The Dish

No, according to evolutionary biologist David Barash. First he distinguishes between violence and war:

Violence is widespread and, sadly, deeply human, just as the adaptation for violence under certain circumstances is similarly ingrained in many other species. But war is something else. It is a capacity, and involves group-oriented lethal violence. Thus it deserves to be distinguished from rivalry, anger, ‘crimes of passion’ or revenge, or other forms of homicide. …

In his justly admired book The Better Angels of our Nature (2011), the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker made a powerful case that human violence — interpersonal as well as warring — has diminished substantially in recent times. But in his eagerness to emphasise the ameliorating effects of historically recent social norms, Pinker exaggerated our pre-existing ‘natural’ level of war-proneness, claiming that ‘chronic raiding and feuding characterised life in a state of nature’.

The truth is otherwise. As recent studies by the anthropologist Douglas Fry and others have shown, the overwhelmingly predominant way of life for most of our evolutionary history — in fact, pretty much the only one prior to the Neolithic revolution — was that of nomadic hunter-gatherers. And although such people engage in their share of interpersonal violence, warfare in the sense of group-based lethal violence directed at other groups is almost non-existent, having emerged only with early agricultural surpluses and the elaboration of larger-scale, tribal organisation, complete with a warrior ethos and proto-military leadership.

A roundup of Dish posts on the debate over Pinker’s Better Angels here. On a related note, Michael Kazin describes how the current war-weariness over Syria “keeps faith with American tradition”:

The Democrats focused their 1900 campaign on opposition to the ongoing war of conquest in the Philippines. In early 1917, the public’s desire to stay out of World War I was so widespread that peace activists demanded a popular referendum on the question which they thought they had a decent chance to win.  Until Charles Lindbergh started accusing Jews of seeking to pull the U.S. into World War II, his America First Committee was an ideologically diverse group with some 800,000 paid members. The throngs which railed against the wars in Indochina and forced an end to the draft belonged to the most successful of all the peace movements. If hundreds of thousands of protesters had not flocked to the Mall starting in 1965, Lyndon Johnson would likely have been elected to a second term, and Richard Nixon might never have had a first one.

The only wars Americans have almost universally supported have been those which began with an attack on the nation: Pearl Harbor and 9/11. And by the time Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan ended in mid-2012, half the public wanted him to accelerate the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Even brief offensives like the Army’s “punitive expedition” in Mexico that Woodrow Wilson ordered in 1916 and Ronald Reagan’s proxy wars in Central America in the 1980s stirred mass demonstrations and outrage in Congress.

Susan Orlean revealed on Tuesday that @horse_ebooks, a Twitter feed passing itself off as a self-tweeting algorithm, is actually operated by humans:

[Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender] have been working on the project for almost four years, keeping their identities secret from just about everyone, including their colleagues at BuzzFeed, where Bakkila is a creative director, and Howcast, where Bender, until about a year ago, was the vice-president of product development.

Russell Brandom interviewed Bakkila, who defends the project as a work of art:

For starters, Bakkila says he never scheduled a tweet. That meant late nights and fitful posting hours, but for Bakkila, the hardship was part of the art. He modeled the project off of the performance art pieces of Marina Abramovic and Tehching Hsieh, in which the artist’s endurance becomes a central focus of the art. “The point was to never automate it,” Bakkila says. “Part of the installation was performing with no breaks for two years. You begin to see things differently.”

Jason Farago scoffs:

If we were really to believe that @horse_ebooks was art, we would have to find some meaning or importance in its central conceit. Yet the indistinct border between human and machine is about as clichéd as it gets these days, and the hoodwinking of hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers is not a sign of some digital sprezzatura, but of the meaninglessness of the distinction in the first place.

Natalie Kane’s perspective:

The interesting thing is that, in being announced as human-controlled performance art, Horse_eBooks loses most of its power. Knowing that each post wasn’t algorithmically generated, but individually, manually created, tells us differently to what we thought we knew about the technologies that use this technique, less about data and scripts, and more about our need to emulate machines, so as to prove our own supposed authenticity.

Above is the most popular Horse_eBooks tweet, according to FavStar.

Pareene doubts Ted Cruz will mount a successful bid for president:

[T]he trick is to try to be an insurgent conservative that the donor class is still comfortable with. Cruz is not bothering to make alliances with people whose support he would actually need if he decided to run for president. As a trio of BuzzFeed political reporters show, Cruz has already alienated the donor class.

Waldman also discounts Cruz’s chances:

[B]arring a run by the reanimated corpse of John C. Calhoun, Cruz is going to be the most conservative Republican running. And for all the talk of the power of the base, when was the last time the GOP nomination was won by the most conservative candidate in the race? You have to go all the way back to 1980 and Ronald Reagan. Ever since, Republican primary voters have ultimately gone with somebody who was conservative enough—not the most doctrinaire, not the most confrontational, but the one who assured them he’d be with them when it counted, but also assured them he could win. Ted Cruz will not be that candidate.

Derek Thompson uses the above chart to argue that Obamacare and the stimulus are “the most divisive legislation in modern history”:

How do you measure most divisive? [Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JP Morgan,] constructed a table … of the century’s major legislation and the percent difference in voting between the two parties. For example, in 1956, 98 percent of House Republicans and 93 percent of House Democrats voted for the Federal Aid Highway Act, which built the interstate highway system. That’s a “difference gap” of 5 percent. In the Senate, 100 percent of Republicans and 98 percent of Democrats voted for the bill — a “difference gap” of just 2 percent.

Seth Masket counters that just ” because something isn’t partisan doesn’t mean it’s not divisive”:

Obamacare gets an astounding 93.5% score — almost every Democrat supported it, and no Republicans did so. But it’s possible to be divisive without having such a partisan split.

For example, let’s look at the Civil Rights Act of 1964. According to Thompson’s graph, there’s only a “disagreement gap” of 16% — the model of comity. But that tells us little about the bill and a great deal about what the mid-20th century parties looked like. Both parties contained liberals and conservatives. Little separated the two parties, but a great deal divided them internally — particularly civil rights. Look at the roll call vote. Nearly every Representative from every former Confederate state voted no, while virtually every member from a non-Confederate state voted aye. That’s really divisive! It’s just not partisan, given how the parties of the day were organized.

In the wake of the Muslim Brotherhood’s official ban by a Cairo court, Eric Trager reviews the group’s options. A worrying scenario:

Muslim Brothers may abandon the Brotherhood and turn to other Islamist movements, including violent ones. After all, younger Muslim Brothers tend to be more radical than their strategically conservative leaders, and they may now act on that radicalism.  Moreover, rank-and-file Muslim Brothers have used violence as a political tool in the recent past—most notably last December, when Brotherhood cadres attacked, tortured, and killed protesters outside the presidential palace in northern Cairo. And history is rich with examples of Muslim Brothers who turned towards jihadi activities during periods of state repression.

Dalibor Rohac expects the ban to backfire:

The Brotherhood was banned during Nasser’s presidency. In Syria, Brotherhood membership was a capital offence between 1980 and 2011. If anything, these and similar bans strengthened the organization’s narrative of victimhood and enabled it to reemerge strengthened and relying on broader popular support. In a recent paper, I show that the electoral success of the Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath of Arab Spring was foreseeable and resulted from the fact that the group had been actively involved in the provision of social services, particularly to poorer segments of the Egyptian population, and possessed a well-recognized brand name. Over time, this electoral advantage would have dissipated, particularly as the Brethren proved to be rather inept policymakers.

Alas, with the crackdown on the organization, the current leadership of the country seems to be determined to drive the organization underground and to radicalize it.

Joshua Hersh wonders whether the waning revolution has come to an end:

The ruling was breathtaking in scope: it applied not only to the Brotherhood’s political wings but to its social-services activities, and even to any personal declarations of membership individuals might be brazen enough to make—all were declared illegal. The intent was clear: to cast out the Brotherhood from any future role, not just in politics but in Egyptian society altogether. “The plan is to drain the sources of funding, break the joints of the group, and dismantle the podiums from which they deliver their message,” an Egyptian official told the Associated Press.

But if the future of a democratic Egypt is bleak, it is not simply because of sweeping court rulings like Monday’s. Indeed, the question that consumed Egypt for much of July and August —was it a coup?— was always the wrong one. Of course it was a coup. The real question is whether any of the lofty aims of the revolution (the dreams of a popular, democratic government, with civilian control of the military, and a thriving free press), or even the more basic ones (an end to wanton police abuses and outright political corruption) still stand a chance amid the backlash.