When America plays cop in the world...

...it can end up having the same effects that cops sometimes do at home.

WaPo:

Ahmad’s relatives are among the civilians killed in events that are being documented with an unprecedented level of precision in a new accounting of the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State. Using U.S. military geolocation data being made public for the first time, U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars has pinpointed locations, some of them to within a meter squared, for hundreds of strikes resulting in more than 1,400 civilian deaths.

Throughout the campaign, strikes took place in crowded urban environments, where it was more difficult to distinguish between civilian and Islamic State targets. They also occurred in remote or militant-controlled areas, which complicated intelligence gathering and target verification.

Let me explain myself.

When police officers in America shoot unarmed civilians, they frequently end up unpenalized because the law gives great leeway to agents of the state who use lethal force when they "reasonably" feel like their personal safety is under threat. As we have seen, that "reasonably" stretches a long way, to almost unreasonable lengths.

Similarly, it appears that in the fight against ISIS -- a genuinely terrible, deadly organization -- the United States has decided to err on the side of its own safety, the the degree that the safety of non-American innocents becomes, well, not nearly as high as a priority as it should be.

It is probably the case that each individual targeting decision can be individually justified. Taken together, though, this number of civilian deaths is unconscionable. 

Sen. Josh Hawley could make himself really useful....

...by proving his economic populism bona fides and putting real pressure on Sen. Mitch McConnell to do something about this.

NYT:

The Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research warned on Wednesday that there were “significant downside risks” to the nation’s financial stability from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic and predicted that many households and businesses might be unable to recover without additional government assistance.

The end of the pandemic may be in sight. But we'll get there faster, and with less damage, if we spend a lot of money now.

The "Live Not By Lies" guy....

...is notably silent about all the lying this president is doing in order to keep his job. 

I guess some lies are more equal than others.

'That's politics'

This part of Paul Waldman's column alarms me:

And unlike the zillions of investigations of Democrats that Republicans have mounted whenever they had the opportunity, these wouldn’t be undertaken solely to gain political advantage. But so what if they were? That’s politics. If there’s actual wrongdoing to be exposed, then the investigation is justified.

Investigations shouldn't be undertaken solely for political advantage. Period. There's plenty to investigate about the Trump years. But it's wrong to use the powers of government just to usurp your rivals. It was wrong when Trump tried to pressure Ukraine into investigating Biden. It was wrong when Republicans investigated Benghazi forever. Democrats might help themselves by playing the same game, but it would still be wrong and corrosive to what's left of our idea of "the rule of law."

A note about grace

About a decade ago, when I was undergoing a series of surgeries that saved my life but also left me broken, I was struck that several people reached out to me -- people with whom I thought I had burnt bridges, people I didn't expect or have any right to expect to show me kindness -- to express well-wishes and a speedy recovery for me.

I received a lot of grace, in other words.

Grace isn't something you earn or deserve, as a recipient. But it is wonderful to receive, and it can relieve the burden of hurt feelings and wrongdoings left unrighted.

I mention this because I ran into an old friend on the river trail today -- somebody whose entrance into my life a few decades ago caused a lot of anguish for people I deeply cared about. And I realized that, as the recipient of grace, I also needed to try and give it.

There's a quasi-spiritual dimension to all of this, I realize, that not everybody will buy into. I recognize that my understanding of all this is probably shaped by my Christian upbringing. What's more, I'm not in a position to expect anybody to show grace to others, especially when they've been wronged. All I know is that receiving grace humbled me. And for me, the proper response to that is to pay it forward.

About guns and suicide

 This piece in the NYT is frustrating:

Clark Aposhian, chairman of a lobbying group for gun owners in Utah, where suicides outnumber homicides by a factor of eight, said he did not believe the numbers when he first heard them: “How did we not know?” Mr. Aposhian blamed the media for hiding the truth and fostering an impression that most gun deaths are murders.

There has been lots of coverage of guns-as-a-major-tool-of-suicide, though. (Those links are all examples from within the last year.) The "media" has covered murders quite a bit, yes, but there has been a lot of reporting about the gun-suicide link.

There has been a problem with gun-rights activists playing down those suicide numbers, though, for fear it will increase pressure to restrict gun sales somehow.

In counting down top-three fake news stories about guns from 2017, NRATV host Grant Stinchfield asserted that suicides by firearms shouldn't be counted as "gun deaths," even though they very clearly are deaths by gun. Fancy that.

"The final fake news of the year comes in the form of a statistic, the overused 30,000 gun deaths a year," Stinchfield said. "The left never mentions that two-thirds of those include suicides. Yet it is a number thrown around like confetti. And it’s deceptive to say the least. From The Washington Post to The New York Times, they all use it to wage war on gun ownership."

This just happened last month:

The Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act, now awaiting the president’s signature, still does things the commander’s family says he would be proud of: funding community organizations that work with veterans, and scholarships to train more mental health professionals.

But before it was modified, the bill would also have required health care workers who treat veterans to be trained on how to talk with at-risk patients about the danger of having guns in the house and about how to reduce that risk — a strategy known as lethal-means safety.

The provision was stripped out "because the provision in question touched a third rail in Washington politics: the danger posed by firearms."

The link between the availability of guns and completed suicides isn't a secret, and hasn't been for years. There are a few people, though, who have been invested in playing down that link. 

The problem with the Substack revolution

Matt Yglesias is leaving Vox to start his own Substack blog. There is part of me that really likes this -- my preference would be to get off social media and return to the blog glory days of the late aughts. I've tried doing it a couple of times, but I always fail to stick with it -- partly because people are on social media instead of blogs, and it gets to feeling very lonely around here.

I'll subscribe to Yglesias' free tier. But I won't spend money on him, or Andrew Sullivan, or Matt Taibbi or any of the other, um, independent thinkers who have abandoned big publications in the last year or so to strike out on their own for Substack and its subscription model.

My subscription dollars are finite. So I have to make them work efficiently. Which means they'll go to publications where I can get news and multiplicity of voices. I simply can't afford to support every writer I want to read who decides to strike out on their own. I can't imagine I am the only person in this position.

And this strikes me as a problem, both for the writers and the larger discourse.

A number of observers have already noted that rise of newspaper paywalls, while absolutely necessary to sustaining what's left of the news media, is a problem for democracy. You can get all the misinformation you want for free, but it increasingly takes cash to get reported, reliable news. Somebody's got to pay for the reporters, writers and editors -- but that means that people who can't or won't pay for that news are vulnerable to misinformation.

Similarly, if -- as appears to be the case -- somewhat independent writers increasingly feel uncomfortable or unable to exist within the framework of a larger publication where their coworkers don't all love their views, and they follow Yglesias et al to Substack and its paywall, it might also be the cases their voices go missing from the national conversation. It'll be easy not to pay to hear ideas you don't want to hear, and if you don't pay, it's less likely you'll be forced to encounter them.

I don't love everything about Yglesias, Sullivan or Taibbi, but it is also true that the three have done valuable work over the years. People are complicated! And sometimes it's good to have complicated people complicating the discourse, even if it's also irritating. It worries me that the complications are disappearing behind a paywall.