Elemental

The question of whether Israel's actions in the Gaza strip constitute a genocide has been hotly debated for nearly as long as the latest fighting between Israel and Hamas has. Now, a pair of Israeli human rights groups have weighed in on the side of calling it genocide.

Genocide has a specific definition in international law: particular acts carried out with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part.

And it's the word "intent" that's really become the stickler. While many people point to statements from Israeli politicians, like the comment from Yoav Gallant that Israel's opponents were "human animals" to explain their positions, the fact remains that the case for whether the government of Israel intends, as a matter of policy, to exterminate or displace the population of Gaza, is, at this point, purely circumstantial. Which doesn't mean that Israel is innocent of the charge, but it does mean that it's difficult, like any charge that requires mens rea, to prove.

The law often uses language differently from the way the public at large, or subsets thereof, tend to use it. Consider anti-abortion activists using the term "murder" to describe the procedure, or people using the term "kidnapping" to describe the arrests of immigrants by ICE agents. In places where and under circumstances when abortion is legal, it is, by definition, not murder, just as when ICE agents are legally allowed to detain someone, their doing so is not kidnapping.

In the case of genocide, the calculus is a bit different; here people tend to judge what is happening based on outcomes, even though international human rights law is based on intent, and if that intent is there, the predicate acts don't have to be particularly horrific, or even effective. They simply need to happen at all.

It's unlikely that there is a formal document, somewhere in an Israeli government office, that spells out a deliberate plan to engage in

... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2

And if there is, it hasn't come to light, so people are left to infer the requisite intent. There is a certain degree to which the inferences a given party makes are related to their overall partisanship concerning the issue. Which is what makes the statements from B’Tselem and the Israel branch of Physicians for Human Rights newsworthy; they could be expected (at least by outsiders) to side with the Israeli government and so their inference that the government intends to destroy the Gazan population, in whole or in part, carries weight.

But it doesn't settle the issue. This is, after all, a matter of law, and it's judges, not human rights campaigners, who make the final decisions. Whether they decide that the elements of the crime are all present, or if judges decide at all, remains to be seen.

Background

It's a difficult thing to examine something that one cannot see. Accordingly, I understand the challenge of attempting to take a close look at my blind spots. Technically, blind spots are not absolutely invisible, the real problem tends to be if they're at the point where they're visible in one's field of view, one has bigger problems.

Recently, I've found myself wondering what my "blind spot" is, in the sense of things that affirm the way I look at the world, such that I'm prepared to simply take them at face value. I suspect that it has something to do with complexity; I tend to be more accepting of stories in which people are doing something that makes sense for them, but has consequences for others, than I am of stories in which people are straightforwardly good or evil. The thing about such stories, I'm finding, is that they're unfalsifiable, for the most part. Even when they aren't anonymized, I simply have no way of looking into someone's brain and understanding what they're thinking. Accordingly, there's a lot of assumptions involved.

And the assumptions I make about the world are, generally speaking, true. The same as they are for everyone else, even when my assumptions and someone else's assumptions are mutually exclusive. And this is due to that same unfalsifiability. If I assume good intent, and someone else assumes bad intent, the "proof" of either of our assumptions tends to be our own readings of the reality of the situation. The same readings, it turns out, that created the assumptions in the first place.

Which is really just a long-winded way of explaining, at least to myself, why I think that my own blind spots would be difficult for me to see; they're born of how I see the world, and blend into it. Which is what makes separating them enough to actually examine them in detail difficult. 

Summer Blooms

A summer rose, and its understudy, basking in the sunlight. 

Wrong Bottle

MAGA turns on Trump!

Oh, really now? I must have missed that. Because if Congress is any indication, Donald Trump still has a very secure voter base that he can use as a weapon against any Republican legislator that dares to disagree with him.

Sure, there are people who were positive that the alleged "Epstein Files" were going to prove their suspicions that prior Democratic administrations colluded with the "Deep State" and an international secret society of wealthy pedophiles to do damage to the United States. And once the cat was out of the bag, they'd all be marched off to prison and/or a firing squad and all would be right with the world. And they're a bit miffed that there doesn't seem to be a cat, or a bag, for that matter.

And, okay. So what? These people may not be as enthusiastic about President Trump as they were a few months ago, but that's not the President's problem. Okay, they can agitate for someone whose thinking is more to their liking to mount a primary challenge against Republicans in Congress who aren't being vocal enough about getting the "evidence" out there, but the rest of the Trump electorate isn't likely to go along with them.

And so the (left leaning) media stories that have come out recently, purporting to explain how this time, President Trump may have actually alienated voters his coalition depends on seem like just so much more wishful thinking. The hoping that President Trump has finally made one misstep too many is understandable. The President is playing the role of Culture Warrior in Chief, and he's willing to go to great lengths to punish organizations he deems as being opposed to him and the people who support him. If something doesn't change, and relatively soon, he's going to inflict irreparable harm on a lot of people. And given the fact that Republicans in Congress have no real reason to pick a fight with him (after all, if things blow up, he'll be a convenient target for the blame) and the current Supreme Court may as well be on his payroll, mass defections by Republican voters are pretty much the only chance they have.

But I don't think that there's a djinni here to grant that wish. The President's core voters don't have anywhere else to go... non-Trumpist Republicans have pretty much been run out of the party and they're certainly not going to vote Democratic, so if they want to have any hope of Washington D. C., continuing to privilege their interests, then Trump it is. Abandoning this project simply has no upside for the majority of people who identify with the MAGA movement. While it's unlikely that a change of control in Congress would result in President Trump being removed from office, it would certainly remove any momentum his administration has left, and leave him a lame duck.

Given this, I don't see President Trump being in any real jeopardy, at least at the moment. There's simply no-one he could cross that his base holds in higher esteem than Mr. Trump himself. Of course, that can change; anything can change, so I should likely decline to make predictions about how this is going to turn out. But for the time being, wishes are what the President's detractors have. But it's a means of making them come true that they need.

Big Screen

Well, as the kids say these days, that escalated quickly.

One Andy Byron, whom I never heard of before yesterday, was at a Coldplay concert on Wednesday with one Kristin Cabot, who I'd also never heard of. The two were shown on the "Kiss-Cam," displayed on the concert's Jumbotron, well, kissing. Their reactions made it evident that they didn't want to be seen together (which is likely what sealed their fates...), and the internet took it from there.

Mr. Byron, it turned out, was the chief executive officer of a technology company named "Astronomer." And Ms. Cabot was Astronomer's chief people officer. Who Ms. Cabot wasn't, however, was Mrs. Byron.

Mr. Byron tendered his resignation, and the board of directors accepted it, in a statement they noted: "Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met." Which is all fine and good, but the statement lacks one detail that I would like to have known: What standard was breached?

Presumably, Ms. Cabot reported to Mr. Byron, and so I can see the problem there. But in most companies, that's not an issue of standards of conduct and accountability... that's a matter of the actual rules; one does not enter into romantic relationships with subordinates. The power dynamic there is just too freighted, and so it too often results in relationships that are later labelled as sexually abusive.

But if the extent of the problem is that Mr. Byron and Ms. Cabot forgot that big concerts with "Kiss-Cams" are a bad place to carry on a relationship that's meant to be a secret (not that big concerts without a "Kiss-Cam" are all that much better), then the only people who should really care about this are Mrs. Byron and the divorce lawyers who will be tasked with ensuring that when she returns to being a single woman, she's a pretty wealthy woman.

Outside of that, no laws were broken, so what's the big deal? If sleeping with someone other than whichever partner one had committed to were a firing offense, the unemployment rate in the United States would be significantly higher than it is (or the participation rate lower, take your pick). Again, the reason why this would be verboten in most American companies is the reporting relationship, and Astronomer's statement  doesn't speak to that.

Astronomer is throwing Mr. Byron (and Ms. Cabot too, I presume) under the bus to show that they still pay fealty to a standard of marital fidelity that most Americans no longer hold themselves to. And for what? Were their customers really going to go to competitors over this? I get that Mr. Byron and Ms. Cabot's carrying on, and being called out (over, and over, and over again) on social media was embarrassing. I think I saw five different posts related to it on LinkedIn alone yesterday over breakfast. But marriage in the United States isn't what it used to be, and I'm not sure why corporate America is so invested in helping the more Puritanical elements of the general public pretend that it is.