Ranking of polls

If anyone is interested, r/538 published a ranking of polls at this link.

Updates on Iran's planned attack against Israel

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post, "Russia reportedly supplying Iran with weapons to retaliate against Israel." The situation is extremely volatile, and could hardly be one with greater potential consequences for the world.  Nevertheless,  it is pretty much absent from the front pages of US media outlets. Here are some of the more concerning developments, with links to more detailed news sources for those who are interested in following this. The following was originally posted as a comment under the related OP yesterday. But it is easy to miss there, and these are truly important developments. 

 

 UPDATES: 

 >>PAKISTAN (A NUCLEAR STATE) ANNOUNCED PLANS TO SUPPORT IRAN WITH SHAHEEN 3 BALLISTIC MISSILES IF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN IRAN AND ISRAEL ESCALATES (see: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-813485 and on missile capacities: https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/shaheen-3/  ) 

Biden wrote Pakistan to affirm Washington's "enduring partnership" with the country in March of this year, after decades of up and down relations with the state. https://pk.usembassy.gov/letter-from-president-joseph-r-biden-to-prime-minister-shehbaz-sharif/ 

 Pakistan's announcement of military support for Iran followed an emergency OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) meeting in Jedah, Saudi Arabia. The OIC is an intergovernmental organization of 57 mostly Muslim majority states. The emergency meeting held discussions on "the crimes of the Israeli occupation" and "the assassination of Haniyeh," said the Saudi OIC representative, according to the Jerusalem Post .   

 

>>EGYPT (which helped Israel and the US to take out Iranian missiles in April) told Israel and the US it will not help them repel missiles from Iran or projectiles from Yemen this time round. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/egypt-says-it-will-not-assist-israel-in-repelling-iranian-attack-report/  

 

>>JORDAN (a close US ally that helped Israel/US in April) sent it's top diplomat, Ayman Safadi, to Iran, the first such visit in decades. He condemned Israel's killing of Haniyeh in Tehran as "an escalatory step" and "violation of international law and Iranian sovereignty."This is the first diplomatic visit from Jordan to Iran in over 2 decades, according to the Washington Post.   

>>Jordan subsequently announced that unlike April, IT WILL NOT HELP ISRAEL BY INTERCEPTING MISSILES, NOR WILL IT ALLOW ANY OF THE PARTIES (ISRAEL, US OR IRAN) TO USE ITS AIRSPACE FOR STRIKES. It is effectively neutral, and wants no part of the conflict, though it has condemned Israel's assassination in Tehran in an unprecedented way diplomatically. http://www.uniindia.com/news/world/security-jordan-airspace/3256384.html#google_vignette and on diplomatic trip to Iran: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/04/iran-jordan-israel-hezbollah-hamas-us-tensions/7a15fe58-5249-11ef-9a60-5b6e8b4da7c0_story.htm

Christians who resist Christian nationalism; About those nasty Unhumans

The WaPo writes about some Christians who are uneasy about Christian nationalism (CN):

A new movement aims to remake 

evangelicals’ relationship to politics

Fifty years after the rise of the religious right, some evangelicals want to rebrand and create a public presence that adheres to faith, not a party or person

Over the past decade, Clint Leavitt saw different models of how to mix his evangelical faith and politics, none of them — to his mind — good. His family’s dinner table was consumed with debate over whether Barack Obama was the Antichrist. [Seriously??] Even as his Phoenix church avoided political issues, he saw Christians around the country turn Donald Trump into a religious idol.

A drive to create a Christian political presence he calls “shaped by Jesus, not a partisan political ideology” led Leavitt, now 29, to seminary and then to pastoring a church filled with congregants who vote differently from one another but all share his goal. The people at Midtown Presbyterian Church in Phoenix say their political existence has been reduced to which party or candidate Christians must choose. They are “exhausted,” they tell him. Or “tired.”

So Leavitt, preparing for a bruising 2024 election season, joined a new national group of theologically conservative pastors who talk weekly about how to reject polarization and religious nationalism and to defend democracy. .... Called “The After Party,” the curriculum, which has been used by some 75,000 people since it was released in April, says Christians should focus less on partisanship and more on how to relate to others so that they “better reflect Jesus … in 2024 and beyond.”

The Midtown church’s “After Party” sessions have been made more intense recently by the attempted assassination of Trump and the response to it by many of his Christian supporters: that God intervened to protect the former president. But the politically diverse group was able to agree that, in their view, the God of the Bible doesn’t work that way — and to keep their focus.

“We can say current events will not stir disunity in our circles and we are going to focus on all the things Jesus talks about — the poor, marginalized, caring for people who have been hurt. How do we care for everyone, even in this [assassination attempt] scenario? That has been the rallying cry of our time together,” said Daniel Barth, a pastoral resident at Midtown.

Now that is the kind of Christianity I was brought up to believe was the real thing. I still believe that. It is tolerant, empathetic, non-threatening, pro-democracy and unifying, the opposite of the CN wealth and power political movement on all 5 traits.**

One other point: The extreme radicalism and ruthless aggressiveness of CN should never be underestimated. Obama was and still is not the Antichrist, and God did not intervene to protect DJT from the assassin. That exemplifies the reality and reasoning that animates the CN movement, including its rank and file.

** Note: CN is not a religious movement. It is a radical right political wealth and power movement of by and for radical elites.

Is Christian nationalism Christian?

No, Christian nationalism is a political ideology and a form of nationalism, not a religion or a form of Christianity. It directly contradicts the Gospel in multiple ways, and is therefore considered by many Christian leaders to be a heresy. While Jesus taught love, peace, and truth, Christian nationalism leads to hatred, political violence, and QAnon misinformation. While Jesus resisted the devil's temptations of authority in the wilderness, Christian nationalism seeks to seize power for its followers at all costs. And while Christianity is a 2,000-year-old global tradition that transcends all borders, Christian nationalism seeks to merge faith with a single, 247-year-old, pluralistic nation. .... However, as a political ideology, Christian nationalism is a spectrum of beliefs. Some individuals hold more of these beliefs -- or feel them more intensely -- than others.

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A NYT opinion (not paywalled) by Michelle Goldberg comments about a book written by a hate-filled, radical right authoritarian crackpot and commended in writing by JD Vance: 

JD Vance Just Blurbed a Book Arguing 

That Progressives Are Subhuman

In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.  

The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”  

Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.

This kind of hate, filth, lies, slanders and fake/crackpot history is now central to the radicalized, authoritarian Republican Party and its radical authoritarian brand of wealth-and-power focused politics. JD Vance recommends a book that openly argues that (i) Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans (liberals?), and (ii) “great men of means”, i.e., rich and powerful elites, are required to crush this scourge of unhumans. 

How this cannot be seen as a major, existential threat to American democracy and social pluralism is, or should be, shocking. 

Nonetheless, tens of millions of average Americans openly support it.[1] Apparently, they see their salvation in authoritarianism. A few cynical authoritarian, rich and powerful elites with their unholy trinity of crackpot radical ideologies** are fomenting hate, false beliefs and directly attacking democracy as best they can. Their goal is more wealth and power for their elites at the expense of us and our environment.

** Corrupt autocracy with DJT as lead corrupt dictator, corrupt plutocracy with no taxes, regulations or social accountability, and corrupt, bigoted (intolerant) Christian nationalist theocracy.

Q1: One a scale of 1 (not a significant threat) to 5 (moderate threat but still manageable) to 9 (imminent lethal threat on the verge of victory, maybe already killed democracy), how much of a threat does America's authoritarian radical right unholy trinity of ideologies pose to pluralistic, secular democracy grounded in the rule of law and civil liberties?

(I'm at 7 or 8, but the Nov. elections might clarify the situation somewhat)

How important is the threat, assuming there is one?

Q2: Does the new book advocate for fascism as Goldberg asserts, or is it merely just rough and tumble, old-fashioned pro-democracy conservatism? 

Footnote:

1. From an interesting book about fascism:

Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia Italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.

A further problem with conventional images of fascism is that they focus on moments of high drama in the fascist itinerary—the March on Rome, the Reichstag fire, Kristallnacht—and omit the solid texture of everyday experience and the complicity of ordinary people in the establishment and functioning of fascist regimes. Fascist movements could never grow without the help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people. Fascists could never attain power without the acquiescence or even active assent of the traditional elites—heads of state, party leaders, high government officials—many of whom felt a fastidious distaste for the crudities of fascist militants. The excesses of fascism in power also required wide complicity among members of the establishment: magistrates, police officials, army officers, businessmen. To understand fully how fascist regimes worked, we must dig down to the level of ordinary people and examine the banal choices they made in their daily routines. Making such choices meant accepting an apparent lesser evil or averting the eyes from some excesses that seemed not too damaging in the short term, even acceptable piecemeal, but which cumulatively added up to monstrous end results. -- Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004

Hm, does any of that sound familiar?  Hmm . . . . . 🤨

Russia reportedly supplying Iran with weapons to retaliate against Israel

How does the US respond if Russia arms Iran to attack Israel? I've worried that it might come to this, given Russia's much improved relations with Iran which has supplied them with drones for their fight against Ukraine/NATO in that proxy war. I hope the 2 conflicts (Ukraine and Israel-Palestine) are not becoming interrelated in some unpredictable way by virtue of the  Iran factor. I don't know where this is going, but it's bad news. Here's the latest.

Times of Israel today writes:

Iranian officials say Russia has begun delivering advanced air defense and radar equipment to Iran after Tehran asked the Kremlin for the arms, the New York Times reported Monday.

While local Iranian media reported that Tehran had requested the equipment, a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and another official confirmed to the Times that not only had the request been made, but that deliveries had started.

The development came with the Middle East on edge at the expectation of a direct Iranian attack on Israel as revenge for Israel’s alleged assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the country must be ready to quickly go on the offensive in the event of an Iranian assault. The Times report did not say what equipment Iran had requested from Russia or what had been delivered. Iran already has some Russian-made S-300 air defense systems, though Moscow now has the more advanced S-400 system.

In April, Iran carried out an unprecedented direct attack on Israel it said was revenge for the killing of a senior army commander in a Syria strike it blamed on Israel. The wave of some 300 missiles and drones was almost entirely intercepted by Israeli air defense systems in cooperation with the US [In fact, without the US successfully intercepting more than half of the incoming drones and missiles, the Israelis would surely have suffered a devastating blow--ed.] and a roster of allies and Arab countries in the region. It caused only minor damage, though a young Bedouin girl was seriously hurt by falling shrapnel.

At the time, Israel apparently responded by striking an S-300 system near a nuclear site in Iran, though it did not confirm the matter.

 

The Times report came as Iranian state media said the country’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian told a visiting senior ally of Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin that Tehran is determined to expand relations with its “strategic partner Russia.”

“Russia is among the countries that have stood by the Iranian nation during difficult times,” Pezeshkian told Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s security council, Iranian state media report.

In further comments reported during the meeting with Shoigu, Pezeshkian said Israel’s “criminal actions” in Gaza and the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran last week “are clear examples of the violation of all international laws and regulations.”

Tehran has for years been arming and training proxy groups around the Middle East including Hezbollah, Hamas and Yemen’s Houthis to attack Israel and others.

War erupted on October 7 when Palestinian terror group Hamas led a devastating cross-border attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, during which terrorists abducted 251 people to the Gaza Strip. Israel responded with a military offensive to destroy Hamas in Gaza and free the hostages.

Russia, which has largely backed Hamas and allied terror groups since the October 7 massacres [Note: there is no record of Russian military support of Hamas, so this is probably a reference to Russian state media coverage which is, according to NYT, supportive of Hamas as described in this article-ed.] , has condemned the killing of Haniyeh and called on all parties to refrain from steps that could tip the Middle East into a wider regional war.

 See also NYT article here.

About making babies; The fight for piping plover beach access

For years 'n years, some people argued that there are not enough babies being made. One argument is that economic growth is predicated on population growth. Another is that Malthusian predictions of overpopulation and collapse have always been wrong, e.g., because science saves our bacon and it will continue to do so. 

For me, those arguments never made much sense to me. In my early years, overpopulation seemed to be bad enough despite advances in agricultural science keeping most people mostly fed most of the time. My logic was pretty simple: (i) The more people there are, the more pressure and damage there is to the environment, (ii) overpopulation generally puts downward pressure on quality of life and the value of all life including human, and (iii) sooner or later science, coupled with intractable wealth inequality, would not be able to keep up. These days, the logic includes (iv) overpopulation seems to put added pressure on democracies, nudging them to move toward authoritarianism. (My limited searching for the effects of high population on democracy vs authoritarianism does not turn up much data to support or refute opinion iv)

A NYT article discusses the political weaponization of the alleged lack of babies "crisis" (not paywalled):

Why Are So Many Americans Choosing to Not Have Children?

For years, some conservatives have framed the declining fertility rate of the United States as an example of eroding family values, a moral catastrophe in slow motion.

JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, recently came under fire for saying in 2021 that the nation was run by “childless cat ladies” who “hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous D.C. and New York status games.”

Last year, Ashley St. Clair, a Fox News commentator, described childless Americans this way: “They just want to pursue pleasure and drinking all night and going to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure in replace of fulfillment and having a family.”

Researchers who study trends in reproductive health see a more nuanced picture. The decision to forgo having children is most likely not a sign that Americans are becoming more hedonistic, they say. For one thing, fertility rates are declining throughout the developed world.

Rather, it indicates that larger societal factors — such as rising child care costs, increasingly expensive housing and slipping optimism about the future — have made it feel more untenable to raise children in the United States.  

Right now, there are plenty of reasons young Americans might be pessimistic, [academic family demographer Karen Guzzo] said, including climate change, frequent gun violence and the recent pandemic [also cited in the article, high student debt, high housing cost and high child care cost].

Why is it that America's political right is always so damned quick to draw negative moral inferences about things they do not like about how other people live their private lives? It arguably is mostly because America's political right has become radical right and authoritarian, probably exacerbated by overpopulation and the irrationality that radical authoritarian dark free speech foments. From what I can tell, most American radical right authoritarians think they have every right to dictate nearly every aspect of everyone's lives according to their infallible moral values. Their values trump our values because they do not compromise or operate in good will or good faith. 

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A NYT article discusses the constant pressure on the environment caused at least in part by too many people:

These Birds Have Their Own Beach. 

Their Human Neighbors Want In.

Every summer, a neighborhood in Queens loses its beach to piping plovers, an endangered shorebird. Some residents want it back

On a mile-long stretch of the boardwalk in Edgemere, a neighborhood in the Rockaways that was a thriving resort destination a century ago, you can still see open skies, dunes and the ocean.

But for most of the summer, the beach here is closed.

Since 1996, this swath of sand and surf has been reserved for much of the spring and summer for nesting coastal piping plovers, which are endangered in New York and protected federally by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Along the Eastern Seaboard, from barrier islands to private and public beaches on the mainland, efforts are being made to provide safe habitats for them.

Some residents of Edgemere say the beach restrictions are unfair and further isolating for an area with a history of neglect that already lacks basics like a grocery store, a playground and reliable drainage on the often-flooded streets. Some are now asking if the beach can be shared during peak season with the surrounding community and leveraged for a revival of the neighborhood.

The grayish, brown and white birds, about seven inches in length, are at risk of extinction — about 6,000 currently live along the Atlantic Coast — because of human development, disturbances like vandalism and natural predators on the shoreline. (Plover species native to the Great Lakes and the northern Great Plains are also federally protected.)

The plover beach in Edgemere has evolved into a model of habitat preservation in an urban setting, drawing nature lovers from across New York. It is the only city-owned beach closed to the public and dedicated to plovers and other threatened shorebirds during their nesting season from April through August.

Qs: Can the beach can be shared during peak season with the surrounding community and leveraged for a revival of the neighborhood? How are the inevitable human vandals going to be dealt with? Or, should the plover just go extinct because humans just gotta be human and we need lots more of 'em?

There's about 6,000 of them left

About the blatant authoritarianism of JD Vance and America's radical right

An NYT analysis article comments (not paywalled) about power and what America's radical right thinks about the political left:

How JD Vance Thinks About Power

Mr. Vance has been blunt about wanting to break norms and test constitutional limits to execute his ideas: “We have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there”

In September 2021, JD Vance offered two predictions about former President Donald J. Trump and one piece of advice.

Mr. Trump would run again in 2024, Mr. Vance said. He would win.

And when he did, Mr. Vance counseled, he needed the right people around him this time.

“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Mr. Vance said on a podcast. “Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did,” Mr. Vance said, citing a (possibly apocryphal) quotation long attributed to America’s seventh president, “and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

He has urged Republicans to “seize the endowments” of left-leaning universities, punishing nominal ideological foes through dramatic changes to the tax code, and warmly quotes Richard Nixon’s observation about higher education: “The professors are the enemy.”

He has suggested that parents should receive extra votes in elections — one for each child in their care — to dilute the electoral power of the left.

“We’re still terrified of wielding power,” Mr. Vance complained of his party last year.

Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist and an ally of Mr. Vance’s who helped catalyze campaigns on the right against critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, said the move from a traditionalist like Mr. Pence to Mr. Vance exemplified “how the Republican Party is going to think about power moving forward.”

People whom Mr. Vance has cited to explain his worldview or detail who helped shape his thinking include Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who has suggested that conservatives must harness the power of the state to counter “liberal totalitarianism”; Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist for whom Mr. Vance worked; and Curtis Yarvin, a prominent voice on the New Right who has argued that American democracy has devolved to the point that the country needs a monarchical leader.  

He has said that Alex Jones, the Infowars conspiracy theorist, is a more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow — in part to get a rise out of Democrats, he has allowed, but also because he recognized key truths in Mr. Jones’s animating arguments, according to 2021 remarks from Mr. Vance reported by ProPublica: “that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country,” Mr. Vance said, “that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts, too.”

The article is long and detailed. It makes clear that Vance and America's authoritarian radical right wealth and power movement sees the situation as fighting against “liberal totalitarianism”, “sex perverts”, “professors” and a country in need of a dictator in the form of a “monarchical leader” like DJT. What is truly terrifying here is Vance's deranged, incoherent assertion that radical right authoritarians are “terrified of wielding power.” That is beyond insane. Their lust for unrestrained power (and wealth) cannot be clearer. Their contempt for the Constitution and rule of law are just as clear.

The cruelty, viciousness, mendacity, moral rot and intolerance of the Republican authoritarian wealth and power movement is undeniable. All of it is now explicit.

Yabbut, waddabout Hillary,

Hunter's laptop, Joe's crimes . . . .