My best writing of 2024
Six posts I'm proud of
I have written 18 posts since I started this Substack on the 4th of July. In the spirit of year-end recaps, here are excerpts from the six I’m proudest of for any newcomers who may have missed them.
But first, a quick thank you.
It’s been a turbulent six months, both personally and politically. The coming year (or four) may be even more turbulent, and my exasperation with American politics seems unlikely to lessen anytime soon. But honestly, my exasperation with political discourse has lessened already, thanks to the many productive examples I’ve seen on this platform. Substack has been a breath of fresh air for me at a time when I really needed it.
This app is less insular and less toxic than any other social media I’ve found, and by far the healthiest place on the internet for long-form commentary. Since joining, I have been comforted by its users’ ability to engage in good faith, stimulated by many excellent writers, and flattered to draw a modest but growing audience of my own. I have big plans for continued growth in 2025; but even if they don’t pan out, I am grateful to have found such a vibrant and responsive community to discuss the issues I care about.
So thank you, truly, for reading my stuff and for being good people. We’ll need more like you in the years ahead. Now for the links and excerpts:
1. Overdue nuance on October 7th and what’s happened since
“It is impossible to understand these attacks outside their political context, as if indiscriminate violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began in October. It is tellingly selective to only remark on that violence in one direction. And it is morally unserious to ignore the attackers’ grievances, their utter desperation, and the massive imbalance in education and power between the two sides…
On October 6th, Gaza was one of the poorest and most densely populated places on Earth. Its residents had no political representation, economic prospects, or control over their borders, water, or energy sources. They were dominated by a hostile foreign military that destroyed their schools and infrastructure at whim—yet also prevented them from leaving, killed them for protesting, and raided their offices if they organized. With every generation their population multiplied, but their land shrunk, until they were two million sardines packed in 140 square miles. A near consensus among reputed, independent human rights groups (including Israeli groups) described their conditions as apartheid. The average resident was 18 years old with a 9th-grade education, and several family members dead by Israel’s hand.
Did you grow up like that?
If not, how can you demonize these people for cheering anyone who claims to fight on their side, when no actual government will?
How discerning can we expect the worst of their moral compasses to be about just which of their oppressors they shoot back at?
How hypocritical is our President to arm their oppressors, shield them from any consequence in the international community, turn a blind eye to hundreds of civilian killings per year, and then mock surprise when that tinder box explodes?
And whatever your answers to these questions, can you truly not understand why we could not end the conversation with condemnation of Hamas?
Too many people confuse empathy with exoneration, causation with culpability, and focus on U.S. policy choices with denial of others’ agency. Cognitive empathy does not deny Palestinians' agency; nor deny Hamas accountability for its atrocities; nor deny Israel the right to defend itself, which I'll address in part two. It merely acknowledges connections between Israel's policies and the threats it faces, which ought to inform its policy choices. It acknowledges the humanity of two million suffering people, at a time when too many bellowed for their collective punishment.”
2. The Killing You Pay For (War in Gaza, pt. 2)
“There is a superficial symmetry to the cycle of suffering and revenge that Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in. But it’s dwarfed by the asymmetry of that suffering’s quantity, an imbalance that persists each time the conflict flares up. There are 38,000 corpses on one side against 1,600 on the other. There are two million homeless, starving people without healthcare, electricity, plumbing, clean water, safety, political representation, or hope for the future on one side, against 125 hostages on the other. To amplify the plight of the hostages in 2024 is to turn your head away from the bulk of this tragedy; to zoom into a picture that’s 99% red until you find enough blue pixels to pretend it is purple.”
3. Of Barbie and Men
“This was not my experience encountering patriarchy. Mine went more like this:
“Wait, why is everyone making fun of me? ☹ Can’t we go back to talking about sports and Pokémon?”
(10 emotionally scarring years later)
“I feel fucking worthless. Maybe this pick-up artist site can teach me how to stop being a little bitch—which is apparently what I am, and also the most humiliating thing it is possible to be.”
I can’t speak for all men. But I suspect that many had formative experiences with patriarchy closer to mine than to Ken’s (or to Ryan Gosling’s, for that matter). It privileges us in unseen ways like not getting raped, catcalled, or patronized; but from what we can see, the most noticeable impact is ridicule. We learn what we’ll be mocked for, and change our behavior to flee that awful feeling. There’s a lot less dopamine and a lot more adrenalin and cortisol. Feminists should know this: doesn’t patriarchy hurt men too?...
The feminist movement has an obvious empathy gap for those it purports to liberate. It makes hand-wavy acknowledgments that patriarchy hurts men too, then goes right back to depicting them in ways that show zero concern for this reality. It takes 100x more joy in mocking men for a whole new set of inadequacies than it does in lessening the ones they’ve already spent their lives grappling with. And just like patriarchy, it intensifies that mockery if men ever dare to admit that it hurts…”
4. Democrats can’t be “real” veterans
“Suddenly, your service isn’t enough if you weren’t active duty. Active duty isn’t enough if you didn’t deploy. Deploying isn’t enough if it wasn’t to a dangerous combat zone. Deploying to a dangerous combat zone isn’t enough if you weren’t in a combat arms branch, or the real door-kickers and trigger pullers in infantry or Special Forces. Infantry isn’t enough if you weren’t a Ranger.
I shit you not, people with a Ranger tab are sometimes teased as not being “real” Rangers if they didn’t serve in a Ranger Battalion. Even people in Ranger Battalions are constantly puffing their chests about which one is best. They literally have an annual Best Ranger competition.
To the conservative mind, military service is one big dick-measuring contest. No matter how you serve, you are never enough. (Why does that sound so familiar? Could it possibly have something to do with the military’s mental health crisis?)…
Conservatives may claim, and even believe, that they care deeply about the military. But in truth, they often only care about it symbolically or instrumentally. They find it a useful pretense for what really enthuses them, which is violence against the outgroups they’re taught to fear and dehumanize. They like that the military imbues that violence with an aura of heroism and necessity, which makes it easier to enforce their draconian ideals and tactics.
Likewise, MAGA politicians love veterans as props in their reelection campaigns—but in truth, they prefer us as dead props. That way the symbol is more potent and less likely to be contravened by our actual voices. MAGA loves how veterans make them feel when we are empty vessels for whatever bile they vomit into us.
They don’t care about people fighting actual wars half as much as they care about the culture war and the gender war. The more absurd excuses they find to betray, demean, and demonize veterans who disagree with them about politics, the more transparent that becomes.”
5. Optimization *is* integrity
“Anyone deciding where to give their money has to compare some ways of helping against others. The difficulty of this comparison does not negate its necessity. You cannot escape it by “trusting your gut” or simply not thinking about it. If you refuse to put a number on how many apples you think an orange is worth, your giving choices reveal your answer all the same.
What is possible is to hide from the answer your giving choices reveal: to plug your ears, refuse to run the numbers, and carry on in blissful ignorance of the good you declined to do. This is, by far, the most popular giving strategy. It is also a strategy extremely unlikely to result in an answer your conscience would approve of were it presented to you in plain English…
To my mind, integrity means being honest—with yourself and with the world—about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. That mean being as transparent as possible in your assumptions and calculations. It means acknowledging tradeoffs, declaring priorities, and showing your work.
That optimization forces difficult decisions about what to prioritize is not a good argument against it. It is rather a reason to introspect about what your assumptions are; fine-tune them through soul-searching, research, and conversation with people you trust; expose your assumptions to public scrutiny, and incorporate the feedback in another round of tinkering; and then finally, when the moral weights are as accurate a reflection of what you actually believe as possible, let logic take it from there. Our mushy gushy feelings must inform the weights in the optimization formula. But once we’ve decided how much we actually value X compared to Y, staying true to those values requires us to shut up and multiply.”
6. Jeff Bezos fuels the real victim mentality
“The reason today’s Post talks “only to a certain elite” has nothing to do with its issuance of presidential endorsements. It has only a little to do with its bias. Both of those things were there in the 1990s too, which Bezos cites as the paper’s glory days. The main difference between then and now is that one side of the political aisle spent the intervening decades waging war against stories that were 95% true—a war which their deranged egomaniac of a candidate has exponentially escalated in defense of his delicate pride.
At every step of this war’s escalation, the conservatives responsible justified it to themselves with exactly what Bezos criticizes: a victim mentality. They convinced themselves that they were a deeply persecuted class on account of most smart people disagreeing with them. They felt insecure that their kids got more liberal when they went off to college. They got defensive at the faintest suggestion that they might carry prejudice, then preposterously recast the occasional excesses of social justice movements as an actual inversion of the real injustices those movements were trying to fix. They nursed petty grievances and confused them with actual oppression.
And then around 2015—slowly at first, but then all at once as they found social cover—they wildly, wildly exaggerated the kernel of truth behind their frustrations with liberal media as a pathetic excuse to dismiss any facts inconvenient to their comfortingly oversimplified worldview. They stopped pretending to care about rational debate in the first place. Those too smart or decent to take that plunge either became Never Trumpers, or quietly constructed sheepish, post-facto justifications for their fellow travelers’ journey to La La Land. That’s why we’re here. You know that’s why we’re here….
Major newspapers can go back to both sides-ism when both sides have a roughly equal relationship with the truth. While the truth itself is biased against one side, journalists will sometimes have to choose between impartiality and doing their duty.”