Newsletter #218 — March 10, 2024
Reader Suggested Links
Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.
- Israel / Hamas War
The Vicious Cycle Driving Gaza’s North to Famine — An article looking at the dynamics behind the deteriorating situation in northern Gaza. - Israel / Hamas War
There is no famine in Gaza — The Israeli side of the story on claims of an impending famine in Gaza. - Israel / Hamas War
Hamas’s Asymmetric Advantage -- What Does It Mean to Defeat a Terrorist Group? — From Foreign Affairs, an examination of how terrorist groups are different from other kinds of international actors. - Israel / Hamas War
As Israel fights Hamas in Gaza, a brutal war is waged in the media — From an Israeli perspective, a window into the information war that may ultimately be decisive in determining the outcome of this conflict.. - Israel / Hamas War
How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers — Given the public relations advantage that Hamas gleans from reports of large numbers of civilian casualties in Gaza, it is worth asking hard questions about the accuracy of those numbers. - Israel / Hamas War
Longing for Auschwitz — Amid increasing concern about the war's humanitarian impact, an article that tries to explain the fears that are motivating Israel's actions in the war. - Israel / Hamas War
IDF aid convoy catastrophe probe: Deaths occurred from looting crush — The kind of investigation that we need to make sense of the violence in Gaza. It would, however, have been better if this had come from a credible and genuinely objective international body (which doesn't exist). - Israel / Hamas War
The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending — An excellent and thought provoking essay exploring how the ongoing war in Gaza and the global rise of antisemitism is transforming the lives of Jews in the United States.
Colleague Activities
Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.
- Saving Democracy
Democracy 2076 — Democracy 2076 is developing a vision for a new U.S. constitution which would ensure an effective, responsive, and representative democracy. - Effective Problem-Solving
CSU Center for Public Deliberation — Our aim is to improve the way our community is able to talk through complex issues so that we can arrive at better decisions. CPD provides the space, good information, and skilled facilitation to facilitate such collaborative decision making. - Effective Problem-Solving
Resolutionaries — Resolutionaries is an organization dedicated to bringing Americans together. Our goal is to shift the current paradigm — from fighting over our problems to working together to solve them. - Saving Democracy
National Endowment for Democracy — The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is an independent, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. - Saving Democracy
Women's Power Collaborative — The only national-level body dedicated to achieving a gender-balanced democracy by networking, strategizing, resource-sharing and helping women run for office. - Peacebuilding
Peacebuilding Starts at Home — A new Alliance for Peacebuilding initiative intended to educate and raise awareness about the drivers of instability and conflict in the U.S. and responses to that. - Trust / Trust Earning
Do you keep your agreements? — Anne Leslie explains why keeping our agreements, no matter how small, has important ramifications for our relationships, demonstrating respect and trustworthiness that are hard to replace once broken.
Beyond Intractability in Context
From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better.
- Culture and Religion
Inside No Labels decision to plow ahead with choosing presidential candidates — For those hoping not to have to choose between the extremes of the right the extremes of the left, news that there is likely to be a national unity ticket on the ballot. - Civil Society
Closing Civic Space in the United States: Connecting the Dots, Changing the Trajectory — From Rachel Kleinfeld, thoughts on opposing the use of regulations, laws, and narratives to restrict the ability of civil society organizations to act and speak. - Artificial Intelligence
Google's Culture of Fear -- inside the DEI hivemind that led to Gemini's disaster — A must-read article describing how DEI has transformed the Google culture and is threatening to transform our image of reality (as we see it through the lens of Google's monopoly). - Artificial Intelligence
Why We Must Resist AI’s Soft Mind Control — Thoughts about how AI, with its inherent biases, is likely to change the way in which we think. - Interstate War
In Defence of the EU — As the world slides toward increasing global tensions and the rising risk of war, it is worth reflecting on the EU's success in bringing peace to war-torn Europe. - Israel / Hamas War
The Justice of Israel’s War in Gaza Will Depend on How It Ends — A thoughtful observation that the morality of Israel's war in Gaza will ultimately be judged by what happens after the war. - Communication Complexity
How Pseudo-Intellectualism Ruined Journalism — An essay exploring how working-class realism could save journalism from groupthink. - Left / Right Conflict
Horseshoe Politics — We should all understand the meaning and implications of the phrase "horseshoe politics" and its observation that political extremes tend to converge on one another. - Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
Perceptions Of Women In The Arab And Muslim World — For international Women's Day, a series of alarming videos exploring what many in the Muslim world think about the role of women. - Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
Women have made major advances in politics — but the world is still far from equal — Global data on the changing role of women around the world. - Race / Anti-Racism
The Prophets: Bayard Rustin — As we still struggle to deal with the problems of racism, an article that helps us remember what we shoul have learned from one of the giants of the civil rights era. - Artificial Intelligence
The Perilous Coming Age of AI Warfare — From Foreign Affairs, thoughts on what AI is going to do the warfare in our increasingly perilous times. - Culture and Religion
The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable — Reflections on what happens to elites when they view their profession as the central focus of their lives (and how that makes them different from the working classes). - Trust / Trust Earning
How to Tackle Truth Decay — Thoughts about what to do about a world in which sources of objective truth have almost completely disappeared. - Communication Complexity
Twelve Communication Traps Democrats and Progressives Must Avoid — From a democratic perspective, an insightful look at the complexities of political psychology and communication. - US Election
The Backlash in Deep-Blue America — For progressives who can't quite see how anyone could disagree with their worldview, news that they are nowhere near as persuasive as they would like to think. - Race / Anti-Racism
Rediscovering the Meaning of Diversity: Lessons from Generation X — From those younger than baby boomers, but old enough to have a sense of history, reflections on the successes that we have had in building a more diverse society. - Superpower Conflict
An Introduction: It’s Time to Protest Nuclear War Again — A refresher course for those who may have forgotten (or never knew) how seriously we ought to take the threat of nuclear war. - Climate Change
Is Global Climate Policy Working? — If you really care about the climate (and you should), you ought to be asking hard questions like this about whether current policies are actually working. - Climate Change
Defending the status quo is not environmentalism — A reminder that the banana syndrome (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) cannot successfully protect the environment. - Large-Scale Violence
Iraq’s Twenty Years of Carnage — As we agonize over the human costs of the war in Gaza, a timely reflection on the human costs of the US invasion of Iraq. - Developing a Unifying Vision
Cosmopolis or Bust? — An article offering a vision about how today's diverse, cosmopolitan cities can effectively function despite deep differences. - Artificial Intelligence
Let AI remake the whole U.S. government (oh, and save the country) — A rare and hopeful article about the ways in which AI could be used to increase the trustworthiness of governmental institutions -- with at least one real-world precedent. - Class Inequity
Preach What You Practice: Charles Murray on Our New Class Divide: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 — A report on a pretty persuasive conservative strategy for limiting inequality from Charles Murray -- one of the first to highlight the class tensions that would give rise to Donald Trump. - Inflammatory Media
Most News Aggregators Biased to the Left, including Google, Apple, Bing: AllSides Analysis — A report on a systematic assessment of the biases associated with popular news aggregators. - Climate Change
Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power — Startling statistics about how much energy AI is going to consume and how that is likely to affect our efforts to move away from fossil fuels. - US Election
The Nonwhite Working Class Bails Out on the Democrats — More on the political implications of the gigantic culture gap that exists between college-educated elites and the working classes. - The Hyper-Polarization Threat
The Law of Group Polarization — A more academic and scientific exploration of the dynamics that drive polarization -- dynamics that we have to find better ways of limiting.
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