Writing In Times Of Terror
I Have Nothing To Add
In times of war and terror striking the heart of our society, it seems trivial to write about big government economics or narcissism in business and politics[i]. I lack the first-hand experience of having lived in Ukraine or Israel or other places which are now deeply affected by terror (also, South Sudan and some other African countries, Myanmar, Syria or even Armenia), so I cannot share more than my outrage. For up-to-date qualified writing with moral and emotional depth, I recommend the ubiquitous Bernard-Henri Lévy (Ukraine and Israel) and Julia Mendel (Ukraine). For a deeper understanding of the Israeli/Palestinian history, I like Tom Segev, especially his biography of David Ben-Gurion (“A State At Any Cost”). For verifiable facts about the battlefronts, I trust Bellingcat (Open Source Intelligence) which is run by a formidable team of investigating journalists (in leading roles Elliott Higgins and Christo Grozev who had to go into hiding from Russian killer commandos when European countries couldn’t protect him anymore).
Dostoevsky said — quoted by Solzhenitsyn: “Great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared”. That moment has come with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and with Hamas’ attack on civilians in Israel, and my mind is trying to discern a possible end to the mayhem. For my orientation, I resort to some basic principles that I have been imbued with by experience:
- Tragedy cannot be weighed against other tragedies. Those who compare, don’t feel. Whataboutism is a pointless exercise in revanchism, marked by intellectual laziness.
- For every atrocity, there is an explanation, but it never justifies it. In our ambition to find psychological or historical explanations, we often come too close to justifying actions that are wrong by any moral standard.
- As tempting as it is to attribute, there is no collective guilt. There can be a collective responsibility of whole countries, and we recognize it in the US, in Germany and others. But guilt is individual, and in this case it is clearly attributable to dictators, terrorists and governments who are directing or suppressing the gullible masses of their countries
- For some problems, there is no solution. The people who rushed to forward their 2-, 3-, 4- or 1 state solutions for Israel within hours, may have to scale back their intellectual ambition. It struck me as too pessimistic when the French-German journalist and world-explainer Peter-Scholl Latour postulated this before his death in 2014, but it rings true now.
Errors, Omissions and Corrections
My writing is a project to understand and provide context. By expressing thoughts in writing, I often get to surprising conclusions that change my mind. But I also make mistakes and I learn about facts after publishing. Some of those deserve to be corrected or amended. So, here are some updates to recent articles.
Immigration
I talked about this in the context of climate change. On the topic of illegal immigration to the US, I wrote:
- We estimate that there are about 11M — more or less tolerated — illegal immigrants who live in the US (Pew Research Center)
- In 2022, the US border patrol turned away about 2.8M potential immigrants
- Maybe 1M illegal immigrants found their way into the US
- Many more potentially illegal immigrants are waiting in Mexico, under a US-Mexican agreement
I clearly underestimated the numbers here because I misunderstood the word “encountered” for “apprehended” or “sent back”.
We have seen a dramatic rise in illegal immigration since March 2021 and most of those people are not sent back because of the expiration of Title 42:
Outside of encounters, the Biden administration is accepting 1,500 asylum seekers per day if they follow the process (i.e., apply online before boarding a flight), but this accounts for a minor share of the total.
CBS News provides a good summarization of the situation:
Not all those apprehended are allowed to stay in the U.S. Some migrant adults are given the option to voluntarily return to Mexico or are placed in a fast-track deportation process if they don’t claim asylum or fail initial humanitarian screenings. But government figures show most migrants in recent months have been released from U.S. border custody and instructed to undergo immigration court proceedings. While those migrants face deportation if they lose their asylum cases, the process can take years to complete due to a 2 million (and growing) backlog of unresolved cases.
Title 42 stands for Title 42 of a 1944 public health law that allows curbs on migration in the name of protecting public health. Following US and international laws, the end of Covid emergencies in the US in January 2023 eliminated the legal basis for sending asylum seekers straight back to Mexico. Stricter rules are being put in place now, including a crackdown on illegal smuggling operations, prohibition of returning for five years in case of illegal immigration and possible criminal prosecution. Under the new rules, people will get turned away if they haven’t first applied for asylum in a country they traveled through. Lawsuits have been filed by advocacy groups and the outcome is pending. As in Europe, the situation requires immigration reform, but that seems unlikely to happen in the current composition of the US congress.
There is a new sensitivity to the issue of migration, now that we face large groups of migrants in New York City and Chicago, often camping outside or inside police stations, airports, train stations and without good solutions in sight as winter is coming. People are more unnerved than moved by the dire humanitarian situation, and I often hear people say “don’t let anybody in”. The US has a 2,000 mile border with its biggest trading partner Mexico, and 890 to 1,250 miles of it are part of the Rio Grande. Despite intense protection efforts, it will never be possible to close that border.
CBS News calls this a push and pull problem and this is probably the best way to describe it:
…the Biden administration has argued the historic migration influx is a direct result of the deteriorating economic and security conditions in Latin America and other parts of the world, including crisis-stricken countries like Venezuela.
The reality is more complicated and likely somewhere in the middle, as both “push” and “pull” factors have intensified. Large-scale migrant releases, the perception that the Biden administration’s border policy is more lenient and the ample supply of jobs in the U.S. have likely fueled more migration. The societal collapse in Venezuela and socio-political crises in other countries like Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua have also pushed many migrants to flee their homelands.
Climate Change
I used a lot of current — not just projected or simulated — data about climate change. To me, the data seems to be irrefutable evidence of long-term trends. However, what if it is all manufactured and everyone is lying to us? I was surprised that people bring up this argument, and I roundly reject it. But how do we prove that something is true if we are unable to generate the data in the presence of those who doubt the evidence?
I follow the logic of “more likely than not” here. If identical data gets reported by independent sources over long periods of time, it is extremely unlikely that manipulative government actors are creating fake data with political intentions. In the case of global warming, we get identical data from independently operating organizations around the world, such as:
- NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
- World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
- European Space Agency (ESA)
- UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre
- The Berkeley Earth Project
- Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA)
- National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
- Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
- Australian Bureau of Meteorology
- Climate Central
How likely is it that all of these are acting nefariously in a coordinated manner and lie to us about global temperature increases? It is still possible, but it is infinitely more likely to not be the case, so spare your energy.
Also, we are just coming out of the warmest September ever and there is a clear trend here (and late September in the South of France was very nice):
Big government
I talked about generous spending by the US government and its impact on growth and inflation. In my statistics about economic growth in the US vs. Europe and comparative government debt levels, I struggled with inflation indexing. Leaving out inflation indexing would be distorting, as indexing makes past and present comparable. On the good side, inflation helps with government debt, which goes down in relation to GDP, if it doesn’t grow at higher rates than inflation. But indexing can be used to minimize problems with price increases. John Arnold, who got very rich in natural gas trading, posted this:
It seems like heresy to argue with John Arnold, but if we index every product and service for inflation, we make it look like there is no inflation problem. To some extent, this may be true for recipients of inflation indexed wages, but for those with passive or no income it is a problem. And it is a macroeconomic problem that needs to be solved with determination, as countries like Argentina or Turkey can tell.
Chicago
In my writing about Chicago, I didn’t minimize the city’s issues with crime, but I insisted that most people are not as affected by it as outsiders think. In July of 2023, Gallup conducted a survey of Americans’ perception of 16 US cities’ safety. Chicago came out 16th, just a notch better than Detroit. Fully 70% of respondents said that Chicago is an unsafe place to live in or visit. As a citizen of Chicago, I find this insulting, but who cares:
The change in perception from 2006 to 2023 is even more staggering, with New Orleans being the biggest beneficiary of an increase in trust and Chicago being the biggest loser.
Arguing with people about their perception is a futile task, as any car manufacturer or airline will know. It takes time to win back trust, but apparently Chicago used the last 7 years to destroy any remains of whatever trust existed in 2006 or before. Or was it other cities or the media industry who were systematically trashing Chicago’s reputation against better evidence? We need to find out.
Footnotes
[i] Although, the chief narcissist among us managed to claim today that neither the attack on Ukraine nor the one on Israel would have happened if he was president.
