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Ask Me Anything
Here’s a confession. The hardest part of my job is deciding what I should write about every day. Every single day, I wake up and scour the news, trying to decide what’s most important. I take this responsibility (and myself) so seriously you’d think I was compiling the President’s Daily Brief. I worry non-stop that I’m going to fail to bring the most important news or the critically important argument to your attention, and that as a consequence of my negligence, the Free World shall perish.
I caught myself doing this today and decided this was seriously neurotic.
So today’s ask me anything day. Within the bounds of the CoC, I’m here today to answer any question you have. I’ll try to do that to the best of my abilities, which are in truth very limited and modest.
Go for it.
Published in General
Barbara too surely?
Have you thought about expanding out of journalistic reporting (staying with Ricochet of course!) and possibly teaching? What would you like to teach?
Has modern technology helped or hurt people in your position whose goal is to report with accuracy, not fluffy spin? It seems that the 24/7 availability of news and non-news has caused brain overload – people are not focused on any given topic for more than a few minutes, so they really don’t absorb anything fully.
With the world changing so quickly, it also has put journalists at greater personal risk – what could improve that?
Lastly (you didn’t say one question each!), this is an old fashioned question – sorry! It’s funny that many of the men are asking about your favorite food, wine, books, music, and other interests (Manfred – you’re late!) – do you have a significant other, and do you see yourself wanting to get married and “settle” someday – somewhere?
wait….one more – it’s silly – and maybe too personal – what are your cat’s names? Can they pose for a group picture?
Happy New Year! I look forward to your posts and other works!
Hi Claire, I want to commend you on the great work you do here at Ricochet.
As an academic, you are a very small political minority. What drove you to conservatism? Did your political philosophy ever pose as a problem for you in university? How do you suggest we “reform” academia, in particular the humanities and social sciences, so that we discourage political bias—from either Right or Left, from wreaking complete havoc on disciplines (though I credit progressives for doing most of the damage)? Is there any hope?
This is a really difficult question to answer because a lot of questions have to be disaggregated, and anti-Semitism is a hard thing to measure. A new ADL poll found a “dramatic decline” in anti-Semitic attitudes in Europe, but I find their polling methodology strange: If you look at the questions they’re asking — and weighting equally — they don’t at all seem to me the right questions to ask. They’re measuring something more like “mild prejudice” than “classic, exterminationist anti-Semitism.” It’s also not clear to me whether a decline in anti-Semitism, as they’re measuring it, is a proxy for “rising hostility toward Muslims.”
When you look at crime rates, country by country, again it’s hard to figure out what’s going on, because each country has its own legal system and its own definition of “anti-Semitic crime.” It doesn’t make sense to me to lump “anti-Semitic speech” (which is defined as “anti-Semitic crime” in many European countries) with crimes like torching a synagogue or murdering a Jew because he’s a Jew. (Don’t forget, sometimes Jews are murdered for other reasons, too.) But often the statistics do aggregate these, and so you’ll see reports of a “staggering rise in anti-Semitic crime” in France in 2014, or “a doubling of anti-Semitic murders” when in fact the number of homicides clearly linked to an anti-Semitic motive went from 0 to 1.
In other words, if Jews are fleeing France to Israel for their lives, they’re not doing it because they’re consulting the actuarial tables and making a fully rational decision — in the same year, 41 Israelis were killed by terrorists, who we may reasonably presume were motivated by anti-Semitism.
There are basically three types of anti-Semitism in Europe: The Islamist variety, which is entirely confined to Muslim immigrants; the hard-left variety, which takes the form of Zionism=racism and is prevalent among the kinds of neo-Bolsheviks who made Corbyn the head of the Labour party, and the genuine, old-fashioned European anti-Semitism, which is very prevalent on the hard right. The latter kind frightens me most, because there’s a very big difference between ambient but stigmatized anti-Semitism that’s condemned and combatted by the government, and an anti-Semitic government.
These parties have been marginalized and stigmatized until recently, but the Eurozone crisis and the refugee crisis is putting the wind in their sails. As for the likelihood of any of these parties coming to power, I think it’s quite low in Western Europe, but Eastern Europe’s another story. And it’s not zero in Western Europe.
Wow, I’m having trouble keeping up with these questions …
Thank you. You either picked an old picture, an ideal picture, or you look younger than you age.
Ahem, you, er, skipped mine.
Oh wow, Claire has a Wikipedia entry. Impressive.
Gun control apart, this seems to be true of non-Hispanics, too: Have you been following the rise of Donald Trump? In any event, “Hispanic” is not the same as “immigrant.” Asian immigrants should — obviously — be GOP voters.
Thank you so much for such a detailed description. I knew the question and answers would be complex, and you moved through working with them with your usual professionalism and candor.
Yes, he was totally inspired by a real friend. No, I’ve never been to Shiraz.
Pro.
Yikes, FIFY. (Mercy, Manny. And you, a married man!)
No, the very idea of it makes my stomach turn.
No. I’m a vegetarian, but even if I weren’t, I just couldn’t. (Actually, I may have when I was a kid — it was served pretty commonly in France back then — but if so, I didn’t know.)
My guess is that Moldova will either be admitted to NATO or become a Russian satellite state. Armenia is one already. And if the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict goes hot again, there will be big problems. (Likewise Transnistria — although with less potential for a direct NATO-Russia conflict, because the Turks don’t care about Transnistria.)
…..hmmmmm…Sancerre
Are you doing anything Saturday night after Shabbos?
(…hmmm…time difference + 4500 miles travel time / work commitments + bank account = Mach 12…??)
Never mind.
Regards,
Jim
Trump voters are not in favor of Obamacare, socialized medicine, corporatism, and higher taxes (except perhaps on the very rich, it seems). I think Trump is awful, but his rise has everything to do with a ruling class mentality in the GOP. Liberal voters have their party — they get good representation. Conservatives do not.
I tried it once just to say I tried it – but that’s it – it’s still a slug with butter and bread crumbs.
I look younger than my age. It’s a recent picture, I think. But I don’t feel younger than my age: one glass of wine, I kid you not, and I’m wiped the next day.
This was not true when I was 18.
Sure, why not.
Probably the funniest 4 letter comment ever made on Ricochet. Reminds me of the succinctness of the laconic Spartan reply to this threat:
“Immigration, Citizenship, and Cosmopolitanism.” “Traditions, duties, and ideals cannot exist without attachment to particular communities—a man can love his neighbors or his nation, but he cannot love an abstraction like humanity.”
Yep. And no one has ever been to the 12th. Ever.
One more thing – what I love about your books Menace and Thatcher is everything is relevant today – how many people even know about the topics your books cover? Everyone who writes go through dry spells – even long ones – but the world has changed so fast, yet those topics still matter today. We here in the US have no clue what it is really like in Europe, or why Thatcher’s policies worked against the cold war etc. This is what you are good at presenting – even the band you covered in the book -that’s big – it is a snapshot of how cultural thinking is evolving and look at the outcome today in Germany! Lots of material – many things the average person has no clue about.
It’s all accurate, except that I don’t live in Istanbul now. But it gets that right later.
First time I’ve ever read that! Who bothers to compile these things?
Definitely.
You rang? Sorry, but my heart still belongs to Judith…and Claire is the interloper. Only very slowly am I getting over the estrangement and warming to Ms. B (the interloper). But it will take a long time before I recover to the point of asking her personal questions ……………………………………………………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………….. like ‘why do you like cats more than kids’?????????????
I sure have. And I’d love to go back to being a research historian, too.
History. I’d love to teach history.
Hurt. Without a doubt.
Absolutely, and print newspapers (which were financed by classified ads and destroyed by Craig’s List, basically) haven’t been replaced by anything with a working business model yet.
That’s also partly related to the revolution in media technology. Fewer journalists have the backing of big and fairly powerful media institutions; more are freelancing. Insurgent groups, for example, had (and have) a powerful incentive not to kill the correspondent from The New York Times, because that would really harm the propaganda message. Now they don’t need The New York Times — they can put out their own propaganda — and they certainly don’t need the freelancers. I don’t think there’s much that can be done about it.
I’ve got something even better than that for you. Follow the links …
Claire, do you believe the United States of America will emerge from the 21st century with the Bill of Rights still in effect? I don’t mean after having undergone a hyper legalistic word torture whereby our progeny learn what they “really” meant. I mean will their effect remain in the form of undiminished individual liberty. I ask this question with the belief that every enumerated right is already in serious jeopardy, on a precipice from which further decline can only be precipitate – to a state where the words lack any effective meaning.
None. I never, ever think about anything else.
Just kidding. Lately I’ve not been reading much fiction at all, though. I don’t know why.