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its original – theological - English meaning as a lesser form of repentance that had a worldly instead of a spiritual motive, lacking the sincerity of true contrition

something second-best

Attrition was therefore established as a form of warfare to avoid, as second best to beating the enemy in a decisive battle. Exhausting an enemy through constant sniping, skirmishing and harassment took time, and increasingly made victory dependent less on the conduct of military operations and more on the underlying economic and social resilience of the nation. In addition, the process worked both ways. One’s own forces also faced attrition, turning war into a contest of endurance.

inflicting attrition on your opponent can be a sensible precursor to battle

Instead of rushing an attack, exploiting surprise, it might make more sense to opt for a more methodical approach, taking out enemy capabilities and undermining morale, before embarking on an offensive – what the Americans call ‘preparing the battlefield’.

In these circumstances, wider economic and social resilience will matter, as both sides try to produce more equipment and ammunition and find more personnel to make up losses. Once one side falters in this effort then they might lose as a result of unrest at home or a progressive inability to fight effectively

Attrition is not just a question of which side is suffering most but also who is best able to regenerate their combat capabilities.

we can note some of this war’s fundamental asymmetries that continue to shape its conduct:

First Russia has identified Ukraine’s dependence on external support as its greatest vulnerability and has been looking for ways to undermine this support, largely by aggravating the economic crises facing the West

Two conclusions emerge from these asymmetries

The second conclusion is that conditions on the ground should increasingly favour Ukraine because of the quality of the systems now entering service and the effectiveness with which they are being used

Ukraine is having to follow a strategy that works round its weaknesses while exploiting those of Russia. This was dubbed back in May as ‘corrosion’ by General Mick Ryan. Ukraine, he noted, has sought to hollow out ‘the Russian physical, moral, and intellectual capacity to fight and win in Ukraine, both on the battlefield, and in the global information environment.’

The problem with attrition is that it does not force a decision on the enemy. It works by persuading enemy forces and their political leadership that their position is untenable and likely to get worse. So long as they believe that they are only facing temporary difficulties and can turn the situation around, or at least must show that they have put up a decent fight before folding, then the war will continue

It is easy to understand why Ukraine feels that it has no choice but to carry on fighting and why it is now confident that it is slowly taking the initiative.

Moscow appears to wish to incorporate seized territory into Russia, for which they are preparing some dubious procedures that will impress nobody but themselves. Deep down for Moscow the war may now be all about denying NATO the satisfaction of a Ukrainian victory and saving Putin’s face

There is nonetheless something increasingly desperate about Russian rhetoric and behaviour. The Russian military position is deteriorating and the West’s backing for Ukraine has yet to slacken. The trends therefore favour Ukraine. At some Putin and his cronies will have to work out how long they can continue to pretend that they have a credible path to victory.

Thus far the battle has seen far less damage done to Mosul's infrastructure than previous attritional struggles like Ramadi in Iraq or Kobane in Syria, though the daily damage to neighbourhoods has intensified since the offensive restarted.

The reason there are so many vacancies without nominees is that certain senators are making strategic choices not to recommend federal trial-court nominees to the White House. These lawmakers are saying that they would rather have no one interpreting federal law in their states than to have more Obama-appointed judges interpreting the law.

The easy response, offered up recently by the Texas delegation, is that it's the White House's fault, too. But it's not.

It's an intentional act by the legislative branch to keep the judicial branch from effectively performing its constitutionally mandated functions. And it's a neutering of a co-equal branch achieved without a constitutional amendment or statute, or even much public debate, about expressly limiting judicial power.

What's happening here is part of a blunt political and ideological strategy: These particular senators have maneuvered so that the citizens of red states have less federal judicial oversight than citizens of blue states and purple states. This is great news if you are a secessionist or hate the idea of federal power exercised through the judiciary.

There are currently 59 federal court vacancies for which there are no pending nominees. This number represents more than half the number of current vacancies in total

By subverting this goal, by seceding from federal judicial authority by attrition, these senators are dooming their constituents to a third-world legal system.

The facts behind these statistics are just some of the newest arguments against one of the worst and most self-defeating Senate "traditions": the granting to local senators of what amounts to veto power over federal judicial nominees.

The reason this important story isn't covered well on television is because there are no dramatic images attached to it. The reason the White House doesn't highlight the problem more often is because it still needs to work with these intransigent senators on future nominations.

But Germans are no longer so ready to be put on the moral defensive or to view the Nazi era as the defining episode of their past. Even non-Germans seem willing to move on. Recent books like “Germania” and “The German Genius” suggest that English-language publishing may be entering a post-swastika phase. Germany still atones but now also preaches, usually on the evils of debt, the importance of nurturing industry and the superiority of long-term thinking in enterprise. Others are disposed to listen. “Everyone orients himself towards Germany,”

A third of Germans think the country is overrun by foreigners, according to a newly published poll; a majority favour “sharply restricting” Muslim religious practice. Over a tenth would even welcome a Führer who would govern with “a strong hand”—a sign that the embers of extremism still glow.

the Bavarian sister party of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), declared this month that Germany needs no further immigration from Turkey or the Arab world. Germany is “not an immigration country”, he insisted, contradicting a hard-won consensus among conservatives.

the Berlin republic is a different sort of character from its westward-leaning, Bonn-based predecessor. Scholars had struck several awkward coinages to describe war-chastened Germany: it was a “tamed power” engaged in “attritional multilateralism”. These no longer seem apt for today’s more confident and self-willed Germany. But its identity is still unformed

Despite their economic strength, Germans fear the worst. They believe their country “has passed its zenith”, says Mrs Kocher, the pollster. This pessimism shapes Germany’s dealings with the rest of the world. Unlike most countries, Germany is not driven by any great ambition, but rather by the fear that “things could fall apart if they don’t hold on to stability,”

These unEuropean outbursts startled not just Greeks, who brandished swastikas in response, but Europeans generally. They had grown up believing that the Germans saw their own interests as inseparable from those of their fellow Europeans. Now they glimpsed a different, ugly German, smug about his economy and untroubled by his past.

The crisis has created a new pecking order, at least temporarily. Germany, with its high-competitiveness, low-debt economy, is on top. The rest are having to adjust, including France, traditionally a joint leader of the European project. This is unsettling. “You get an enormous sense of German self-righteousness, which is very difficult to take, especially when there are solid foundations for it,” says François Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. France, which has lagged behind Germany in making structural reforms, feels its influence waning. “France has to do its homework to be able to restore some level of influence in Europe,

Germany’s brightest business prospects do not involve its slow-growing neighbours but the charismatic economies of Asia and Latin America. A German acceptance of Turkish membership of the EU looks less likely than ever.

“Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks. And the Acropolis while you’re at it,” demanded Bild, a popular tabloid

Germany’s overall direction is obscure. It is torn, intrigued by its new possibilities but painfully aware that alone it does not count for much in the world. Its population is already shrinking. Europe will lose economic and demographic bulk relative to China, India and Brazil. The EU was virtually ignored at last year’s Copenhagen summit on climate change, even though it had taken the lead in setting targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. This was “an enormous shock”, says Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister who now leads the liberals in the European Parliament. “It shows we need one voice.” Fear of war launched the European project; he hopes that fear of irrelevance will drive it forward.

in military terms, Germany remains a midget compared not just with America but with Britain and France, which together account for 70% of the EU’s military research and development and 60% of its deployable forces.

Kuh and others emphasize that fates are not fixed by early life. "I don't ever want the findings to be interpreted as purely deterministic," says Kuh; she prefers the more optimistic idea that disease risks result from an accumulation of experiences throughout life, and that education, diet or other factors can shift poor trajectories to better ones.

Sars-CoV-2 shares between 80% and 90% of its genetic material with the virus that caused Sars – hence its name. Both consist of a strip of ribonucleic acid (RNA) inside a spherical protein capsule that is covered in spikes. The spikes lock on to receptors on the surface of cells lining the human lung – the same type of receptor in both cases – allowing the virus to break into the cell. Once inside, it hijacks the cell’s reproductive machinery to produce more copies of itself, before breaking out of the cell again and killing it in the process.

Coronaviruses have caused two other recent epidemics – severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in China in 2002-04, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), which started in Saudi Arabia in 2012. In both cases, work began on vaccines that were later shelved when the outbreaks were contained.

Though nobody could have predicted that the next infectious disease to threaten the globe would be caused by a coronavirus – flu is generally considered to pose the greatest pandemic risk – vaccinologists had hedged their bets by working on “prototype” pathogens.

All vaccines work according to the same basic principle. They present part or all of the pathogen to the human immune system, usually in the form of an injection and at a low dose, to prompt the system to produce antibodies to the pathogen. Antibodies are a kind of immune memory which, having been elicited once, can be quickly mobilised again if the person is exposed to the virus in its natural form.

Some of the Covid-19 vaccine projects are using these tried-and-tested approaches, but others are using newer technology.

Cepi’s original portfolio of four funded Covid-19 vaccine projects was heavily skewed towards these more innovative technologies, and last week it announced $4.4m (£3.4m) of partnership funding with Novavax and with a University of Oxford vectored vaccine project.

Clinical trials, an essential precursor to regulatory approval, usually take place in three phases. The first, involving a few dozen healthy volunteers, tests the vaccine for safety, monitoring for adverse effects. The second, involving several hundred people, usually in a part of the world affected by the disease, looks at how effective the vaccine is, and the third does the same in several thousand people. But there’s a high level of attrition as experimental vaccines pass through these phases.

There are good reasons for that. Either the candidates are unsafe, or they’re ineffective, or both. Screening out duds is essential, which is why clinical trials can’t be skipped or hurried. Approval can be accelerated if regulators have approved similar products before.

No vaccine made from genetic material – RNA or DNA – has been approved to date, for example. So the Covid-19 vaccine candidates have to be treated as brand new vaccines, and as Gellin says: “While there is a push to do things as fast as possible, it’s really important not to take shortcuts.”

It’s for these reasons that taking a vaccine candidate all the way to regulatory approval typically takes a decade or more, and why President Trump sowed confusion when, at a meeting at the White House on 2 March, he pressed for a vaccine to be ready by the US elections in November – an impossible deadline.

In the meantime, there is another potential problem. As soon as a vaccine is approved, it’s going to be needed in vast quantities – and many of the organisations in the Covid-19 vaccine race simply don’t have the necessary production capacity. Vaccine development is already a risky affair, in business terms, because so few candidates get anywhere near the clinic. Production facilities tend to be tailored to specific vaccines, and scaling these up when you don’t yet know if your product will succeed is not commercially feasible. Cepi and similar organisations exist to shoulder some of the risk, keeping companies incentivised to develop much-needed vaccines. Cepi plans to invest in developing a Covid-19 vaccine and boosting manufacturing capacity in parallel, and earlier this month it put out a call for $2bn to allow it to do so.

The problem is making sure the vaccine gets to all those who need it. This is a challenge even within countries, and some have worked out guidelines. In the scenario of a flu pandemic, for example, the UK would prioritise vaccinating healthcare and social care workers, along with those considered at highest medical risk – including children and pregnant women – with the overall goal of keeping sickness and death rates as low as possible. But in a pandemic, countries also have to compete with each other for medicines.

Because pandemics tend to hit hardest those countries that have the most fragile and underfunded healthcare systems, there is an inherent imbalance between need and purchasing power when it comes to vaccines.

Outside of pandemics, the WHO brings governments, charitable foundations and vaccine-makers together to agree an equitable global distribution strategy, and organisations like Gavi, the vaccine alliance, have come up with innovative funding mechanisms to raise money on the markets for ensuring supply to poorer countries. But each pandemic is different, and no country is bound by any arrangement the WHO proposes – leaving many unknowns.

Fudge, who has represented parts of Cleveland and Akron in the House since 2008, was praised by Democrats for her years of work in Congress toward bolstering federal safety net programs and fighting racial inequities in the economy.

She is the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and served as mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, from 2000 until she was elected to Congress.

Fudge announced her resignation from the House on Wednesday afternoon after voting for Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan.

several Republicans fiercely opposed Fudge’s nomination over past heated criticisms of GOP lawmakers and her lack of expertise on housing policy issues.

Fudge will take over HUD at a challenging time for both the U.S. housing system and the federal department that oversees it.

More than 11 million U.S. households are facing homelessness after nearly a year of economic peril caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the housing affordability crisis that began long before COVID-19 hit the U.S.

President BidenJoe BidenManchin cements key-vote status in 50-50 Senate The Memo: How the COVID year upended politics Post-pandemic plans for lawmakers: Chuck E. Cheese, visiting friends, hugging grandkids MORE is also seeking to dramatically expand public housing and make sorely needed maintenance upgrades to the country’s existing supply of federally supported homes, a longtime goal of Democrats and housing advocates.

Fudge will face those issues with a HUD staff depleted by years of attrition and insufficient hiring.

Fudge vowed during her confirmation process to turn HUD around at a critical moment for the U.S. with a special focus on narrowing the racial inequities in the housing market that have been deepened by COVID-19.

While 7 percent of white households reported being behind on rent or mortgage payments in December, 22 percent of Black households, 18 percent of Hispanic households and 13 percent of Asian households had missed payments,

And while roughly 75 percent of white Americans owned their homes in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to the Census Bureau, only 44 percent of Black Americans did.

But it isn’t. Instead, we face a situation in which Mr. Trump clearly lost the 2020 election — and yet the pressure for us to ditch the party is even more intense than it was before Nov. 3.

Sure, they were all generally less tax-happy than their Democratic rivals and favored more conservative judges. But they — and their respective power bases — also didn’t agree on everything, and sometimes disagreed on a lot.

I don’t want to leave the Republican Party. But I need to believe that if people like me stay, we will have a fighting chance at changing the direction of the party.

So elected Republicans need to force Mr. Trump out of office, one way or another, to avoid further attrition in the ranks and the risk that the party devolves into something even worse than what we have seen over the last week.

The remaining days in the presidency of Donald Trump now number in the single digits. That should also be the number of days until the Republican Party begins the post-Trump era, and Trump-disdaining Republicans like me can fully re-engage with it.

Despite his role in the sacking of the Capitol, he has (also not surprisingly) refused to resign from office — but what is shocking is that so many Republicans in Congress have expressed downright hostility against forcing him out

Many former Republicans who deeply dislike Mr. Trump have already done so. Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, announced last year that he was becoming a Democrat.

hird party (perhaps the Libertarian Party)

That may be where many of us — those of us who were explicitly NeverTrump, and even those who were willing to cut the president a lot more slack — wind up.

“You’ll see the same associate staffed on all the great cases and think, ‘Why am I not getting those same opportunities?’ ” said Duvol Thompson, a partner at Holland & Knight LLP. He recently helped compile a survey of 60 Black male lawyers that concluded: “The consistent challenge is attempting to rise through the ranks based on knowledge, experience and ability rather than being minimized, diminished or judged based on the color of our skin.”

“What gets done is what gets rewarded,” said Shannon Klinger, chief legal officer of pharmaceutical company Novartis AG , which withholds 15% of legal fees if diversity benchmarks aren’t met.

In any given year, a handful of the nation’s largest law firms have no Black partners. Elite law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, which has 500 lawyers, has had one Black partner in its centurylong history.

Attrition rates for minority associates were 22%, compared with 17% for white associates, according to a study this year by the NALP Foundation, an industry research group, and legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa.

“For a profession that’s supposed to be all about equality, opportunity and justice,” he said, “we should be first, not last.”

There will be a few later-night states out West that are worth keeping in mind: Nevada, which Mr. Trump has sought to pull back from the Democrats, and Arizona, which Mr. Biden has been trying to put into the Democratic column.

If Mr. Biden does not win any of those three states (or Texas, where most of the state polls close at 8 p.m.), that will ratchet up the importance of the so-called blue wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which Mr. Trump flipped from Democrats in 2016 and where polls show Mr. Biden ahead.

Florida officials have already processed the state’s record-breaking early vote, which has been almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.

Now, with the president expecting no definitive winner on Tuesday night, and his campaign lawyers trying to use state rules to stop the counting of mail-in votes after Election Day, he has no plans to deliver any sort of concession.

. A win in Florida would keep him in the race, but attention would then turn immediately to the Northern battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

The White House has invited 400 people to the East Room and was planning for everyone attending to be tested for the coronavirus. There was no official invitation sent to many guests invited: The president’s secretary called them to extend the invitation personally. But officials said they expected a lot of attrition and were not certain how many people would show up.

Many people in the president’s circle think he is likely to lose. A brief burst of optimism a few weeks ago has settled into concern about their own careers, post-Trump. Coupled with expectations of large protests around the White House, and the coronavirus, it was not seen by all invitees as the see-and-be-seen event of the year.

Mr. Biden is expected to deliver remarks sometime late Tuesday night or Wednesday morning from Wilmington, Del., but if the result remains in flux he may wait.

Mr. Biden, after a campaign premised largely on the idea of returning to presidential norms, would be stepping far out of character if he too called himself the winner before results were known in enough states.

Control of the Senate is also among the biggest issues being decided Tuesday, with the result going a long way toward determining the contours of the federal government for at least the next two years.

Polling suggests Democrats are favored to pick up seats held by Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona, and lose the one held by Senator Doug Jones of Alabama.The other big tossup contests are in Maine and North Carolina, where the Republican Senators Susan Collins and Thom Tillis face fierce challenges from the Democrats Sara Gideon and Cal Cunningham.

With control of the House unlikely to change, the ability of Democratic candidates for Senate in these states to outrun Mr. Biden may determine the shape of Congress next year.

The first thing to watch for is what the two candidates do if Mr. Biden wins Florida.

If Mr. Trump holds on to Florida, watch out for the lawyers. There are likely to be legal challenges — mainly from Mr. Trump — to early votes cast across the country. Mr. Trump has laid the groundwork with his unfounded warnings about voter fraud and by dispatching lawyers ready to challenge the legitimacy of votes cast. And if Pennsylvania is close, expect that state to be ground zero for legal action that could keep this election unresolved right through Thanksgiving.

What would Mill have said if England had had then, as it does now, a public health system in which everyone shared the cost of treatment for alcoholism? What would he have said about smoking if he knew about the effects of secondhand smoke? Indeed, secondhand smoke is rapidly becoming a metaphor for our time.

Am I being too alarmist? Possibly. Sweeping legislative proposals like the Green New Deal places virtually all of the burden on utilities and industry, rather than end-users like us, by imposing a price on carbon

The other obvious objection to my scenario would be, in effect, so what? The First Amendment doesn’t protect your right to eat steak

Yet that’s not quite right. Very few of us care so much about our rights of speech or conscience

in 1819, Constant wrote that the democrats of Greece and Rome, like the revolutionaries of his own day, “admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community.”

By contrast, Constant wrote, “the aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures, and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to those pleasures.”

One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as F.D.R. put it, more prescient than he knew. In the cataclysm of the Depression, the president was able to summon up the sense of collective purpose needed to embark on large-scale change

We moderns build institutions, and establish tacit norms, to guarantee the security of such private pleasures. That’s liberal individualism.

But what do we do once we see that some of those choices threaten the health and lives of others? We will have to strike a new equilibrium between what society has the right to demand of us and what we have a right to retain for ourselves.

F.D.R. was a liberal — that was the word he used to describe himself — but he was willing to restrict some liberties in order to advance larger ones. A liberal, as he once put it, was prepared to use government to ensure the ordinary citizen “the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Liberal societies, in short, have always faced the problem of secondhand smoke, but what once was exceptional has now become endemic.

Constant wasn’t thinking of Marie Antoinette’s right to play at shepherdess while her subjects starved, but the right to open a shop and build yourself a home rather than be drafted into Napoleon’s army

Our own crisis, of course, still appears to many far too remote for any such call to sacrifice.

Can we forge a new equilibrium before Miami is under water?

The Dutch can reach consensus on painful social questions because they’ve spent the last thousand years working cooperatively to build dikes; the climate accord adopted last year came after a full year of discussion among representatives of all interest groups.

That’s not how American democracy works, and especially so in recent years. We allow those interest groups to wage a pitched battle using all the money and influence they can muster against one another. Legislation emerges only after a war of attrition.

what do we do once we see that some of those choices threaten the health and lives of others? We will have to strike a new equilibrium between what society has the right to demand of us and what we have a right to retain for ourselves.

Liberal societies, in short, have always faced the problem of secondhand smoke, but what once was exceptional has now become endemic. One man’s meat is another man’s poison

Can we forge a new equilibrium before Miami is under water? I would like to think we’ll do so as part of a larger process of democratic deliberation. The Green New Deal envisions a 10-year phase of “transparent and inclusive consultation,” which sounds just about right.

The Dutch can reach consensus on painful social questions because they’ve spent the last thousand years working cooperatively to build dikes; the climate accord adopted last year came after a full year of discussion among representatives of all interest groups.

That’s not how American democracy works, and especially so in recent years. We allow those interest groups to wage a pitched battle using all the money and influence they can muster against one another. Legislation emerges only after a war of attrition.

just maybe we’ll rise to the occasion: With the flood upon us, we, too, will learn how to build dikes together.

A survey by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education found that 19 percent of undergraduate-level and 11 percent of graduate-level teaching programs saw a significant drop in enrollment this year.

combined with longstanding frustrations over low pay compared with professions that require similar levels of education.

After months of seeing only her roommates, moving around a classroom brimming with fourth and fifth graders was nerve-racking

“I didn’t want to start despising a career I had a passion for because of the salary,”

while they might have pictured themselves holding students’ hands and forming deep relationships, they’re now finding themselves staring at faces on a Zoom grid instead.

Educators have struggled with recruitment to the profession since long before the pandemic. In recent years, about 8 percent of public schoolteachers were leaving the work force annually, through retirement or attrition.

the secretary of education, recently called for financial help to reopen schools safely, which will allow them to bring on more employees so they can make their classes smaller. The Covid-19 relief package approved by President Biden includes $129 billion in funding for K-12 schools, which can be used to increase staff.

that teaching has historically been a “recession-proof profession” that sometimes attracts more young people in times of crisis.

“Seeing her make her students laugh made me realize how much a teacher can impact someone’s day,” she said. “I was like, whoa, that’s something I want to do.”

The city’s population remains about 85 percent white — in a state that is among the whitest in the nation. But Burlington is a college town, drawing people from around the country. It’s also a refugee resettlement hub, where people from war-torn countries in Asia and Africa come to live.

The measure capped the number of officers at 74, down from a maximum of about 100. Most of the reduction was expected to happen over time through attrition.

Still, the Burlington Police say many kinds of crimes have increased in 2022. Larceny of all types is up 107 percent this year in Burlington compared with the five-year average from 2017 to 2021, and downtown businesses have begun to react.

“And 85 percent of the time that is probably true,” she said, “but there is the other 15 percent that has to be dealt with.”

“Street level crime, like bike thefts, they are not being dealt with before it escalates into something bigger,’’ said Joseph Corrow, a patrol officer and president of the local police union.

The police say making arrests for bike thefts could be challenging. They cite a memo from the local prosecutor which stipulates that, according to Vermont law, in order to effectively prosecute someone the police must prove the person “actually knew” the property was stolen.

Tammy Boudah, a street outreach worker in Burlington, said she supported the broad examination of race and class by the city government. But the notion of replacing the police with more social workers, she said, “is predicated on the idea that everyone just wants to get along.”

Mr. Weinberger readily admits, however, that the police cuts do not explain everything that’s going wrong in Burlington, particularly the increase in violence.Over the course of two weeks in September, a man in a wheelchair was hit in the face and robbed while withdrawing money from an A.T.M., another man suffered multiple skull fractures and nearly lost an eye after being beaten outside a Walgreens and a third man, a college student, was robbed at gunpoint and forced to strip naked.

“We are not used to this level of violence in Vermont,” Mr. Weinberger said at a news conference announcing a double murder in early October.

“I no longer feel safe going into City Hall Park at any time of the day,” said Ms. Toof, who has worked in street outreach for seven years.Those concerns are exacerbated because the outreach workers say they can no longer depend on the police to accompany them on certain calls because of staffing constraints.

Michael Hutchins, who moved to Florida last October to get away from the drug scene in Burlington, said some meth users he knew in Burlington stole bikes for transportation. “To get from Point A to Point B,” he said.

Others stole for the sheer thrill of taking something. Up for days without sleeping, some rode the bikes around with no real purpose. Mr. Davis said he had watched one bike change hands six times in the park

Last year, when the police dismantled a large encampment in an empty lot, they found the “severed limbs of hundreds of bikes” strewn about, Chief Murad said.

“Bikes were a quick easy grab that fulfilled the need to take something for an adrenaline rush,” Mr. Hutchins, 40, said in a phone interview from Florida.

Stealing and hoarding were common among the people Mr. Hutchins knew in Burlington struggling with addiction.

(A study of sixty-seven civil wars published in the Journal of Peace Studies in 2021 found no evidence that ceasefires and prisoner releases led to sustainable peace agreements.)

Because of Israel’s deep alliance with this country, its wars run on a timer: When will the U.S. conclude that its interests, and Israel’s, require that hostilities end? After the atrocities of October 7th, the Israel Defense Forces launched an unprecedented retaliation and, because of the predictable killing and immiseration of innocents which followed, effectively shortened the time that the Biden Administration and European allies were likely to offer unqualified support.

there is no way for the I.D.F. to fight what amounts to a war of attrition without killing many more noncombatants

In any event, Israel cannot “destroy” or “eliminate” Hamas anytime soon. With international diplomatic support, however, it might be able to disarm, suppress, and further delegitimatize the group

Doing so would require the committed help of those powerful Arab states, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders fear and despise the Islamist ideology that Hamas espouses.

Durable Israeli security cannot be achieved without Palestinian sovereignty. The alternative to re-starting the difficult work toward a sustainable deal is violence with no end in sight. ♦

Then came 2016. The overreading began once again. The old electoral college “blue wall” had become a “red wall,” and Trump had supposedly unlocked the key to lasting control. But, well, you know the rest.

Everyone keeps looking for the political Battle of Yorktown—that moment when your opponents lose once and for all and they march out slowly before you while the band plays “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Instead, in a closely-divided nation that’s characterized mainly by negative polarization and calcification, the better analogy is to trench warfare—grinding, bloody attrition, with gains often measured in yards rather than miles and true breakthroughs few and far between. 

Thus, the question after any given election isn’t so much, “Who is ascendant?” Rather, it’s “In which direction did the lines move?” 

often the more important cultural changes can be harder to discern

in this instance one of those more important changes was the blow to the malice theory of American politics. 

The malice theory is a core element of Trumpism, and it’s a natural temptation of negative polarization. Negative polarization (or negative partisanship), as I’ve written many times, is the term for politics that is fundamentally motivated by animosity for the other side more than affection to your own party’s leaders or ideas. 

Under the malice theory, the key to electoral victory is unlocking that anger. That means highlighting everything wrong with your opponents. That means hyping their alleged mortal threat to the Republic.

who should be kind to the “godless communist orcs” who are “trying to ruin this great country”? 

then persuasion is a waste of time. Defeating the enemy isn’t about persuading the enemy, but rather about mobilizing the righteous.

inspiring people is hard. Scaring them is easy—especially when the internet gives you constant access to the worst and weirdest voices on the other side. 

here’s where the malice theory collides with human nature. Most people aren’t content with simply thinking their opponents are terrible. They still want to see themselves as good. They want to see the world as “good versus evil,” not “lesser evil versus evil.” 

That’s why the argument that voters should always swallow deep moral objections to vote for the lesser evil are ultimately unsustainable

When confronted with relentless wrongdoing from your own partisans, one of two things happens—over time you’ll either redefine evil as good, or you’ll abandon evil for the good. 

The first response is core to much of the MAGA movement. It’s how someone goes from holding their nose and voting for Trump in 2016 to being the first bass boat in the boat parade in 2020. We all watched it happen.

The ultimate expression of this faction was represented by what’s been called the “Stop the Steal” slate of Republican candidates. These were the folks who were all-in, not just on Trump, but on some of the most transparently, incandescently absurd political conspiracies in modern American history. 

I don’t want to make the very mistake I identified at the start of this newsletter and overstate my case. Talk of a true MAGA “repudiation” is overblown

remember, the question isn’t whether anyone achieved ultimate victory or faced a final defeat. It’s in which direction the lines moved in our nation’s political trench warfare. And they most definitely moved back towards reason and our most basic moral norms. 

since politicians so often follow voters far more than they lead voters, it is ultimately up to us to demonstrate to them that the malice theory of American politics is truly a dead political end

The worst thing for American politics would be for the Trumpist narrative—that decency is for the weak—to prevai

If cruelty truly is the sole or best path to partisan victory, then the continued temptation to yield to our worst impulses would grow overwhelming. The temptation was already strong enough to distort and transform the political culture of the right simply based on Trump’s single, narrow win.

the opposite message seems to be true

Ever since Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the Trumpist GOP lost and kept losing. A movement that prioritized vicious political combat lost the House in the 2018 midterms, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, and has likely blown a virtually unlosable election in 2022, despite the fact that the country is struggling under the great weight of the worst crime and inflation in at least a generation.

It turns out that there’s some life left in decency yet. Even when times are hard, there are voters who are unwilling to call good evil and evil good

It turns out that it’s hard to escape the need to persuade and inspire, and that might be the best—and most important—consequence of a midterm election that gave neither party a mandate but reminded the Republicans that malice and lies can do far more political harm than good.