StephenKMackSD's Blog

Newspaper Reader, and other possible guises!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 16, 2026

https://www.ft.com/?&segmentID=ad94a536-e1f0-b9d8-39e5-d6d1fc32b2d8&gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23619929682&gbraid=0AAAAAC_ArBuRlD-rYnCXYOky3Et7yZ65i&gclid=CjwKCAjw1N7NBhAoEiwAcPchp3zeayz_1G_K6HICWbL8pD8r8nAaYjZtGQqxzbgs-v88vNh3Vqk7DxoCOrgQAvD_BwE

Editor: Reader here is a collection on my comments on Mr. Luce’s comments over time!

https://www.ft.com/content/f69b4b68-55d0-11e7-9fed-c19e2700005f

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Political Reporter riffs on a theme from Edward Luce

Posted on February 27, 2017 by stephenkmacksd

Can the reader of his latest essay wonder, has Mr. Luce discovered the 99%? If so, it qualifies as a belated victory for the Scruffy Hippiedom of Occupy Wall Street! So much for my lapse into the hyperbolic. Mr. Luce carefully lays out the likely next steps in the Trump/Bannon project of Economic Nationalism: this notion reeks of the most unsavory historical connotations.

Over the weekend the New Democrats have chosen the respectable Neo-Liberal Tom Perez to lead the Party. For some very informative background on the contest between Perez and Ellison see this Intercept report:

DNC Chair Candidate Tom Perez’s Bank-Friendly Record Could Kneecap the Democratic Party

Why would I mention this election in regards to the Trump advocacy of an Economic Nationalist Agenda? Mr. Perez is the candidate of the Clinton/Brazil/Wassermann-Schultz, not forgetting Leon Panetta , faction of the New Democrats: a perpetuation of the ‘Old Guard’. The political corollary of the Pelosi/ Schumer congressional leadership.

How can the New Democrats hope to even mount an opposition to the Trump /Bannon political project, when they are still beholden to the utterly corrupt Clinton/Brazil/Wassermann-Schultz leadership? Who have willfully discarded the New Deal mantle of reform, in favor of being New Democrats, which is in fact a cosmetically enhanced Reaganism.

If the election of Perez tells the reader anything, it is that the New Democrats will be defeated in 2018, and if they persist in their addiction to the Clinton Neo-Liberalism, a defeat in 2020 is also very likely.

The formation of the ‘Resistance’, that has its root in the Clinton Apologists endless propagandizing, in the hope of Impeaching Trump, seems very unlikely with both Houses of Congress controlled by Republicans. The desperation of those apologists is such that Rachel Maddow condemned Jill Stein for her silence on the Russian Question:

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/rachel-maddow-why-hasnt-jill-stein-said-anything-about-the-trump-russia-scandal/

Even given the Russian/Trump connection, and a pending congressional investigation, led by Republicans. Trump seems to be playing into the hands of the ‘resisters’ by his banning of the New York Times,CNN and Politico from White House briefings.Trump, the Peronist, doesn’t even rely on other political actors in creating exploitable political chaos, he creates it himself by banning reporters, and posting on twitter.

Yet the New Democrats refuse to confront the fact that the Neo-Liberal Age is over, in the 9th year of the watershed of the Economic Calamity of 2008. Reform or die, that is the stark choice that the New Democrats refuse to acknowledge. Could their adamant refusal to confront reality be the predictor of the rise of the Greens?

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/7dec9a66-faa2-11e6-9516-2d969e0d3b65

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https://www.ft.com/content/e63646c4-1962-11e7-a53d-df09f373be87

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Edward Luce’s toxic amalgam of ‘Depth Psychology’ & The Occult, as an exploratory device for American politics 2019. Old Socialist wonders

Posted on March 21, 2019 by stephenkmacksd

Headline: Magical thinking crosses party lines in America

Sub-headline: The left may prefer white magic to Donald Trump’s black, but everyone is dabbling

Mr. Luce wastes no time calling to account the New Democrats for their lackadaisical attitude toward Trump. Yet this elides from the political picture the responsibility of both Parties and Pundits, like Luce, in their long-term advocacy for the Neo-Liberal Swindle, and its aftermath from the 2008 Crash to the dismal political present present.Trump is a product of this political/economic catastrophe.

Yet in this thicket of Political Metaphysics, that lapses into Occult jabber, that is unintentionally comic, Luce fails to ask the salient question: where is the money coming from to support this crowded field of candidates?

The New Democrats, fully under the thumb of the Clinton coterie, not to speak of AIPAC, don’t have an inexhaustible supply of money to waste on these candidates. But to create the fiction of choice might that money be spent upon such candidates, as the in-or-too of lending that fiction plausibility? Also keep in mind the willful destruction of campaign finance reform orchestrated by Citizens United and Justice Roberts, champion of stare decisis ?

While after some maladroit stage management , a specialty of Mrs. Clinton and her minions , she will enter as the compromise candidate that offers the best chance to win in 2020. The only real problem with this sketch of a possible scenario is that Sen. Sanders, and his coterie, represent a real danger to this possible coronation of Hillary. So the imperative of attacking Sanders must begin as soon as possible, in sum, The Bernie Bros must be resuscitated and or re-imagined for this campaign.

In his haste to write his column, Mr. Luce misses an opportunity to think and imagine what might be plausible in an actual American Politics. In favor of a failed, not to speak of a maladroit Hegelian pastiche: Luce should stop reading the Straussian fabulist Fukuyama!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/cc30e206-4a6c-11e9-8b7f-d49067e0f50d

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Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary

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edward.luce@ft.com on The Republican’s patriarchal bubble. Political Observer comments

Posted on September 20, 2018 by stephenkmacksd

Headline: Brett Kavanaugh and the Republicans’ patriarchal bubble

Sub-headline: Party’s fight to approve Supreme Court nominee risks further alienation of female voters

Quite surprised that Mr. Luce has read the 1970 Feminist classic ‘Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society’ by Eva Figes. I still have my paperback copy that I bought at the Compton College bookstore in the early years of that decade.

As with his earlier essay Mr. Luce continues to frame his comments on Kavanaugh and the Republicans in an eternal political present, with the briefest nod to Kavanaugh’s reactionary political history. Anti-Patriarchy is the rhetorical ‘actor’ that is at the root of the Kavanaugh opposition, as argued by Luce. Trump’s growing unpopularity with women voters is another convenient framing employed by Mr. Luce. Yet the record of the almost wholesale Dixiecrat Migration, from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act provides part of the answer to the ‘why’ of that racism, misogyny, homophobia and a generalized xenophobia that now dominate the Republican Party. Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ and Reagan’s notorious Neshoba County Fair speech, that opened his 1980 run for the presidency are just two examples of this. The Party of Lincoln has been supplanted, by a Republican Party, that willfully cast aside Lincoln, in favor of its newest member’s racism and misogyny, that defined the Dixiecrat’s identity politics, and in due course the seductive mirage of Free Market Economics.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/17c43268-bcab-11e8-8274-55b72926558f

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Edward Luce on the ‘Mueller Report’. Political Observer comments

Posted on March 25, 2019 by stephenkmacksd

The sub-headline begins the inauspicious essay from Mr. Luce, in a Shakespearean allusion. The headline writers relied on their elite educations to provide the necessary garnish to Luce’s unalloyed hero worship of former FBI director Mueller.

Trump will feel dangerously vindicated — when you strike at a king be sure to kill him

A sample of Luce’s Hero Worship, a latter day Carlyle:

Spare a thought for Robert Mueller. He wrapped up an exhaustive investigation within two years of being asked to do so — easily beating his predecessors. Moreover, he stuck resolutely to his brief. Unlike Kenneth Starr, who expanded his probe into the Clintons’ failed real estate deal in Arkansas to include sex in the White House with an intern, Mr Mueller avoided fishing expeditions. He ran an operation with zero leaks. By any measure he embodied integrity and diligence in a town sorely deficient in both. Yet he managed to disappoint both wings of US politics.

In the Age of Trump Mr. Mueller is the yardstick by which all other political actors are measured. This is political desperation wedded to a deadline: vulgar melodrama ,the stuff of the small black and white screen of 1952:

Mr Mueller is indeed “America’s straightest arrow”.

Never fear the Party Line of Putin as The New Stalin makes its appearance with a warning that Russian Interference in American Elections future is a stark reality that needs to be faced!

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By the same token, an outsized role was conferred on Vladimir Putin as the evil genius who robbed Hillary Clinton of the presidency. There were large dollops of evidence supporting both views.

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Likewise, Mr Mueller proved the Russians interfered in the 2016 election — as they have tried to do in other democracies. That threat still exists. Mr Trump publicly requested Russia’s help and Russia obliged.It could happen again. Washington has done almost nothing to strengthen its electoral infrastructure since 2016.

Compare the Hero Worship of Mueller by Luce, with David Bromwich’s Hero Worship of Comey in The London Review of Books of August 9, 2018:

Comey’s memoir has now surpassed the combined sales of Michael Wolff’s portrait of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, and Hillary Clintons’s election elegy What Happened. The book, written in an idiom identical to the one he uses in interviews and press briefings, is clearly the work of an un-ghosted author, and it contains passages most unusual for an official memoir:

There is a place I have visited on the coast of North Carolina where two barrier islands come close together. In the narrow passageway between them, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean meet the waters of the huge and shallow sound that lies behind the islands. There is turbulence in that place and waves appear to break even though no land is visible. I imagine that the leaders of the Department of Justice stand at that spot, between the turbulent waters of the political world and the placid waters of the apolitical sound. Their job is to respond to the political imperatives of the president and the voters who elected him, while also protecting the apolitical work of the thousands of agents, prosecutors, and staff who make up the bulk of the institution. So long as the leaders understand the turbulence, they can find their footing. If they stumble, the ocean water overruns the sound and the department has become just another political organ. Its independent role in American life has been lost and the guardians of justice have drowned.

This depth of formal piety cannot be faked; the passage shows the burden (as Comey sees it) of maintaining constitutional and legal restraints on Donald Trump.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/2018/08/09/david-bromwich/american-breakdown

The record of the FBI is one of criminality and mendacity pioneered by the execrable J. Edgar Hoover, that was continued by his successors Mueller and Comey: the FBI Crime Lab scandal just one of the many demonstrated coverups and incompetencies wedded to the lies of the FBI. The desperation experienced by The Midwives of Trump, like Luce and Bromwich, in the Age of Trump, that they helped to birth is thought never to be entertained.

Also Mr. Luce giving credence to the ‘Russian Interference’ lie is that it provides political cover for the Clinton/Clapper/Brennan coterie, and their political allies like MSNBC, Maddow, Schiff and a host of fellow travelers, as the in-order-too of fomenting a New Cold War, based on a self-serving series of political lies. Bret Stephens enunciates the New Party Line:

This sounds like Obama saying that we need is ‘to put the past behind us’, that was his rationalization for not prosecuting the Wall Street Thieves who funded his campaign. Or Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Nixon, to spare the country the ordeal of a protracted exercise of Constitutionally mandated Rule of Law: The Empire must never seem to falter!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/6c5e80e6-4e80-11e9-b401-8d9ef1626294

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Edward Luce’s toxic political romance with Henry Kissinger.

Posted on November 4, 2021 by stephenkmacksd

Political Reporter comments.

What regular readers of Mr. Luce can forget his interview with ‘The Great Man’?

Headline: Henry Kissinger: ‘We are in a very, very grave period’

Sub-headline: The grand consigliere of American diplomacy talks about Putin, the new world order — and the meaning of Trump

https://www.ft.com/content/926a66b0-8b49-11e8-bf9e-8771d5404543

The New Cold War has been a fact for almost ten years, or even longer in its nascent stages: enthusiastically advocated by this newspaper and its hirelings!

In the political present ‘The Great Man’ now becomes the voice of reason instead of ‘the grand consigliere’.

Just select a paragraph, of Mr. Luce’s essay, for the current cast of heroes and villains:

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said that whoever led in artificial intelligence would dominate the world. Kissinger, who, with Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, is co-author of a new book, The Age of AI, says we have not yet begun to grasp the impact it is having on future warfare and geopolitical stability. The FT recently reported that China had tested a hypersonic missile, which could enable it to evade US missile defence systems. The Pentagon this week estimated that China planned to quadruple its nuclear arsenal by 2030. Nicolas Chaillan, the former head of AI at the Pentagon, told the FT he had resigned because he could not stand to watch China overtaking the US. “It is already over,” he said.

Note this Luce sentence – a retrospective apologetic for The Great Man’s’ murderous past.

Yet Kissinger’s analysis should be separated from moral evaluations of his cold war record.

The reader needs to steel herself for the final pronouncement, from Mr. Luce, on ‘The Great Man’:

At 98, he is among the few living figures to have played a leading role grappling with the last century’s existential threats. Each side eventually acquired an intimate knowledge about their nuclear capacities and doctrines that may be impossible to match on AI, he argues. There are no spy planes that could take pictures of China’s AI. There is no clear way of deterring attacks, or of knowing where they come from.

“With nuclear weapons it was possible to conceive of principles of deterrence in which there was some symmetry between the damage on each side,” he said. “If an unrestrained [US-China] arms race goes from nuclear to AI, the dangers of dramatic escalation would be very great.”

Political Reporter, and other guises, where they may apply!

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On the Political Rehabilitation of Zbigniew Brzezinski, via FP and Edward Luce!

Posted on July 7, 2025 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jul 02, 2025

What is telling is that FP was founded by Samuel P. Huntington of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and its racist twin ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ ! Luce was also a Speech writer to US Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, 1999-2001. In sum Mr. Luce is a well connected political writer, and regular columnist for The Financial Times. He qualifies and one of Lippmann’s Technoctrat’s for hire, as a check against too much democracy!

Mr. Luce’s notorious interview with Kissinger, in the guise of The Great Man, is here:

Lunch with the FT: Henry Kissinger ‘We are in a very, very grave period’

Edward Luce | Financial Times

July 20, 2018

https://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/lunch-ft-henry-kissinger/

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On the Political Rehabilitation of Zbigniew Brzezinski, via FP and Edward Luce!

Posted on July 7, 2025 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer comments.

Editor: In the bleek Age of Trump, Simon & Schuster provides Public Realations chatter:

An intimate and masterful biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski—President Carter’s national security advisor and one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers—from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland’s razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump’s first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America’s “Cold War University”—and who ousted Washington’s gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.

Brzezinski’s impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow’s “Achilles heel”—the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow’s grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history’s orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Zbig/Edward-Luce/9781982173647

Political Observer.

Political Observer.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 15, 2026

The reader need only look to this Esquire magazine issue of 1967 to find the precurosor of the the near adoration of the Kennedy family. Gore Vidal’s ‘The Holy Family’ was, and is, revelatory of the near adoration of the Kennedy Family and the concomitant toxic Mythology!

Editor: Now in vacious Age of Trump, what is left of that once vibrant Kennedy Mythology, in the political present! That de-evolution is expressed in this newspaper headline The Lost Horizon of John and Carolyn, as chronicled by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. What can the reader make of the demise of once thriving Gossip Columnist, of another time! Maureen Dowd in this instance, now fills that empty space?

Once, in the mid-1990s, John F. Kennedy Jr. called me. He had a great voice, with a seductive thread of mischief running through it. Even on the phone, I could feel the magnetism of the reigning dreamboat.

He wanted to do a Q&A with me for his new magazine, George, which blended politics with pop culture.

“After all,” he said, “you’re the godmother of this form of journalism.”

I really wanted to meet J.F.K. Jr. But I write better than I talk, and I told him I was afraid that I’d be hopelessly inarticulate.

“That’s what editors are for!” he said puckishly, adding, “You’re the only person who has turned me down for this — except the pope.”

I was skeptical about George. Politics and entertainment were merging, and I was worried that the balance would tilt toward the superficial. George was a fanzine for “the giant puppet show” of politics, as J.F.K. Jr. called it — a strange blend of Vanity Fair and C-SPAN. Was it too frivolous, with a glossy debut cover of Cindy Crawford cosplaying George Washington? Was it weird to have a cover with Drew Barrymore vamping as Marilyn Monroe, the paramour of J.F.K. Jr.’s father and uncle?

J.F.K. Jr. was the nation’s magic child: little John-John saluting his father’s casket in a gesture that broke the nation’s heart, now all grown up. He had become a stylish, adventurous man surfing New York City on bikes and Rollerblades, searching for his purpose in life.

Miraculously, despite all his travails, he was a caring soul who tried to make people feel special. I thought he should use that magic for more than persuading Salma Hayek to pose with an elephant. He was considering a bid for New York governor when he died.

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Editor: The Reader can almost hear the voices of Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Rona Barrett, Joyce Haber and Liz Smith? But in the above paragraph, just quoted, she demonstrates a verifiable sympathy, or its distant cousin?

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Editor: A selection from her commentay:

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The cool aesthetics were a means to an end, an ensorcelling engine that put you in a position to change the world.

The Camelot myth has tattered, particularly with the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a destructive, unhealthy force in Trump world.

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The pair went from an unlimited horizon to a “false horizon,” when pilots get dangerously disoriented. All that promise literally vanished into thin air.

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A legion of new acolytes is emulating Bessette’s chic ’90s minimalism, neutral palette and quiet luxury, while men in Gotham are comically imitating John’s carefree style, biking in suit and backpack, with a Kangol hat or a backward baseball cap.

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Editor: Dowd resorts to Romantic Kitch aimed at the disatisfaction of ‘Women, increasingly dejected by unsatisfying online interactions with men,’

Women, increasingly dejected by unsatisfying online interactions with men, were verklempt about the episode depicting John sending flowers to Carolyn’s office every day until she agreed to go out with him; they can’t get over the way that John, played by the hunky, if not savvy enough, Paul Anthony Kelly, gazes adoringly at Carolyn, played by the lovely, if not lusty enough, Sarah Pidgeon. They want to take cues from Carolyn’s “Rules”-like way of staying elusive.

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Editor: Reader only 355 more words to wade through! Yet ‘unsatisfying online interactions with men,’ might that be corrected by person to person contact, between men and women? Or is that too simplistic an answer?

Political Observer.

Newspaper Reader: Jeremy Waldron’ superb commentary and replies to The New York Review of October 9, 2014 & October 23, 2014 issues are worth the reader attention and contemplation!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 15, 2026

Triumph of the Nudge

By Corey Robin on 03.14.26

One of the more delightful innovations of the Obama era was the requirement that every full-time employee—or taxpayer, I don’t know—has to provide proof of “health insurance offering and coverage”, when filing their taxes. It’s called a 1095-C form. The employer provides it to you, the employee, and we file it with your taxes.

The 1095-C form is yet one more way that Americans show to the world our pitch-perfect sense of how to waste time while pretending to do something good. Instead of having the government provide everyone with healthcare or health insurance, our leaders and experts come up with some sort of nudge that somehow or another is supposed to get us somehow closer to some group of people having some sort of access to some sort of coverage for some sort of healthcare—all the while doing nothing but forcing people to fill out more forms.

That’s the baseline of our country’s distinctive combination of sadism and tomfoolery.

But now comes along that bit of extra, which is so expressive of our moment. Where CUNY used to provide us with the 1095-C form—we’d get in the mail and file it with our taxes—some genius somewhere in the institution decided that it would be smarter and more efficient and save money and time for everyone to subcontract the providing of this one form to a private company.

Wait, it gets better.

Back in early February, all of us got a very strange and fishy-looking email from someone claiming to be an employee at CUNY, an email out of nowhere, from no apparent office at CUNY, saying that we had to register at some company or some website called bencorpaca, where we would provide company codes, social security numbers, passwords, the whole nine yards.

Obviously most people thought the email was one of the ten thousand phishing scams that we get every day at CUNY, despite our having ten thousand spam filters and twenty thousand passwords requiring thirty thousand verification codes and other security processes.

So the next day, after getting this initial suspicious-looking email, we get a follow-up email from the institution saying, “Many people have inquired regarding the legitimacy of the email received from the University Benefits Office this afternoon with the subject ‘ACA 1095C Tax Information.’ This email is legitimate and was validated with the sender at CUNY.”

In other words, click on the link you were sent, register with this new company, just so you can get one form—one fucking piece of paper, called a 1095-C, which was mandated by the Obama administration in order to, sort of, nudge people to, sort of, well you know the rest of the drill.

So today I go through this whole process. I click on the link. I enter the company code provided to me. I enter the last four digits of my social. And my email address. A new link is sent to me—so that I can sign up for the service that CUNY has subcontracted out to someone, in order to save time and money, in order to create efficiencies and synergies of scale—to sign up for the new service, come up with a new password, click this, waive that, sign this, so that, lo and behold, I can be told this: “No forms available. You will receive notification when your Form is available.”

It’s March 14. I wanted to finish filing my taxes this weekend. But now I wait. Because of :

Internet. Email. Links. Portals. Forms. Passwords. Obamacare. Efficiency. Nudges. Savings. Improvement. Progress. Better. Bullshit

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Editor: some of us have memories that reach back to 2014!

It’s All for Your Own Good

Jeremy Waldron

‘Why Nudge?’ by Cass Sunstein

October 9, 2014 issue

In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein considered the choices made by ordinary people about their retirement.

Many employees have the opportunity to enroll in a 401(k) plan, in which their contributions will be sheltered from taxes and to which their employer will also contribute. But a considerable number of people do not choose to enroll in a 401(k) plan and of those who do, many select levels of contribution that are far below what would be most advantageous to them. Why? Probably because of inertia. It is easier not to make a decision than go to the trouble of calculating an optimal contribution.

Employers sometimes try to educate people to make better choices, offering them retirement-planning seminars, for example. But the lessons of these seminars are soon forgotten: “Employees often leave educational seminars excited about saving more but then fail to follow through on their plans.” And so Sunstein and Thaler suggested a different strategy. Instead of teaching people to overcome their inertia, we might take advantage of their inertia to solve the problem. Suppose we arrange things so that enrollment at some appropriate level of contribution is the default position—the position that obtains if the employee does nothing. Something has to be the default position; why not make it the position that accrues most to the employee’s benefit, “using inertia to increase savings rather than prevent savings”?

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It’s All for Your Own Good

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Nudges: Good and Bad

Cass R. Sunstein, reply by Jeremy Waldron

On freedom of choice, autonomy, and dignity

October 23, 2014 issue

In response to:

It’s All for Your Own Good from the October 9, 2014 issue

To the Editors:

I am most grateful to Jeremy Waldron for his generous and clear-headed review of my books Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism and Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas [NYR, October 9]. Waldron worries that nudging poses a risk to autonomy and dignity, but it is important to see that nudges are meant to promote both of those values. Disclosure of relevant information (about the terms of a school loan or a mortgage, for example) is hardly a threat to human dignity. When people are asked what they would like to choose, their autonomy is enhanced, not undermined. (Active choosing is a prime nudge.) A GPS certainly nudges, but it does not compromise what Waldron favors, which is “a steadfast commitment to self-respect.” Waldron is right to worry about the risk of manipulation, but the whole idea of nudging is designed to preserve freedom of choice, and in that sense both autonomy and dignity.

Cass R. Sunstein
Robert Walmsley University Professor
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Jeremy Waldron replies:

I appreciate this clarification. Many nudges simply involve an improvement of the decision-making environment and of the information available to choosers. Professor Sunstein is right that there can be no objection to that. But in his book, the term “nudge” also comprises attempts to manipulate people behind their backs, using their own defective decision-making to privilege outcomes that we think they ought to value. I think both of us should be concerned about that and about a world in which that more sinister sense of nudging becomes a widespread instrument of public policy.

October 23, 2014

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Editor: Jeremy Waldron’s short but telling reply provides a telling commentary on the manipulation practised by decision making elites, to reduce it to the essentials, that are valued by those very elites. Corey Robin riffs on self-serving complaint via ‘Bullshit’!

Newspaper Reader.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/13/donald-trump-iran-war-total-disaster

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 14, 2026

Newspaper Reader: What are Trumps confused reasons? What are Freedland’s political reasons?

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Jonathan Freedland since his defaming of Jeremy Corbyn, with help from other Zionists Hysterics, he now carefilly frames his latest comment on the Trump’s War on Iran via this sentence fragment ‘Even taking Trump’s confused reasons for the Iran war at face value,’ The reader might think that our ‘expert’ is really just what he is, another propagandist! In sum Freedland is a propgandist under the cover of political exploration, as an expanitory device?

Editor: Nothing gets in way of Freedland political chatter but his own well worn medacity!

Editor: Freedland brief attempt at ‘most charitable light’.

It’s not easy, but let’s try to look at this war in the best, most charitable light. Let’s try to see the US-Israel conflict with Iran as its prosecutors and advocates would want us to see it.

Editor: This next paragraph is not explanitory but is about Trumpism framed by a fellow Traveler:

They would say that it has two aims, both legitimate. The first is to weaken if not remove a regime that has done terrible evil to its own people. Who could mourn the supreme leader of a government that, according to one report, gunned down 30,000 of its citizens on the streets in just two days on 8 and 9 January? Listen to those Iranians who long ago reached the glum conclusion that the only way they could be rid of their tormentors was through external military action. As one exiled Iranian put it to me this week: “The Iranian people have been begging the world for help for so many years. They tried voting for change in 2009; they were killed. They tried protesting in 2019, 2022 and this year; they were massacred in the tens of thousands … They were out of all other options.”

Editor: A collection of Freedlands revelatory fragments leaves The Reader almost in augh of his ability to shape even mold the readers thought processes?

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Iran hoped to make good on that threat by arming and funding the proxies – Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis – that formed its much-vaunted “ring of fire” around Israel. After 7 October 2023, Israel resolved not to wait for its enemies to strike, but to rob them in advance of the means to do so.

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The goals identified by Donald Trump have shifted daily, if not hourly. One minute he wants regime change, the next he seeks merely an end to Iran’s nuclear programme. At breakfast, he insists on unconditional surrender; by lunchtime, he’s open to negotiation.

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It offers vanishingly few examples of a dictatorship removed through the use of air power alone and, when US force has toppled regimes in the Middle East, the result has not been a smooth transition to democracy but rather the unleashing of enduring chaos and bloodshed: look no further than Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.

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After nearly half a century, the apparatus of the Islamic Republic is too entrenched, too committed to its own survival, to be felled so easily.

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Editor: Freedland’s resort to David Petraeus, which is the very definition of political bankruptcy!

To distil what the former head of the CIA, David Petraeus, told the Unholy podcast this week: “We were hoping for Delcy Rodríguez … Instead, what we got is a young Kim Jong-un.”

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Editor: War Criminal Benjamin Netanyahu makes his appearance. Netanyahu has now disappeared …

Benjamin Netanyahu may be urging Iranians to “take to the streets”, but how exactly are they supposed to do that, with an internet shutdown that makes organisation close to impossible and in the face of security forces ready to machine-gun their fellow citizens?

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Editor: The Iranians now control the strait of Hormuz: ‘to disrupt the lives of hundreds of millions’ the manifest power of the Iran to manage its own oil reserves!

By effectively closing the strait of Hormuz, it has reminded the world of its chief deterrent: its chokehold over the global economy, its ability to disrupt the international oil supply, to drive up energy prices and therefore inflation, to disrupt the lives of hundreds of millions.

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Editor: Ukraine war is already lost, to the chagrin of Freedland and his allies!

Putin now has more cash to fight Ukraine, already hurt by depleting stocks of drone interceptors, which are urgently needed in the Middle East.

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Editor: Iran and its store of weapons of war, from even the crudet of weapony, to the most sophiticated: places Freedland’s bellicose chatter in line with ‘West’ headed by Trump, whose alligence is to Miriam Adelson. As Trump and his operatives, and the whole of the Western Media exalt the Party Line!

As for Iran itself, if the regime survives, it will have every reason to double down on its nuclear ambitions, reasoning that the best guarantee against US attack is the bomb. Think of it as the North Korea principle.

Every one of these risks was predictable and indeed predicted, but the warmakers went ahead anyway. Which brings us to the strongest reason to view this war not charitably, but in a cold, harsh light.

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Editor: I will end with this final hyperbolic chatter from Friedland. Yet the reader confronts not the Iranian regime of 1979, but its now 47 years old State ! What remaines of the Gaza Genocide is the cowardice of a West, in the thrall of the perennial myth of Jewish Victionhood!

To confront the Iranian regime was to walk, with a lit match, towards a tinderbox soaked in gasoline. If it were to be done at all, whether by military or other means, it had to be done with the greatest care. But Trump has blundered in, crushing and trampling all before him, making a bad situation worse. He does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. He does not deserve his war to be assessed charitably. He deserves our contempt.

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Mar 13, 2026

Adam Smith Is Still the GOAT After 250 Years

By Clive Crook

March 12, 2026 at 3:30 AM PDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-12/adam-smith-is-still-the-goat-economist-after-250-years?srnd=phx-opinion

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This reading completely misunderstands Smith’s thinking, as the economist Ronald Coase explained 50 years ago. (His article “Adam Smith’s View of Man” is the best short thing to read on this.) In the same paragraph as that tiresomely familiar quotation, Smith also observed, “In civilized society [man] stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.” This is the puzzle that fascinates him throughout. For cooperation at a distance, benevolence (an admirable sentiment) can’t be expected, much less relied on; self-interest (deplorable in excess) is necessary.

Smith applies this thinking consistently to governments as well as to buyers and sellers – yet another contradiction of the modern caricature. He sees that rulers are also self-interested. They have the same motives as the rest of us and, crucially, face fewer constraints. He questions government interventions not because he wants private self-interest to prevail unhindered, but because he’s alert to the depredations of self-interested kings and ministers. He isn’t preaching self-love. He’s saying that self-love is a fact of human nature – a necessary evil, part of what makes commercial society work, and something that must be kept within bounds.

The Wealth of Nations, mainly concerned with cooperation at a distance, is appropriately preoccupied with self-interest and incentives, more than with benevolence. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is mainly concerned with the norms and intuitions that guide people in their relationships with families, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens, where benevolence and related sentiments, such as affection, loyalty and sympathy, figure more prominently. But again Smith applies the same basic framework: He sees self-love and benevolence intermingling and acting together. As he illustrates at length, our benevolent instincts often serve our interests, as when they promote trust (which successful commerce requires) or burnish our status, reputation or self-esteem.

As you’d expect, this framing gives rise to another line of criticism: Smith’s view of human nature, not just of commercial society, is mean and dispiriting. He isn’t content to argue that society is and should be ruled by selfishness; he also thinks that true benevolence doesn’t exist, regarding this sentiment as either fraud or self-deception.

Again, this critique is wrong. There’s such a thing as genuine benevolence, Smith believed, and it’s admirable; sometimes, it also rewards the benevolent, which is good, because it encourages benevolence. There’s no contradiction. Indeed, this understanding of benevolence and self-interest interacting in ways that, according to circumstances, moderate or reinforce each other – in turn helping commercial society to flourish – points ineluctably to adaptation and natural selection. Smith’s “science of man” anticipates Darwin.

Maybe we often misunderstand Smith’s project of morals and markets because he was more concerned with seeing and understanding how societies work than in advocating any particular course of action. His recommendations are well known, and the classical liberals he inspired (an endangered species, sadly) advocate them still: liberty, rule of law, limited government, competition, free trade. Yet he had little time for theoretical abstraction and delighted above all in observing and disentangling unforeseen or unintended consequences. As a result he ranged far beyond economics, as it’s now understood, through moral and political philosophy, sociology, and social psychology. He was driven by curiosity more than conviction.

This is why the charge of market fundamentalism is risible. First and foremost, Smith was a pragmatist: He saw that commercial society worked, and applied his open mind to asking why. After 250 years, his answers are still enlightening.

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Editor: A long quotation from Charlotte Brown’s review of D. D. Raphael’s ‘The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-impartial-spectator-adam-smith-s-moral-philosophy/

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Raphael’s discussion of the way Smith develops the idea of an impartial spectator to explain how we morally judge ourselves is as elegant as it is economical. His discussion spans several chapters, which include a critical appraisal of Smith’s theory of conscience and an examination of Smith’s account of moral rules and the virtues; but his chapter, “The Impartial Spectator,” is the central one. Here Raphael is especially careful to detail Smith’s revisions.

Raphael prefaces this discussion with a brief chapter on the role of the ‘spectator’ in Hutcheson’s and Hume’s moral theories. On his reading, Smith follows his predecessors in grounding moral judgments in the feelings of a spectator, attempting, as they did, to capture the disinterestedness of the moral sentiments of approval and disapproval. According to Raphael, Hutcheson’s and Hume’s idea of a spectator is that of a stranger — someone who is “indifferent in the sense of not being an interested party.” (34) All three philosophers aim to provide an empirical account of the moral sentiments.

Hutcheson was the first to insist that our approval of someone else’s actions can be disinterested, “uninfluenced by any thought of benefit to oneself.” (28) He claims that we possess a special moral sense, in addition to our other senses, that disposes us to feel approval or disapproval when we survey people’s character traits and actions. Hume’s contribution is that he saw the need to explain our capacity to approve and disapprove. He traces it to sympathy: we sympathize with the person herself and everyone with whom she interacts. We judge her character traits and actions expressive of them to be virtuous or vicious in terms of whether they are good or bad for everyone affected. Raphael thinks that the idea of an impartial spectator is present in Hume, although not the term.

On Raphael’s reading of Smith, he only needs the simpler idea of a spectator as “not being an interested party” to explain moral judgments we make about others. His originality and lasting contribution lie in his account of how we come to judge ourselves: how we acquire conscience, how it operates, and how it becomes authoritative.

There are two central features of Smith’s explanation of conscience, both of which were present at all stages in the development of his theory. One is that conscience is a social product, a “mirror of social feeling.” The other is that an agent is able to judge herself only by imagining what an impartial spectator would approve or disapprove of in her conduct.

Smith first stresses the impartiality of the reactions of spectators in his discussion of the virtue of self-command: when an agent tries to moderate his passions to the point where a spectator can sympathize. The virtue of self-command is essential to our being able to see ourselves as others do. Conscience originally springs from our “social experience” of being judged by others and being spectators who judge others. We have a natural desire to be loved and we dread blame. Because we love praise and hate blame, we learn to see our conduct through the eyes of others. We come to approve or disapprove of ourselves by imagining how spectators would judge us.

Raphael argues that Smith increasingly came to trust “imagination more and society less.” (38) One reason is that he was bothered by an objection that Sir Gilbert Elliott raised after TMS first appeared: if conscience is merely a reflection of actual spectators’ social attitudes, how would judgments of conscience differ from those of actual spectators?

However, even in the first edition, Smith’s spectator isn’t an actual bystander, but one we imagine. In the 2^nd and 6^th editions, Smith stresses even more that the spectator is a creation of imagination. Self-examination requires an ability to divide ourselves:

Whenever I endeavor to examine my own conduct … I divide myself as it were into two persons: and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. The first is the spectator… The second is the agent… (TMS III. 1.6)

I become a judge of my own conduct by imagining what I would feel if I were a spectator of my own behavior. I then compare these feelings with the feelings that I as an agent actually have.

This leads to Smith’s famous idea of an internal, impartial spectator — “the man within.” Although conscience is initially a product of the approval and disapproval of others, Smith retains the traditional idea that “the voice of conscience represents the voice of God.” As a superior tribunal, it may conflict with the judgments of actual spectators. How does conscience gain its independence and become a higher authority?

Once we are capable of judging ourselves, we make a new distinction between being praised and being praiseworthy, being blamed and being blameworthy. We want not only praise, but to be praiseworthy; we dread not only blame, but to be blameworthy. Actual spectators may be partial and ill informed, but we are able to view ourselves without partiality or misunderstanding. I may gain the approval of others, for example, by pretending to be virtuous. But since I am able to judge what others would think of me, if they knew everything and were impartial, I realize that I do not merit praise. Not only may the judgments of the internal, impartial spectator differ from those of actual spectators, conscience comes to represent a higher tribunal. Smith eventually saw that being “flattered by the praise of society,” while ignoring the superior verdicts of conscience, is a sign of vanity.

At one point, Raphael remarks that a spectator theory is able to explain more easily third-person judgments, and also second-person judgments, but is “apt to be in difficulties with judgments made in the first person (about ‘me’ or ‘us’).” (31) But, on his view, what is original and enduring in Smith’s thought is his explanation of our capacity to judge ourselves from the point of view of an impartial spectator. He also notes that a spectator theory is “more comfortable with passing verdicts on what has been done in the past than with considering and deciding what should be done in the future.” (31) Does Raphael think that Smith is able to explain how we go from being a spectator of our own conduct to being a moral agent who tries to live up to her own ideals of conduct? In the moment of action, we may not be able to view ourselves impartially. But doesn’t the importance of the internal, impartial spectator lie in the fact that the spectator is the person to whom we, as agents, try to conform our conduct, thereby becoming worthy of love and praise? Raphael says that, according to Smith, an agent who attains a high degree of self-command can “identify himself with the imagined spectator to the extent of obliterating the natural feelings of self-regard.” (41)

Raphael maintains that Smith’s psychological and sociological explanation of conscience also shows that judgments of conscience possess a kind of authority or normativity. Does he think that Smith is able to show that they are authentically normative — answering a justificatory question about why we ought to approve as an impartial and well-informed conscience would? Or does he think that Smith is answering a question in “moral anthropology” — explaining why we are inclined to think that the judgments of conscience are normative?

Interestingly, Hume sketches a process that is similar in some ways to Smith’s account of conscience. According to Hume, sympathy ensures that we will catch the moral feelings other people have about us. Since we care deeply about what others think about us, our internalization of the praise and blame of others has the effect of making us see ourselves as others see us, valuing ourselves as others value us. Sympathy thus pressures us to survey ourselves as we appear to others. Hume says that sympathy may even go so far as to make us disapprove of our own vices, even though they benefit us.

Anyone interested in Adam Smith’s moral philosophy or in 17^thand 18^thcentury British moral philosophy will find Raphael’sTheImpartial Spectatora stimulating book.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-impartial-spectator-adam-smith-s-moral-philosophy/

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Mar 12, 2026

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Extra Added attraction!

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Mar 11, 2026

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Mar 10, 2026

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The most famous query in the history of modern warfare came from David Petraeus, then a major general, in an interview with Rick Atkinson, then a reporter, during the initial assault on Iraq: “Tell me how this ends.”

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Editor: The first paragraphs of Bret Stephens latest essay demonstares a shocking ignorance of both Stephens and Petraeus? What might the reader think of Stephens own inexcusable ignoance of the what Petraeus did! And the fact that other actual ‘whistle blowers’ suffered jail time, while Petraeus received 2 years probation and pay a fine of $40,000.

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Petraeus Sentenced To 2 Years’ Probation, Fine For Sharing Classified Info

April 23, 20157:31 AM ET

By

Bill Chappell

Former CIA Director and retired Gen. David Petraeus was sentenced Thursday to two years of probation and handed a $100,000 fine for the unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, in the form of notebooks he shared with his lover.

Under the terms of a plea deal, Petraeus, 62, will avoid jail time. As we reported last month, “The charge’s maximum possible punishments include a fine of $100,000 and a one-year prison sentence. Instead, prosecutors agreed that Petraeus should serve a two-year probation and pay a fine of $40,000.”

Judge David Kessler said he increased the fine to “reflect the seriousness of the offense.”

At issue are “black books” — eight notebooks in which Petraeus kept highly classified information that the government says included “the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings, and defendant David Howell Petraeus’s discussions with the President of the United States of America.”

That description comes from court documents that were filed along with the plea deal. The documents also included an email in which Petraeus promises to give the black books to Paula Broadwell, his biographer with whom he was having an affair.

The government also said that Petraeus gave false statements to FBI agents about giving Broadwell the notebooks, and that he also falsely swore when he left the CIA in 2012 that he did not have any classified material in his possession or control.

The black books were found in 2013, after the FBI conducted a search of Petraeus’ house. They had been sitting in an unlocked desk drawer, according to court documents.

Jesselyn Radack, an attorney for Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou and Thomas Drake, called the sentence handed to Petraeus a “travesty.”

“This sentence is nothing more than a slap on the wrist that highlights a gross double standard in leak prosecutions, which makes clear that the Obama administration’s record breaking number of Espionage Act prosecutions has nothing to do with protecting classified information and everything to do with punishing and silencing whistleblowers,” she said in a statement. “If leaks were the real concern, Petraeus would receive punishment as harsh as the government demanded for other accused leakers.”

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Mar 10, 2026

Middle East & Africa | On their guard

Should the Gulf states join attacks on Iran?

A lack of trust in America and Israel, internal divisions and the risk of domestic strife all hamper a unified response

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/03/09/should-the-gulf-states-join-attacks-on-iran?utm_content=ed-picks-image-link-1&etear=nl_today_1&utm_campaign=r.the-economist-today&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=3/9/2026&utm_id=2172130

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Editor: Let me empsize some of the belicose chatter coming from this ‘newspaper’ via its editor Zanny Menton Beddoes who once was one of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist in the post Soviet Union:

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Getting a handle on the magnitude of the problem is obviously difficult in a country that cannot even explain why life expectancy has fallen sharply in the last two decades. But some number is better than none. And by pressing officials to address this and other pivotal issues, Sachs hopes to accelerate the pace of reform.

Sachs’s message of urgency is not universally accepted. Plenty of Western as well as Russian economists contend that a more gradual approach is not only possible but necessary. “Economic reform is a political process,” says Padma Desai at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. “First, you must build consensus.”

And even his sympathizers acknowledge that Sachs’s high profile and world-class impatience could generate a backlash in a nation still adjusting to the reality that it is no longer a superpower. “There’s a real dilemma here,” says Stanley Fischer, an international economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to make a lot of noise to get the attention of the West. But the more noise you make, the more you make it seem that the reform program is a Western program. And that could be the kiss of death.”

Still, Sachs’s brand of “shock therapy” has worked elsewhere. And there is good reason to believe that Russia’s future will turn on how well its leaders learn the catechism of change that he has worked so hard to promulgate.

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The six members of the Gulf Co-operation Council (gcc) often struggle with the co-operation bit. Plans for a common currency and a railway across the Arabian peninsula are decades behind schedule. Foreign-policy disputes have led to years-long ruptures between monarchs.

Over the past ten days, war has brought a traumatic consensus. Since America and Israel attacked Iran on February 28th, more than 2,000 Iranian missiles and drones have rained down on Gulf states. The pain has not been equally distributed—more than half of Iran’s attacks thus far have been aimed at the United Arab Emirates (uae), compared with only a handful at Oman—but it has been felt everywhere. One of the most recent drone attacks, on March 9th, hit Bahrain’s sole oil refinery, injuring 32 people and leading the state-run oil company to declare force majeure.

Yet there is no unity on how to respond. That is not only because of long-standing disagreements between states, but also within them: some officials urge restraint, while others seek retaliation. Gulf states are paralysed because they do not trust any of the parties to this war—including themselves.

Editor: Zanny Menton Beddoes has the temprement resembling that of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, its creator George MacDonald Fraser made a hero out of cad! Though Zanny Menton Beddoes is a dullwitted Neo-Consevative!

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Editor: The ‘ZMB’ Prognonis :

Start with America. In the months before Donald Trump (and Israel) struck Iran, all six gcc members urged him not to do it. When war began to look inevitable, some added a caveat: if you do it, do it right. They feared that America would drag them through a conflict only to leave the Islamic Republic wounded but intact.

Mr Trump’s vague suggestion on March 9th that the war could be nearing an end might have spooked them. Gulf rulers know that he can be unreliable. Less than a year ago, after all, he stood in Riyadh and denounced the “interventionists” who had “wrecked” the Middle East. And they can read the polls in America, which show a majority opposed to the war and the president’s approval rating stuck at 38%.

For the restrainers, then, joining the war seems an unacceptable risk: Gulf states might paint a target on themselves only to watch America pack up and leave soon after. A few officials muse about setting up a coalition like the one that fought Islamic State a decade ago, as a way to bind Mr Trump and draw in other allies. But that seems a hard sell with a president who is not fond of multilateralism.

At the same time, trust in Iran—never high—has evaporated. Saudi Arabia and the uae laboured for years before the war to improve their once-hostile relations with the Islamic Republic, while Qatar has long maintained friendly ties with it. All were attacked anyway. To more hawkish voices in the Gulf, restraint looks naive. It has not shielded them so far. As the war continues, Iran will probably keep escalating its attacks. Conciliatory messages from Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, and other officials have proved worthless.

They also worry about what happens when the war ends. Even assuming the country remains intact, Iran will presumably remain under onerous American sanctions and the regime may have billions of dollars in damage to contend with. It could seek to extort the gcc by keeping up a trickle of drone attacks or continuing to harass ships in the Persian Gulf. Those who argue for taking action now reckon it is better to try to create some deterrence by showing Iran that Gulf states can hit back, at a moment when America is still focused on their defence.

Editor: Reader recall that the whole of the Western Press tried but failed, to erase the pictures of The Zionist Faschist State under attack!

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Editor: What the reader is fed is warmed over Political Melodrama!

Israel’s role is another complication. On March 8th several Israeli journalists reported in unison that the uae had joined the war by attacking a water-desalination plant in Iran. Their unsubstantiated stories were attributed to an unnamed “Israeli source”. The uae rushed to deny them. “This is fake news,” said Ali al-Nuaimi, a defence official.

In private, the Emiratis were furious. Since they established diplomatic ties with Israel in 2020 they have worked to build a close partnership, one that even endured the Gaza war, when other Arab states kept their distance. Now the Israelis were leaking something that was either a closely guarded secret or an outright falsehood (and probably a war crime to boot).

Nor was it the first time Israeli journalists made such a claim about a Gulf state. Five days earlier they reported that Qatar had carried out strikes in Iran. That too was denied. “It’s a dirty game,” says an official from a third Gulf country, who thinks Israel is trying to create a fait accompli by leaking reports of supposed gcc military action. This is becoming a widely-held view in the region. It is making even some interventionists uneasy.

The final issue is domestic. Though the Gulf states are monarchies, they cannot ignore public opinion. Bahrain is a particular worry. The island’s Shia majority has long complained of discrimination at the hands of its Sunni rulers. Mass protests in 2011 were brutally repressed by Bahraini police and armies from other Gulf states. Those grievances have not gone away. In some videos of Iranian strikes on the kingdom, the people filming can be heard cheering the attacks. Were Bahrain or other Gulf states to join the war, it might stir up fresh unrest.

The business community is starting to grumble, too. Khalaf al-Habtoor, a billionaire property mogul in Dubai, has posted several criticisms of the war on social media, accusing America of dragging the Gulf into danger, only to delete them later. His missives touch on a long-standing difference between Abu Dhabi, the uae’s capital, and Dubai, its commercial hub. The former is more comfortable with an assertive foreign policy and views Iran as a menace, while the latter would prefer to stay neutral and is often rapped by America’s Treasury for turning a blind eye to Iranian money-laundering.

For now, the restrainers seem to be winning the argument. A spectacular Iranian attack could tip the balance the other way, while a swift truce could end the debate. The longer the war drags on, the more contentious it will become.

Editor: The near total absence of American Political actors in this Economist failed panaorama, offers the reader what ? Trump, Hegseth and the crush of Reporters, on the plane, waiting for the latest chatter coming from the feckless Trump. Flashman was in its way about a still-born nostalgia?

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Mar 09, 2026

The Poisoning of Tehran

The U.S. and Israel are inflicting monstrous collective punishment on one of the largest cities in the world in a war they started.

Daniel Larison

Mar 9

READ IN APP

The city of Tehran is being poisoned by a toxic cloud of smoke from the Israeli bombing of oil depots:

Iran’s capital was engulfed in a cloud of toxic smoke that unleashed black rainfall dozens of miles away on Sunday after overnight Israeli strikes on several fuel depots caused fires to burn for hours.

Images from Tehran, a city of nearly 10 million people, showed thick black smoke from the fires hanging over it, while residents reported difficulty breathing and oil-tainted rainfall staining everything around them.

The destruction of the country’s civilian infrastructure is terrible in itself, and the harm that the U.S. and Israel are doing to the population is appalling and indefensible. Millions of people are being threatened by toxic fumes and poisoned rain. The damage to the environment will be severe. The short and long-term effects on the health of the population of Tehran and the surrounding region will be grave. Iranians will be suffering the consequences of this war long after the bombing stops.

It is not surprising that a genocidal government would commit more crimes against humanity in this war, but it is important to recognize and condemn those crimes when we see them. Poisoning the air that the entire population breathes is a horrifying crime. The U.S. and Israel are inflicting monstrous collective punishment on one of the largest cities in the world in a war they started. The attackers have made clear through their actions that this is a war to wreck Iran and hurt its people.

The smoke from the fires is so thick that it has blotted out the sun:

Residents of Tehran woke up on Sunday morning to find it was still dark outside, an apocalyptic sight created by thick black smoke billowing from oil depots hit by Israeli strikes.

With the Sun blotted out, disoriented people in the Iranian capital had to turn on their lights to see through the gloom.

Gabriel da Silva, an atmospheric chemist, explains the dangers from the fumes and poisoned rain:

In the longer term, exposure to the compounds in the air and in this black rain is potentially increasing people’s cancer risk. When ultrafine particles (PM2.5) are inhaled, they can get into your bloodstream. This has been linked to a range of health impacts, including cancers, neurological conditions (such as cognitive impairment), and various cardiovascular conditions.

Once these heavily polluted plumes of air have their pollutants rained into natural waterways, they can also start to affect aquatic life, as well as human drinking water sources.

Another issue is that this black rain is depositing these compounds on buildings, roads and surfaces, which means they can make their way back into the air when disturbed by strong winds.

The poisoning of Tehran will be harming and killing innocent Iranians for years after the war is over. As we have seen in our government’s many other unnecessary wars from Southeast Asia to Iraq and beyond, there is always a trail of ruin and contamination left behind. The longer that this disastrous war goes on, the more devastating its effects will be.

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