Watching a Dictatorship Collapse is Fun

What's coming in Syria may be horrible, but let's enjoy the collapse of the Assad Regime.

Good Afternoon:

Bashar Al-Assad, still president of Syria. For now.

When it ends for a tyrant, it ends quickly.

Things may look durable. They may look stable. Nietzsche famously once described tsarist Russia as the only European regime with any durability. Oops.

But as was the case when he wrote that, authoritarianism is often brittler than it looks. And and when it breaks, it doesn’t break gracefully. It doesn’t fail in one part and retain structure and performance in others. It just shatters. And the tsar gets shot, and Nicolae Ceaucescu and Benito Mussolini get shot. And Qadafi gets dragged through the streets.

And so Bashar al-Assad, mayor of an increasingly shrinking Damascus, awaits his fate. Maybe he will flee to Russia. Maybe he deludes himself that the end is not coming.

But it’s coming. And let’s face it: It’s a lot of fun to watch.

To be clear: I have no illusions about the rebel group that is encircling Assad. A salafist Syria is nothing to be excited about. There are actually a bunch of groups of different stripes, and they will probably turn on each other and fight for power. And a lot of civilians will die. Because that’s what tends to happen when regimes fall in multi-polar environments. And Syria is complicated as hell.

But the fall of a brutal, genocidal, hereditary, dictatorship is always a matter of joy—at least until what comes after shows itself to be worse. And it is always an opportunity for something better—even if that opportunity doesn’t come to fruition. And it is always some small measure of justice—at least on its own terms.

And wow! It’s exciting to watch it unfold.

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The ongoing Feast of Sol Invictus Sale on #DogShirtDaily subscriptions continues through end of the year. All subscriptions are 50 percent off through December 31.

Did I mention that this includes gift subscriptions?

And did I mention that subscribing to #DogShirtDaily gives you coveted access to the Greek Chorus/The Collegium on #DogShirtTV, which now features the ability to highlight Collegium questions onscreen?

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Speaking of #DogShirtTV, I was delighted yesterday to welcome the estimable Shane Harris, now of the Atlantic, who came on to share his latest reporting on the esoteric secrets of the Washington elite—his last reporting effort for his previous employer, the Washington Post. This story has everything: spies, reporters, cocktail parties, funerals, elite families with signature recipes. Everything you could want in a political thriller.

The story is about bacon, by the way.

Once we’d covered that, we moved on to my latest research project, on a topic of equal importance: Kash Patel’s weird-ass children’s books. We finished off the episode by doing a dramatic reading of one of them. Really.

And there’s the underlying story, which ran in the Post Reports podcast:

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Yesterday on Lawfare

Behind the Scenes With the Alt-Right

Paul M. Barrett reviews “Black Pill” by Elle Reeve, a “gutsy book” that follows Elle’s reporting on an “early cadre” of the alt-right movement in the years leading up to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” demonstration, which ultimately—though “awkwardly”—connects this movement to its culmination on Jan. 6, 2021:

The author, who now covers the right-wing extremism beat for CNN, does not focus on analysis of larger political trends. Instead, she provides unusually detailed portraits of a number of the bigots and trolls she persuaded to tell their stories. Her persistence in cultivating this unsavory crew, and her willingness to take real risks to interview them in isolated, private spaces, allow her to provide fresh illumination of the personalities and ideas she encountered.

How Hack and Leak Shapes Public Policy

In the latest installment of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren broke down the news, including the rise of the “hack-for-hire” industry and its effect on policy, “crimephones,” cryptocurrency hacks and the pursuit of remote tech worker jobs by North Korea:

Today, in some ways, we are better off. There is more focus on these hacks from investigative journalists, leaked materials are viewed more skeptically, and there is more focus on responsible reporting. That is all positive, but unfortunately it is still a technique used regularly by wealthy vested interests to manipulate public policy and pervert the course of justice.

Documents

Here’s the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s decision to deny three petitions challenging the constitutionality of the TikTok ban in the United States.

And here’s the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland’s decision to uphold the U.S. Naval Academy's policy of affirmative action, determining that maintaining a diverse officer corps is critical for national security.

Podcasts

On the “Lawfare Daily” podcast, Scott R. Anderson sits down with Joel Braunold for the latest in their series of podcast conversations on aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including Donald Trump’s return to the White House, who’s going to steer policy toward the conflict within the incoming Trump administration, how their approach may differ from the first Trump term, and what it all may mean for Gaza, the West Bank, and the broader region:

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Tell Me Something Interesting

As the conversation continues about whether the #DogShirtTV audience should be considered more of a Collegium than a Greek Chorus, I assigned my crack research team to study exactly what Collegia existed, on which we might model ourselves. For this purpose, the “Encyclopedia of Social Reform” by William Dwight Porter Bliss proves invaluable. It lists the following as known Roman Collegia:

The Fabri navilium, or ship carpenters and boat-makers of the Tiber; the collegium vasculariorum (metal vessel makers); the collegium pistorum (millers); the collegium incendarium (firemen); the collegium vinariorum (wine dealers); even the collegium lupanariorum (brothel keepers); the collegium bisellariorum (makers of chairs for the gods); the collegium centonariorum (rag-pickers or junkmen); the collegium saliarium baxiarum (shoemakers); the fullonum sodalicum (fullers); the corpus nemesiacorum (fortune-tellers); the collegium armariorum (gladiators); the communionis minirum (actors); the collegium castrensialiorum (sutlers); the collegium vinatorum (planters); the collegium farnariorum (mowers); the collegium urinatorum (devils), and a long list of others too numerous to mention.

Here at #DogShirtDaily, we are very fond the “makers of chairs for the gods,” but it doesn’t quite suits our association for Greek Chorus purposes.

Our Collegium is of course devoted to dog shirts, to projecting on Russian embassies, and to asking good questions and having a merry old time during discussions. As the tendency seems to be to name a Collegium after an occupation, projection—being an action—is rather more appropriate than dog shirts.

Since Latin has, alas, no word for “laser projector,” my impulse is use a word like “luminare,” meaning both a lamp and a window shutter, to refer to a projector, but I would have to consult the estimable Sarah Bond on how to construct a noun meaning “lamp-lighter” from there. This approach, would of course, also usefully refer to shedding light on things in the form of asking good questions.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is an owl in the process of waking from anesthesia. The next time you have to undergo anesthesia, remember this beast, and be grateful that you have evolved the capability to be comfortably horizontal.

Video from @drtrentshrader on TikTok.