Saturday Miscellany

First, what the fuck, Zuck? 

You may have heard that Meta, aka Facebook, has an Oversight Board. And you might also have heard that said Oversight Board has proclaimed that the phrase, “From the river to the sea” is not hate speech.

Since the phrase says that the Palestinian cause wants to rid Israel of Jews, it is not a stretch to call it hate speech.

Senator John Fetterman denounced the notion immediately. To his credit.

Now, for those who find this mysterious, the New York Post tells us who sits on said Oversight Board. You will not be surprised to hear that the Board is packed with anti-Semites.

One of the most vocal has been Tawakkol Karman, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate who has referred to the deaths of civilians in Gaza as an “ethnic cleansing” and a “war of extermination.”

In a June 7 post on X, Karman celebrated the United Nations’ move to place Israel’s military on a global list of entities that have committed harm against children – known as its “list of shame.” Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were also added.

“The United Nations puts Israel, its terrorist government, and its most criminal army in history on the list of shame. I applaud this decision, which was long overdue,” Karman wrote, according to a Google translation.

Nighat Dad, an Oversight Board member and the director of the Pakistan-based Digital Rights Foundation, also has been publicly critical of Israel since Hamas’ surprise cross-border raid killed 1,200 in Israel.

And also,

Oversight Board member Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of left-leaning UK news outlet The Guardian, penned a column earlier this year arguing that, while “real and vile antisemitism” does exist, the “horrors of 7 October most certainly did not happen in a vacuum.”

Endy Bayuni, an Oversight Board member and senior editor at the Jakarta Post, published a column last April that argued Indonesia “should be seen championing an independent Palestinian state and full membership of the United Nations.”

How does it happen that Meta chooses radical leftists to perform censorship and oversight? Is it any consolation that they are diverse.

Second, meanwhile in the conservative podcasting sphere, one Tucker Carlson has lost his mind. Or, lost what was left of his mind. Worse yet, he damaged his reputation, which is now swirling down the drain.  

Apparently, Carlson was jealous of all the attention that leftist anti-Israeli activists were gleaning, so he decided to one-up them, by having a conversation with a genuine, bona fide Nazi. The man’s name is Darryl Cooper.

Carlson proclaimed him a great historian, even though Cooper has not written any history. Worse yet, Carlson decided to promote Cooper’s crackpot ideas-- that the great villain of World War II was Winston Churchill, while the great hero was Adolph Hitler.

Niall Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson, two important historians of the period, responded to Cooper in The Free Press.

Ferguson summarizes his analysis thusly:

Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism.

Third, the latest from once-Great Britain shows that the war against free expression is moving ahead.

Peter Sweden offers this on Twitter:

BREAKING: Britain will begin to release s*x offenders early to make more prison cells available. Meanwhile they are sending people who post offensive words online to long prison sentences. Soviet Britain.

Fourth, Aayan Hirsi Ali writes in The Spectator that free speech is dying in Great Britain. She explains:

Julie Sweeney, fifty-three, got a fifteen-month sentence for a Facebook comment: “Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.” Lee Dunn, fifty-one, on the other hand, got eight weeks for sharing three images of Asian-looking men with captions such as “Coming to a town near you.”

Fifth, on the learning loss front, Harvard has discovered that first year students do not know algebra. They blame it on the Covid lockdowns.

Thus, it is introducing courses in remedial algebra, lest too many students fail to advance in their STEM studies.

The Harvard Crimson reports:

The Harvard Math Department will pilot a new introductory course aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students, according to Harvard’s Director of Introductory Math Brendan A. Kelly.

He said the Covid-19 pandemic led to gaps in students’ math skills and learning abilities, prompting the need for a new introductory course.

“The last two years, we saw students who were in Math MA and faced a challenge that was unreasonable given the supports we had in the course. So we wanted to think about, ‘How can we create a course that really helps students step up to their aspirations?’” he said.

“Students don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum, and so it creates different trajectories in students’ math abilities,” Kelly added.

Now, to put it all in context, MIT had the same problem a year or so ago. It concluded that the students who were flunking Freshman math were diversity candidates. So the institute changed its admissions policies.

Could Harvard be suffering from DEI admissions policies? We do not know.

Sixth, when it comes to competing with other nations at building ships, we have fallen seriously behind. Brian Potter at Noahpinion has the story.

It is going to take more than tariffs and new legislation to revive the American shipbuilding industry.

Consider this, from Potter:

Commercial shipbuilding in the U.S. is virtually nonexistent: in 2022, the U.S. had just five large oceangoing commercial ships on order, compared to China’s 1,794 and South Korea’s 734. The U.S. Navy estimates that China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times our own. It costs twice as much to four times as much to build a ship in the U.S. as it does elsewhere. The commercial shipbuilders that do exist only survive thanks to protectionist laws like the Jones Act, which serve to prop up an industry which is uncompetitive internationally. As a result, the U.S. annually imports over 4 trillion dollars worth of goods, 40% of which are delivered by ship (more than by any other mode of transportation), but those ships are overwhelmingly built elsewhere.

And also,

The situation we face today, with U.S. ships costing at least twice as much to build as ships built elsewhere, is not a recent development; it’s been the norm for at least the past 100 years.

Does this apply to other industries? It is worth asking the question. 

Sixth, if you are in despair at Trump’s losing Liz Cheney’s vote, balance it against the fact that Alan Dershowits has quit the Democratic Party. He sees that it has become infested with anti-Semitism.

The New York Post reports:

Renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz recently announced that he is leaving the Democratic Party, after being “disgusted” by what he witnessed at last month’s Democratic National Convention. 

The retired Harvard Law School professor, who is a longtime self-described liberal Democrat, told radio host Zev Brenner on Aug. 23 that he felt the Chicago gathering was “the worst convention in American history” because of the number of speakers who have publicly expressed opposition to Israel. 

“They had more anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist people who were speaking, starting with [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] – a miserable, anti-Zionist bigot,” Dershowitz said during an appearance on “Talkline with Zev Brenner.” “Then of course they had [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren, who is one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate. Then they had Bernie Sanders, one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate.”

Dershowitz argued the Democratic Party gave anti-Israel arguments “legitimacy” by allowing those that espouse them to speak at the convention.

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