What Happened Today: July 18, 2022
Secret Service agent sent home after assault on Israeli woman; shooting survivor squares off against Minneapolis protestors; Brief Interviews with Dangerous Amateurs
The Big Story
Two days before President Biden arrived in Tel Aviv last week, a U.S. Secret Service agent already in Israel assaulted a local woman, Tamar Ben-Chaim, before he was detained by police and sent back to the United States. Israeli media reported that Ben-Chaim had made a remark about the agent’s “rowdy behaviour,” and the agent then “came at me with his fist,” she said, before police arrived to the scene. “He hit me on the chest, held me tight and gave me a slap, tearing out my earring and headset and throwing it all on the ground.”
The Secret Service did not respond to The Scroll’s requests for comment. But an unnamed agency spokesperson did confirm last week to Fox News that an “employee working in Israel was allegedly involved in a physical encounter” and that pending further investigation, the employee lost access to the agency’s “systems and facilities.” It was only days later that the “physical encounter” was revealed to be an alleged drunken assault on a woman. Ben-Chaim is the great-granddaughter of the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the former chief Sephardi rabbi of Israel and founder of the influential ultra-orthodox political party Shas. The incident last week was just the latest episode in what has been a decade now of regularly occurring scandals and sinking morale across the Secret Service. The last episode occurred in May, when two Secret Service agents working on President Biden’s trip were sent home after one of them was accused of drunkenly assaulting a cab driver in South Korea. Despite the no-fail mission mandate to protect current and former presidents as well as other politicians and their families, the agency is perennially underfunded and understaffed, with veteran employees regularly departing for better-paying jobs in the private sector. A recent non-partisan review of the agency found that “workforce’s morale and level of engagement plummeted.”
Read More: https://news.yahoo.com/secret-member-allegedly-involved-apos-193431895.html
In the Back Pages: Brief Interviews with Dangerous Amateurs
The Rest
→ On Saturday, a group of protestors confronted Arabella Foss-Yarbrough, the mother of two young children who had called the police on Tekle Sundberg, who had been her neighbor, after he fired several rounds of bullets through her apartment door while she prepared a family dinner. Police had evacuated the apartment complex and endured rounds of fire from Sundberg during a six-hour standoff before two snipers shot and killed him. Demonstrators had gathered with Sundberg’s adoptive parents to say the police should not have shot back but rather attempted to de-escalate what was “a manic breakdown,” one demonstrator said. Trahern Crews, an organizer with Black Lives Matter, used a bullhorn to lead the crowd, saying, “We’re here to respect life [and] demand justice.” With her apartment now a crime scene, Foss-Yarbrough squared off with the protestors, shouting that they shouldn’t be here so that “my kids have to see you celebrate the man who tried to kill them.” Sundberg’s parents expressed sympathy that Foss-Yarbrough’s children will be affected by the attempted murder of them and their mother “for the rest of their life,” but other demonstrators thought Foss-Yarbrough’s focus on her children’s safety detracted from the protest’s message about police brutality, saying this was “not the time nor the place for her outburst,” according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
→ Chinese authorities are ramping up their investigation into one of the largest data heists in history, after the private data of nearly 1 billion Chinese citizens was stolen from a police database in June. The data, which was stored online and not password-protected for a full year, was easily scraped by hackers and then sold for $200,000. Chinese authorities determined that the data had been inappropriately stored by the cloud-computing division of Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company, and have now brought Alibaba’s senior executives in for questioning. Beyond their failure to password-protect this enormous trove of personal data, analysts also believe that Alibaba’s cloud-computing software had outdated and inadequate security features.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“Making TikTok by playing loud music creates a nuisance for pilgrims from all over the world who come to the birthplace of Gautama Buddha. We have banned TikTok-making in and around the sacred garden, where the main temples are located.”
Sanuraj Shakya, a spokesperson for the Lumbini Development Trust, which manages shrines in Nepal that have been overrun by TikTok influencers who come to the country’s holy sites to dance against these ancient backdrops. Nepal has seen a huge surge of TikTok-ers in recent years, with the number of TikTok users in the country rising from 3% of the country’s internet users in 2020 to 55% in 2022. It is not just spiritual sites that are struggling with the country’s passionate TikTok-ers; some Nepalese farmers have reported having their crops trampled and ruined by roving gangs of youngsters filming dance videos.
→ “Fish,” an art piece that’s one of dozens about death and mourning at a new exhibit at the Jeonnam Museum of Art in South Korea, has been flushed of much of its substance after animal rights activists complained that the 15 goldfish kept captive in intravenous bags hanging from the ceiling were being abused. As Yu Buk, the artist of the piece, explained, the lack of food provided to the gold fish was the point of the piece, which shouldn’t have been a surprise to the museum, as Buk previous “work consists of the death of bugs” and, by his own admission, “the slow deaths of the goldfish were meant to be a part of my piece.” After the museum removed the fish from the bags (five had already died), the exhibit “lost its meaning as a work of art,” Buk said.
→ Healthcare professionals in Texas are not providing medical care to women with ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening complications out of fear of running afoul of the state’s restrictive abortion laws, according to a letter sent by the Texas Medical Association. The letter cited several examples of patients being denied crucial care, including a case in which hospital administrators told doctors not to treat an ectopic pregnancy—which occurs when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, rendering the pregnancy unviable—until the egg ruptured. “Delayed or prevented care in this scenario creates a substantial risk for the patient’s future reproductive ability and poses serious risk to the patient’s immediate physical well-being,” the letter said. Texas currently outlaws all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, but its policy will soon be changing to outlaw abortion altogether. Last week, the Biden administration issued guidelines that hospitals “must” provide abortions if the mother’s life is imperiled; Texas sued the administration over that law shortly thereafter.
→ Map of the Day
A brutal heat wave is drifting across Europe, driving temperatures to record-setting and life-threatening highs in France and the United Kingdom and causing wildfires all across the continent. The map above indicates the hundreds of wildfires, some of which are forcing the evacuation of thousands of people, that are currently burning in the region. The heat wave is caused by hot air being funneling up from North Africa and is likely to send temperatures to 104 degrees in England, breaking the previous heat record of 101, set in 2019. Heat waves of this kind are predicted to become more common as global warming continues to raise global surface temperatures.
→ With housing costs in tech hubs like San Francisco and New York City hitting historic highs, smaller cities across the United States are launching programs to lure tech workers to relocate and work remotely, incentivizing these high-paid employees with promises of cash gifts and subsidized services like child care and work spaces. Small municipalities such as Greensburg, Indiana (population 12,193), see this as a way of bringing in high-wage workers who might otherwise overlook a city that’s top attraction, per Tripadvisor, is the tree growing from the roof of its courthouse. For many workers, however, these smaller cities are exactly what they’re looking for. “I’ve felt so loved and known here in ways I never have before,” one tech worker who was lured from San Francisco to Tulsa told The Wall Street Journal. With 71 cities nationwide offering these kinds of programs, however, there is growing concern that the bidding wars that enabled powerful tech companies like Amazon and Google to secure enormous tax benefits by allowing states to compete against one another for their corporate headquarters are now creating remote-workplace wars, as poor cities compete for high-paid tech workers by offering free resources to these well-off prospective residents that they don’t provide to their long-time residents of lesser means.
→ Critics of Benjamin Netanyahu might have hoped to see his face out of politics, but they’re now seeing it emblazoned upon gold medallions. At an event in Israel on Sunday night where many prominent members of Netanyahu’s Likud Party were gathered, large gold necklaces featuring images of Netanyahu alongside the Jewish star were passed around. “This is a necklace of loyalty,” explained one party member to another as she draped the gold chain around his neck. While some in the media and on the left were quick to note the biblical admonition against idol worship, many of Netanyahu’s supporters were eager to get one of these necklaces for themselves. Raz Pereg, the necklace’s creator, told Ynet that he can’t keep up with the orders. With Israel set to vote this fall for the fifth time in four years, Netanyahu and Likud are currently polling at the head of the pack, but not by enough of a margin to form a governing coalition, suggesting more political paralysis in Israel in the months to come.
→ TWEET OF THE DAY:
That’s Philadelphia Sixers big man and five-time NBA all star Joel Embiid getting down with a most respectable hora at a Napa California wedding over the weekend. Much credit to the wedding guests, who also managed to get Embiid (weight: 280 pounds), along with a woman sitting on his lap, up onto a chair for a few rounds during the celebratory dance.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Brief Interviews with Dangerous Amateurs
Last Monday, The Scroll published an essay titled “The War in Ukraine Is Not Taking Place” in which an anonymous Twitter user who goes by the name Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost (CLAG) argued that a “global media spectacle has overtaken reality.” To learn more about this CLAG fellow, and the emergent world of anonymous media critics and public thinkers of which he is a part, I spent several hours in mid-May speaking with him over Zoom. The following is a condensed and lightly edited version of our conversation.
Jacob Siegel: What are you? … I’ll be more specific. There seems to be a new class of anonymous public intellectuals, or anonymous media critics or pseudonymous social critics, operating on Twitter and other social media platforms. It’s a new thing and it’s interesting, but it’s not clear exactly what it’s accomplishing or how significant it is—whether, for instance, it has begun to outwork and replace some of the prestige media and intellectual institutions or instead just provides a larger stage for the age-old critical discourse of disgruntled intellectuals who would once have carried on their harangues in bars. What’s clear is that there’s a class of people, which you’re a part of and therefore well positioned to comment on, who issue social commentary both for each other and for the larger media class whom they’re commenting on and maybe gradually replacing. What are you all up to?
Christopher Lasch's Angry Ghost (CLAG): Anonymity has a history. It’s got an extensive history in terms of authorship. Think of the 18th-century public sphere where a great deal of publication was done anonymously. In the States, you’ve got the Federalist Papers as a good example.
There was this norm of conducting civil and political discussions behind pseudonyms, and it was an accepted thing. It’s interesting now because the affordances of digital media provide us with an opportunity to conduct something similar. There was an important ethos around anonymity from the earliest days of the internet, but that’s no longer the case. Now it’s being highly problematized because it’s seen as something that can’t be disciplined. So it becomes a problem.
How long have you been on Twitter?
In one form or another, probably for 12 years. I was a pretty early adopter, but I had a number of accounts. I’ve had accounts under my own name but also various other kinds of anonymous accounts, just playing around with different forms of tweeting. I didn’t really get any traction, so I would spend a lot of time just kind of tweeting whatever I wanted to virtually no engagement whatsoever, but it was fine.
I’m interested in this idea of fragmentation and the aesthetics of the fragment. Twitter perfectly encompasses or encapsulates that. You put together a tweet thread, it’s a collection of fragments. You look back on your posting history as a collection of fragments or perhaps notes to self, notes to others, notes on things, notes in the margins. So for me, that’s the metaphor I approach it with. I see it very much as a series of notes, which I make on the timeline.
What are you taking notes on?
John Pistelli [columnist for The Scroll] made a brilliant observation a few years ago. He pointed out that there’s this kind of belated “theory cannon” on Twitter, or at least the parts of Twitter that we hang out in, that’s made up of texts from the ’70s and ’80s, writers like Christopher Lasch, Jean Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio. In a way, it’s kind of an oppositional thing, a way of making sense of where we are now.
There’s not much good stuff being published right now, not a lot of good cultural commentary about our current digital predicaments, so we have to go back to what was published in what I think is the most similar period to what we are living through now: the 1980s, and that period of postmodernism and so-called political correctness and the various responses that emerged to that. And essentially we’re arguing by analogy. We’re kind of going back to that work, finding it a precedent, and trying to make sense of the present through the lens of this curated canon of slightly obsolete texts, which nevertheless have quite profound things to say about where we are now.
Okay, but now imagine that you’re explaining this to your grandmother. Grandma finds out that you spend X number of hours per day in this place, Twitter, let’s say it’s five, and she’s worried about you. She wants to know, “What do you do there?” How do you explain this to grandma?
It’s not a part of my life that I tend to talk to others about because I just don’t feel that it has any particular meaning or kind of resonance outside the set of online relationships that one has with one’s followers or with whom one follows, or the kind of general kind of subculture we’re all in. But on the other hand, if I were to make a bigger sense of this, I think there is certainly a kind of media class or a chattering class, as you referred to it, that is very much on this platform. A lot of eyeballs are glued to this platform daily. A lot of the discourse gets produced here in real time that determines the collective responses of people through Paulo’s idea of emotional synchronization [See CLAG’s essay from last week for an expanded discussion of emotional synchronization] via the smartphone.
What’s happening is that there are these global waves of affect and emotion that are churned out through social media but have material effects. You can say it’s just this website, but it affects the way news stories are written. It affects the way in which people teach certain subjects in school and university. It affects politics. It affects how we make sense of current events and connect those events into a kind of wider context. Retrospectively, it’s a way of understanding history. It’s really a kind of collective reading and authorship platform. It’s not something I see as trivial. This is part of the evolution of the internet itself.
Saying “it’s just Twitter” is like saying “it’s just academia.”
Yeah, exactly. There’s a desire to trivialize this in order to protect oneself from really thinking about the outsized nature of the problem because we really are dematerialized now. People use the terrible phrase referring to “lived experience” to mystify this by implying there’s some kind of distinction between the “real” lives we live and what we do online, where I don’t think there is anymore. What happens online is just as much real life and just as visceral and just as physical and embodied as what we do offline.
Read more here.