ARE YOU ABETTING, MAN?

Two people are having a conversation over the phone. One is in a typical Singapore apartment complex. Lush green trees are all around. Air conditioning units and laundry hang off the building. Everything's glowing orange with the sunrise. The person on the other end is in Vancouver in a similar apartment in a similar setting but, of course, it's late afternoon.

ZINO:  But that’s nobody.

BOLLAH:  What do you mean?

ZINO:  Well, even many dozen is, what, 0.001% or 0.01%? It’s most certainly not 1%.

BOLLAH:  I guess. Is it that few? Like, I’m sure those folks— I mean, however many, they’ll represent many more, obviously. Y'know, people who share their views.

ZINO:  Certainly. But why would you leap to thinking that’s the opinion of a majority or a significant minority, or even could be?

BOLLAH:  I wasn’t really thinking of it like that. I suppose it could amount to something if this was a poll; like, with that as a sample and not the sum total of supporters.

ZINO:  Only if the sample was randomly selected and among a much smaller population. Much smaller. What's the population in this case? Something around a million people?

BOLLAH:  That high?

ZINO:  Yeah. Of course, as always, it depends how you define things.

BOLLAH:  Sure. Is this 100% of the teachers in your specific program or are we looking at 1% of all faculty and alum?

ZINO:  Well, let’s be generous. Let’s say the number is 50 times as high. Let’s say there are, in reality, 3,500 members of the community behind them— or, I mean, you could go 500 times. Let’s talk about 35,000. Even that would only represent something like 5% of anything like what might be reasonably considered the University of Toronto community. Y’know what I’m sayin’?

BOLLAH:  Fair enough. Yeah. And I guess 25% doesn’t even win you an election.

ZINO:  Even in Canada.

BOLLAH:  Even in Canada.

ZINO:  How many tenured professors are there in the University of Toronto system? No journalists offered that? It's gonna be like 20-30% of the faculty. I would imagine it's around a thousand or something. It's gonna be in the high hundreds or low thousands. It doesn't really matter, all I mean is those are folks who can’t easily be ousted from their jobs, not for voicing a political opinion or taking a stand on a pressing issue. But people are excited about some dozens, 50 or 75 of them, showing up or signing a petition, or whatever?

BOLLAH:  Seems like it. The newspapers reported it.

ZINO:  Here, I looked it up: it's around 680,000 alumni, 97,678 students, 16,503 faculty, 8,087 staff, and 163 librarians. And we’re sitting around talking about the public statements of 65 of those faculty? And, what, a hundred students? And another hundred of their friends? If it was 10X or 100X it would be uninteresting. I mean, to me at least.

BOLLAH: Sure. That's not a consensus or even a voting block.

ZINO: Well, and how does it make the news, this irrelevant and unpopular movement, unless it has many friends and sympathizers in the media?

BOLLAH:  Right. Yeah, I don't know. And at almost 800k just in the U of T network. That's bigger than some major cities. I wonder if we added up all the people at all the events and rallies and such in all of the city of Toronto over many months, would that hit 100k? Unique individuals, I mean.

ZINO: Actually, I'd be surprised if the number was 50,000. I think the biggest event I saw was generously estimated at 25,000 attendees, so plus or minus 5,000. There could have been others I'm unaware of.

BOLLAH: Huh. And, I guess, why would all those bodies count the same. I mean, in any real sense.

ZINO: That's an interesting thought, too. Indeed, who would attend if there was a $70 admission fee or if there was a hockey game on? Who gives the slightest damn and who is there just to post a favourable photo on their Instagram account? Who can name any of the figures or locations relevant to this thing? Or who of this group has any relevant historical context for what's happening?

BOLLAH: Sure. Or I'm a fan of that line Dawkins would use when debating the religious. What was it? He pointed out how, no, your toddler isn't a 'Democrat' or a 'racist', and it would be obscene to label people in such a manner. You know, arguing that, like, try as you might, whatever branding and brainwashing you commit against your infant, you know, that doesn't actually mark that person as a soldier for your cause. I think that's shockingly clarifying; drives home how, in any sober light, this kind of thing looks more like child abuse than something cute.

ZINO:  That's interesting. I do recall that. And it's a good point. If you're a parent and you bring three kids, I don't know why we would count that as four avid supporters of the cause, as is the framing.

BOLLAH:  Yeah. And your 18-month-old is not an anti-Zionist, or a terrorist for that matter, even if you dress them in army fatigues and the headband of the Al Qassam brigades. That's just child abuse.

ZINO: Similarly, too, no one's told us if this group of instructors is full of teaching assistants from the fine arts department or if they're biochemistry PhDs or if we’re talking about emeritus professors from political science and history who've published the world's most cited works on pertinent themes. The distinction matters in this rare instance.

BOLLAH:  Right. Yeah, that would be interesting to know, if—

ZINO: Don't get me wrong. That's not an elitist thing. I'm not arguing for deferring to authority. I'm just sayin' we could expect that there's a chance certain people have some basic grounding in what war looks like or peace negotiations or international relations and they're not solely informed and motivated by a video clip they saw on TikTok. And, I mean, as such, we can demand more of them. That's all I'm sayin'.

BOLLAH: Totally. Regardless, whatever their footing, I’d love to read their publications and sit through their classes. 

ZINO:  Totally. I mean, most of those folks seem to be profoundly illiterate, like across multiple dimensions of literacy. Which is not meant as a deprecation. I’m not being mean. I’m describing their public outputs.

BOLLAH: I agree. How does a serious person so breathlessly reiterate so much they have to know cannot possibly be? Like, straight propaganda, direct from a war zone, that contradicts everything they know about the world. What is that?

ZINO: Yes. Exactly.

BOLLAH: The Greeks gave us the maxim that "truth is the first casualty in war." This was an established truism 2,500 years ago. And what are we seeing, 80% of the population, even just journalists and academics, demonstrating they're highly skeptical of the outputs from one side of the conflict while offering the verbatim account from the other side?

ZINO: Precisely. You're forced to wonder if these people live in the world. Like, these are smart people who know how their own world operates, right? Even just some of it? Just the most basic universal truths about living in the world? But no part of any of that makes it into their analysis?

BOLLAH: That's what I'm asking myself. And I keep wondering why the local paper or the national media who've established these misinformation teams don't walk people through this stuff. It's literally their job.

ZINO: For real. I mean, how is anything they’re sayin' composed of even any shreds of anything in their own acknowledged reality? And, I mean, even if all of it's fiction, how does their expressly fictional accounting even touch reality? Spell that out for me. These are serious people. They can’t be giving us fiction from fiction on fiction with a sprinkle of fiction and then demand that conforms to what we all know about demographics and public health and economics and history and physics — while everyone can point to three ways any offering clearly misses the mark.

BOLLAH:  They probably feel it’s well-grounded.

ZINO:  Do they, though? I think that's what I'm getting at, that I’ve stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt.

BOLLAH: That may be deserved.

ZINO: Can any of it really be seen as anything but a political tactic?

BOLLAH: Most certainly there's a strategy of repeatedly shouting things they wish to be true.

ZINO: Yeah, loudly and repeatedly enough in the hopes that it sticks and folks start believing it.

BOLLAH:  Exactly. Well, that’s how so much of the world works. That's the whole FOX media empire. That's Russiagate. On and on.

ZINO:  It would explain why folks refuse to define terms or provide examples. Y'know what I mean? These seemingly vigorous fictions would just immediately sublimate and blow away the moment they were exposed to facts or even fact-like conditions. As in, you just cannot be a historian and know none of the history or be totally disinterested in any of the relatively recent, well-known, and well-documented historical context—

BOLLAH:  But you can. 

ZINO:  Oh, for sure—

BOLLAH: This is what they do.

ZINO: Oh, I know. I’ve seen these people in action: PhDs claiming this is their entire area of focus but they can’t, or won’t, point you to any textual evidence, preferring instead to insist they’ve read all the books that matter and the opinion they've cultivated neatly conforms to the undisputed scholarly consensus. End of story.

BOLLAH:  I’ve seen that, too. And how many of the worst assessments and prescriptions and proscriptions of our time have come from the mouths of people labelled “expert.”

ZINO:  Well, I’m starting to say "No!" We need experts. Sure. But you cannot call yourself a lawyer and be unwilling or unable to cite international humanitarian law. I’m not buying it. You’re a fake lawyer. You’re engaged in a massive fraud. You're not a legal expert. Same as you cannot pretend to be a statistician while caring nothing for how the numbers play out or how you’d go about getting or presenting those numbers. No. Fraud. We need more actual experts and specialists and fewer politically motivated frauds.

BOLLAH: I keep saying this. We need our experts to be more like Japanese sushi chefs and less like radical activists.

ZINO: Yeah, fewer people defending arguments they cannot even articulate, never mind defend.

BOLLAH: Yeah, more people able to talk and not rely upon screaming or walking away as their primary communication tools.

ZINO: I like that. We need more sushi chefs. Yeah, like if you're a journalist or reporter, can you go a decade without misrepresenting someone's views? That should be the minimum entry point that bumps you from apprentice to practitioner. Expert would be above that.

BOLLAH: I think about this sort of thing all the time. What if you built something beautiful or important instead of just inciting in others the rage you appear to have toward folks who think differently to you?

ZINO: What if you built something that people love and that made the thing you hate obsolete, rather than setting fires?

BOLLAH: Exactly. Sure. There's nothing challenging or creative about self-immolation or swinging a sledge hammer.

ZINO: To me it's like Wikipedia or something. Folks shouldn't be shitting on Wikipedia, they should be improving it. Similarly, they shouldn't be reposting or liking something without enhancing it. Add a link or an image, cite a source, fix the wording—

BOLLAH: Provide additional context, point people to your favourite writers and investigators.

ZINO: Yeah. And you could do that with anything and everything. And you should. People should get in the habit of improving stuff not merely repeating it or shitting on it.

BOLLAH: For sure.

ZINO: But instead we get a sea of noise and unmitigated propaganda.

BOLLAH:  I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that a lot.

ZINO: Because that's what the news has become.

BOLLAH: Totally. And worse still. The only strangers I follow on social media are professionals like journalists, lawyers, researchers, doctors, public health folks, and such. People considered the top of their class or experts brought on to comment in the media. And yet they all still enthusiastically repeat things like “34,000 dead civilians.”

ZINO:  Right. And that's all our favourite news sources doing the same. “70% women and children.”

BOLLAH:  Yeah. In what universe? With what physics?

ZINO:  Not our own universe. Look, annual all-cause mortality for a population of over two million is gonna be what? In the tens of thousands? And that's in countries with robust and functioning social and medical systems.

BOLLAH:  Oh, for sure. Yeah, that's stabbings, falls from ladders, old age, the flu, lightening strikes, everything. I remember looking up those data during COVID to try and make sense of where we were at. I think it was around 40 or 50 thousand annual deaths for British Columbia. Those numbers were up, of course, but were consistent in many places and not just due to COVID.

ZINO:  For sure. That’s as “normal” a figure as you’re gonna get. And that’s for a population of, what, five million, more than five million?

BOLLAH: Yeah, and Singapore and BC have vaguely similar populations.

ZINO: Right.

BOLLAH: But also part of the picture here is that BC and Singapore are not places with lots of state-sanctioned killings of all sorts.

ZINO:  Sure. We’re not talking apples to apples here. And those state killings are not just someone getting the death penalty for murder, say, but political rivals—

BOLLAH: Yeah, and deviants discovered by the morality police and all the horror shows I don’t have to spell out.

ZINO: Indeed. Which reminds me, I was just looking for something else and noticed that while Gaza has a relatively low homicide rate, the bulk of that annual homicide number are honour killings, which is fucking bonkers. Mentioning such is, of course, a virulent combination of Islamophobia and this novel innovation of "anti-Palestinian racism", so called.

BOLLAH: No no, that would be generous. You're letting yourself off the hook. We all know your real aim is not merely advancing your own brand of bigotry but facilitating genocide.

ZINO: Oh of course. My bad. Yes. I'm enabling genocide.

BOLLAH:  But, yes, apparently all of it is irrelevant. Especially the national sport that is gender-based violence and murder.

ZINO: Also irrelevant, apparently, is that individual militant groups have memberships in the thousands who carry out rocket attacks and the like.

BOLLAH: And there are a dozen such groups.

ZINO:  Exactly.

BOLLAH: And those folks are being actively targeted by the people on the receiving end. 

ZINO: Irrelevant.

BOLLAH:  Irrelevant. It’s all irrelevant: the repeat identification numbers, the fact that there are folks on the official government fatality lists who also died in 2014, the lack of recognition that they employ youth as active combatants and dress themselves in civilian clothes… You've heard all this before. Everyone has.

ZINO: Also irrelevant: the Gaza health authority makes no distinction, and could not, between combatants and non-combatants.

BOLLAH: Irrelevant.

ZINO:  It’s mind devouring. Sanity sucking. But it’s everywhere.

BOLLAH: I keep saying to people that the Cambodian Genocide took place over just a few years and how today, 50 years on and with plenty of interest and research, we don't know if the death toll was closer to 1.5 million or twice that.

ZINO: The death toll is plus-or-minus a million.

BOLLAH: Yes. When the total population back in 1975 was only something like six or seven million. We don't know if a quarter or half the population was exterminated.

ZINO: I know. I know. It's just— goddammit. Imagine Singapore has a new government and in just a handful of years most of your neighbours are gone, taken to work camps or executed. And those surviving can't sort out of if it was some or a majority who died.

BOLLAH:  I saw something yesterday that compared the situation in Gaza to Hiroshima.

ZINO:  Oh they were offering that shit back in October, on day one of the bombing.

BOLLAH:  That's probably right. But you should've seen it. The accompanying video was a panorama of destroyed buildings. Something similar to what's been splashed around everywhere. The text was about needing no more evidence than this, this video, for a finding of genocide.

ZINO:  People are just aggressively pronouncing the depth of their illiteracy.

BOLLAH:  Well, yeah. What was great was they were actually offering numbers. They were citing the usual figures for the dead alongside numbers of bombs dropped and the percentage of damaged buildings and suggesting those look like the effects from Little Boy. Can you imagine?!

ZINO:  I’d wager this was the output of a WWII historian. 90% or higher probability.

BOLLAH:  No, no. But that would be funny. It was some kind of activist.

ZINO:  I’ve seen worse. 

BOLLAH:  I bet.

ZINO:  Did you respond? 

BOLLAH:  I did respond to it. I wrote something like “GAZA: pop 2.3M, 8 months, 50,000 bombs, 25% of buildings destroyed, 15,000 civilian deaths; HIROSHIMA: pop 350k, 1 second, 1 bomb, 70% of buildings destroyed, 80,000 civilians dead.” I wrote, “These are different things.”

ZINO:  Blocked and reported. "Violent," "bigoted," "harmful." No one will even see it.

BOLLAH: Probably.

ZINO: I've been trying for months to get folks to look up Mariupol.

BOLLAH: Where's that, Ukraine?

ZINO: Exactly!

BOLLAH: Ha. Well, in my defence, it's been a busy last few years.

ZINO: Indeed. But yeah, Ukraine.

BOLLAH: What about it?

ZINO: Mariupol has, or had, about a fifth of the population of Gaza. And it's just one city, of course. The major event there, now called the Siege of Mariupol, lasted less than three months. And about 90% of the city was destroyed; that's housing, hospitals, everything. Estimates for the number of military dead are around 10,000. The confirmed, identified bodies of civilian dead sits at about 2,000; but the estimates for actual civilian deaths, according to locals, Ukrainian officials, and international reporters, varies from about 20,000 to 80,000.

BOLLAH: Damn.

ZINO: Yeah. And that highest figure doesn't come from the mayor of Mariupol or the propaganda wing of the Ukrainian military but a recent Associate Press assessment resulting from the discovery of a whole bunch of graves.

BOLLAH: Right.

ZINO: And by "a whole bunch of graves" I mean more than 10,000 graves.

BOLLAH: Right, so you're suggesting this Russian attack on Mariupol is far worse than the Israeli attack on Gaza; Gaza being many villages, towns, and cities, with a population of well over two million, and in a war that's lasted many more months.

ZINO: And in a place folks insist is far more densely populated. And, Mariupol just occurred, too. Yet, comparatively, no one at all freaked out about Mariupol; certainly no one claiming to be upset about Gaza or starvation as a tool of war or—

BOLLAH: War crimes generally or genocide specifically.

ZINO: Yeah, none of those people even know the name Mariupol.

BOLLAH: Doubtless.

ZINO: And Mariupol didn't cause them to riot in the streets or take over airports or abandon their education to force their school to divest from Russian-associated entities.

BOLLAH: Or companies doing business with companies that once did business with companies who once had a Russian-American CFO, as it were.

ZINO: Indeed. Or firebombing Russian churches or businesses in Hamilton or Brisbane. Or marching a mob through a Russian-speaking neighbourhood in Montreal or Melbourne.

BOLLAH: It's messed up. And no one cares.

ZINO: This is the default in 2024. Apparently you can be a political scientist and pay no mind to the political interplay within and between states or be afraid to talk about the constitution of a nation’s laws. Apparently. That’s not fraud in their minds. I’ve seen these conversations and had them myself. I just had one about malnutrition, starvation, and famine.

BOLLAH: That's another one.

ZINO: You can ignore all the public reports from all the NGOs on the ground. You can ignore all the UN and NGO data from previous years that tell us what typical import rates look like. You can ignore that in any other context what they're sayin' about starvation and famine would definitely mean an additional 10,000 or 30,000 dead — not the three or 23 reported.

BOLLAH: Totally. And you can ignore a million Instagram posts from Gazans, giving us nearly real-time shots from on the ground, in city markets and eateries and bakeries.

ZINO: Folks were citing the IPC, that's something like the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or something. It's the official schedule, the classification system for hunger in a population. It's serious business. Used by the UN and everyone else under the most serious situations. In November they were reporting "Phase 5" famine among about 350,000 Gazans. Then it went to 500,000 in December and by February it was closer to 700,000 and I think now we're at a million, according to reports and media stories.

BOLLAH: Okay. I might have seen something about that.

ZINO: Probably. But, as you'd imagine, these things are narrowly defined. And "Phase 5" is the end of the line. Not food insecurity or hunger or malnutrition but death. It means that, on a daily basis, they're seeing 2 deaths from starvation per 100,000 people. You can look it up. It's IPC.org or something.

BOLLAH: Okay.

ZINO: But get this—

BOLLAH: Yeah, I've definitely seen stuff about starvation and famine generally.

ZINO: You couldn't have missed it, I don't think. But now just do the math. I mean, it's more complicated, the numbers of people impacted shifts all over the map, but you can attempt to make sense of what might plausibly be happening on the ground. And you can even give it a huge margin of error. It's only a guess. But do the math.

BOLLAH: I get you. If it was only 300k for six months, that would be almost 200 times six, so like a thousand starvation deaths.

ZINO: It would have to be. By definition. But that's not the figure we're getting. I've only seen single and double digits in various offerings from questionable sources. And, by my math, the figure should, or could, or would be as high as 10,000 or 20,000 or something if you take seriously the kinds of things being said with a population this size.

BOLLAH: Wild.

ZINO: I mean, what do I know? All I'm sayin' is you don't have "Phase 5" without starvation deaths. But they don't say "We don't know" or "The fatalities from food deprivation could be in the tens of thousands" instead they offer "21" and then that's just repeated all over the place, "They're being starved to death! 21 deaths from deliberate starvation!!!" You know? It's mental.

BOLLAH: I hear you.

ZINO: Everyone's competing for Best Fiction. Everyone's trying to make the Pyromaniac Paralympic Team.

BOLLAH:  That’s definitely who we’ve decided to become. And, I guess, who we’re encouraging people to be.

ZINO:  Absolutely. More important than knowing anything or having any experience or sharing any of that, we’re encouraging folks to be, above all, loud and threatening.

BOLLAH: Yeah. And people seem to think that folks responding to what they perceive as an existential threat will be magically made more rational or passive or aligned with their own views if everyone everywhere generates seven more dimensions of threats to Israeli existence and simultaneously smashes all those buttons all day every day.

ZINO: Look, people think that Netanyahu is calling the shots. They think that a good way to catalyze Israeli or Canadian policy change is to punish the founder of Chapters, for caring about Israel, or the former CEO of Starbucks, for the crime of being Jewish. All while barking about a famine that is not occurring under conditions that don't exist.

BOLLAH: As five nations launch land, sea, and air attacks on Israel.

ZINO: That'll definitely bring them to heel.

BOLLAH: Yeah, all that, apparently, is not perfectly insane.

ZINO: Well, they'll tell you with a straight face that all the oldest slanders and threats toward Jews are nothing of the sort—

BOLLAH: They don't even adjust the language

ZINO: Indeed, they just straight plagiarize ancient blood libels and tropes.

BOLLAH: With no push-back.

ZINO: None. And, in fact, when they employ those it's not overt anti-Semitism.

BOLLAH: In fact, that charge of anti-Semitism is itself racist. What they're doing is combating racism and fighting oppression. Like a fool, you're claiming reverse racism.

ZINO: Yeah, they're punching up.

BOLLAH:  All of this reminds me, did you see this paper a few years back, in psychology, where a pair of authors boiled all of our many misconceptions and biases down to just a handful? I think there were six. And they all had a similar flavour. Everything boiled down to one of: My experience is a good reference for others; my assessments are good; I am good; my group is a good reference for others; or my group is good. Oh and the last bias was along different lines, something like: attributes deliver outcomes, context is irrelevant.

ZINO:  And then all our countless failings splinter out from there? Makes sense. These are kinda simplified, higher level metabiases?

BOLLAH:  Basically.

ZINO:  Even if it’s not rock solid, would be a simple framework to think about your own perception and beliefs, a good way to try and get behind them and break them down.

BOLLAH:  For sure. But, to everything you've been saying, even without that you would think there would be plenty of triggers causing people to question their beliefs or even just their public declarations.

ZINO: Even just the worst bits.

BOLLAH: Totally. I mean, these encampments, the one's at elite universities, are getting formal recognition and thanks from Iran’s Ayatollah and the leadership of Al Qaeda and Hamas.

ZINO: I've seen that.

BOLLAH: That’s where their moral support is landing and doing the most work, not bolstering those being repeatedly displaced or blown up.

ZINO: And how could it be otherwise?

BOLLAH: I suppose.

ZINO:  Yeah, and we're talking about avowed terrorists and whole terrorist organizations and networks of them, and their friends and supporters and progenitors, who’ve spent generations blowing shit up, kidnapping, and killing people on every continent, but especially their own. It's bonkers.

BOLLAH: And then even after many recent months of endorsement and celebration, people waving the flags, brandishing all the symbols, and repeating all the slogans, none of it is considered to be aiding these groups — groups who want you dead — even as the leadership names these folks and thanks them for their financial, material, moral, and spiritual aid.

BOLLAH: It's bad.

ZINO:  It’s worse than that, man. Because all of that's paired with campaigns of absurdist revisionist history and things like the framing of their cause as liberation from tyranny and not its clearest extant substantiation.

BOLLAH:  Fair.

ZINO:  Man, and none of it, never mind all of it, is deemed to be, in any way, as you say, abetting.