Some Windows are Small

For the last several weeks, Iran and Isreal have been in a CyberWar. Most recently, unsecured websites in Israel have been hacked and threatening messages attached. Thursday’s attack comes after a series of tit-for-tat cyberattacks between the two countries, with Iranian hackers linked to an attempted cyberattack on the official Israeli water network in April and Israel blamed for a reciprocal attack on computers at Iran's Shahid Rajaee port that caused massive backups on waterways and roads leading to the facility. Not a shot has been fired.

Disruption, like bombing supply lines, bridges, and train tracks--without a shot--has become the disorder of the day. It is a field where a single man can have a lot of leverage.

It's not Stuxnet, but it is a new age of danger to humanity that attracts a new kind of homicidal mind.                                              

                                Some Windows are Small

This is an opinion piece on the NYT's take on one of the Democrat debates. I can't remember where it's from.

The Times’ editorial board shows that it is unconcerned with economic growth or paying for government programs. But it is obsessed with the markers of identity politics, like a candidate’s stance on reparations and the number of people of various ethnicities employed by campaigns. It is suspicious of anyone who has even briefly been associated with for-profit companies.

Economic growth is a great social good. It raises people out of poverty and is correlated with longer life and greater happiness. Even if you believe that the state should engage in progressive redistribution of income and provide important social services, growth remains important because that growth permits more distribution and better services.

Yet the board never asked any questions of any of the Democratic candidates about growth.

The board gave a hard time to only three of the candidates about their résumés—Steyer, Buttigieg, and Yang. In all three cases, its concerns only revolved around their work with for-profit companies. Their worries about Buttigieg were particularly telling. One might well be concerned that Buttigieg’s experience of being the mayor of a city of 100,000 residents does not qualify him to be the president of a nation of 300 million people. But instead the questions about his qualifications focused on his work with McKinsey as a junior consultant right out of college. The board was concerned, for instance, that McKinsey works on consulting reports which result in cost-cutting and layoffs (as if businesses can easily thrive if they are overstaffed and inefficient).

In contrast, the board never raised any questions about the lack of business or economic experience of those who spent most of their lives on the public payroll. For the Times, being a legislator or a professor brings with it the presumption of fitness for the Presidency, but participation in business carries a presumption of unfitness.

The board’s enthusiasm for identity politics often descended from the momentous to the relatively unimportant. They quizzed Buttigieg about how many African Americans were on his campaign staff and Bernie Sanders about how many women. They wanted to quiz Steyer on his asylum policy specifically for LGBTQ people, although Steyer could not even remember that he had one.

The focus on identity politics is the flip side of the board’s indifference to economic growth. Economic growth expands the pie. Identity politics in the form of reparations or employment preferences is a divisive, zero-sum game.

The board is also hostile to big tech. They even asked some candidates whether they were members of Amazon Prime, as if this were evidence of complicity in evil. But while the board focused on the possible benefits of breaking up big tech in general, Facebook was clearly the object of its greatest ire. In one interview, a Board member suggests that Facebook is a threat to democracy.

It’s much more obvious that it is a threat to institutions like the New York Times. Its influence comes from letting others offer their opinions through their posts and advertisements. This mechanism for decentralized messaging undermines the hegemony of the old media—especially the influence of their political endorsements.