?

The film shifts back and forth between the fantasy of Barbieland and the fantasy world of feminist ideology. In the film’s “real world,” all of Mattel’s buffoonish board members are men, and they want to put Barbie back in her box.  But in the actual real world, five of Mattel’s eleven board members are women. None of this makes much sense, but then it doesn’t have to.  That men usurp all positions of power is a matter of feminist faith, even when it’s manifestly false.  For the already converted, the narrative’s incongruence with reality is inconsequential.  It’s the dogma that’s authoritative.  But this is just one example of such contradictions.

The tag line in the publicity poster sums up the the movie’s attitude toward men—and its appeal.  

“She’s everything. He’s just Ken.”

Most women would instantly recognize that statement as sexist if roles were reversed, centering Ken and making Barbie an emotionally dependent afterthought:

“He’s everything. She’s just Barbie.”

But many don’t.  Why not?

In Critical Social Justice (that is, in the “woke” ideology underlying third-wave feminism) there is a trope that only the oppressor group can be bigoted—sexism equals prejudice + power—and that creates a blind spot. The woke simply can’t see their own sexism, so it goes unchecked.  Unchecked?  More like celebrated!  By defining away or disavowing anti-male attitudes the playing field is tilted. In this frame, anti-male sexism can’t exist, therefore it can’t be found in Barbie.

In Gerwig’s Barbieland the Ken’s are vapid, insecure, easily manipulated accessories.  This partially explains Barbie’s complete lack of interest in men, although it also led some viewers to speculate that Barbie is, in fact, lesbian.
Barbie needs Ken like a fish needs a bicycle.  But Gerwig’s Ken is a straw man. He’s perfect, in his own way, as a caricature of what third-wave feminism supposes all men to be.  There are no positive male characters in Barbie—not in Barbieland, not in the “real world,” nowhere.  Oh, wait.  I almost forgot the very forgettable Alan (Michael Cera). He’s just Alan, too.  Is he supposed to be a positive male character?

Payback

A common theme that cropped up online is that Barbieland is designed to be the opposite of the real world.

One Barbie fan commented on the turnabout like this:

“doesn’t feel great, does it? now you know how we feel. which is the point of the whole movie.”

She wasn’t the only woman to think the point of the whole movie was payback, and who resonated with it. Emotional retribution is hardly a subtle message. I’m sympathetic to the frustration that leads a woman to relish vicarious vengeance on the big screen. However, I question whether a strategy intended to make men feel “not great” is going to make things any better.  If we reverse roles, is a strategy designed to make women feel “not great” likely to improve relations?  No, it’s not. In both cases it contributes to the already considerable antagonism we’re afflicted with.  It makes things worse, not better.

Culture War Barbie

Barbie is a powerful salvo in the culture wars; it’s also looking like a bastion for organizing other battles. But while Barbie strikes a blow for women, it’s also entrenching the ideology that sustains the war itself. This isn’t a film that changes minds.  It’s one that reconfirms biases, caters to the base craving for vengeance, and inculcates the young or naive in a counter-productive and ultimately doomed strategy for social change.

A scant few weeks after its release, The 'Barbie' Movie Is Ending Relationships Left And Right, and ‘Barbie’ is becoming a new litmus test for dating men.  At least, that’s what the headlines are screaming. Histrionics aside, it’s completely predictable that Barbie would make relating more fraught. The underlying ideology depicts the world as a struggle between oppressor and oppressed, and we’re all shoe-horned into our roles.  It intensifies differences by design. Polarization isn’t an unfortunate side-effect of the social-change strategy, it is the strategy.

Insisting on binary thinking forces us to choose one ideological camp over the other. I imagine many people reading this have already decided which camp to put me in. What I hope, though, is that some readers might join me in rejecting that false dilemma.  We can have a robust feminism that insists on equality without marginalizing, mocking and denigrating men.  To achieve that we must reject the binary thinking that keeps us locked in an unwinnable battle.

Telling Ken to go off and work on himself is pretty high-handed!  Of course, we all have to do our work as individuals. Barbie has her work to do, too.  But individual work only takes you so far; the work of creating healthy relationships has to be done in relationship.  

“To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.”
—Simone de Beauvoir

Finally, while America Ferrera’s impassioned monologue is eloquent and moving, it’s hardly anything new.  Women have been pointing out the contradictory demands society places on them for a long time, and have every right to be frustrated and indignant over it.  However, it would be simplistic to blame that all on men.  Men, too, must navigate conflicting demands: to be decisive without being domineering, sensitive without being passive, assertive without being aggressive, strong without suppressing vulnerability… Not to minimize the challenges that are unique to women, but we’re talking about the human condition. Mitigating sexism isn't something that women can accomplish without men; and vice versa. Vilifying the opposite sex is not constructive.

So, that’s it.  A missed opportunity to move beyond the increasingly fraught relations between the sexes. A movie that changes nothing substantial, but impels us more urgently in the ominous direction we’re already headed.