What Happened Today: March 30, 2022
What Happened Today: March 30, 2022
Critical race school; Israel's terror wave; A warning about ‘scarcity inflation’
The Big Story
The concept of legal possession is a “term of art for a settler-capitalist society,” and U.S. property law is a product of the country’s “history of dispossession and appropriation,” according to a mandatory new course influenced by critical race theory that is being taught to first-year law students at Georgetown University. The social-justice-laden class became a requirement for new law students following a September 2021 vote by the law school’s faculty to enforce “foundational knowledge” in the first-year curriculum that prompts students “to think critically about the law’s claim to neutrality and its differential effects on subordinated groups, including those identified by race, gender, indigeneity, and class.” Students must also now take an elective class, in addition to the new required course, that the school’s associate dean for equity and inclusion has certified as showing a sufficient “focus on the importance of questioning the law’s neutrality.” Georgetown is a member of the elite “top 14” law schools in the United States and costs roughly $70,000 per year to attend. The Georgetown faculty’s decision to adopt the new educational requirements followed demands from student groups for the school to “mandate a critical race theory unit in all first-year criminal justice courses” and a “racial justice requirement,” according to a report in The Washington Free Beacon that first broke the news. Class slides for one of the new courses that were viewed by the Beacon include the claim that “Intellectual Property has a cultural appropriation problem,” with one example cited being the appropriation of black choreographers’ dance moves by a popular video game. Georgetown is hoping that its new policy of blending legal and ideological education in its “race and racial justice in the curriculum” will become a model for other elite credentialing institutions in the United States.
In The Back Pages: Drowning in Information
The Rest
→ The victims of Tuesday night’s terrorist attack in Bnei Brak, a city on the outskirts of Tel Aviv that’s known for its large community of religious Jews, were identified Wednesday. They included two local fathers, Ya’akov Shalom, 36, and Avishai Yehezkel, 29; a Christian Arab police officer, Amir Khoury, 32; and two foreign workers from Ukraine who were not immediately identified. Tuesday’s shooting was the third attack in eight days and brought the total number of victims killed in the terror wave to 11. The perpetrator of Tuesday’s attack was a 27-year-old Palestinian man who had spent a total of more than two years in Israeli prisons for selling weapons, belonging to a terrorist group, and plotting to take part in a suicide bombing.
→ The president of BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager worth about $10 trillion, warned Tuesday that “scarcity inflation” would lead to widespread shortages in the United States, hitting younger Americans especially hard. “For the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want,” Rob Kapito told an audience in Texas on Tuesday. According to Kapito, scarcity inflation is a product of shortage in the labor pool, agricultural supply, and housing stock combined with high energy prices. Last week, BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, sent a letter to investors warning about the impacts of rising inflation and declaring that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades.”
→ Amid Russian demands that “unfriendly” countries pay for gas in rubles—a demand that the West immediately rebuffed—European nations are preparing for energy shortages, with Germany, Italy, and Latvia initiating emergency laws to begin rationing gas. By requiring nations to purchase energy in rubles, Russia seeks to stabilize its currency, which has collapsed since the country’s sanctioning; the European Union fears that, in response to its refusal, Russia will now stop supplying Europe with gas altogether. At present, the European Union imports 45% of its gas from Russia.
→ Russia’s requests for military equipment from China, which have been reported by U.S. intelligence officials, signal a significant reversal in the trading relationship between the two countries and suggest that the Russian military, which promotes an image of self-reliance, may be in a more dire state than previously understood. Russian and Chinese officials have both denied reports of the weapons request, but as an analysis in the Financial Times notes, “For nearly 30 years, Russia has been enabling China’s rise as a military power.” But that relationship, which has been worth an average of $1.5 billion a year, may now be turning around, with China supplying the Russian military with military equipment and critical parts.
Read more: https://archive.ph/08jT5
→ Countdown to the most absurdly redefined conceptions of violence—it’s violence if you don’t say “bless you” when someone sneezes, and it’s violence if you do say “bless you” and that makes them uncomfortable—becoming part of the mandatory curriculum at elite law schools. Yuh-Line Niou, the author of the tweet, is a Democratic assemblywoman in New York.
→ In its ongoing efforts to bring customers their stuff as quickly as possible, Amazon is testing a new program called Prime Air, which would deploy delivery drones to crisscross the sky, airlifting toothpaste and toilet paper. The program, however, keeps running aground: According to federal crash reports and internal documents, at least eight drones have crashed in the past 13 months, with one causing an acres-wide bushfire. Company documents suggest that Amazon tested 2,300 drone deliveries, making eight crashes seem like a fairly low rate of failure until you consider that the company delivers more than 1.5 million packages per day. A total of 5,217 daily crashes would surely have customers flocking to Amazon to order first aid kits.
→ More than 4 million Ukrainians, representing almost 10% of the country’s population before it was invaded by Russia, have become refugees after fleeing the country. Most have relocated to surrounding countries in Eastern and Central Europe, with more than half of Ukraine’s refugees now in Poland. “Just over 350,000 have fled to Russia,” according to Bloomberg News.
→ Container ships are queuing up outside of Israel’s backlogged ports, which lack the crew to berth and unload the cargos. Now 80 ships are idling along Israel’s Mediterranean coast—a record for the country. Such understaffed ports have become a widespread international crisis—in recent months, California has routinely seen more than 100 ships waiting to berth—but Israel’s supply-chain problem now threatens the nation’s food security. Israel’s wheat imports were already under duress, as the country imports 30% of its wheat from Ukraine and 50% from Russia. Government officials now worry that if cargo ships can’t unload their grain and fodder, Israel might soon be facing food shortages. Indeed the impact of these supply issues might be felt very soon: With Passover approaching, the cost of matzah, made exclusively of wheat and water, is sure to rise.
Rabbi and poet Zohar Atkins has a new essay that examines “The Politics, Economics, and Philosophy of Information.” You can read a free excerpt here and the full article by signing up for Atkins’ Substack, “What Is Called Thinking.”
Authority: Then and Now
Former CIA analyst Martin Gurri writes in Revolt of the Public (2018) that as sources of information multiply, the authority of any single source declines in authoritativeness:
In the age of social media, it’s not that news becomes “fake” but that there are fewer barriers to entry in the “information space.” Information is no longer scarce. If authority is the market price where the supply of information meets the demand for it, the market is so saturated with information supply that the price is basically zero. The price of information is so low that our attention is now the thing in demand—media will pay us for our eyeballs (and resell them to advertisers). The constraint is no longer information, but attention. As the Silicon Valley adage goes, “If you are not paying for it, you are the product.”
Of course, The New York Times does retain an imprimatur of prestige that some random influencer on Instagram or YouTube lacks, but the value of that prestige matters far less. The internet has done to authoritativeness what Uber has done to taxis and Airbnbs to hotels. It has both capitalized on and exacerbated an environment of compromised trust. We now shop around for information and “takes” the way we do for a ride or a vacation rental. Like or dislike it, this is the situation.
In previous eras, knowledge was also decentralized. As Carlo Ginzburg describes in The Cheese and the Worms, the average medieval peasant was far removed from Church Orthodoxy. His beliefs were far more influenced by local culture than top-down prescriptions. Yet subculture or “folk culture” were recognized as such. What is new in the situation that Gurri describes is the obliteration of any clear distinction between institutional, top-down authority and fragmented, bottom-up authority. The medieval peasant did not directly influence the creed of the bishops, but today’s ruling class are as more like peasants of the internet than royals commanding it with their scepter. While the Church or the Crown had the power to accuse anyone of “misinformation,” today, anyone can play this game.
Hannah Arendt begins her essay “What Is Authority?” (1958):
“In order to avoid misunderstanding, it might have been wiser to ask in the title: what was—and not what is—authority?”
For Arendt, it is a feature of the modern era that authority has vanished. To Gurri’s point, Arendt would say that the cause of the decline in authority is not the internet (which she did not live to experience), but a loss of faith in tradition—inaugurated since at least the French Revolution, certainly fomented by the work of Marx, and finally completed by the horrors of the 20th century. The twin horrors of Nazism and Communism—this is a cold-war liberal trope common in the ’50s and ’60s—has simply left us bereft of ideological certainty. Religion and other certitudes must become modest, lest they become totalitarian themselves
Arendt connects the meaning of authority to the word author, which, she claims, is connected to the Roman concept of augmentation. To author is not to create from nothing, but to augment. Tradition is (was) authoritative because it both augments and calls out for augmentation. Critically, tradition was authoritative not because it was taken as true, but simply because its age, its longevity, gave it a prestige. In evolutionary terms, tie went to tradition, because it was considered “robust” and “resilient” in the face of change.
The Arendt - Gurri Crossover
It strikes me that Arendt and Gurri need not disagree about the meaning of authority, even if they do emphasize different factors in its decline …
Re race theory at law schools: How does a required elective class differ from a required class in "Students must also now take an elective class, in addition to the new required course..."?
To hear NPR tell it, the murders in Israel come down to lack of adequate gun control in Israeli Arab communities (despite these communities' pleas for help) and the ongoing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Oh, yeah, and she was dressed sexy, so you know she actually really wanted it.