Cory Doctorow (7:01)

Follow along.

Mike Pesca (7:03)

T R U E w e r k.com use the code the gist. You know Utah, Florida, they recently banned fluoride in the drinking water. We did a segment with Sadie Dingfelder on it. It's. It's a live issue. Let's just say it's unsettled science right now. I wouldn't bring you product that I thought was in any way safe or going to get in the way of health of you and your family. Cove Pure gives you the freedom to choose Pure Water, a countertop water purifier certified to remove up to 99% of impurities. I will tell you this about COVID Pure. If it's on the counter, you think about all these things. Maybe you worry, maybe you don't. Maybe what you like is good tasting water. And Cove Pure delivers this water that's supposed to taste like what you've always imagined water tasted like. Pure, clean, no aftertaste. So don't wait for the government to sort out pure water. Do it yourself. Head to covpure.com the gist and for a limited time you'll get 200% off your first purchase that c o v e p u r e.com/the gist to get $200 off covpure.com the the gist Cory Doctorow is the author of Insidification. What a great title. Subtitle why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and what to Do About It I don't know what to do about it. I do know that it was one of those conversations where we just hit the ground running. I didn't even do an introduction. So that's what you're going to hear right now. Don't get freaked out. Me and Corey have at it. And now you will too. I think Ticketmaster and your printers are the two least popular things on earth. I know everyone makes fun of Nickelback, but I think if a politician were just to run on inkjet reform, that politician would. I'm not gonna say win, but gain like six points in the polls.

Cory Doctorow (9:04)

Well, you know, I know you're kidding, but like one of the. One of the issues. Well, one of the issues that is really key to this book is this idea of interoperability, making one thing work with another. You know, anyone's shoelaces go in your shoes, anyone's gas goes in your gas T and you have these companies that have blocked interoperability using a variety of legal means. So you know, this is printer companies blocking you from using generic ink and Apple blocking you from using any app store and so on. And the most progress we've made on interoperability has been in state legislatures and it's been through right to repair laws that ban companies from blocking third party diagnostics and parts and service. And at eff, we've been thinking about a parallel campaign for right to print. We think that there's a lot of space in state ledge for bills that just say, you know, printer companies are not allowed to interfere with your decision to use generic ink.

Mike Pesca (9:57)

Is Canon or the printer companies, is HP so powerful that that would be a big haul? I mean, I know they're somewhat powerful, but they don't seem as powerful as Amazon.

Cory Doctorow (10:07)

Well, this is the key right to. We're getting off the topic of the book, but into the topic of my career as an activist, which is where the book came about. I've worked for.

Mike Pesca (10:13)

Yeah, EFF is electronic for.

Cory Doctorow (10:16)

Yeah, I've worked for them for most of my adult life. I'm in my 24th year working for them now as an activist. I used to be their European director and worked all over the world.

Mike Pesca (10:23)

So if you were a tech platform, you'd now be in your inshitification.

Cory Doctorow (10:26)

That's correct, yeah. Funnily enough, EFF has gone in the other direction and has disinshid ified and become.

Mike Pesca (10:32)

But they've made less money.

Cory Doctorow (10:33)

Well, that's true. So the thing that we discovered working on interoperability and then on right to repair is that if you decompose the issue into smaller issues, you get less done with every bill, but you break up the coalition that's fighting you. So our first efforts with the repair Coalition and repair.org and iFixit and other partners was something called these muscular right to repair bills that we introduced in, I think it was 18 legislatures in 2018. Maybe it was 20. And the coalition against them was everyone, right? It was the automakers, it was Apple, it was Microsoft, it was Google Vol, the company that makes the shavers. You remember we all bought a Vol shaver during the lockdown so we could.

Mike Pesca (11:15)

Oh yeah, it's spelled with a W but in German. I did not know it was pronounced. I think it's pronounced small burrowing animal.

Cory Doctorow (11:20)

Yeah, I think it's pronounced. So they joined the anti repair coalition because they had started booby trapping the shaver heads with a little spring. When you took them apart to sharpen them, it flew apart. You couldn't put it back together again, so you had to buy a new head. It was just this insane coalition. And so we started breaking down the bills. So we took an automotive right to repair to Massachusetts voters in the ballot in 2020 and we saw like a 77% approval for just the automotive side. And then in Colorado we did one for powered wheelchairs. And powered wheelchairs are such a scam. There's two private equity owned companies that make all the powered wheelchairs. They bought all their competitors. Medicare only pays for indoor wheelchairs. So these are indoor wheelchairs being used outdoors. They break all the time. And the two companies that make them have cut back on their maintenance because they don't have any competitors and only they can fix them. So there's a long wait to get your wheelchair fixed. And so when your wheelchair breaks, you can end up in bed for weeks with bed sores with blood clots, waiting for them to show up. And like fix your wheelchair. And it's not just fixing it, it's things like small adjustments, like if you change the tire pressure and you want to change the steering sensitivity, that has to be done by an authorized technician. Because there's this law, section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright act, this 1998 law that Bill Clinton signed that bans breaking a digital lock because there's a digital lock that stops you from accessing those settings on your own, making the tool that bypasses the lock so that people who use wheelchairs can decide when they're going to adjust their wheelchairs. That's a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. So you need state leg. You need legislative action that says, okay, we're just. If you want to sell a wheelchair in Colorado, you're not allowed to do this. Right. They can't imagine that.

Mike Pesca (13:11)

Imagine that in lockup. Conversation between the two guys.

Cory Doctorow (13:16)

What are you in for?

Mike Pesca (13:16)

What are you in for? Well, and you know, practically.

Cory Doctorow (13:19)

It's not that people go to jail, though. Some people have. We had a mathematician who was arrested after giving a technical presentation about the problems with Adobe ebooks. He was Russian. And when he got back to Russia, the Russian State Department issued guidance to Russian scientists not to present at American learned conferences. Because sometimes they put you in prison for talking about math. But, you know, it's that anyone who wants to go out and start a business doing this, you go, you know, pitch your business and then they say, no, we're not going to give you any capital because they'll just shut you down. Right.

Mike Pesca (13:50)

And that's another great argument for the right to repair. It's not that my aged parents will start wrenching on their own wheels. It's that two or three shops will pop up within wheeling distance of them. So what I'm saying is we're suppressing small businesses.

Cory Doctorow (14:07)

That's right.

Mike Pesca (14:08)

We're suppressing the marketplace, which of course should be the goal of every. Every avowed capitalist senate and the House.

Cory Doctorow (14:17)

Well, and the numbers on repair are incredible. So landfilling a ton of e waste creates one job, and repairing a ton of e waste creates 150 community jobs. Right. And they are in the community because you don't send your wheelchair, your car, or your iPhone out of state to get it fixed. You take it down to the guy at the mall who fix your screen while you wait.

Mike Pesca (14:36)

Right. And so even with the iPhone, what about a job where you ship it and they ship it back? That's fine too.

Cory Doctorow (14:42)

Sure. Although I think a lot of people are like, well, I don't want to be without my phone for a week. Right. They want the guy in the corner. It's a good local business. The money stays in the community and it helps the community and it means you get more out of your stuff. So one of the things Apple does is if you take your broken phone to an Apple store, is they offer you a trade in and the reason they offer you a trade in is because their recycling program for iPhones is they shred them to stop any of those parts from getting back into the part stream.

Mike Pesca (15:06)

Really?

Cory Doctorow (15:06)

Yeah.

Mike Pesca (15:07)

Then why are they so. Well, I could understand why they'd want to disqualify your phone for a trade in if it has a tiny crack on the screen, just because then they wouldn't have to honor their agreement. But also the repair. I just went through this and I'll. I'll tell you why. I had to get a new iPhone and I didn't want to, but he was very assiduously wiping down the COVID He want. It seemed like he wanted to send it back to. To hq.

Cory Doctorow (15:33)

Right.

Mike Pesca (15:33)

Great looking shape.

Cory Doctorow (15:34)

So refurb some of them. Right. But the ones that are beyond refurb go in a shredder. They don't. So if you like dispose of your phone in some other way, chances are it goes to the Pacific Rim and it's decomposed into parts and comes back into the US as parts for independent repair stores. Apple has this very weird scam for this. So they engrave microscopic Apple logos on sub assemblies and that means that every part that might be harvested from an iPhone has an Apple trademark on it. And then they file with the CBP complaints that by re importing parts that have been harvested from broken phones that you are committing this very obscure trademark violation called tarnishment, which is when you lower the association in a consumer's mind with a quality brand. Because they say like maybe if you get a phone fixed with Apple parts that have been refurbished and it stops working because the part was damaged during refurbishing and you take it apart and look at it through a jeweler's loop and you see the Apple logo, you might think less of Apple as a consequence. And CBP being useful idiots for this kind of nonsense, they just seize the parts at the border.

Mike Pesca (16:43)

That. First of all, part of me says if you are that clever just technologically but also legally, it's almost like a Torah reading, you should get some benefit from that. On the other hand, I want to ask you, so are there legitimate. Let's not scrap the tarnishment laws in general. I see the logic of the top line argument that it would tarnish a brand were some version, some reasonable version of that to occur. Or do you think the whole tarnishment law should be scrapped like. Like so many Apple iPhones in the Pacific Rim?

Cory Doctorow (17:19)

Well, you know, look, I think trademark, we tend to conflate trademark with copyright. We Send. We think like, oh, Apple owns the Apple logo. Like, copyright would give it control over, you know, its code. But trademark foundationally is a consumer protection tort, right? The idea of trademark is that if you go out to buy Pepsi and there's Coke in the can, that you've been cheated, right? And so what trademark does is it empowers firms to act on behalf of their customers to sue people who would introduce confusion in the marketplace. And tarnishment is a very weird fit for that because you can understand why companies wouldn't like tarnishment. But how does that protect you as a consumer? Right? Like someone else thinks that your phone sucks. Why does that make your life any worse? How is that a consumer protection statute?

Mike Pesca (18:07)

It's be. Well, I think it's, I don't know, devil's advocate here. You love Coca Cola. Coca Cola. Is that your top cola? You have, you know, you've done taste tests, you've taken the Pepsi Challenge to Pepsi's detriment, and then someone is essentially tricking you into buying Pepsi.

Cory Doctorow (18:27)

Oh, no, that's fine. But that's not tarnishment. Tarnishment is somebody, like, makes somebody publishes something about Pepsi or uses the Pepsi, puts a Pepsi logo on a little flag and sticks it in all the dog turds in town. So that whenever you think of Pepsi, you think of dog turds, right? Like that's tarnishment, right? And it's hard to understand. Like, I understand how that is to Pepsi's detriment. I don't understand how that's to the detriment of people who, who continue to enjoy Pepsi, right?

Mike Pesca (18:53)

Well, it gets in the way. It get. There's this natural association with dog turds. Take the Coca Cola fan. If Coca Cola. If the Coca Cola polar bears, if someone invented AI where the polar bears were doing untoward things to each other or on the Epstein list, that could make the taste of Coca Cola less good. It feels like a long walk for.

Cory Doctorow (19:12)

Like a pretty narrow benefit, right? And you know, like one of the things that, you know, the actual thing that does give firms control over works for their own benefit, which is copyright. One of the things that copyright carves out is commentary and criticism. Like, here's a weird thing, right? If you make fanfic of Harry Potter to celebrate how much you like it, that's a copyright infringement. But if you make fanfic of Harry Potter to talk about how much you hate it, that's arguably fair use, right? So it's. It's actually quite the reverse in the way that we, you know, IP law actually works where we have an IP that redounds to the maker of something. Criticism is the one thing you can't use IP law to prevent. And so, you know, tarnishment, again, it's this very weird fit. It's not statutory, Is created by judges. You know, I think it's just like what my friend Jay Freeman calls felony contempt of business model. Like, I just don't think the government should step in to defend your profits. Like, that's kind of your job.

Mike Pesca (20:11)

Okay, we hit the ground running, and now I'm gonna give you the information. I'll give you the introduction that you so deserve. And. And then we'll decide where to put this. Or maybe our listeners will just go along with the ride. I'll orient them beforehand.

Cory Doctorow (20:26)

It's a hell of a cold open. Yeah.

Mike Pesca (20:28)

And say, guys, the. The introduction's coming, but it's like, after we talk about Pepsi and dog shit. Here we go. In shittification is the name of the new book by Cory Doctorow. The subtitle is why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about It. The everything isn't really everything. I mean, trees are nice and puppies, but it's mostly what we deal with on a daily basis, our technology. And Corey, who's a great wordsmith and has been thinking and working in this field for years and years and years, he lays out a very discernible structure of this process instead of in shit ification. Things are good, things get bad, then things are shit forever. Corey, welcome to the gist.

Cory Doctorow (21:07)

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be on.

Mike Pesca (21:09)

I love your case studies. So why don't you tell us, take us through a really good one that we'll identify with that shows the process of insidification.

Cory Doctorow (21:19)

Well, I like Facebook here because they are really the poster child for inshidification. And statistically, you probably had a Facebook account or an account on another meta.

Mike Pesca (21:26)

Still do, quite sadly.

Cory Doctorow (21:28)

Yeah. Yeah. So that's one of the things inshidification asks is like, not just how is it that all these platforms are going bad, but why aren't we leaving them? I think that's an important aspect of this. So here's the Facebook case study in stage one of inshidification. Firms are good to their end users, but they find a way to lock those end users in. So Mark Zuckerberg rolls out the gate with his first public offering. Beyond, you know, just kids with a. Edu. American college address, but the whole world. And he says, look, I Know, all you people have already got an account on a rival social media network called MySpace, but has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil crapulin senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch? And if you come to Facebook, we promise we will never spy on you. And also we will only show you things that you asked to see. So you tell us who you want to follow and we'll show you what they post. So that's stage one. Part of stage one is locking users in. And there's lots of different ways to do that. We just talked about it, you know, when we got on the line about like printer ink locking you in and so on. Facebook locks you in through the most dead simple way of all. They really play it on the easy level, which is that they rely on something called switching costs and collective action problems. So the collective action problem is that like you love your friends, but they're a pain in the ass. And you can't agree on like what board game you're going to play this weekend or you know, what movie you're going to go see. And if there's like 200 of you on Facebook and some of you are there because that's where the people have the same rare disease as you are hanging out, or that's how you like book the carpools for your kids Little League game, or it's where your customers or your audiences and it's just really hard, like maybe transcendentally hard to get off. And so long as you love your friends more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg, right? So long as you're not willing to pay the switching cost of leaving, right? Mark Zuckerberg can make stuff worse for you. So that's what he does.

Mike Pesca (23:11)

Like them, like the Facebook cultivated, presented to the public with filter version of your friends.

Cory Doctorow (23:16)

Sure, sure, fine, yes. But you know, so long as you're getting more value out of Facebook than Mark Zuckerberg is, is extracting by tormenting you, you'll stay there. Right? So stage two of insidification. Once it's hard for you to leave, Mark Zuckerberg can make it worse for you without risking your departure. And not out of sadism, but to attract business customers. And so he goes to the publishers and he says, hey, you remember we told these rubes we were only going to show them the things that they asked to see. Actually, we will cram anything you want, non consensually into their eyeballs. Take stuff from your own website, excerpt it, put a link at the bottom. We'll Give you a free traffic funnel. Some of those people will click the link, some will subscribe to you, some will do both and that'll be good for you. And to the advertisers that go, hey, you remember we told these rubes we weren't going to spy on them. Also obviously a lie. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. Give us remarkably small amounts of money and we will target ads to them with exquisite fidelity. And because I'm such a good natured slob, I have paid for an entire building of engineers who do nothing but police ad fraud. So you give me a dollar to show an ad to a specific user, that user's gonna see that ad, right? So that's stage two. Business customers get locked in too. We under appreciate this, but it's actually a monopsony, which is where you're like a powerful buyer is much harder to get break free of than a monopoly.

Mike Pesca (24:37)

Inverse of a monopoly. Monopoly is one seller, this is one buyer, right? Yeah, Walmart classic monopsony. They could control prices and then you as the end user get screwed. Fruit on pickles, sure.

Cory Doctorow (24:50)

Yeah. So like you know, if you're a business and there's another business that you sell to that is 20 of your market and they go away, that's trouble, right? You get mass layoffs, maybe you never recover. If you're a consumer and there's five places where you buy stuff and one of them goes out of business, that's not a big deal. You still got 80% of the market left. So monopsonies are much more powerful and insidious than monopolies. So the publishers and the advertisers, they get locked insidious. The platform too. And stage three, they turn the screws on those business customers as well. So advertising gets more expensive. Advertising fidelity goes way down. And then the amount of ad fraud explodes beyond anyone's imagination. So Procter and Gamble had a $200 million per year behavioral advertising spend. Behavioral advertising is the euphemism for surveillance advertising. They took that to zero and their sales fell by zero because to a first approximation, $200 million a year was disappearing into the fraud hole. Right. For publishers, you know, they found that they had to put more and more content, like a longer and longer excerpt just to get seen by their own subscribers, let alone to be recommended. And then Facebook said, oh well if there's a link off platform back to your website, we are not going to show it to anyone because maybe that's a malicious link. And so now you have this like fully substituted mirror of your own website on Facebook that you can only monetize using that crooked ad market. So now you're in stage three. Facebook has withdrawn all the value, right? The stuff in your feed that you've asked to see is dwindled to a kind of homeopathic residue. The resulting void has been paid with things that people will pay to shove in your eyeballs. The people who are paying to do it are getting ripped off. All the value has been diverted to shareholders and executives and now the platform is a pile of shit. And sometimes people leave even though they're locked in. And whenever they see like any kind of departure of users, they panic. And being tech bros, they have a technical term for panicking. They call it pivoting. And Mark Zuckerberg one morning like arises from his sarcophagus and says, hearken to me brothers and sisters, I've had a revelation in the night. I know I told you that the future would consist of you arguing with your racist uncle using the primitive text interface that I created in my Harvard dorm to non consensually rate the fuckability of undergraduates. But it turns out that the real future is I'm gonna turn you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character and I'm gonna imprison you in a virtual world that I stole from a 25 year old cyberpunk novel that I call the Metaverse, right? And that's when the platform is fully just a pile of shit. And that's inside ification. It's a tragedy in three acts.

Mike Pesca (27:21)

So the words are dense and wonderful. Corey, I take issue with some of them. Like maybe it's not the case that surveillance advertising is the euphemism for behavioral advertising. Maybe surveillance advertising is the dysphonym for targeted advertising. And advertisers love these tools. And there is a tradeoff. I don't know if people consciously enter the tradeoff, but when presented with the trade off, most people do not care. And surveys show that they do not care about being surveilled. They might. Can I dispute that a little one second, they might say they do, but their revealed preference is that they will turn themselves into the product if they get some free services. I think that there are second order horrible effects of more and more efficient advertising, which I think is one of the real problems, but go ahead. Yes, I don't want to.

Cory Doctorow (28:13)

Yeah, okay. So I think the revealed preference story is very interesting here because in the theory of revealed Preferences, you have to have a field of choices. And the choice can't just be take it or leave it. Right? When the choice is take it or leave it, you get a very coarse reveal preference when you give a finer grain preference, like the ability to push back. So 51% of web users have installed an ad blocker. That's the largest consumer boycott in human history. Apple turned on a feature in iOS that let people block Facebook spying. 96% of iOS users blocked Facebook spying. Presumably the other 4% were drunk or Facebook employees. Or drunk Facebook employees. Which makes sense because if I worked at Facebook or Procter and Gamble has.

Mike Pesca (28:54)

A lot of employees, right?

Cory Doctorow (28:56)

So I think that it's true that firms would like to create a distributional outcome where things tilt towards themselves. But I think that it's false to say that a firm will exit the market if it can't get 100% of what it wants. In the same way that consumers will tolerate surveillance advertising not given a choice. I think that the entire history of advertising until about 10 years ago shows you that advertisers will tolerate targeting based on content rather than behavior if they're not given a choice. And that choice is a policy matter, because the reason that we don't have 100% penetration of AD blockers in all forums is because the US government passed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright act that makes reverse engineering certain technologies a felony. And so we made it a crime to defend your privacy while you use an app. No one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app. Apps are just websites skinned in the right kind of IP to felonize, protecting your interests while you use them. And Internet companies are desperately horny to get you to not use their websites and use their apps instead.

Mike Pesca (29:55)

And if you are a Pesca plus patron, you get more of Cory Doctorow. He could go on and on. He's quite verbose. He's skilled at the rhetoric. And we don't deny you the Pesca plus subscriber that rhetoric. Go to subscribe.mikepeska.com or just pay for, at a slightly lower price point, an ad free version of the show. I believe Corey says that is about point 1.5 of initiatification. Maybe if you subscribe to the gist, we can avoid the process of initiative cation. In fact, I know we can. This is an off ramp to the initiative around us. It's the Pesca plus ification helping out the gist. Subscribe.Mike pesca.com.

Jeff Bridges (30:50)

Morning, Zoe.

Dana (30:51)

Got donuts Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage?

Jeff Bridges (30:55)

Well I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T Mobile commercial like you teach me.

Dana (31:01)

So Dana oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly at t mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.

Jeff Bridges (31:14)

Wow, impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.

Cory Doctorow (31:21)

Nice.

Dana (31:22)

Jeffrey. You heard them.

Jeff Bridges (31:23)

T Mobile is the best place to.

Cory Doctorow (31:25)

Get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade in in any condition.

Jeff Bridges (31:30)

So what are we having for lunch?

Dana (31:32)

Dude, my work here is done.

Commercial Announcer (31:34)

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Mike Pesca (31:53)

And now the spiel. 20 Israeli hostages have now been returned to their families, which was in fact always the stated goal of the war, along with the degradation of Hamas as a force capable of doing this to Israel. Again, the imputed goal according to much of the international human rights community, was not what Israel said it was, but rather to kill Gazans because they are Gazans. So maybe this is a data point that the mythical fair minded person might consider as to the question of whether Israel was intending a genocide or intending to, as they said, get their hostages back and keep their country safe. But this isn't about definitions of genocide. It's about the broader failure of the international and human rights community to actually grasp the fundamentals of what they do to try to ameliorate the toll of war. Because the law of war is not war needs to be against the law. But that is how the human rights community acts. The problem is it's not how nations or militant groups act and they're the entities who could actually wage war. Let's consider this successfully negotiated cease fire by Donald Trump. Think about what he got right. I don't know, maybe he just stumbled into a solution. But why was it that? Trump, Witkoff, Kushner, I guess Qatar. Why was that plan was successful when all the calls for cease fire now dissipated into the wind? One reason is leverage. The other reason is that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, all these UN commissions don't or can't understand Clausewitz. War is policy by other means. And countries very much want to achieve their policy objectives, even if via a method that outsiders deem impermissible. The pressure from the international community, meaning these human rights organizations. I've been listing most of The United Nations NGOs, also large contingents within both US political parties, was definitely relentless. And the prevailing line was simple. Israel must stop fighting, pull back its military pressure on Hamas, lessen the suffering, and thereby allow peace talks to ensue. But this deal surely belies that theory, doesn't it? And so, by the way, do all the other peace deals in the conflict. Every time Israel got a large batch of hostages back, it was because they pursued something other than peace. The more the fight was taken to Hamas, the more Israel gained from their enemy. The human rights community's catechism, shared by many, many decent people who recoil at the spectacle of suffering is this fewer bombs, less pain, more peace. But that logic only works if combatants believe they can win by following the human rights rules. The catechism dissolves when one side, or sometimes both sides, conclude that victory requires rejecting some of those precepts. The laws of armed conflict were negotiated by nation states that knew they would one day have to wage war. And that's why they allow for brutality. Not because of moral blindness, but because their authors understood the necessity of such. The proclamations of the NGOs, on the other hand, never account for the imperative to win a war. And this is my point. In seeking to stop the current hostilities that are quite horrible. But in seeking to stop them immediately and always, these groups often prolong wars because the actual combatants have only two real choices. To brush aside the demands, or to adhere to the demands, but then forfeit a chance at achieving their desired outcomes. For the international community, the highest imperative is that civilians who are dying right now stop dying. It's urgent, it's imperative. You always see this language in the calls to actions pressing an emergency. But by definition, that is short term thinking. For nation states, the highest imperative is to preserve the safety of their citizens in the long term, which very often does mean winning wars. Put it this way, if Human Rights Watch, and I'm using them as a stand in for the other organizations, they've been active during the US Civil War, and the Union had followed their guidelines to the letter, the Confederacy would have won. The same is true of Nazi Germany in World War II. To follow these precepts when one's adversaries choose not to in anything close to a balanced conflict is to lose civil war. Side note the reason Grant won the Civil War and the reason Lincoln stuck with him after cycling through a series of less aggressive generals, is that Grant relentlessly took the fight to the enemy. The Overland Campaign, the Siege of Petersburg, William Tecumseh Sherman's doctrine of hard war, which was explicitly aimed at breaking civilian morale. That's what won the war for the Union. And without those techniques which got Grant labeled the Butcher and US Grant was said to stand for unconditional surrender. Grant. But without him, the Union might have failed. The United States can comply with most of the laws of armed conflict because it is powerful enough to win regardless. Yet even the United States runs afoul of Amnesty International or Human rights watches definitions of lawful warfare. Not the actual definitions, but how they define it. So we are left with naive, unrealistic, counterproductive situations. The international community, sure out of righteousness, out of genuine moral conviction, has just one mode which is urging an end to combat. Its tools are to shame, cajole, threaten punishment to the combatants, or at least the combatants who are listening. Because the Houthis and Boko Haram and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, they're not listening. And with Israel and with so many of these other wars, their tools don't work. They don't work to end the suffering. They don't work to convince the more powerful party to pull back. So if you look at what actually happened, what's going to occur next is soul searching Recalibration? No, of course not. Because if you're a human rights organization, it's right there in the name you're on the side of righteousness. To the righteous, recalibration is tantamount to siding with evil. And so the pattern repeats. Moral condemnation not paired with an actual case for success. The combatants are always going to prioritize victory over adhering to impossible standards set by outsiders who don't share in the policy goals. In the case of Israel, who are dead set against the policy goals, a policing expert recently explained to me how the use of force, sometimes overwhelming force, can actually promote peace. In threat assessment, time matters. A threat that persists over time becomes increasingly likely to materialize. But if the threat is handled decisively, even brutally, then that threat ends. The war in Gaza has gone on for two years. It's the longest such conflict in Israeli history. So it's not a short, sudden, decisive victory. But Israel's time horizon is its entire existence. And allowing the threat of Hamas, which ceased to be as a threat hypothetical on October 7. To linger is to damn and doom the entire country. The cease fires, the hostage releases, the celebrations in both Tel Aviv and Gaza City, where Hamas and Palestinian and Islamic Jihad are also celebrating their referendum on one truth. Actual force has logic and perversely as it sounds, a morality, at least to the combatants, versus the alternative of yielding to outside pressure, agreeing with the notion that we need to stop fighting and accept more suffering in the hope that your enemy will then agree to your terms. That almost never happens. It didn't here. And that's it for today's show. Cory War is the producer of the Gist. Ashley Khan does our coordination of production, which is one way to say it. Jeff Craig runs our socials. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the Gist list. Michelle Pesca helps more than helps, really. Orchestrates it all from above. Pulling the strings. Sort of a Svengali in robes. When she wears a robe, a bathroom, sometimes it's white, it's not black. Umpu G? Peru Duper. And thanks for listening.