Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“The Rage Transcends”
reflects on the feeling of rage that pervades contemporary American politics at . Drawing on the response to (alleged) assassin, Luigi Mangione’s, murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, Merchant writes: “Almost everyone understands on a gut level the awfulness of the modern insurance industry, its perverse financial incentives, and that its executives profit while ordinary Americans are routinely denied coverage and care and get sick and go bankrupt and die. Too many have personal horror stories. Few in the schadenfreude-filled comment boards support actual organized murder of executives, but almost everyone can feel the pain and the reasoning behind it. The rage transcends politics, and coalesces around injustice.”Merchant continues: “Of course, lighting a Waymo on fire will address Silicon Valley’s acceleration of inequality about as much as murdering an insurance company CEO will address the systemic injustices of the healthcare industry. But the rage transcends organized politics. Our institutions are failing far too many of us. Healthcare is bankrupting people who need care. Homelessness is rising to sickening heights.”
Merchant also mentions Manigone’s online review of Ted Kaczinski’s Industrial Society and its Future. In light of the revived media attention on the Unabomber’s thought, readers may find it helpful to revisit my Handful of Earth essay, “Ted Kaczynski and the Paradox of the Postwar Predicament.”
“UnitedHealth Uses Faulty AI to Deny Elderly Patients Medically Necessary Coverage, Lawsuit Claims”
After the assassination of Thompson, this CBS story from last year about his company’s practices takes on additional significance: “The families of two now-deceased former beneficiaries of UnitedHealth have filed a lawsuit against the health care giant, alleging it knowingly used a faulty artificial intelligence algorithm to deny elderly patients coverage for extended care deemed necessary by their doctors. The lawsuit, filed last Tuesday in federal court in Minnesota, claims UnitedHealth illegally denied ‘elderly patients care owed to them under Medicare Advantage Plans’ by deploying an AI model known by the company to have a 90% error rate, overriding determinations made by the patients' physicians that the expenses were medically necessary.”
The report continues: “In their complaint…the families accuse UnitedHealth of using faulty AI to deny claims as part of a financial scheme to collect premiums without having to pay for coverage for elderly beneficiaries it believes lack the knowledge and resources ‘to appeal the erroneous AI-powered decisions.’ UnitedHealth continues ‘to systemically deny claims using their flawed AI model because they know that only a tiny minority of policyholders (roughly 0.2%) will appeal denied claims, and the vast majority will either pay out-of-pocket costs or forgo the remainder of their prescribed post-acute care.’”
“The ‘Anti-Elon Tesla Club’: Musk’s Politics Gives Some Owners Second Thoughts”
The Financial Times reports on liberal Tesla owners’ efforts to distance themselves from Elon Musk: “Loren Repollo in Florida said she is unlikely to buy another Tesla unless Musk’s public persona swings back to promoting environmentalism. Repollo bought her Tesla in December 2021 — her first major purchase as an adult. She wanted an EV and was impressed by Tesla’s driving range. Though she assumed Musk was ‘out of touch’ like other billionaires, she found his behaviour increasingly off-putting after he bought Twitter, which he rebranded as X, and that feeling intensified this summer as he began campaigning for Trump. ‘Once he started getting more involved politically, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I need to sell my car,’ she said. ‘I can’t have any affiliation with him.’ Instead, she bought an ‘Anti-Elon Tesla Club’ bumper sticker for the car, and also one for her mother.”
The article continues: “Until recently, Tesla was viewed as a more ‘liberal’ brand, because switching to greener energy sources is critical to combating climate change. But some consumers have cooled on the brand as Musk has adopted increasingly rightwing and conspiratorial positions on his social media platform, X, and pumped more than $250mn into Trump’s campaign.”
The superficial nature of this “resistance” to Musk lends credence to my earlier observation that “his Silicon Valley ideology shares much in common with the values of many leftists and liberals, a fact which has made it difficult for them to mount a substantive critique of Musk.”
“Israel's Love Affair with Syrian Jihadis”
In response to regime change in Syria,
writes on Israel’s role in fueling the conflict: “Zionist apologists commonly present support for Israel as a necessary extension of opposition to radical Islam and the threat of Jihadi terrorism. ‘Support us fighting them here, so you don’t have to fight them there’ is a common plea to the West from Zionist spokespeople within Israel. Yet when it comes to the Syrian Civil War, the conflict which sparked the major refugee crisis responsible for flooding Europe with millions of Muslims, Israel has been firmly on the side of Jihad, even and most particularly Al-Qaeda.”Woods continues: “When ISIS did emerge, many voices within Israel saw it as a positive. A 2016 paper by an Israeli strategic think-tank that contracts for NATO and the Israeli government argued against destroying the Islamic state, since ‘The continuing existence of IS serves a strategic purpose,’ and could be ‘a useful tool in undermining’ Israel’s enemies of Hezbollah, Iran, Syria and Russia. Other senior Israeli figures also saw an opportunity in the growth of ISIS. Naftali Bennett, now a former Prime Minister of Israel, told the annual Herzliya conference — a ‘closed-door annual gathering of the country's very top political, security, intelligence, and business elite’ — that the emergence of ISIS would offer Israel an opportunity to legitimise its annexation of the Golan Heights. Calling for a quintupling of the Jewish occupation population to 100,000 in a 5 year period, Bennett argued the chaos in Syria now made Israel’s claim more appealing than ever to the international community.”
“U.S. Nonprofit Raised $300,000 for Israeli Sniper Unit Associated With Killings of Unarmed Palestinians”
Meanwhile, American Zionists—operating under the auspices of tax-exempt nonprofits—play an important role in funding Israel’s continued genocide in Palestine.
writes for : “A U.S. nonprofit has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for an Israeli sniper unit for the stated purpose of buying scopes, silencers, and other equipment. The unit, which is nicknamed Rephaim, or “Ghosts,” has since been implicated in possible war crimes and killing over 100 people in Gaza and has been tied to the killing of four unarmed Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, 2023.”Vanderlip’s report provides multiple examples of the unit’s self-reported activities: “On April 19, 2024, Shalom Gilbert, another member of the 202 Paratroopers [“Ghosts”] Battalion posted a montage video of his battalion’s activities in the Gaza Strip. Like many similar videos uploaded to social media by Israeli soldiers since the start of the war in Gaza, Gilbert’s footage shows in detail the tremendous devastation wrought upon the territory by the Israeli military assault. While there is typically very little combat footage in the montages, this particular video shows three separate clips of snipers targeting apparently unarmed people. The battalion’s video states in blunt terms their intention to bring violence upon Gaza: ‘When they meet the 202nd battalion they are going to regret being born,’ a text displayed in the video says. Around two minutes into the montage, grainy thermal imagery displays a scene of two men, appearing unarmed, walking down a street and in civilian clothes. The man then falls to the ground, appearing to have been shot. The second man runs away to the left, outside of the camera view.”
“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”
In a New York Times op-ed, David Morris meditates on the disappearance of men from the American literary world: “Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales.”
He continues: “In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent. This disparity surely translates to a drop-off in the number of novels young men read, as they descend deeper into video games and pornography…What will become of literature — and indeed, of society — if men are no longer involved in reading and writing? The fortunes of men and women are intertwined.”
While Handful of Earth is not a literary publication (though it has featured original poetry by a guest writer), I believe that fostering a shared space among male and female readers is pivotal. As I wrote earlier this month in a welcome post to new readers, “to the extent that I can tell from my subscriber list, Handful of Earth has a relative balance of male and female readers. This may seem like a trivial point, but I increasingly believe that an effort to counter the sex-polarized American virtual world is essential. Online spaces that address the themes covered on Handful of Earth—culture, politics, and technology—are often more segregated by sex than the in-person public sphere. As voting patterns in last month’s election demonstrate, this segregation exerts a very real impact on politics. Well before that, the ossification of male and female online spheres had already begun to overdetermine many aspects of social life in the United States and beyond. Handful of Earth is but a mere drop in the bucket of online discourse, but the fact that it is an independent publication read by men and women alike is an important step forward.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
It's completely different in tone from what you've shared, but I loved this post by Dan Keane: https://open.substack.com/pub/dankeane/p/a-walk-is-not-a-lesson?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1vdpq9
We are nearly blood brothers. Great work Vincent. Random thoughts here.
That Mangone is Atheist (proven by his Kazcinski review) doesn't make him wrong in the least, except for our creation. But, it does indicate the problems of growing Atheism everywhere which gives us cold blooded murder and worldwide genocide where there is no fear of God. I see very bad times ahead as a result of loss of faith to constrain our human nature. He is right about American Healthcare which takes licenses from people that don't play the kickback game of total corruption and genocide for cash. As for women, this also has been a brewing problem.since they got the vote and we are nearly in the horrors of their pagan matriarchy. I did this, not exactly satire.
https://worldyturnings.com/2024/07/30/the-pagans-among-us-are-mainly-girls/