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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Let's try this again! [1]

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Date: 2023-10-24  

We begin today with Eliyahu Freedman of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency describing a meeting with journalists in Tel Aviv where officials of the Israeli Defense Force showed a “raw and unedited” 43-minute video and audio “compilation” of the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7.

Gruesome photos and videos have circulated online in the two weeks after the attack, along with harrowing accounts of the violence visited upon Israelis. The images have become so ubiquitous that Jewish day schools in the United States cautioned students to delete their social media apps to avoid seeing them, while journalists and other public figures have expressed ambivalence about sharing them. [...] Now, the Israeli government’s decision to broadcast the footage came as it is increasingly concerned that people are questioning the scale and depravity of Hamas’ massacre. Social media users and journalists alike have expressed skepticism about widespread reports and testimonies of the attack’s most harrowing details, often at the same time as they have sought to shift attention toward the escalating casualties of Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza, where it aims to depose Hamas. “I can’t believe I’m saying this and I can’t believe that we as a country are having to do this,” said Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, in a video announcing the press conference. “As we work to defeat the terror organization that brutalized our people, we are witnessing a Holocaust denial-like phenomenon evolving in real time as people are casting doubt on the magnitude of the atrocities that Hamas committed against our people, and in fact recorded in order to glorify that violence.”

First of all, there is no such thing as “raw and unedited” video that is also a “compilation.” A compilation, by definition, goes through some process of editing.

There’s a much more graphic version of this story over at The Atlantic written by Graeme Wood. (Trigger Warning: extreme violence) I do, however, take exception to one thing in that story.

This is a quote from Israeli Defense Forces Major General Mickey Edelstein.

“We are not looking for kids to kill them,” he said. “We have to share it with you so no one will have an idea that someone is equal to another.”

I guess that it’s okay if children in the Occupied Territories and Gaza are killed because they are in the way or something. As long as you’re not “looking” for them.

How about the indiscriminate killing of a journalist? I have no opinion about the decision of the Israeli authorities showing this footage to journalists.

Aidan Quigley and Mary Ellen McIntire of Roll Call report that House Republicans will try yet again to elect a speaker later this morning.

The GOP conference is set to vote Tuesday morning after hearing from the remaining eight candidates, a crop that thinned out slightly Monday night when Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., dropped out. He said he had other commitments he wanted to focus on, including working on former President Donald Trump’s campaign in his home state. [...] The remaining speaker candidates are Jack Bergman of Michigan, Byron Donalds of Florida, Tom Emmer of Minnesota, Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, Gary Palmer of Alabama, Austin Scott of Georgia and Pete Sessions of Texas. [...] At Tuesday’s conference meeting to vote for the speaker nominee, members will vote in multiple rounds until one candidate secures 50 percent of the votes plus one. LaLota said he thinks it’ll go three or four rounds. “We think it’ll go actually rather quick,” he said. But winning on the floor is a different matter, and that’s where other recent candidates have struggled. Any GOP nominee can only afford to lose four votes if all members are present and voting and all Democrats vote for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., as they have been.

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic writes that for Republicans, the reality of right-wing threats of violence have come home to roost.

Before this contest moves into horse-race handicapping, we should revisit the astonishing stories from over the weekend about the threats made against Republican legislators during Jordan’s brief candidacy. CNN’s Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, and Aaron Blake at The Washington Post, among others, reported on these threats, but many Americans seem unable to muster more than a shrug and a kind of resigned acceptance that this is just how some Republicans are now. The only people who seem angry about this are the Republican lawmakers who, along with their families, received these threats. [...] Republicans have long feared their own voters, and have for years whispered about it among themselves. Now that Jordan has been defeated, they will likely go back to pretending that such threats are isolated incidents. But the threats during Jordan’s candidacy should confirm that Trump’s MAGA loyalists, firmly nested in the GOP, constitute a violent movement that refuses to lose any democratic contest—even to other members of its own party. [...] After threats over the speakership, what’s next? Death threats over who becomes deputy whip? Put the honorable Mr. Bloggs on the Rules Committee, or I’ll hurt your family? As the writer Eric Hoffer so presciently noted more than 70 years ago, decadence and boredom can be among the most useful raw materials for the construction of an authoritarian movement, and clearly, American society has plenty of both.

So Republicans have been aware about the snake of right-wing violence for years? And even expected to get bitten at some point.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times has some good news: the economy.

Jeff Lagasse of Healthcare Finance News reports that a newly published study shows that health care system chatbots based on large language models might be harmful to Black patients.

Chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) are being integrated into healthcare systems, but these models may be perpetuating harmful, race-based medical beliefs that could be particularly harmful to Black patients, according to a new study published in Nature. [...] Recent studies using LLMs have demonstrated their utility in answering medically relevant questions in specialties such as cardiology, anesthesiology and oncology. LLMs are trained on large corpuses of text data and are engineered to provide human-like responses; some models, such as Bard, can access the internet. But the training data used to build the models are not transparent, and this might lead to bias. Such biases include the use of race-based equations to determine kidney function and lung capacity that were built on incorrect, racist assumptions. [...] Every LLM model that was put under the microscope demonstrated instances of racist tropes, or a repetition of unsubstantiated claims about race.

Nicholas Kusnetz and Katie Surma of Inside Climate News look at how fossil fuel companies are successfully “weaponizing” the international law system against developing countries.

Corporations have filed more than 1,250 claims since the 1990s, with the number accelerating over the last decade along with a rise in foreign investment, although the true number of cases is unknown because many remain secret. Their claims are typically heard by three-member arbitration panels made up of attorneys, with each side nominating one member who, together, pick the third. Arguments are then heard behind closed doors by the arbitrators, whose awards are binding on the parties. [...] Oil, gas and mining companies have lodged more claims than any other industry, with many of the awards reaching into the billions of dollars. The 12 largest awards alone, 11 of which have gone to fossil fuel or mining companies, totaled more than $95 billion, according to Boyd’s report, a figure that “likely exceeds the total amount of damages awarded by all courts to victims of human rights violations in all States worldwide, ever.” While the system was intended to help protect companies when governments nationalize their assets, the report and many other critics of ISDS say that multinational corporations have “weaponized” these protections to challenge new environmental regulations, taxes and other policies that cut into profits.

Rachel Chason, Kevin Crowe, John Muyskens, and Jahi Chikwendiu of The Washington Post examine the threat of malaria as a result of climate change.

The threat posed by malaria stands to soar as the planet warms because of longer transmission seasons, more frequent and severe extreme weather events, and the migration of malaria-carrying mosquitoes to new latitudes and altitudes, according to a Washington Post analysis of climate modeling and reporting from the southern African country of Mozambique. [...] The results of the Post analysis reveal which countries and regions are at most risk, in particular as seasonal changes benefit disease-carrying mosquitoes. In some regions of the world, transmission seasons could increase by up to five months by the year 2070. [...] While infectious-disease experts have for years documented that rising temperatures expand the range of deadly pathogens, the ominous trend here underscores the extent to which nearly two decades of global progress against malaria is being eroded in part because of climate change. The world has seen global case counts ticking up over the past six years, according to the World Health Organization, with case rates increasing by 10 percent during that period in Mozambique, which researchers rank among the countries most vulnerable to climate change.

Finally today, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes of BBC News reports that tensions between the Philippines and China are heating up in the South China Sea.

The confrontation between Manila and Beijing over submerged shoals in the South China Sea has been going on for decades. But in recent months something has changed. The spats at sea are now unfolding in the full glare of the television media. This is the second time in weeks Philippine journalists have filmed a close encounter near a particularly sensitive reef known variously as Second Thomas Shoal, Ayungin Shoal or Ren Ai Reef. This is no accident. It is part of a deliberate policy by the Philippine government to shine a spotlight on what it has called China's "brute force" in asserting control over what Manila says are its waters. [...] But Beijing's overall assessment is that the Sierra Madre cannot last forever, and at some point, the Philippines will be forced to evacuate the marines, as the ship crumbles into the sea. During the six years under former president Rodrigo Duterte that assumption appeared well-founded. But since the election of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr last year, the Philippines' foreign policy has turned 180 degrees.

Try to have the best possible day, everyone!

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