As always, there's a lot you can say about the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. But one of the things you can say is this: After holding them prisoner for 11 months, Hamas decided last week to murder six of them in cold blood rather than take the chance they might be rescued.
Condemn Israel all you want. But either condemn Hamas too for this monstrous act or else forfeit your claim to be a decent human being.
Regular readers know that I've long been annoyed by the relentless use of the word chaotic to describe the Afghanistan withdrawal. Of course it was chaotic. It's like saying the D-Day landings were chaotic. There's no way anyone conducts an airlift of 100,000 people in a neat and orderly way from a city that's just been overthrown by the Taliban.
In any case, since it's back in the news it's worth reviewing how the Afghanistan withdrawal played out:
In early 2020 Donald Trump negotiated with the Taliban for a withdrawal date of May 1, 2021, and the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government.
Over the next year Trump pushed hard to reduce US troop levels. By the end of his term he had reduced the US presence to 2,500 troops.
When Joe Biden took office, he moved the withdrawal date out to September 11. Trump criticized the change. "We can and should get out earlier," he said.
In July Biden changed the withdrawal date to August 31. At this point, the Taliban was fighting but hadn't yet taken over a single province. The broad assumption was that when the US withdrawal eventually took place the Afghan government would still control the country. The US, naturally, was committed to protecting the government through the withdrawal.
That changed suddenly because the Afghan army collapsed faster than anyone expected. On August 15 the Taliban took over Kabul and the president of Afghanistan fled the country. With only two weeks to go, this made a large-scale evacuation imperative.
The withdrawal started chaotically, but within a few hours the Army restored order. Meanwhile, despite the Trump administration's longtime policy of delaying visa requests, which left a huge backlog of unprocessed applications, the State Department worked heroically to process visas for Afghans who wanted to leave the country.
In two weeks, the Army evacuated about 90% of Americans in Afghanistan and nearly 100,000 Afghan nationals. By any kind of historical standard, this was a superb performance under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
The entire operation had only one serious failure: the death of 13 American service members (and 170 Afghans) to an al-Qaeda suicide bomber at Abbey Gate. Multiple investigations by the Pentagon concluded that there wasn't really anything that could have stopped it.
Everyone processes grief differently, and I can't bring myself to reproach the families that blame Biden for the deaths of their children. But the fact remains that Biden wasn't at fault; the Army wasn't at fault; and deaths in the line of duty are a natural occurrence in war.
The withdrawal wasn't handled perfectly, but there weren't any huge mistakes. Nor was it really possible not to withdraw given the situation Biden inherited: the Taliban's takeover was inevitable as soon as Trump signed the withdrawal agreement with them. It might well have been inevitable even without that. After 20 years it was as clear as it could be that there was simply no more the US could do, and Biden showed a lot of political courage in facing up to that.
In the end, despite everything, the evacuation and airlift were considerable successes—and it's remarkable that the only serious casualties came from a single al-Qaeda suicide bomber. The blame for that rests squarely on al-Qaeda and no one else.
For chrissake. Will anyone ever have the guts to tell Trump that BleachBit is just an ordinary piece of open source disk management software that was used by Platte River Networks, Hillary's email hosting company?
I know it doesn't matter anymore. But how is it possible for Trump to be ignorant of this for eight years?
In case you're curious, real GDP per capita for the US increased at an annual rate of 0.84% during Donald Trump's four years in office. It has increased in California at an annual rate of 2.8% during the five years Gavin Newsom has been governor.
This is by no means exhaustive. It's just a short collection of some of the extremely presidential things Donald Trump has said recently. Needless to say, none of it is even remotely true.
"The transgender thing is an incredible thing. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation."
"Hard to believe, they have some states passing legislation where you can execute the baby after birth. It’s crazy."
"Look at Kamala ... every place she has touched has turned to shit!"
"Over the past 4 years, Kamala and Crooked Joe Biden have presided over an economic reign of terror, committing one economic atrocity after another."
"There will be no future under Comrade Kamala Harris, because she will take us into a Nuclear World War III!"
"The USA is not ready for a Communist President."
"MASSIVE SCANDAL! The Harris-Biden Administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics to hide the true extent of the Economic Ruin they have inflicted upon America."
Barack Obama should be hauled in front of a military tribunal:
Things Trump has tried to sell recently:
Gold sneakers: "People were going crazy for these sneakers. You probably were, too. Everybody was. Every friend I have had called me for a pair of sneakers."
NFTs: "Back by popular demand, my TRUMP DIGITAL TRADING CARDS, Series 4: The America First Collection, is available RIGHT NOW, and I think you’ll love it!"
Picture book: "My new Book, SAVE AMERICA, is out next week, and is already a Best Seller! I hand-selected each photo, and wrote the captions - It is a MUST HAVE for every America First Patriot."
Bible: "I'm proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible... You all should get a copy of 'God Bless the USA Bible' now."
Bitcoin sneakers: "Just spoke at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee on Saturday. It was GREAT! Get your Bitcoin Sneakers now."
The New York Times has an astonishing story today about the amount of money college football players are paid these days in NIL (name image and likeness) fees. Here are averages for the Power 4 conferences:
The SEC now pays its players three times more than any other conference. SEC quarterbacks are paid an average of $1 million per year.
It's unclear how any kind of competitive balance can be maintained with differences this big. There's still some attraction for kids to stay close to home and play for teams they grew up watching, but even that's been reduced by the transfer portal. Top players may still stay close to home as freshman commits, but by the time they're juniors and making serious contributions, the combination of the portal and big money will be too much to resist.
How does the rest of college football compete when the SEC can outbid them 3:1? Beats me.
Why have we mostly given up on ornamentation in architecture? Ross Douthat correctly says today (based on an essay by Samuel Hughes) that it's not because ornamentation got too expensive. Just the opposite: we can mass produce high-quality ornamentation today far more cheaply than any previous era—both in absolute and relative terms.
From my perspective, the decline of beauty, grace and ornament in public architecture reflects a collapse of humanist confidence and religious faith, an abandonment of the assumption that human artifice is tapping into some deeper cosmic order, a fatal surrender to bad ideas about aesthetics and human life itself.
This is sort of typical of Douthat, but even putting my personal perspectives aside I think it's plainly misguided. To see why, let's dive down a little bit into what kinds of buildings we're talking about.
Houses. The typical house of yesteryear is clearly no more beautiful than even the dreariest tract house of today.
Mansions. That is, houses of the rich. Some of these were quite beautiful in prior times. But the same is true today. Fallingwater is unornamented but Instagrammable in a whole different way. Take a helicopter tour of the Malibu coast and you'll see hundreds of stunning mansions in all kinds of architectural styles.
The Sandcastle House and the Wave House on the Malibu coast.
Cathedrals. This is a matter of taste, to be sure, but modern cathedrals are often quite spectacular and ancient ones are sometimes nothing much.
Retail shops. These have never been anything special.
Factories. Again, using this in the broadest sense (everything from granaries to steel mills), these have never been anything more than functional boxes.
Apartment houses: As far as I know, these have always been ordinary rectangular boxes subdivided into rooms, usually built as cheaply as possible in order to maximize rental income.
So far, I don't see a case for much difference at all between prior eras and today. But there are two more categories:
Civic buildings. This is a tricky one. Were city halls in the past uniformly beautiful? Hardly. Some were, while others were fairly ordinary. The same is true of modern city halls. Ditto for concert halls, museums, arenas, and schools. Government buildings are probably uglier on average today. Overall, I might score this one in favor of previous eras, but it's a close call.
The Crescent Tower in Qatar.
Large commercial buildings. Now we're cooking. When people talk about ugly buildings, this is what they almost always mean: skyscrapers. The Chrysler building is beautiful while the World Trade Center is mundane. But keep in mind that skyscrapers have been around for little more than a century, so we're only comparing the early 20th century and the postwar 20th century.
It's true that modern skyscrapers are often plain glass and steel towers, but this is mostly for reasons of cost and modern taste, not because of a fatal surrender to bad ideas about aesthetics and human life itself. Those prewar buildings tended toward art deco and rococo, but it wasn't because they were built in the Middle Ages when large buildings were monuments to God. It's because that was the style of the time.
Long story short, complaints about modern architecture almost always revolve around big skyscrapers, and these are commercial buildings, not pieces of art.
There's also a recency bias at work here. We tend to remember only the old buildings that were spectacular and therefore are still around. We've forgotten the thousands and thousands of mediocre ones. The Pantheon in Rome, which started off Douthat's essay, is a case study in this. Most old Roman buildings didn't survive to the present day, but the Pantheon did because it was lucky enough to be transformed into a Christian church before looters got to it. What's more, it's not even that beautiful. It's just a big dome and a fairly pedestrian portico. It's impressive, and we tend not to build very many big domes these days outside of football stadiums, but especially viewed from the outside it's pretty ordinary.
The Sphere in Las Vegas. It's a very different kind of dome than the Pantheon, but is it really any less beautiful or impressive?
Long story short, I'm skeptical that architecture in general is any less beautiful than it ever was. Sure, downtown Peoria is probably pretty humdrum, though I'll bet downtown Feronia was too. And you'll never convince me that brutalist architecture is anything but a huge mistake. But if we could compare the entire corpus of ancient and Renaissance buildings with the entire corpus of modern buildings, I'm not sure I'd put my money on the old guys.
Democrat authoritarians! I knew it was clickbait, but I clicked anyway. To Hemingway's credit her article was full of links, so I started clicking to find out what it was based on. Here's what I discovered.
Last year J.D. Vance bought a house in the liberal enclave of Del Ray, a neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia. According to Hemingway, this led to a campaign of hate and authoritarian tactics designed to intimidate Vance and his children. The story is full of filler, but when you plow through it this campaign turns out to have consisted of three things:
Several residents have posted mildly disparaging comments about Vance on Twitter.
Last week, when the Secret Service asked to shut down a tiny park next to Vance's house, residents were sad. A local newspaper described what they did about it: .
On Saturday afternoon, neighbors gathered for an impromptu celebratory wake for the park. Decorations left over from a Bachelorette party were hung from trees, neighbors brought hot dogs and donuts to share, and the park was filled with Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan music. .
....Several attendees wore shirts or buttons supporting Vice President Kamala Harris and the yards near Vance’s home featured multiple signs supporting Harris including one labeled “Cat People for Harris Walz” — a reference to Vance’s comments about Democrats being childless cat ladies. .
....“It’s no surprise that Del Ray would come out in the most optimistic and celebratory way,” said Sandy Marks, a co-host of local politics podcast Liberally Social and chair of the Alexandria Democratic Committee. “It’s sad to lose the park, but it’s good to keep it safe for JD Vance’s kids. We look forward to getting the park back.”
Like me, you are welcome to read the story, click the links, and decide for yourself if I'm describing things fairly. I am. When you take out both the incendiary language—the knitted signs are likened to the KKK's burning crosses—and the irrelevant filler—in 2017 a guy from Illinois shot a bunch of Republicans at a baseball practice held in Del Ray—there's nothing left. In fact, the folks in Del Ray seem remarkably mild and easygoing about having Vance as a neighbor.
But that's the Federalist for you. I wonder how long it will take Hemingway's interpretation to enter the canon of Republican grievance?
Trump claimed that he didn’t know “anything about” the use of the images on his campaign social media. “We have a lot of people, we have TikTok people,” he said. “You know, we’re leading the internet.”
Pressed on it again, Trump suggested the parents of the deceased service members he had accompanied may have been responsible for distributing the videos and photos. “I don’t know what the rules and regulations are. I don’t know who did it,” Trump said. “It could have been them — it could have been the parents.”
No, it couldn't have been. It was his own campaign that did it. But now he's trying to blame it on grieving families.
I see that Donald Trump has finally decided how he's going to vote on an initiative that would repeal Florida's six week abortion ban. He doesn't like six weeks, but he's voting No anyway. Why? Because Democrats in other states are crazy.
OK, sure, whatever. In reality, the Florida initiative would allow abortion until viability, which is roughly around 24 weeks. So Trump, who prefers 15 weeks, had to decide between 24 weeks and 6 weeks. I have to admit, that's a knife edge for the poor guy.
In any case, Trump must have felt that he had finally pushed his anti-abortion fans too hard and needed to throw them a bone. This was it.
I know it doesn't matter anymore. But how is it possible for Trump to be ignorant of this for eight years?
In case you're curious, real GDP per capita for the US increased at an annual rate of 0.84% during Donald Trump's four years in office. It has increased in California at an annual rate of 2.8% during the five years Gavin Newsom has been governor.
Things Trump has tried to sell recently:
The SEC now pays its players three times more than any other conference. SEC quarterbacks are paid an average of $1 million per year.
Several residents have posted mildly disparaging comments about Vance on Twitter.
