Thoughts on a historic week
As everyone knows, this week was a (an?) historic one for the State of Texas and for the United States as a whole—because this is the week when my wife Dana finally gave a 3-hour public lecture on OpenAI’s recent proof of the Unique Games Conjecture! Thanks so much to the nearly 200 people who joined us in person or via Zoom, and to the staff of UT Austin’s CS department for pulling the event together on short notice. Video will be up on YouTube as soon as we can manage it.
But also, yes, there was an election.
I remember that, when Dana and I moved to Texas in the summer of 2016, we were excited to be a small part of what seemed at the time like Texas’s impending transformation into a cosmopolitan blue state.
And now the prophecy is finally being fulfilled. But so many strange and harrowing things have happened in the interim, that I feel like Murph when her father finally returns to her at the end of the movie Interstellar.
So it turns out that, indeed, the Democrats could’ve easily recaptured both houses of Congress without any need to sell their souls to the likes of Hasan Piker or Abdul El-Sayed. And now the keffiyeh-clad revolutionaries will claim a mandate directly from the people, to put to the sword all the evil landlords and techbros and kulaks and bourgeoisie and (obviously) Zionists, and thereby finally usher in the utopia that failed the first 10,000 times it was tried. I see them as more likely to inspire a Republican comeback in 2028 (as unlikely as it seems this week) than to achieve their stated goals.
For please remember that the socialist firebrands massively underperformed more moderate Democrats on Tuesday—it looks like the socialists were merely lifted up by the same tide of justified anti-MAGA rage. Yes, in the US and across the Western world, some university humanities departments continue to churn out young people who’d see my family’s slaughter as an inspiring (or at least deeply understandable) act of revolutionary justice, and who vote on that basis. By and large, though, the American voters simply belatedly realized that Trump is a charlatan who was never going to deliver anything he promised, and also they wanted cheaper gas.
The Allied victory over Nazi Germany was glorious, it called for parades and dancing in the street, and it was 3,000% earned by Nazi behavior if anything in human history ever was. It left only one tiny problem for the future—namely that, within the winning coalition, the fans of liberal democracy, science, and Enlightenment still needed to confront the Stalinists, whose evil rivaled even the Nazis’, yet who believed their fanatical ideology to be the one vindicated by events. Why was I so often thinking about that these past couple days?
There was, of course, also a big election in Israel. Given the results, I pray that Gadi Eisenkot finds some way to form a coalition, or at least soft coalition, with Israel’s Arab parties, since that’s clearly what it will now take finally to topple Netanyahu, a man whose corruption (like Trump’s or Ken Paxton’s) knows no bounds. I’m under no illusions that this step would do anything to appease the hundreds of millions of protesters around the world whose true demand (as they’ll explain if you ask them) never had anything to do with Israeli policies or Gaza or the West Bank or Bibi Netanyahu, but was always simply that Israel cease to exist—that Israel’s Jews either “go back to Poland” or the other countries where their grandparents were murdered or expelled, or, preferably just die, as on October 7.
Nevertheless, I pray for a coalition of moderate Israeli Jews and Arabs, firstly because it’s morally right, secondly because it’s politically expedient, and thirdly because it will impress on at least some fair-minded observers the enormity of the moral chasm here—that, whereas the Arab countries expelled or murdered virtually all of their Jews, the State of Israel not only tolerates its Arab minority but gives it the right to vote and to wield power.
Whatever else one can say, Israel’s Arabs have been sufficiently loyal to their nation that, on October 7, Hamas murdered them right along with the Jews, treating them as Zionist collaborators and traitors to Islam. I’d like to see that loyalty rewarded with a role in Israel’s governing coalition.
As is becoming standard practice with my political posts, I’m closing the comments—because life is short, and these days, the overwhelming majority of comments that I get on posts like this one, whichever ideological axe they’re grinding, are not ones that engender in me even minimal respect for their authors. I apologize to those who would’ve actually pursued a thoughtful dialogue with me or others had I left the comments open—to all five of you, or however many righteous men of Sodom there might be.
Follow