I don't understand everyone's facination with Soros.
Lex Luther in the comic book is way different than in the movie.
Ethnostates were the allied powers solution to Europe. We dislike Russian postwar strategy. One of those ideas was to fuse east ukraine and west ukraine together. This was actually counter to the ethnostate solution. They did it for their own political/strategic/miliatry objectives. When it failed, they wanted to do the ethnostate solution. Bush didn't allow it, but Bush also couldn't integrate Crimea into Ukraine. So you got a weird compromise that eventually failed. At somepoint, Biden is going to have to show what his compromise is. We control all the cards. You can't take Crimea or the se without our help.
> There’s something on its face absurd about the emergence of a “nationalist international” movement in which nationalists from different countries get together and hang out at big conferences.
I have never understood the special dislike that “Conservatives” have for Soros. There are other donors to left of center causes. So maybe anti-Semitism does provide just a soupçon of additional hate.
Anglophiles should have a special palace of warmth in their hearts and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the BoE must have special little alters there at # 11 Downing and at Threadneedle St. where a candle always burns before Soros’s icon. For he more than another person prevented UK from join the Euro.
There is way too much effort put into analyzing Musk's remarks.
Musk statements aren't the result of some thoughtful reasoning or a PR team. They are just whatever random shit he feels like saying when he gets stoned and irked at someone.
I'd be shocked if Musk even thought about the religious affiliations of Soros and Magneto. He probably just saw some Soros tweet that irked him after rewatching some X-Men comic.
Just because he's a billionaire doesn't make his remarks any different than that stoner friend of yours who says dumb stuff on social media. Maybe he should take more care because of his power but he clearly doesn't so I think it's a mistake to treat his offhand remarks so much more seriously than he does.
I think it's pretty misleading to say Musk sided with Russia given the amount of starlink systems and access he donated to the Ukrainians.
Yes, he eventually pulled some of that access and I was very disappointed in that. But being vulnerable to Russian pressure or even just being petty because he felt hurt ppl critisized him is blameworthy but isn't 'siding with Russia'.
And yah, his suggestion for a peace deal was unhelpful. Not because it was even obviously wrong (morally Ukraine deserves all of its territory back but if they could get the kind of deal Musk suggested with sufficient peacekeeping guarantees, eg NATO trigger forces, it might be worth it to save the lives of their soldiers) but because championing it publicly served Russian interests. Peace deals are negotiations where both parties make hard choices and putting that position on the table puts Ukraine in a worse place.
Huge props to MY for calling out Elon’s hypocrisy on free speech regarding Twitter censorship at the Turkish government’s request. That is where them Lex Luthor attitudes meet real world consequences - particularly because these Turkish election are incredibly important to global affairs, not just Turkish.
Bravo, good sir! This is my favorite kind of Matt Yglesias post, taking something from nerd culture like comic books and using it as an extended metaphor for real-world society. It reminds me of the old "Economics of Ice and Fire" days.
I always find citations to Lincoln a bit just-so. I agree, of course, with the sentiment quoted by Matt, but the fact is that Lincoln was a tyrant. I'll grant that his tyranny did have the result of defeating a worse evil, but a tyrant is a tyrant. Lincoln said a lot of fine words, and won a very important war, but he didn't let anything get in his way in the process, let alone things like the Constitution or civil liberties.
Moreover, I'm not convinced that this form tyranny was NECESSARY for victory. The Federal side's massive human, economic, and industrial advantages made it the overwhelming favorite. The Confederate side, by contrast, merely had the greater part of America's experienced officers and some inchoate sympathy from the governments (but not necessarily the people) of the United Kingdom and France.
The irony of Lincoln's assassination at that particular time is acute. On the one hand, he died early enough that none of the stain of botching reconstruction stuck to him (and it's certainly possible that, had he survived, reconstruction would have been handled much better). He had won the war but not yet fought the peace, as it were.
But by dying at that time, he also lost the opportunity to reverse his own tyranny, which as I said he might have done. In reality, his martyrdom to a certain segment of the Republican party at the time, who used the assassination to take over the party, led to the reproduction of Lincoln's wartime tyranny in the peacetime reconstruction, but this time by a bunch of strikingly unable bunglers (Lincoln's ability is unquestioned). In the end, the so-called Radical Republicans squandered the opportunity for reconciliation, and did John Wilkes Booth's work for him.
“[There is] a convergent consensus that we really do want to deter people from far-flung countries from making asylum claims in such large numbers, which Biden is now doing to the disappointment of hard-core immigration advocates. Magneto isn’t per se right about the world, but you absolutely do need to temper liberal humanitarianism with some conservative realism to get by.”
I question why we should call a humane Biden policy to keep folks from making dangerous journeys “conservative realism.”
The Biden administration policy is clearly to the benefit of both border control and individuals safety. It’s an empathic approach. How is that related to conservatism? It’s also thwarts the conservative narrative.
As conservatives continue to use immigration as a wedge issue and refuse good faith negotiation, I find it has to hear their view as anything but disingenuous.
Thank you for stating this somewhat openly. I'm going to be spicy, sorry Milan.
The thing is that "George W. Bush’s disastrous military adventurism" is all bound up with "intra-Jewish communal disputes" in a way that this article rather talks around.
As far as I can tell, after 9/11 the country's multi-ethnic ruling class basically adopted a framing of the Jewish nationalist worldview, where it was rationalized as somehow the true and higher interpretation of the liberal worldview, and therefore a completely acceptable basis for national foreign policy decisions of the American state.
It's important to understand that this was in large part a sincere ideological takeover, and that it was driven neither by Israel as such nor by American Jews as such, but by an American Jewish intellectual movement that was obviously centered around the idea of Israel while in no way subservient to the day-to-day interests of the Israeli state. Indeed, Israel the actual country was clearly pissed off that these quasi-educated nuts were starting from a particular representation of their external propaganda ideology and getting to policy proposals that made obviously no sense and had nothing to do with Israeli interests.
(Even today, hilariously misguided right-wingers still try to pander to the lobby by proposing to "return" the territories to Jordan and Egypt. This proposal has basically no contact with reality, it is just an extremely literal misreading of a propaganda line about Palestinian hypocrisy that is supposed to prove "Palestinianness" is just a trick played by antisemitic Arabs such that they deserve no consideration. You see this kind of thing all the time, precisely because "pro-Israel" activism is by now essentially 100% about increasing the status and power of diaspora Jewish leaders and only loosely connected to any external need.)
Anyway, I find it deeply and obviously offensive that even some fifteen years after these people largely lost their influence, and even after a kind of insane level of social attention to "disparaties," it is almost literally impossible to talk about the 2001-2006 takeover and misuse of the state by a Jewish-centered intellectual movement as a simple thing that happened. The politically correct nature of it is so obvious. People in power just care about maintaining elite social peace and avoiding damaging accusations that, in many cases, would be coming from friends and family. (Recall how Goldstone outright retracted his report on the 2008 Gaza war under intracommunal pressure, despite having no clear explanation of what was supposedly substantively wrong with it, as the liberal Israeli press immediately pointed out.)
Look, Jews came by their generally high socio-economy status honestly, in a genuinely admirable way. And it is true that accusations of Jews misusing the state for basically communal purposes are incredibly fraught, although I think it's a little rich to discuss them exclusively in terms of "anti-semitism" in light of the IRL social position of American Jews in 2023 and the general American intellectual climate. But we need to be able to talk about it openly when this stuff happens. As a gentile is frankly just a sheer, illegitimate exercise in intra-ethnic domination that we're not. The disproportionate influence on Western foreign policy of this specifically Jewish intellectual movement, which is clearly just self-regarding and self-perpetuating and serves no real purpose other than a rallying point for Western Jews of clannish disposition, consistently leads to worse outcomes even for Israel.
I'd go so far as to say it's "bad for the Jews" except I'm not even really entirely sure what a Jew is anymore. It seems like Jewish self-identification these days is very strongly correlated with attachment to the Zionist movement. Maybe it's actually "good for the Jews" because the Jews just means something different in a society where Jewish integration is a genuine and widely accepted possibility. Maybe it just means a self-interested clique that rallies around the excuse that integration is impossible while actually being hyper-integrated and largely the children and grandchildren of the integrated, and pushes everyone who doesn't accept their insufferable racket to drift away from Jewish identification entirely.
The question of whether Soros is, separate from his Jewishness, a benign or malign force is extremely important. I understand that it's not the point of this essay, but that does strike me as missing the point.
So many of my favorite Substack writers speak too much in this meta-frame, without engaging with whether a given policy, position, or argument is correct or incorrect.
This is the most subtly damning critique of Musk and Muskthought I've ever read, including anything I could come up with.
"Their vision of meritocracy is precisely that the strong *should* dominate the weak" is an insight that sums up the dark side of the man better than any of the usual hyperventilating one could read on the Internet.
Watch out, though, Tim Urban will think you're being "tribal". *eyeroll emoji*
It's not clear that for Herzl, "the mythos of the Land of Israel was not the important part" is an accurate description. Throughout his career, Herzl maintained a preference for Palestine as the site of the Zionist project, but was open to compromising on this if it meant providing safe haven against the threat of imminent anti-Jewish violence. Compromising on land for the sake of Jewish lives is a common position historically with longstanding antecedents. Arguably, this position is found in the later prophetic writings (see, e.g. Jer. 38:17 regarding submitting to the Babylonian invasion), and it certainly exists in the aggadic literature in the Talmud (see, e.g. m. Gittin 56b). I raise these sources here because, for their authors, the commitment to the "mythos of the Land of Israel" was unimpeachable.
I don't understand everyone's facination with Soros.
Lex Luther in the comic book is way different than in the movie.
Ethnostates were the allied powers solution to Europe. We dislike Russian postwar strategy. One of those ideas was to fuse east ukraine and west ukraine together. This was actually counter to the ethnostate solution. They did it for their own political/strategic/miliatry objectives. When it failed, they wanted to do the ethnostate solution. Bush didn't allow it, but Bush also couldn't integrate Crimea into Ukraine. So you got a weird compromise that eventually failed. At somepoint, Biden is going to have to show what his compromise is. We control all the cards. You can't take Crimea or the se without our help.
As someone who has never seen an X-Men movie or read an X-Men comic I found this extremely hard to follow
> There’s something on its face absurd about the emergence of a “nationalist international” movement in which nationalists from different countries get together and hang out at big conferences.
Yep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSWrGQLcHSM
I stopped listening to Lowry after he scoffed at the "literal" idea that the US is 'obviously' not an idea.
I have never understood the special dislike that “Conservatives” have for Soros. There are other donors to left of center causes. So maybe anti-Semitism does provide just a soupçon of additional hate.
Anglophiles should have a special palace of warmth in their hearts and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the BoE must have special little alters there at # 11 Downing and at Threadneedle St. where a candle always burns before Soros’s icon. For he more than another person prevented UK from join the Euro.
There is way too much effort put into analyzing Musk's remarks.
Musk statements aren't the result of some thoughtful reasoning or a PR team. They are just whatever random shit he feels like saying when he gets stoned and irked at someone.
I'd be shocked if Musk even thought about the religious affiliations of Soros and Magneto. He probably just saw some Soros tweet that irked him after rewatching some X-Men comic.
Just because he's a billionaire doesn't make his remarks any different than that stoner friend of yours who says dumb stuff on social media. Maybe he should take more care because of his power but he clearly doesn't so I think it's a mistake to treat his offhand remarks so much more seriously than he does.
I think it's pretty misleading to say Musk sided with Russia given the amount of starlink systems and access he donated to the Ukrainians.
Yes, he eventually pulled some of that access and I was very disappointed in that. But being vulnerable to Russian pressure or even just being petty because he felt hurt ppl critisized him is blameworthy but isn't 'siding with Russia'.
And yah, his suggestion for a peace deal was unhelpful. Not because it was even obviously wrong (morally Ukraine deserves all of its territory back but if they could get the kind of deal Musk suggested with sufficient peacekeeping guarantees, eg NATO trigger forces, it might be worth it to save the lives of their soldiers) but because championing it publicly served Russian interests. Peace deals are negotiations where both parties make hard choices and putting that position on the table puts Ukraine in a worse place.
But that's naivety not being on Russia's side.
Huge props to MY for calling out Elon’s hypocrisy on free speech regarding Twitter censorship at the Turkish government’s request. That is where them Lex Luthor attitudes meet real world consequences - particularly because these Turkish election are incredibly important to global affairs, not just Turkish.
Bravo, good sir! This is my favorite kind of Matt Yglesias post, taking something from nerd culture like comic books and using it as an extended metaphor for real-world society. It reminds me of the old "Economics of Ice and Fire" days.
I always find citations to Lincoln a bit just-so. I agree, of course, with the sentiment quoted by Matt, but the fact is that Lincoln was a tyrant. I'll grant that his tyranny did have the result of defeating a worse evil, but a tyrant is a tyrant. Lincoln said a lot of fine words, and won a very important war, but he didn't let anything get in his way in the process, let alone things like the Constitution or civil liberties.
Moreover, I'm not convinced that this form tyranny was NECESSARY for victory. The Federal side's massive human, economic, and industrial advantages made it the overwhelming favorite. The Confederate side, by contrast, merely had the greater part of America's experienced officers and some inchoate sympathy from the governments (but not necessarily the people) of the United Kingdom and France.
The irony of Lincoln's assassination at that particular time is acute. On the one hand, he died early enough that none of the stain of botching reconstruction stuck to him (and it's certainly possible that, had he survived, reconstruction would have been handled much better). He had won the war but not yet fought the peace, as it were.
But by dying at that time, he also lost the opportunity to reverse his own tyranny, which as I said he might have done. In reality, his martyrdom to a certain segment of the Republican party at the time, who used the assassination to take over the party, led to the reproduction of Lincoln's wartime tyranny in the peacetime reconstruction, but this time by a bunch of strikingly unable bunglers (Lincoln's ability is unquestioned). In the end, the so-called Radical Republicans squandered the opportunity for reconciliation, and did John Wilkes Booth's work for him.
Lincoln was a tyrant. Amazing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Milligan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Merryman
Always disappointing when I pay Yglesias to come to an opinion that was very obvious but his Twitter addiction prevented him from articulating.
“[There is] a convergent consensus that we really do want to deter people from far-flung countries from making asylum claims in such large numbers, which Biden is now doing to the disappointment of hard-core immigration advocates. Magneto isn’t per se right about the world, but you absolutely do need to temper liberal humanitarianism with some conservative realism to get by.”
I question why we should call a humane Biden policy to keep folks from making dangerous journeys “conservative realism.”
The Biden administration policy is clearly to the benefit of both border control and individuals safety. It’s an empathic approach. How is that related to conservatism? It’s also thwarts the conservative narrative.
As conservatives continue to use immigration as a wedge issue and refuse good faith negotiation, I find it has to hear their view as anything but disingenuous.
Thank you for stating this somewhat openly. I'm going to be spicy, sorry Milan.
The thing is that "George W. Bush’s disastrous military adventurism" is all bound up with "intra-Jewish communal disputes" in a way that this article rather talks around.
As far as I can tell, after 9/11 the country's multi-ethnic ruling class basically adopted a framing of the Jewish nationalist worldview, where it was rationalized as somehow the true and higher interpretation of the liberal worldview, and therefore a completely acceptable basis for national foreign policy decisions of the American state.
It's important to understand that this was in large part a sincere ideological takeover, and that it was driven neither by Israel as such nor by American Jews as such, but by an American Jewish intellectual movement that was obviously centered around the idea of Israel while in no way subservient to the day-to-day interests of the Israeli state. Indeed, Israel the actual country was clearly pissed off that these quasi-educated nuts were starting from a particular representation of their external propaganda ideology and getting to policy proposals that made obviously no sense and had nothing to do with Israeli interests.
(Even today, hilariously misguided right-wingers still try to pander to the lobby by proposing to "return" the territories to Jordan and Egypt. This proposal has basically no contact with reality, it is just an extremely literal misreading of a propaganda line about Palestinian hypocrisy that is supposed to prove "Palestinianness" is just a trick played by antisemitic Arabs such that they deserve no consideration. You see this kind of thing all the time, precisely because "pro-Israel" activism is by now essentially 100% about increasing the status and power of diaspora Jewish leaders and only loosely connected to any external need.)
Anyway, I find it deeply and obviously offensive that even some fifteen years after these people largely lost their influence, and even after a kind of insane level of social attention to "disparaties," it is almost literally impossible to talk about the 2001-2006 takeover and misuse of the state by a Jewish-centered intellectual movement as a simple thing that happened. The politically correct nature of it is so obvious. People in power just care about maintaining elite social peace and avoiding damaging accusations that, in many cases, would be coming from friends and family. (Recall how Goldstone outright retracted his report on the 2008 Gaza war under intracommunal pressure, despite having no clear explanation of what was supposedly substantively wrong with it, as the liberal Israeli press immediately pointed out.)
Look, Jews came by their generally high socio-economy status honestly, in a genuinely admirable way. And it is true that accusations of Jews misusing the state for basically communal purposes are incredibly fraught, although I think it's a little rich to discuss them exclusively in terms of "anti-semitism" in light of the IRL social position of American Jews in 2023 and the general American intellectual climate. But we need to be able to talk about it openly when this stuff happens. As a gentile is frankly just a sheer, illegitimate exercise in intra-ethnic domination that we're not. The disproportionate influence on Western foreign policy of this specifically Jewish intellectual movement, which is clearly just self-regarding and self-perpetuating and serves no real purpose other than a rallying point for Western Jews of clannish disposition, consistently leads to worse outcomes even for Israel.
I'd go so far as to say it's "bad for the Jews" except I'm not even really entirely sure what a Jew is anymore. It seems like Jewish self-identification these days is very strongly correlated with attachment to the Zionist movement. Maybe it's actually "good for the Jews" because the Jews just means something different in a society where Jewish integration is a genuine and widely accepted possibility. Maybe it just means a self-interested clique that rallies around the excuse that integration is impossible while actually being hyper-integrated and largely the children and grandchildren of the integrated, and pushes everyone who doesn't accept their insufferable racket to drift away from Jewish identification entirely.
I have to diverge from other commenters; I think this was a very below-average essay and spent too little time talking about Soros himself.
The question of whether Soros is, separate from his Jewishness, a benign or malign force is extremely important. I understand that it's not the point of this essay, but that does strike me as missing the point.
So many of my favorite Substack writers speak too much in this meta-frame, without engaging with whether a given policy, position, or argument is correct or incorrect.
This is the most subtly damning critique of Musk and Muskthought I've ever read, including anything I could come up with.
"Their vision of meritocracy is precisely that the strong *should* dominate the weak" is an insight that sums up the dark side of the man better than any of the usual hyperventilating one could read on the Internet.
Watch out, though, Tim Urban will think you're being "tribal". *eyeroll emoji*
It's not clear that for Herzl, "the mythos of the Land of Israel was not the important part" is an accurate description. Throughout his career, Herzl maintained a preference for Palestine as the site of the Zionist project, but was open to compromising on this if it meant providing safe haven against the threat of imminent anti-Jewish violence. Compromising on land for the sake of Jewish lives is a common position historically with longstanding antecedents. Arguably, this position is found in the later prophetic writings (see, e.g. Jer. 38:17 regarding submitting to the Babylonian invasion), and it certainly exists in the aggadic literature in the Talmud (see, e.g. m. Gittin 56b). I raise these sources here because, for their authors, the commitment to the "mythos of the Land of Israel" was unimpeachable.