October 6, 2026

ALEX, I’LL TAKE “DAVID LEAN’S WORST MOVIE” FOR $500, PLEASE: Fox Butterfield of Arabia.

Fox Butterfield is famous for his repeated inability to tell cause from effect in stories like the one headlined “Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling.”

We now have the Arab-Israeli conflict version of Fox Butterfield, thanks to a piece in Foreign Affairs authored by Michael Robbins, Amaney A. Jamal, and Mark Tessler. This time the punchline isn’t the headline. Instead, it’s more like a recurring joke throughout the article.

Titled “Palestinians Want a Two-State Solution,” it’s a rare optimistic essay on the conflict. The authors review Palestinian opinion surveys over time and show a clear trend toward a willingness to negotiate. That, by itself, is a positive development, though limited because those polled don’t live in a democracy and therefore their leader, who has already rejected the framework, must still be convinced of the value of peace. A real test will be whether there is any public pressure from Palestinians on their government to reverse its position and to discard the “resistance” culture built into Palestinian cultural and education institutions.

But assuming this desire for a negotiated solution is accurate, what inspired it? Here we have our Fox Butterfield moment:

“Gazans, despite having borne the brunt of destruction over the past three years, tend to be the most pragmatic: an even greater proportion of them are open to a two-state solution than are Palestinians living in the West Bank.”

Gazans, having seen their invasion of Israel ultimately fail, are indeed being pragmatic by expressing their openness to a different strategy. The authors appear to believe that pragmatism fell from the sky like fairy dust. But in fact what’s being described here is quite simple: The Palestinians started and then lost a war, and now they are open to a negotiated end to hostilities.

History has numerous reminders of when happens when the side that started a war loses it:

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IS PARIS BURNING? Could the Riots in France Lead to the Election of Conservative Marine Le Pen?

President Emmanuel Macron and his supposed “centrists” can scream “Nazi!” all they want about Le Pen and National Rally. That’s been their electoral strategy since Le Pen’s father was running for president in the 1970s. But the colossal failure of Macron’s left-wing policies and those who preceded him, along with the rise of populists in France, has created a genuine opening for the right that Le Pen will almost certainly exploit.

The fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is trying to start a revolution will make Le Pen’s job a lot easier.

UnHerd:

Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, levelling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)

“Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a ‘Sixth Republic’ — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and ‘a New France,'” writes UnHerd’s Andrew Hussey. “Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants.”

This kind of overreach by Mélenchon is already leading to a significant backlash against the left.

“Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the ‘Old France’ — which still makes up the majority of French people,” Hussey continues. “With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s.”

It’s not hard for “Old France” to decide which side they should be supporting.

And it’s not hard to notice, as John Daniel Davidson writes at the Federalist, that “The riots in France last week stand as a warning to the United States and all western countries: mass immigration will split your country in two, and the two sides will eventually go to war.”

Posted at 4:43 pm by Ed Driscoll

YEP, WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES:

Make the Ottoman Hejaz Great Again?

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Barack Obama to campaign with Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

The Oct. 24 event will feature Obama, as well as El-Sayed and Jocelyn Benson, who is seeking the governorship, the Michigan Democratic Party announced on Monday.

Obama has generally stayed out of the spotlight since leaving the White House, though he has ocassionally appeared on the campaign trail for other Democratic candidates.

The Michigan race is expected to be one of the most competitive of the cycle and a pivotal contest in the battle for control of the upper chamber.

The trick, of course, is trying to figure out which one is actually to the left of the other.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

THE STANDARDIZED TEST WAR HEATS UP AGAIN. Between the sudden reemergence of woke thought policing, campus sexual assault being on the front pages again, and a plague arising from the East, it seems like everything old is new again.

Posted at 3:10 pm by Robert Shibley

NEEDS AT LEAST TWO MORE ZEROES, BUT POINT TAKEN:

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

WHAT, THEY RAN OUT OF KANGAROOS FOR THEIR COURT?

Posted at 2:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Correctly Understanding the ‘Stupidity’ of the Left.

A long list of prominent conservatives have referred to leftists and Democrats as dumb, stupid, incompetent, crazy, and insane. In 2007, Ann Coulter wrote the book “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans.” Both Rush Limbaugh and President Trump regularly referred to Democrats as “Dumbocrats.” More recently, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus called Democrats “the crazy party,” and JD Vance framed the contrast between the parties as “common sense vs. crazy.” Matt Margolis titled a piece in PJ Media this year “Democrats Are Too Stupid to Heed This Warning,” and posited that somewhere between the 1990s and today, the Democratic Party lost its mind.

Some of this stuff gets a chuckle, but conservatives need to be careful with this narrative.

Conservatives need to understand that this tactic can not only contradict the more serious messages they’re trying to convey about leftist policies, it can also remove responsibility from leftists for their malevolence. Consider a recent interview in which Representative Jim Jordan explained that the left’s open-border policy was part of a shrewd, long-term plan to bring in new Democrat constituents, with sanctuary-city policies as another step in that plan. Yet in the same interview, he called the policy “Just stupid” and “one of the dumbest policies I’ve ever heard of,” and in a later interview, adding, “just about every single position today’s left adopts is crazy.”

So we are told that leftists are shrewd, long-term planners who are simultaneously stupid and crazy. Which is it? The distinction may seem trivial, but it’s not.

“Evil” works.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

EVERY RECORD HAS BEEN FALSIFIED:

Posted at 2:34 pm by Glenn Reynolds

UM…:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

CRUEL, BUT TO THE LEFT, USEFUL:

“I think most people (if given the chance) would prefer to not become victimized histrionic narcissists and it’s cruel to build a cultural incentive structure that leads them down that path yet here we are.”

Posted at 1:59 pm by Stephen Green

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Dirty Deeds After Dark: British Government Locks Down Entire Town to Import More Migrants.

As I am in a Labour fascist bashing mood, I wanted to bring you something else the kinder, gentler government of the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, was doing to British citizens last night in the name of diversity and inclusion.

They were ordering them all to remain locked in their homes until the authorities gave them permission to move again, and not because the Russians lost the bones of a saint and a pissed-off God unleashed a plague on the world.

Would it were so simple.

The government was preparing for the arrival of a ‘migrant boat,’ rumored to have shoved off the coast of France earlier that day, and headed for the coastal town of Town Gosport, population around 83,000.

Meanwhile, UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood basically admits that the “migrants” arrive via rape boats.

But I guess importing non-assimilating rapists is a small price to pay for… everything else Labour is doing to break Britain.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

SUPER INTELLIGENCE DOOMERS WANT TO CONTROL A MONSTER THAT DOESN’T EXIST:

SI doomers have built an entire lexicon with incredibly loaded terms that are meant to advance their objectives. Consider the term “alignment.” To the uninitiated, it sounds like straightforward, innocent, uncomplicated language. Yet within the doomer discourse, alignment is the most loaded premise of all time. Doomers say that SI models are potentially capable of developing independent objectives akin to those of a sentient being. Alignment isn’t about software design. Instead, it focuses on whether humanity itself can retain control over a new form of intelligence.

SI “risk” is another severely loaded term in the doomer lexicon. Indeed, every novel technology has risks if the innovation leaps far ahead of our understanding of tackling the security parameters. But when SI doomers invoke “Risk,” they are often smuggling the notion of a hypothetical sentient SI that seeks human extinction into the conversation. Then SI “Safety” becomes the answer for this hypothetical “risk” event without any of the core premises being grounded in reality. If we take the bait and accept the doomers’ terms, they come to us with preferred solutions that are now “common sense” in the policy and politics world. This quickly turns into advocacy for restricting access to like-minded ideologues and delegating authority to a small circle of approved experts for the sake of humanity.

So often in these “breakout” scenarios breathlessly reported in the media, we find a not-so-subtle hint that can only be interpreted as a glimpse into the future of an autonomous adversary. Of course, it’s just not true. And by the time anyone more sober-minded can explain the prompts, permissions, tools, etc. that these systems involve, the public is manipulated into the sense that SI “went rogue” again. Policymakers in D.C. and doomer corporations in California then declare that ordinary technical controls are inadequate, and it must be solved with regulation, legislation, and the like. The conclusions are continually outrunning the evidence in front of us.

Meanwhile, Commentary’s Abe Greenwald writes that the AI programmers are dealing with something that doesn’t exist, either: Silicon Souls.

One of the most vocal proponents of the AI soul is Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. The New York Times reports on a series of meetings that Olah convened with theologians this year to determine how to ensure that AI serves the general good. But during these meetings, it became clear that Anthropic’s engineers already believe that their Claude model is conscious, has feelings, and therefore deserves the status of an entity with rights.

From what I can tell, none of the participating theologians agreed. Here’s a representative example: Rabbi Mois Navon “argued that if Anthropic was right and Claude were conscious, then the company was creating slaves, because it was making conscious entities work for free. Rabbi Navon said that he personally was not troubled by the slavery issue because he did not believe the machine was conscious, but that Mr. Olah was troubled.”

I concur.

But here’s what is troubling about all this. Anthropic has written a constitution for Claude nicknamed the “Soul Doc.” Here’s how the Times describes it: “Instead of having the models follow a specific list of rules, the constitution focuses on developing the models’ overall character, informing the way they make decisions.”

AI developers are still overseeing the writing of computer code, no matter sophisticated their chatbots seem. Why do they want to see themselves as Dr. Eldon Tyrell from Blade Runner?

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll