Tom Roche

Author (PHOTO: Ora et Labora (Pray and Work). This 1862 painting by John Rogers Herbert depicts monks at work in the fields) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century by Paul Collins. PART 5 of 6. From Booklist Under the Carolingian rulers, and especially under Charlemagne, medieval western Europe enjoyed a period of relative political stability and a modest cultural renaissance. After the death of Charlemagne, in 814, much of the area reverted to internecine internal wars while Viking raiders plundered both coastal and inland regions. Collins, an ordained Catholic priest and radio and TV presenter, asserts that the tenth century brought order out of this chaos, transformed the basic institutions of medieval society, and laid the foundations for the future nation-states of western Europe. Although the apogee of the temporal power of the Papacy would come two centuries later, Collins illustrates how the church played an essential role in the achievements of the tenth century, which included forming a largely successful working relationship with Germanic kings. Collins provides a broad panorama of the age, presenting characters great and small, including kings, magnates, popes, and peasants. This is a well-done study suitable for both scholars and general readers. --Jay Freeman Review Stephen O'Shea, Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada) “The Birth of the West offers a refreshing breather from the ambient buzzkill of our era.… [Collins] is not your usual Western-civ cheerleader, jumping up and down about the glory that was Greece … his is a wider tour d'horizon, encompassing also Mulsim Spain, Ireland, Briatin, Poland, and Hungary.… Stimulating, encyclopedic, and often downright funny, this is a book worth remembering.” Thomas Keneally “The Birth of the West is a re-making of what we think we know about the end of the “Dark Ages”. It is also the gate to the utterly unexpected cosmos of European forebears. In some ways, from waterlogged England by way of the folk beliefs of French peasants, to the ambitious consolidation of Germany, corruption and reform in the Papacy, the machinations of Constantinople and the continuing presence of Moorish culture in Western Europe, the characters who people ‘The Birth of the West' are as familiar as relatives—as indeed they are—groping their way to a cohesive Western culture as yet dominant in the world. The ‘Birth of the West' is thus the tale of our birth, and Collins tells it with a narrative grace and elegance which will make readers cherish it.” “Very readable… The 900s are a fascinating time in history, and many lessons might be derived from the era's amazing and usually violent changes in reigns and rulers…Collins follows the lead of other recent historians in seeing this period not just as brutish and stagnant, but also rich in its cultural and spiritual life, and his best chapters focus on everyday people and experiences.” Shelf Awareness”An engaging account of an often overlooked era.” National Catholic Reporter“Australian Collins, historian and former priest, has a masterly touch throughout, for he writes the book on the several levels. He describes Europe, physically. He tells us what we are looking at, the stage set of history, the extensive woodlands, the major massifs and plateaus. All the while he is populating this landscape. This is truly history from the bottom up, layering the terrain…Collins' history is telling that though the ages were dark, not all the lights had been turned off. What we are receiving from Collins' sure hand is what happened after the fall of Rome…This is an intriguing 395-page read that gradually comes together at the end as Collins pulls on all the threads to tie into a fine knot.” Shepherd Express Kirkus Reviews, starred review “A live...

Author (Photo: Elizabeth "Betsy" Brown Stephens (1903), a Cherokee Indian who walked the Trail of Tears in 1838) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears. by Daniel Blake Smith. PART 1 OF 2. The fierce battle over identity and patriotism within Cherokee culture that took place in the years surrounding the Trail of Tears Though the tragedy of the Trail of Tears is widely recognized today, the pervasive effects of the tribe's uprooting have never been examined in detail. Despite the Cherokees' efforts to assimilate with the dominant white culture―running their own newspaper, ratifying a constitution based on that of the United States―they were never able to integrate fully with white men in the New World. In An American Betrayal, Daniel Blake Smith's vivid prose brings to life a host of memorable characters: the veteran Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson, who adopted a young Indian boy into his home; Chief John Ross, only one-eighth Cherokee, who commanded the loyalty of most Cherokees because of his relentless effort to remain on their native soil; most dramatically, the dissenters in Cherokee country―especially Elias Boudinot and John Ridge, gifted young men who were educated in a New England academy but whose marriages to local white girls erupted in racial epithets, effigy burnings, and the closing of the school. Smith, an award-winning historian, offers an eye-opening view of why neither assimilation nor Cherokee independence could succeed in Jacksonian America. https://www.amazon.com/American-Betrayal-Cherokee-Patriots-Trail-ebook/dp/0805089551/ref=la_B001JS0WUU_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473562229&sr=1-4

Author (Photo: A Trail of Tears map of Southern Illinois from the USDA - U.S. Forest Service) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears. by Daniel Blake Smith. PART 2 OF 2.

Author (Photo:James Byrnes and Averell Harriman arrive at Potsdam ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe by Michael Neiberg. PART 3 of 4. After Germany s defeat in World War II, Europe lay in tatters. Millions of refugees were dispersed across the continent. Food and fuel were scarce. Britain was bankrupt, while Germany had been reduced to rubble. In July of 1945, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin gathered in a quiet suburb of Berlin to negotiate a lasting peace: a peace that would finally put an end to the conflagration that had started in 1914, a peace under which Europe could be rebuilt. The award-winning historian Michael Neiberg brings the turbulent Potsdam conference to life, vividly capturing the delegates personalities: Truman, trying to escape from the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt, who had died only months before; Churchill, bombastic and seemingly out of touch; Stalin, cunning and meticulous. For the first week, negotiations progressed relatively smoothly. But when the delegates took a recess for the British elections, Churchill was replacedboth as prime minster and as Britain s representative at the conferencein an unforeseen upset by Clement Attlee, a man Churchill disparagingly described as a sheep in sheep s clothing. When the conference reconvened, the power dynamic had shifted dramatically, and the delegates struggled to find a new balance. Stalin took advantage of his strong position to demand control of Eastern Europe as recompense for the suffering experienced by the Soviet people and armies. The final resolutions of the Potsdam Conference, notably the division of Germany and the Soviet annexation of Poland, reflected the uneasy geopolitical equilibrium between East and West that would come to dominate the twentieth century. As Neiberg expertly shows, the delegates arrived at Potsdam determined to learn from the mistakes their predecessors made in the Treaty of Versailles. But, riven by tensions and dramatic debates over how to end the most recent war, they only dimly understood that their discussions of peace were giving birth to a new global conflict. https://www.amazon.com/Potsdam-End-World-Remaking-Europe/dp/0465075258/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505269729&sr=1-4

Author (Photo:File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R67561, Potsdamer Konferenz, Konferenztisch.jpg ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe by Michael Neiberg. PART 1 of 4. After Germany s defeat in World War II, Europe lay in tatters. Millions of refugees were dispersed across the continent. Food and fuel were scarce. Britain was bankrupt, while Germany had been reduced to rubble. In July of 1945, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin gathered in a quiet suburb of Berlin to negotiate a lasting peace: a peace that would finally put an end to the conflagration that had started in 1914, a peace under which Europe could be rebuilt. The award-winning historian Michael Neiberg brings the turbulent Potsdam conference to life, vividly capturing the delegates personalities: Truman, trying to escape from the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt, who had died only months before; Churchill, bombastic and seemingly out of touch; Stalin, cunning and meticulous. For the first week, negotiations progressed relatively smoothly. But when the delegates took a recess for the British elections, Churchill was replacedboth as prime minster and as Britain s representative at the conferencein an unforeseen upset by Clement Attlee, a man Churchill disparagingly described as a sheep in sheep s clothing. When the conference reconvened, the power dynamic had shifted dramatically, and the delegates struggled to find a new balance. Stalin took advantage of his strong position to demand control of Eastern Europe as recompense for the suffering experienced by the Soviet people and armies. The final resolutions of the Potsdam Conference, notably the division of Germany and the Soviet annexation of Poland, reflected the uneasy geopolitical equilibrium between East and West that would come to dominate the twentieth century. As Neiberg expertly shows, the delegates arrived at Potsdam determined to learn from the mistakes their predecessors made in the Treaty of Versailles. But, riven by tensions and dramatic debates over how to end the most recent war, they only dimly understood that their discussions of peace were giving birth to a new global conflict. https://www.amazon.com/Potsdam-End-World-Remaking-Europe/dp/0465075258/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505269729&sr=1-4

Author (Photo:James Byrnes and Averell Harriman arrive at Potsdam ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe by Michael Neiberg. PART 2 of 4. After Germany s defeat in World War II, Europe lay in tatters. Millions of refugees were dispersed across the continent. Food and fuel were scarce. Britain was bankrupt, while Germany had been reduced to rubble. In July of 1945, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin gathered in a quiet suburb of Berlin to negotiate a lasting peace: a peace that would finally put an end to the conflagration that had started in 1914, a peace under which Europe could be rebuilt. The award-winning historian Michael Neiberg brings the turbulent Potsdam conference to life, vividly capturing the delegates personalities: Truman, trying to escape from the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt, who had died only months before; Churchill, bombastic and seemingly out of touch; Stalin, cunning and meticulous. For the first week, negotiations progressed relatively smoothly. But when the delegates took a recess for the British elections, Churchill was replacedboth as prime minster and as Britain s representative at the conferencein an unforeseen upset by Clement Attlee, a man Churchill disparagingly described as a sheep in sheep s clothing. When the conference reconvened, the power dynamic had shifted dramatically, and the delegates struggled to find a new balance. Stalin took advantage of his strong position to demand control of Eastern Europe as recompense for the suffering experienced by the Soviet people and armies. The final resolutions of the Potsdam Conference, notably the division of Germany and the Soviet annexation of Poland, reflected the uneasy geopolitical equilibrium between East and West that would come to dominate the twentieth century. As Neiberg expertly shows, the delegates arrived at Potsdam determined to learn from the mistakes their predecessors made in the Treaty of Versailles. But, riven by tensions and dramatic debates over how to end the most recent war, they only dimly understood that their discussions of peace were giving birth to a new global conflict. https://www.amazon.com/Potsdam-End-World-Remaking-Europe/dp/0465075258/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505269729&sr=1-4

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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden discusses the massive Equifax data breach and allegations of Russian interference in the US election. Commentator Shaun King explains his call for a boycott of the NFL and talks about his campaign to bring violent neo-Nazis to justice. Rapper Open Mike Eagle performs.

In 2013 NSA contractor Edward Snowden shook the pillars of the worldwide intelligence community when he revealed a trove of highly classified information that exposed astonishingly widespread mass U.S. surveillance overreach on a variety of international and domestic levels. Labeled a hero and whistleblower by some, he was formally charged with espionage and has been granted asylum in Russia, where he lives in an undisclosed location. In this one-of-a-kind interview, Snowden will discuss these revelations along with the current status of the surveillance state with Jeremy Scahill, investigative journalist, co-founder of the online journal The Intercept, and author of the bestselling books Blackwater, Dirty Wars, and The Assassination Complex. (recorded 9/11/2017)

The NYT had a piece on prices being charged by drug companies for new types of treatment for cancer, which can run as high as $1 million a year. While the piece noted the argument of one industry critic, Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, that we don't pay firefighters when they show up at a fire or based on how many lives they save, it didn't carry through the logic of this point.

The alternative implied by Dr. Kesselheim's remark is that we could pay for the research upfront, as we already do to some extent with funding for the National Institutes of Health and the Orphan Drug Tax Credit. If the government paid for research upfront, then in nearly all cases the price of treatment would be trivial, since the cost of manufacturing and delivering the drug is rarely very high. It would have been worth presenting this alternative more clearly in the piece.

Extended web-only interview with prize-winning New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her latest piece is titled "The Resegregation of Jefferson County."

In yet another win for moving your digital life into Emacs, wasamasa has released nov.el, a package for reading EPUBs in Emacs. Until now, I have always opted to get digital content as PDFs rather than EPUBs or MOBIs because of the great tools in Emacs for reading and annotating PDFs.

Now, thanks to wasamasa, we have the ability to read EPUBs in Emacs too. This would be even better, of course, if publishers would give up DRM. Until that happy day, we’ll have to continue using proprietary apps for reading most books but wasamasa’s package is a great start.

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In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere – the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglass – both published their first works. Each would become the most…

In a talk that he delivered at our recent World War Two event in Bristol, Professor Nicholas Stargardt reflects on how the Second World War was experienced by ordinary Germans, both on the front line and back home

Issuing massive IPCC climate change reports every seven years is too slow at a time when constant updates are needed to keep pace with science, some scientists say.

By Peter Fairley

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The word has become a rhetorical weapon, but it properly names the reigning ideology of our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human • Read the text version here

Author (Photo: Artist rendering of the Presidio in 1790) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776, by Claudio Saunt. PART 1 of 2. “A history more terrible than wondrous, a necessary counternarrative to our enlightened Revolution… Saunt stretches the scope of his history to provide context and background… He has created a sweeping narrative of noncolonial America in 1776. But he is at his most colorful when he finds individual stories, such as that of the Frenchman floating down the Arkansas River with ‘one severed head and the corpses of two of his companions.’” (Carolyn Kellogg - Los Angeles Times) http://www.amazon.com/West-Revolution-Uncommon-History-1776/dp/0393351157/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445142002&sr=1-1&keywords=west+of+the+revolution

Author (Photo: ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776, by Claudio Saunt. PART 2 of 2. “A history more terrible than wondrous, a necessary counternarrative to our enlightened Revolution… Saunt stretches the scope of his history to provide context and background… He has created a sweeping narrative of noncolonial America in 1776. But he is at his most colorful when he finds individual stories, such as that of the Frenchman floating down the Arkansas River with ‘one severed head and the corpses of two of his companions.’” (Carolyn Kellogg - Los Angeles Times) http://www.amazon.com/West-Revolution-Uncommon-History-1776/dp/0393351157/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445142002&sr=1-1&keywords=west+of+the+revolution

Author (Photo: NuSTAR has captured these first, focused views of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way in high-energy X-rays.) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe by Roger Penrose. PART 1 of 2. “We must understand why the universe began in an incredibly special state, so well ordered that 14 billion years later, the universe still has not reached maximum disorder. Penrose is at his best when he explains this deep and beautiful mystery, and the book may be worth reading for this chapter alone.” —Science http://www.amazon.com/Cycles-Time-Extraordinary-View-Universe/dp/0307278468/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457314127&sr=1-5&keywords=roger+penrose

Author (Photo: Artist’s_impression_of_the_Milky_Way) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe by Roger Penrose. PART 2 of 2. “We must understand why the universe began in an incredibly special state, so well ordered that 14 billion years later, the universe still has not reached maximum disorder. Penrose is at his best when he explains this deep and beautiful mystery, and the book may be worth reading for this chapter alone.” —Science http://www.amazon.com/Cycles-Time-Extraordinary-View-Universe/dp/0307278468/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457314127&sr=1-5&keywords=roger+penrose

There are a lot of myths about the benefits that Britain brought to India that need to be busted.

Controversy erupted on April 14 over the New York Times’s hiring of neoconservative climate-skeptic and anti-Arab polemicist Bret Stephens as the paper’s newest Op-Ed page columnist, hired away from the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing op-ed page. But just two days after it unveiled him, the paper’s op-ed page, with much less fanfare, announced that it had also hired a carbon copy of Stephens named Bari Weiss, also from the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, to “write and commission the kinds of quick-off-the-news pieces” that will “amplify the section’s already important voice in the national conversation.”

In her short tenure, Weiss (pictured, right) has given the paper exactly what it apparently wanted when it hired her. She has churned out a series of trite, shallow, cheap attacks on already-marginalized left-wing targets that have made her a heroine in the insular neocon and right-wing intelligentsia precincts in which she, Stephens, and so many other NYT op-ed writers reside.

Exactly as she was doing a decade ago as a “pro-Israel” activist at Columbia and thereafter at various neocon media perches, her formula is as simple as it is predictable: She channels whatever prevailing right-wing grievance exists about colleges, Arabs or Israel critics (ideally, all of those) into a column that’s supposed to be “provocative” because it maligns minority activists or fringe positions that are rarely given platforms on the New York Times op-ed page.

She was first cheered for using this highly valuable journalistic real estate to attack organizers of the Chicago Dyke March for excluding flags that contained the Star of David on the grounds of similarity to the Israeli flag, followed by a crude guilt-by-association attack on the minority women who organized the Woman’s March based on their praise of various Muslims we’re all expected to hate, and then yesterday mocked campus critics of “cultural appropriation,” taking time — in advance — to celebrate her own courage and martyrdom by including this line: “I will inevitably get called a racist for cheering cultural miscegenation.” (Weiss loves to declare her own brave martyrdom in advance of reactions to what she writes; “I’ll be accused of siding with the alt-right or tarred as Islamophobic,” she proclaimed in her column attacking the Women’s March organizers, concluding: “If that puts me beyond the pale of the progressive feminist movement in America right now, so be it”).

Weiss, standing alone, isn’t worth spending much time on: She’s just another thoroughly mainstream writer who thrives on cheap, easy, and superficial “controversy,” who sees herself as a brave intellectual dissident as she is continually celebrated by and gets promoted within the most mainstream media circles — all for spouting conventional and power-flattering critiques of largely powerless figures. But she is worth examining for what it says about the New York Times, its understanding of “diversity,” and the range of opinions it does, and does not, permit.

In the wake of the controversy prompted by hiring Stephens, the Times justified its decision by appealing to precepts of intellectual diversity. The paper “has proclaimed a public commitment to reflecting a broader range of perspectives in its pages,” Public Editor Liz Spayd wrote, citing “the general principle of busting up the mostly liberal echo chamber around here.”

On CNN, the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, chided critics of the Stephens hiring this way: “Didn’t we learn from this past election that our goal should be to understand different views?” He claimed that “the New York Times has a history of trying to bring in different voices,” asking rhetorically: “Don’t we want to surface all ideas?”

Few things are more laughable than watching the incomparably homogenized New York Times op-ed page justify itself with appeals to the virtues of diversity. If your goal were to wage war on media diversity in all of its forms, and to offer the narrowest range of views possible, it would be hard to top the roster of columnists the paper has assembled: Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Nick Kristof, Paul Krugman, Roger Cohen, Ross Douthat, Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni, David Leonhardt, Charles Blow, Gail Collins, Bret Stephens, with Bari Weiss as a contributor and editor.

Beyond the obvious demographic homogeneity, literally every one of them fits squarely within the narrow, establishment, center-right to center-left range of opinion that prevails in elite opinion-making circles. Almost all of them, if not all, supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, and now have politics close to that neighborhood. None is associated with or supportive of the growing populist left or the populist right; they all wallow in the vague, safe, Washington-approved middle ground, members in good standing of the newly overt neoliberal-neoconservative alliance. As long as Stephens avoided talking about climate change and Douthat steered clear of abortion, most if not would all be capable of giving a speech that would be cheered at a so-called #Resistance rally, or at an AIPAC conference.

In writing about the controversy over the Stephens’s hiring, Huffington Post media reporter Michael Calderone summarized the glaring joke of the NYT Op-Ed page — of all places — claiming the mantle of viewpoint diversity:

But as far as embracing views far to the left or right, the Times’ full-time opinion writers have never represented a particularly wide range. The paper has never had a Pat Buchanan or Steve Bannon, a strident right-wing populist arguing against free trade, immigration and U.S. intervention abroad. Nor has it played host to a regular columnist from the anti-war left in the vein of Michael Moore, or an anti-capitalist like Naomi Klein.

And several of its left-leaning voices on the op-ed page are often aligned with conservatives on foreign policy. Stephens, like [Bill] Kristol before him, backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But so did Tom Friedman. And like Stephens and Kristol, both Friedman and Nick Kristof supported Trump’s decision last week to strike Syria in response to a chemical attack.

As my colleague Zaid Jilani put it when the Stephens’s hiring was announced: “Stephens’s voice is hardly new to the media landscape — it echoes the powerful and attacks the powerless, specifically marginalized groups like Arabs and Muslims who have little representation in U.S. media. … The Times editorial page currently does not have a female minority columnist and, despite frequently writing about conflicts in the Middle East, employs no regular Arab American or Muslim American writers.”

That’s not to say there are zero differences among NYT columnists. Douthat expresses occasional social issue conservatism; Brooks and Krugman have passive-aggressively argued on elements of conservative dogma and economic policy; and Stephens’s climate views are certainly an outlier. But on the most contentious issues that divide the country, the range of opinion they offer is as narrow and stultifying as their demographic diversity is.

The old joke used to be that, for mainstream media, diversity of views spanned the range from the centrists at The New Republic to the conservatives at National Review. For the contemporary NYT op-ed page, diversity spans the small gap from establishment centrist Democrats to establishment centrist Republicans, with the large groups of people outside of those factions essentially excluded.

Bari Weiss is a caricature of all of the op-ed page’s longest-standing, worst attributes. Her relatively short career as a writer and activist has been overwhelmingly devoted to one issue: a defense of the Israeli government and a corresponding smear campaign against its critics. Her targets have tended overwhelmingly to be Muslim and/or Arab, often in the context of campus politics. She has already used her NYT space to endorse the disgusting and false Haim Saban-created smear campaign against the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, writing: “Recall that only a few months ago, Keith Ellison, a man with a long history of defending and working with anti-Semites, was almost made leader of the Democratic National Committee.”

Weiss’s admirers, such as Niall Ferguson, the right-wing Harvard professor and husband of Netanyahu-fan Ayaan Hirsi Ali (whom Weiss admires), have hailed her columns as an “amazing and welcome outbreak of intellectual diversity at the New York Times.” But while Weiss brings many things to the New York Times, viewpoint diversity is plainly not among them.

There’s not a single view she holds about Israel or campus controversies that couldn’t be, and hasn’t been, repeatedly expressed by Friedman, Stephens, and Brooks, if not also Cohen and Douthat. Hiring her didn’t add an iota of viewpoint diversity; it just replicated tendentious views about Israel and its largely marginalized critics that have been repeated for years on those same NYT pages to the purposeful exclusion of actually dissenting voices.

That devotion to Israel is the North Star of Weiss’s worldview and journalism was best demonstrated by Weiss’s own description of her career. At a 2012 Conference of the American Zionist Movement, Weiss gave a speech about what she called the “connection between advocacy journalism and Zionism.”

She explained that she “got involved in journalism through activism” — specifically, activism against Arab and Muslim professors at Columbia whom she accused of bullying Jewish and Israeli students. That was as part of an incredibly ugly campaign, launched by the film “Columbia Unbecoming” to depict those Arab professors — members of one of America’s most marginalized groups — as oppressors of Jewish students.

One of the Arab professors targeted by that campaign, Joseph Massad, described it as “the latest salvo in a campaign of intimidation of Jewish and non-Jewish professors who criticize Israel.” The New York Civil Liberties Union condemned the campaign and that film — which Weiss credits as having catalyzed her interest in journalism — as a witch hunt designed to punish Israel critics: “The attack on Professor Massad and other in the [Middle East Studies] Department is really about their scholarship and political expression.”

Weiss’s activism against these professors was preceded by a one-year stint in Israel. After she crusaded against these Middle East studies professors at Columbia, penning columns denouncing them, she was quickly hired by the standard organs for neoconservative opinion: the New York Sun, Tablet, then the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. She gushed that the Wall Street Journal op-ed age was perfect for her politics — it “can often be an island of sanity for those of us who care about Zionism and Israel” — and explained that she went to Tablet “because I wanted the chance to focus on Jewish issues.”

Weiss’s attacks on Muslim and Arab professors weren’t limited to the Columbia campaigns. She also participated in the campaign to destroy the reputation of Nadia Abu El-Haj, an American-born rising star in the academic world who had received a Fulbright scholarship and a fellowship at Harvard. Abu El-Haj, a doctorate of anthropology, has a Palestinian-Muslim father and an American Episcopalian mother.

In 2002, she published a book anthropologically examining Jewish claims to a biblical entitlement of Israel, and it won numerous scholarly awards, along with critical praise from her academic colleagues at the University of Chicago, where she was teaching. As a New York Times article described, the book documented that as “Israeli archaeologists searched for an ancient Jewish presence to help build the case for a Jewish state … They sometimes used bulldozers, destroying remains of other cultures, including those of Arabs.” Abu El-Haj’s book questioned their anthropological conclusions designed to bolster Israel’s current political posture.

In 2006, El-Haj moved with her husband to New York and obtained a teaching position at Barnard College, the women’s college at Columbia. She then applied for tenure, and, as the New Yorker’s review of the ensuing controversy recounted, “No one in her department doubted she would get it,” as “she was known on campus for having an original and scrupulous mind.” But then, after Abu El-Haj’s tenure application had passed the review of three separate academic committees, an online petition emerged — written by an Israeli settler — demanding that she be denied tenure, accusing her of defaming Israel based on ignorance and shoddy scholarship.

Though the petition ended up being ultimately discredited, and Abu El-Haj was eventually given tenure at Barnard, the ensuing controversy was toxic, tarnishing the reputation of this young professor. “She is a scholar of the highest quality and integrity who is being persecuted because she has the courage to focus an analytical lens on subjects that others wish to shield from scrutiny,” Michael Dietler, an anthropology professor at the University of Chicago, told the Times, “and because she happens to be of Palestinian origin.”

A senior professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Barnard, Alan Segal, ultimately led the on-campus campaign against Abu El-Haj. “He was used to being consulted on anything at Barnard involving ancient Israel,” said the New Yorker. In the campaign, Segal breached academic protocol by publicly attacking and maligning her scholarship, telling the New York Times: “There is every reason in the world to want her to have tenure, and only one reason against it — her work.”

One of the media leaders stoking the flames against this accomplished young American-Palestinian academic was Bari Weiss, living in Jerusalem at the time. With no training or expertise whatsoever in anthropology, a deficiency she made up for with her ample passion for publicly smearing Israel critics, Weiss attacked Abu El-Haj in the Israeli daily Haaretz, arguing that “this is not just another round between the Zionists and the anti-Zionists,” but instead, “is about the nature of truth, and the possibility of, well, facts themselves.”

Depicting Abu El-Haj as a disciple of another Weiss target, the late Columbia Middle Eastern studies Professor Edward Said, Weiss claimed that Abu El-Haj, in her book, “is forced to abandon the methodology of science altogether.” Of the award-winning and highly praised work, Weiss said: “She has written a book condemning the notion of facts themselves.” Weiss’s sudden outburst of concern for academic and anthropological rigor and the scientific method seems to find expression only as a tool for smearing people who happen to be critics of the Israeli occupation and/or scholars of Arab descent.

It’s truly amazing: Weiss now postures as some sort of champion of free thought on college campuses. Yet her whole career was literally built on ugly campaigns to attack, stigmatize, and punish Arab professors who criticize Israel. And that’s because, as she herself has said, she regards her journalism as merely a form of “Zionist activism.”

So that’s Weiss’s overwhelming preoccupation: defending Israel, primarily by vilifying its critics. Why the New York Times op-ed page — in the midst of feigning a devotion to diversity — decided that this is what it needed more of is mystifying indeed, given that her views on her central issue are already shared by many, if not the large majority, of her colleagues on that page.

Just review her own list of views that she believes converted her into a brave and “politically homeless” dissident on college campuses, “in which being an outspoken Zionist made you fascist, supporting the war in Iraq made you an imperialist, and believing that some cultures are indeed more enlightened than others a hegemon.” Those beliefs are not the hallmark of a dissident but rather the prevailing views of the New York Times op-ed page where she now works.

Indeed, at the time of hiring, Weiss heaped praise on Stephens. And that makes sense: They are virtually indistinguishable, particularly when it comes to Weiss’s obsessive focus on Israel and its critics. Though it got little attention amid the controversy over his climate change denialism, Stephens has expressed blatant anti-Arab bigotry in the past: “The Arab world’s problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism,” he once wrote, adding that this “Arab mind” has produced few achievements: “Today there is no great university in the Arab world, no serious indigenous scientific base, a stunted literary culture.”

Weiss’s most celebrated NYT column thus far — her attack on Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour for praising Muslim extremists and expressing anti-Israel ideas — was just a rehash of a similar column she wrote earlier this year at Tablet that asked in the headline, referring to Sarsour: “Do Jews have to make common cause with people who want to kill them?”

Others have dissected the glaring fallacies of that particular Women’s March column, as many have done with Weiss’s celebration of cultural appropriation yesterday, so we can leave those to the side. But let’s apply one of Weiss’s favorite smear tactics that she used against Sarsour — finding someone who her target has praised, and then finding their worst comments to attach to her target — to Weiss herself.

Judging by the praise she dishes out on her Twitter feed, Weiss’s favorite people are all part of that insular, highly homogenized clique of war-loving, “pro-Israel” neoconservative American writers: John Podhoretz, Jamie Kirchick, Bill Kristol, Eli Lake, and Stephens. And they all adore her. But, to use her words in maligning the Women’s March organizers, she sure does “have some chilling ideas and associations.”

One of the people Weiss most admires and most frequently praises, Podhoretz, is literally an advocate of genocide. He wrote a 2006 New York Post column wondering whether “the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything?” He added: “Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?”

Of Bari Weiss’s friend and beloved writer, Podhoretz, the foreign policy analyst Gregory Djerejian expressed shocked that he “would muse so innocuously about the merits of mass butchery — basically the wholesale slaughter of a broad demographic of an ethnic group writ large — a policy prescription that is quasi-genocidal in nature.”

Another one of Weiss’s favorite writers, Jamie Kirchick, got his start in journalism working as an assistant for and protégé of long-time New Republic publisher Marty Peretz, whose own writers have exposed his countless expressions of overt anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry. Kirchick himself has his own history of ugly anti-Muslim animus, such as his defense of anti-Muslim stereotypes on the grounds of accuracy, and his invocation of Stephens’s “disease of the Arab mind” phrasing.

A tip for Muslims angry about Muslim stereotypes: stop acting like Muslim stereotypes. http://t.co/NqrLbQ5843

— Jamie Kirchick ? (@jkirchick) April 10, 2014

A disease of the Arab mind, if you will https://t.co/buCXMy9fML

— Jamie Kirchick ? (@jkirchick) June 9, 2017

Stephens himself, one of her mentors, has a history of ugly defamations against Arabs and Africans. And then there’s Bill Kristol — himself once a NYT columnist — whose record of advocating the most extreme evil and blatant deceit is too well-known to merit discussion.

So on top of her own history of crusading against Arabs, Muslims, and other assorted critics of Israel, Weiss’s own “associations” and admired figures have a long history of overt hatred against such groups and have espoused some of the most repugnant ideas to gain traction in U.S. discourse since the War on Terror began. Using her own standards of judging people by the worst views of those whom they have praised, shouldn’t this put Weiss beyond the pale of what’s tolerated in decent company?

News outlets, even the New York Times, are free to hire only those writers which espouse particular orthodoxies or ideological views — whether on Israel or any other hotly contested topic. But what they shouldn’t do is insult everyone’s intelligence by prancing around as advocates of diversity. Hiring Bari Weiss as a new op-ed writer isn’t something you do if you are committed to fostering viewpoint diversity at your paper; it’s what you do if you want to further smother it.

Top photo: People walk past the New York Times building in New York City on July 27, 2017. 

The post The NY Times’s Newest Op-Ed Hire, Bari Weiss, Embodies its Worst Failings — and its Lack of Viewpoint Diversity appeared first on The Intercept.

It must be great to be able to read people's minds. Most of us lack that ability, but thankfully the Washington Post was able to find a reporter who could tell us Emmanuel Macron's motives in moving to weaken France's labor laws in a way that gives businesses more power and workers less. Those of us who lack mind reading ability might have thought that Macron was motivated by a desire to give businesses more power and workers less. After all, he is a wealthy person who made a fortune in investment banking. He also won without much support from France's labor unions.

But the Post can tell us Macron's true motives:

"...to stimulate economic growth and lower unemployment, now over 9 percent."

This is especially not obvious since the most effective way to boost growth and reduce unemployment would be to increase spending, something that Macron is not planning to do. It is far from obvious that the labor market reforms described in this piece will have the effect of boosting growth and lowering unemployment, so it seems that Macron is badly confused.

The piece also makes many assertions that are wrong or misleading. It tells readers in the second sentence:

"Find one of those golden tickets and you basically cannot be fired, even if you stop performing."

This is a Washington Post invention, like the claim that Mexico's GDP quadrupled between 1987 and 2007 due to NAFTA (the actual growth figure was 83 percent, according to the I.M.F.). It is simply not true, employers absolutely can fire workers in France if they can show they are not doing their jobs.

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Behind the News, 8/31/17 - guests: Stan Collender, Tim Shorrock - Doug Henwood

We are seeing many terrible pictures from Houston as a result of Hurricane Harvey. People with young children and pets are wading through high water in the hope of being rescued by boat or helicopter. Elderly people in nursing homes are sitting in waist high water waiting to be rescued. It's a pretty horrible story.

One thing we can feel good about is that because the United States is a wealthy country, we do have large numbers of boats and helicopters and trained rescue workers able to assist the victims of the storm. We also have places where we can take these people where they will have shelter, as well access to food and medical care. However bad the human toll will be from Harvey, it would be hugely worse without these resources.

This might be a good time for people to take a moment to think about Bangladesh, a densely populated country on the other side of the world. More than 160 million people live in Bangladesh. Almost half of these people live in low-lying areas with an elevation of less than 10 meters (33 feet) above sea level.

Bangladesh experiences seasonal monsoon rains which invariably lead to flooding, as well as occasional cyclones. The monsoon rains and cyclones are likely to get worse in the years ahead, as one of the effects of global warming. This will mean that the flooding will be worse.

Bangladesh does not have large amounts of resources to assist the people whose homes are flooded. It does not have the same number of boats and helicopters and trained rescue workers to save people trapped by rising water. Nor can it guarantee that people who do escape will have access to adequate shelter, medical care, or even clean drinking water. This means many more people are likely to be dying from floods in Bangladesh in part as a result of the impact of global warming.

Emissions of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming are often treated as a natural market outcome, whereas efforts to restrict emissions are viewed as government intervention. This is nonsense.

Allowing people to emit greenhouse gases without paying for the damage done is like allowing them to dump their sewage on their neighbor's lawn. Everyone understands that we are responsible for dealing with our own sewage and not imposing a cost on our neighbor. It's the same story with greenhouse gases.

It is understandable that a rich jerk like Donald Trump might not want to pay for the damage he does to the world, especially when the people most affected are dark-skinned, but it is not a serious position. The emissions from the United States and other wealthy countries will result in a lot of Harvey-like disasters in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the developing world. We have to take responsibility for this human catastrophe.