From the Everything Is Terrible department:
The Onion’s Clickhole associate editor Daniel Kibblesmith will join BuzzFeed as a staff writer for its Buzz vertical, the publication told staffers Monday … BuzzFeed was among the sites Clickhole was founded to lampoon.
“I’m extremely excited to join the BuzzFeed team,” Kibblesmith told Poynter. “I’ve never felt closer to my ultimate goal of living directly inside of the internet.”
The best thing you’ll see on the Internet today:
Massie sees the upcoming British elections as “a win-win proposition for nationalists and a lose-lose calamity for unionists”:
First, it is entirely possible that the SNP will win the Scottish part of the election — if their performance matched the latest polls, they would take 50 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster constituencies. (Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown’s belated decisions not to run for Parliament again need to be understood against this backdrop.)
Second, and just as disturbingly, David Cameron may yet win a second term. Scots Tories, more than 90 per cent of whom backed the Union, would face a lose-lose proposition. The SNP’s popularity in Scotland might cost Labour the election but only at the price of further weakening the Union. A Tory government with little support in Scotland would encourage the nationalist narrative that Scotland and England are countries of such divergent character that divorce is inevitable. No wonder the SNP secretly pines for the very thing it professes to hate most: Tory supremacy at Westminster.
Last Sunday, Israel’s cabinet advanced a controversial bill that would amend the country’s Basic Laws to define it explicitly as “the national state of the Jewish people”:
According to many critics, the new wording would weaken the wording of Israel’s declaration of independence, which states that the new state would “be based on the principles of liberty, justice and freedom expressed by the prophets of Israel [and] affirm complete social and political equality for all its citizens, regardless of religion, race or gender”. … Netanyahu argued that the law was necessary because people were challenging the notion of Israel as a Jewish homeland.
For my part, I see it as a natural evolution of Israel’s settler policies and the end of any pretense at aiming for a two-state solution. The claim on the West Bank is a religious and racial claim – and that identity is far deeper at this point than any commitment to Western ideas of democracy, and deepening by the day. It’s also a way, of course, to ensure that the slow annexation of the West Bank can continue, because it all but ends any hope of negotiation with the Palestinian leadership. It comes at a time when the Knesset is also considering a proposal (unlikely to pass) that would enshrine punitive home demolitions in Israeli counterterrorism policy, strip citizenship from anyone who expresses support for terrorism, and have anyone brandishing a Palestinian flag arrested for “incitement”. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman openly wants to pay Arab Israelis to leave the country. In such a climate, what can prevent a further weakening of Israeli democracy in favor of racial and religious fundamentalism?
Dahlia Scheindlin nonetheless thinks such a law would be very bad for the Jewish state:
Some insist that it is hypocritical and maybe even anti-Semitic to protest a simple law of national self-definition, when ‘France is for the French people,’ or ‘Germany is the land of the German people.’ Can we lay this argument to rest already? In those examples citizenship overlaps with nationhood. Yes, France is for the French. But what makes someone French is not birth or ethnicity alone, but citizenship. This proposed basic law would codify and demarcate the State of Israel as something that belongs only to a subset of its citizens.
State rights will not overlap with citizenship; they privilege a subset of citizens. Non-Jewish citizens have no route to sharing in the privileged national group. Being Israeli won’t be enough to live equally in this country. In fact, the state has consistently rejected the very idea that there is an Israeli nationality. The true comparison is simple: the law says Israel is for the Jews, just as America once said America is for whites.
The Guardian’s editors come out against it:
Arab citizens of Israel, who make up at least 20% of the population, would be granted civil rights as individuals, but denied “national rights” as a people. This is not a charge levelled by critics. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who voted for the bill, unabashedly admits that, should it become law – and it still faces parliamentary obstacles – only Jews would be granted national rights. An immediate manifestation of the change could be the downgrading of Arabic from its current status as an official language of Israel.
For nearly half a century, Israel’s defenders have insisted that – whatever the world’s misgivings about the 47-year occupation of lands gained in the 1967 war — the country itself, Israel-proper, is a full-blooded democracy, with Palestinian citizens of the country enjoying full equality. This would render that claim false. The basic laws would enshrine inequality, ensuring Jews had fuller rights than Arabs.
Gershon Baskin also opposes the bill:
How could the State of Israel be less to Muhammad who was born in Kafr Kara, whose father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were born in Kafr Kara, than it is to me, who was born in the United States and immigrated here 36 years ago? How could Israel belong more to Svetlana who arrived here a few years ago than to Samira whose family has been living in Haifa for 50 generations? Israel demands loyalty from its Palestinian citizens. Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman even wanted them to take a loyalty oath. What are they expected to be loyal to? Israel continues to discriminate against its Palestinian citizens. There is absolutely no excuse for discrimination on national or religious grounds in Israel after more than 65 years of statehood. The proposed law for the Jewish state would push us in the exact opposite direction.
But Haviv Rettig Gur downplays the controversy, noting that the idea of a “Jewish nation-state law” has been kicking around for years and emerged from the political center, not the far right:
In the summer of 2009, [Institute for Zionist Strategies] staff working on the bill met with former Shin Bet head and then-Kadima MK Avi Dichter, who adopted the initiative eagerly. Dichter is known as a political centrist, a critic of the far-right and an advocate of separation from the Palestinians.
In fact, in explaining his own support for the bill, he described it as an end-run around Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people – a demand Netanyahu saw as a litmus test for the Palestinian willingness to end the conflict. By defining Israel as the Jewish nation-state in its own constitution, simple recognition of Israel, which moderate Palestinian leaders have been willing to do, would necessarily constitute acceptance of the state’s constitutional identification with the Jewish nation, Dichter reasoned. It would remove a small but significant obstacle on the road to peace.
That sounds like whistling past the graveyard of democracy to me. What road to peace? And doesn’t this law all but make Palestinian engagement a dead letter?
If someone wanted to set up a site to include every single nasty illiberal aspect of the new identity politics, well … enjoy. Brendan Eich was just the beginning.
I think it’s pretty clear by now that governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has one over-riding principle in his political life: getting to be president. That was the key rationale behind the campaign to punish 
any Democratic mayors who refused to give him an aura of bipartisanship he could take to the national stage. And that’s the only rationale behind his contemptuous veto of the state legislature’s second attempt to ban the use of gestation crates for sows in factory farms. The crates prevent a pig from moving or turning around for her entire life. They’ve been banned in nine states and throughout the EU. The law was passed by the state Assembly by a vote of 60 to 5 and the state Senate by a vote of 29 to 4. It has the support of close to 90 percent of New Jerseyans in a recent poll. But it would tar Christie’s rep with the hog-farmers in Iowa, and so had to be vetoed. Christie denies that there is a widespread problem at all in New Jersey, with a mere 9,000 pigs, but fails to argue why signing the law wouldn’t merely prevent such cruelty in a few cases or in the future. What’s the harm? He calls a very bipartisan vote a partisan plot.
The veto was not unexpected – but need not be the last word. The state Assembly and the Senate can simply over-ride the veto – and it appears they have the votes to do so. Whether the GOP will follow through – they sure didn’t the last time – is an open question. But I fail to see why they shouldn’t. Christie gets to claim he tried to stop it, and New Jersey can end capricious, money-grubbing cruelty. Win-win no? Especially for the pigs.
#BlackFriday This woman has won Black Friday http://t.co/FpLKgdjafh pic.twitter.com/9j9hdI2n29
— HuffPost UK (@HuffPostUK) November 28, 2014
Peter Weber highlights a new survey:
According to the [National Federation of Retailers]’s survey, by Prosper Insights & Analytics, weekend sales dropped to an estimated $50.9 billion, from $57.4 billion in 2013, and about 133.7 million people said they shopped online or in stores over the four days, a 5.2 percent drop from last year. The retail trade group stood by its forecast that over the entire season, spending will rise 4.1 percent from 2013, but it had a bunch of conflicting explanations for why Black Friday weekend was a relative bust, especially given dropping gas prices and increasing consumer confidence.
Steven Perlberg sums it up:
The fact remains that while Black Friday has become an American institution – with its brawls and stampedes well-documented across social media – it has also decreased in economic relevance as shopping habits shift.
But Barry Ritholtz questions the survey’s methodology:
Ask a person a specific question, and you will typically get a specific answer. The problem is that the answer is either guesswork or fabricated, bearing little if any resemblance to reality. You have no idea what you spent on holiday shopping last year. You have no idea what you are going to spend on holiday shopping this year. The net result of comparing one made-up number with a second made-up number is a random outcome lacking any relationship to actual spending.
These are facts of human behavior. Credible survey methods seem to be wholly unfamiliar to the NRF. Why bother when the fiction works so well? In truth, no one has an idea what the holiday sales were as of yet.
Ed Morrissey notes that sales are hardly limited to the immediate aftermath of Thanksgiving:
If people find good deals before Thanksgiving, they’ll be a lot more inclined to take advantage of them at the moment rather than enter the Thunderdome on the day after Thanksgiving, especially given the contrivances and artificial shortages that would force them into the lines early in the morning. If Black Friday is dying, as some early data suggested, it’s because retailers themselves are making the day less relevant. It may also be because die-hard discount shoppers know they can get the same deals or better by holding out to the end [.] …
Shoppers are wising up, and retailers will get a little more competitive as a result. That doesn’t make Black Friday a dud, but in a couple of more years, it might become an irrelevant measure — and perhaps an object lesson in desensitizing consumers after repeated panic tactics. One can only cry “Wolf!” or “Limited supply!” so often before losing all credibility.
Joe Pinsker elaborates on how clever shoppers can see through sales tactics:
Many retailers depend on cultivating a sense of urgency in shoppers, which leads them to spend irrationally on a deal they believe could evaporate any minute. Cutting through that anxiety might be possible with a shift in mindset: A recent study suggests that when people reflect on a time when they felt grateful, they can become less intent on instant gratification. In fact, those who were merely happy or amused were willing to sacrifice $100 in a year for $18 immediately, but those who were primed to feel grateful were patient enough to draw the line at $30. Another study, to be published early next year, suggests that disciplined people aren’t actually less impulsive in the moment; they just choose to limit the number of tough decisions they have to make.
The president’s disapproval rating just fell to 50 percent. Why? Hispanics are back on board. This presidency is far from over.
More black men need to bring their cell-phones to these police interactions. The rest of us have to see this shit with our own eyes before we’ll begin to understand the rage that simmers beneath the headlines:
Update: the police department defended the interaction:
Oakland County Undersheriff Michael McCabe said Sunday that the deputy acted properly, and took exception to bloggers and social media commenters who he said took the video out of context, and didn’t bother checking to get the rest of the story.
“The store that called about the man has been robbed multiple times in the last year,” McCabe said. “In addition, employees have been robbed while making deliveries. According to the caller, this man was walking back and forth in front of the store five or six times.
A reader starts the debate over a big post you might have missed over Thanksgiving:
I make no claim of expertise on this topic, but your mention of the GI bill caught my attention. You seem to see it as a great equalizer, and I do not wish to challenge the fact that the GI bill created tremendous educational opportunities. However, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the policies of the GI bill disproportionately benefitted whites. So, a policy that you portray as an equalizer arguably helped ossify and perhaps expand the racial gap in educational opportunities. Just like so many of the social and housing policies of that era, the GI bill seems to have helped cement not ameliorate racial disparities. Ira Katznelson has covered this topic well in his scholarly work, as well as in his book When Affirmative Action Was White. In particular, he engages in a compelling dialogue with Suzanne Mettler, who argues that the GI bill was “relatively inclusive”.
Another expands on that reader’s point:
You claimed that the G.I. Bill “was a huge step forward for meritocracy in America.” You should be very careful with your history here.
As pointed out by Ira Katznelson in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, Jim Crow laws and practices were baked into the G.I. Bill. The congressional “Dixiecrats” at the time ensured that the administration of G.I. Bill benefits (and Federal Housing Administration loan insurance and WPA jobs) was left up to each state individually. This meant that Black soldiers in the South returning from WWII were often denied government benefits from these so-called meritocratic programs. Black veterans in the North were barred from buying houses in white neighborhoods and couldn’t obtain loans in Black neighborhoods due to housing shortages and the practice of redlining. From the NY Times book review (which is easier to copy-paste than my copy of Katznelson’s book):
The statistics on disparate treatment are staggering. By October 1946, 6,500 former soldiers had been placed in nonfarm jobs by the employment service in Mississippi; 86 percent of the skilled and semiskilled jobs were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled ones by blacks. In New York and northern New Jersey, ”fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill supported home purchases by nonwhites.”
Discrimination continued as well in elite Northern colleges. The University of Pennsylvania, along with Columbia the least discriminatory of the Ivy League colleges, enrolled only 46 black students in its student body of 9,000 in 1946. The traditional black colleges did not have places for an estimated 70,000 black veterans in 1947. At the same time, white universities were doubling their enrollments and prospering with the infusion of public and private funds, and of students with their G.I. benefits.
I challenge you to do dig deeper into this history before opining that government assistance programs represent anything approaching a meritocracy. In fact, citing the G.I. Bill provides a powerful refutal to that notion. White men were able to attain government-backed housing loans and government-subsidized post-graduate education via the G.I Bill. This allowed them to accumulate wealth in the decades since, while Black people were actively excluded from that process. It’s almost like action was taken to affirm the place of white men in this country!
Many more of your emails to come regarding the debate over affirmative action itself.
The Dish 