I don’t read Chait enough to diagnose why I don’t care for him — his vaguely liberal views always make me too queasy to think hard enough about what he’s saying, which is a good warning sign. But Alex Pareene does read him carefully and gets specific about what’s annoying. It’s not just that he’s always complaining about “free speech” on campus and how colleges are starting to wise up to the conservative scam of booking controversial assholes, it’s that he always favors avoiding calling out the bad guys.

In the course of defending his piece on Twitter, he has effectively made it clear that he thinks it’s inappropriate to label any person or cause “white supremacist” unless the targets of the label have openly embraced it. He has suggested that a political tendency can’t be “white supremacist” without vocal anti-Semitism, which is silly in the American context—as Ali Gharib points out, Judah P. Benjamin, perhaps the most prominent Jewish politician in the country at that time, served in Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s cabinet. Chait has argued that Rep. Steve King, who has explicitly argued that “somebody else’s babies” pose a “demographic” threat to “our civilization,” is merely “edging closer” to white supremacy.

So I’m safe from criticism by Chait if I make Nazi salutes, advocate putting brown people into camps, sloganeer about white genocide, and quote The Bell Curve to say that some races are inferior, as long as I don’t say, “I’m a white supremacist”? Good to know. I wouldn’t want to get on Chait’s bad side.

Something that is well-known to people who’ve read Chait for years, but may not be apparent to those who just think of him as a standard-issue center-left pundit who is sort of clueless about race, is that he is engaged in a pretty specific political project: Ensuring that you and people like you don’t gain control of his party.

I say “you” because his conception of the left almost certainly includes you. He is not merely against Jill Stein voters and unreconstructed Trotskyites and Quaker pacifists. He means basically anyone to the left of Bill Clinton in 1996. If you support a less militaristic foreign policy, if you believe the Democratic Party should do more to dismantle structural racism and create a more equitable distribution of wealth, if you think Steve fucking King is a white supremacist, Chait is opposed to you nearly as staunchly as he is opposed to Paul Ryan.

I’m not one of those people who has read Chait for years, so it’s good to have that flaw pinned down in the dissecting tray for me. But is Pareene right? I want to see Chait’s own words. So he quotes him defending Joe Lieberman in 2006. Joe Lieberman! Jesus.

In the end, though, I can’t quite root for Lieberman to lose his primary. What’s holding me back is that the anti-Lieberman campaign has come to stand for much more than Lieberman’s sins. It’s a test of strength for the new breed of left-wing activists who are flexing their muscles within the party. These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent. Moreover, since their anti-Lieberman jihad is seen as stemming from his pro-war stance, the practical effect of toppling Lieberman would be to intimidate other hawkish Democrats and encourage more primary challengers against them.

This is Chaitism distilled: They may be right—about Joe Lieberman, about the Iraq War, about the racism of the conservative movement—but they are right for the wrong reasons, and we cannot let them gain a foothold.

Yeesh. At least now I can go back to not reading Jonathan Chait with a clear conscience.

The Epstein fallout continues. MIT is thoroughly scolded by the Boston Globe editorial staff.

Heads have rolled; new rules have been promised. But what led MIT to accept the donations of sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein is about much more than bad apples or bad fundraising criteria: It’s a reflection of a culture that has strayed from basic values and that’s long overdue for a reckoning.

The report that MIT released Friday showed the Institute took $750,000 in donations from Epstein after he was convicted as a sex offender in Florida in 2008 (and $100,000 before that) as well as hosted the late financier on campus nine times between 2013 and 2017. The investigation of the donations, led by the law firm Goodwin Proctor at the behest of the MIT corporation, showed that in addition to two faculty members who solicited the post-conviction gifts — former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and mechanical engineering professor Seth Lloyd — three university vice-presidents, R. Gregory Morgan, Jeffrey Newton, and Israel Ruiz, were aware of Epstein’s donations, his reputation, and his 2008 conviction for soliciting a child for prostitution, and yet approved taking his money and keeping it a secret anyway.

We’ve already seen Joi Ito go down in flames — he knew exactly what he was doing, and he lied to cover up the money coming into his lab. I’d heard of Seth Lloyd, but had no idea until know what a corrupt SOB he was. Lloyd was an associate of Brockman’s Edge group, which is beginning to look like a red flag.

Mano has covered the Lloyd story well, and it’s written up in Nature.

It’s hard to comprehend how consciously devious he was.

He received $225,000 in research grants, and shockingly, a $60,000 personal gift from Epstein. This is unheard of, as far as I know. Grant awards do not come with big ol’ piles of money to the awardee; not once in my career have I profited from a grant in any way. That money is supposed to go through the institution, and be managed and regulated by that institution.

Then he kept the money secret.

“Professor Lloyd knew that donations from Epstein would be controversial and that MIT might reject them,” the report concluded. “We conclude that, in concert with Epstein, he purposefully decided not to alert the Institute to Epstein’s criminal record, choosing instead to allow mid-level administrators to process the donations without any formal discussion or diligence concerning Epstein.”

Wow. Unimaginable. The last big grant I received was administered by our grants office, I didn’t see a penny of it, and every purchase request was overseen by an administrator who would double-check whether it was allowed under the terms of the grant. Heck, even the little in-house grants I’ve received are policed strictly by administrators, which is right and proper. It is not the PI’s money!

Lloyd even tried to justify his actions to his classes!

In her op-ed, Graham said that Lloyd opened his initial class, by asking, “How many of you have heard of Jeffrey Epstein?” and then diving into an explanation of why he decided to visit Epstein in prison and accept funds from him after he had been convicted of having sex with minors. He told students he had consulted important women in his life, his mother and wife, before taking the funds. “There was no information that couldn’t have been sent in an optional email to the class. This was a power play, pure and simple,” Graham wrote of Lloyd’s lecture.

In other words, Lloyd knew that accepting the money was wrong, that the association with Epstein was unconscionable, so he had to make a guilty rationalization to his students. This is another alien experience to me — I’ve never felt the need to explain to a class that “I did X, and I know it looks really, really bad, and it got me entangled with criminals, but…”.

That Boston Globe editorial may not have gone far enough. It’s true that MIT has “a culture that has strayed from basic values”, but let’s not let the faculty off the hook. They hired a bunch of cowboys, turned ’em loose with little oversight, and are now shocked to learn that they were a bunch of sleazy rustlers.

I wonder if MIT will now start enforcing the rules, and how many of their big names with big egos will complain?

The least the president of MIT can do right now is resign. Lloyd should be fired.

In a Washington Post op-ed, John Ellis opines on who he thinks ought to be the Democratic presidential nominee. This is John Ellis.

Worked at Fox Business Network and Fox News on business and financial news “content,” programming and strategy. Worked at Dow Jones on WSJ CEO Council News Items, a newsletter that went out to the WSJ’s CEO Council and to a wide network of “influencers” in government, media, finance, entertainment, etc. Worked on business projects for Rupert Murdoch from 2016 through 2018.

Do you think he might be giving good advice? Perhaps he might have the best interests of Democrats at heart?

A short summary of his opinion piece: Bernie Sanders is a “nightmare”, and he’s going to lose to Trump, as is everyone except for one shining knight: Michael Bloomberg. And why is Bloomberg so good?

He’s rich.

If Democrats nominate anyone besides Bloomberg, they will be outspent in the general election by 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1. If they nominate Bloomberg, he will outspend Trump at least 5 to 1 and dramatically improve the party’s chances of winning seats at every level of governance.

Holy hell. The presidency is for sale, and rather than electing a candidate who might fight for campaign finance reform, we’re supposed to bow to the wind and find the richest man we can to run the country, because he is so wealthy.

Fuck off, John Ellis. You’re going on my list of smug lackeys to oligarchs who need to be lined up against a wall.

Recently, the University of North Carolina paid a Confederate group to take possession of a Confederate monument, a deal that stank like a garbage dump. They paid $2.6 million to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a shady low-rent outfit of good ol’ boys who existed only to promote racism, which made it even stankier. Now the SCV has been further exposed — they’re a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization which is prohibited from meddling in politics, and guess what they’ve been doing? Meddling in politics, of course.

For years, the pro-Confederate group that the UNC System dealt $2.6 million has been violating federal tax laws, operating a political action committee in violation of its tax-exempt status and facilitating political donations through illegal means, according to numerous individual first-hand accounts, a slew of internal communications provided to The Daily Tar Heel and multiple expert legal opinions.

The North Carolina Division Sons of Confederate Veterans Inc. struck a pair of backdoor deals last November with UNC System Board of Governors members. A predetermined lawsuit and settlement gave the group Silent Sam and $2.5 million in UNC System money for the Confederate monument’s “preservation and benefit.” A week previous, the system paid $74,999 to the SCV for an agreement to limit its display of Confederate symbolism on UNC System property.

When I say low-rent, I mean it. SCV has $100 membership dues, and their process is rather irregular. The dues are paid to an individual who cashes the checks and doles out payments with little in the way of documentation.

“We tend to have the cigar box in the gun safe approach,” Starnes wrote. “So the checks are made out to the Captain, ie, Bill Starnes, so they can be cashed.”

They’ve got enough members that the organization’s income gets up into the range of tens of thousands of dollars, and UNC just plopped a couple of million dollars into Bill Starnes’ lap. This is nuts. It represents considerable fiduciary irresponsibility on the part of UNC — why are they paying all this money out to a fringe group with little financial oversight? — and suggests that there’s an even deeper layer of corruption in the UNC system that hasn’t been fully exposed yet.

I can’t even imagine my university dropping a few mil on some radical group to perform a dubious “service” for us. Heads would roll. Our students would rage at the wasteful use of their tuition dollars.

When I was in high school, the Vietnam War was still going on, and remarkably, it was never discussed in any of my classes. I suspect that if we had, any conversation would have been strongly shaped by those authority figures, the teachers, and I had a good idea that most of them were middle-of-the-road, conservative leaning people who would have praised the American government — or worse. I knew the PE coach would constantly play the “Ballad of the Green Berets” and praise John Wayne as an ideal American. Fortunately, that meant I got most of my training in the ethics of war from Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Bob Dylan, Creedence, Pete Seeger, and CSNY.

Here we are now, 50 years later, and I’m afraid that the loudest voices expressing opinions about war are Fox News, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk, who are all, I’m afraid, jingoistic assholes. The counter-culture lies bleeding on the ground, wrecked by the profit motive, and if we rely on the populist expression of thoughtful sentiment from mass media outlets like YouTube, I guarantee that we are fucked. One of the failures of the atheist movement is that it ought to have been a solid platform for global humanist ethics, but do you think Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, or any of the major atheist organizations are going to condemn our current actions? They’re most likely debating whether they ought to express an opinion on these matters, or gearing up to exult over the deaths of Muslims.

At least Nathan Robinson is talking sense, giving clear lessons in how to avoid being swayed by the deluge of war propaganda we’re swimming in right now. Follow his lessons, and you’ll see all the lies you’re being told.

He even criticizes the approach our Democratic candidates take. Far from being the terrorist-appeasing saps that the Right would like to paint them in, they’ve swallowed a lot of the pro-war justifications as implicit in their premises.

We have to be clear and emphatic in our messaging, because so much effort is made to make what should be clear issues appear murky. If, for example, you gave a speech in 2002 opposing the Iraq War, but the first half was simply a discussion of what a bad and threatening person Saddam Hussein was, people might actually get the opposite of the impression you want them to get. Buttigieg and Warren, while they appear to question the president, have the effect of making his action seem reasonable. After all, they admit that he got rid of a threatening murderer! Sanders admits nothing of the kind: The only thing he says is that Trump has made the world worse. He puts the emphasis where it matters.

I do not fully like Sanders’ statement, because it still talks a bit more about what war means for our people, but it does mention destabilization and the total number of lives that can be lost. It is a far more morally clear and powerful antiwar statement. Buttigieg’s is exactly what you’d expect of a Consultant President and it should give us absolutely no confidence that he would be a powerful voice against a war, should one happen. Warren confirms that she is not an effective advocate for peace. In a time when there will be pressure for a violent conflict, we need to make sure that our statements are not watery and do not make needless concessions to the hawks’ propaganda.

We saw it happen with Vietnam and Iraq — we got this incessant messaging that the Other Side was Evil, making it impossible to support anything but total war unless you wanted to be painted as a traitor, and look what happened: we ended up in these futile, bloody wars that accomplished nothing other than to make defense contractors rich. Now it’s happening again. The stock market is happy, people are implicitly justifying assassination because the victim was Evil, and our president, echoed by the gullible media, is spewing nonsensical jingo nonstop.

It’s a good time to stop and ask ourselves how much of our lives are being wasted at war, and how little we’ve accomplished, and how much the USA is hurting the world.

Pay attention this time around, people.

Some folks are born made to wave the flag
They’re red, white and blue
And when the band plays “Hail To The Chief”
They point the cannon at you

He’s not even aware that he’s tweeting out promises of war crimes.

The UN passed a resolution in 2017 prohibiting this sort of thing, you know. As explained by UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova:

“The deliberate destruction of heritage is a war crime, it has become a tactic of war to tear societies over the long term, in a strategy of cultural cleansing. This is why defending cultural heritage is more than a cultural issue, it is a security imperative, inseparable from that of defending human lives,” Director-General Bokova told the Security Council, as she spoke in support of the resolution, with Executive Director of UNODC Youri Fedotov and Commander Fabrizio Parrulli of the Carabinieri Italiani.

“Weapons are not enough to defeat violent extremism. Building peace requires culture also; it requires education, prevention, and the transmission of heritage. This is the message of this historic resolution,” she added.

The resolution was prompted by a number of tragic acts of cultural vandalism, many of them by Islamic state fanatics. Now we’re planning to be just like them.

The resolution urges nations to increase efforts to preserve historic monuments and sites in conflict zones. The onset of the 21st century witnessed attacks against global heritage sites increase significantly, including the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and Timbuktu’s ancient shrines in Mali.

Previous efforts by the Council to safeguard cultural heritage focused on the illicit trafficking of looted cultural relics to fund terrorist activities in Iraq and Syria, where the “Islamic State” militant group destroyed UNESCO World Heritage sites, including Roman ruins at Palmyra.

However, Friday’s resolution called for further international cooperation in investigations and prosecutions of individuals and groups committing attacks against cultural heritage sites, monuments and relics.

The resolution affirmed that “directing unlawful attacks against sites and buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, or historic monuments may constitute, under certain circumstances and pursuant to international law, a war crime and that perpetrators of such attacks must be brought to justice.”

You may recall that religious fanatics in the US, particularly the likes of the Hobby Lobby fundamentalists, were actively looting cultural artifacts from Iraq…also a crime. Now Trump is threatening to bomb major cultural sites in Iran, confirming our status as a rogue state run by barbarians.

Do I need to point out the dishonor of using the Iranian hostages from forty years ago as a justification for destroying art and history, or the hypocrisy of telling Iran to not threaten us by threatening Iran? Very well, I do. Trump is a dishonorable hypocrite and a lying barbarian. He has to go. Soon.

Actually, you should look around the bar before you throw that first punch, to make sure someone has your back. Theoretically, that is — not that I’ve ever been one to leap into bar fights.

In totally unrelated news, Iran, China, and Russia are teaming up in a joint military exercise.

Iran has kicked off the first joint naval drill with Russia and China in the northern part of the Indian Ocean, Iranian state TV has reported.

The four-day exercise comes at a time of heightened tensions since the United States withdrew from a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in May last year.

“The message of this exercise is peace, friendship and lasting security through cooperation and unity … and its effect will be to show that Iran cannot be isolated,” Rear Admiral Gholamreza Tahani said on state television.

Well, our European friends have pledged their undying loyalty to us, I’m sure.

The US reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran after quitting the nuclear deal last year, prompting Tehran to hit back with countermeasures by dropping nuclear commitments.

Remaining parties to the badly weakened agreement include the UK, France and Germany, as well as China and Russia.

I can take on all of youse, c’mon. Just let me down a couple more shots first, ‘k?