Why Belgium? Leon Neyfakh asks. Pointing readers to Joshua Keating’s 2015 piece on the topic, Neyfakh reports that terrorist organizations have “capitalized on the high rates of poverty among Muslims in Belgium, as well as anger over widespread discrimination against Muslims and bans on Islamic veils that were passed in Antwerp in 2009 and at the national level in 2011.” ISIS now claims responsibility for the attacks, which have killed at least 30 people.
Jordan Weissmann has been following Donald Trump’s message on the Brussels attacks as it evolved through the day. “The note [Trump] returned to again and again was that Belgium’s capital was a ‘horrible city’ brought low by Muslim immigration,” Weissman writes, rounding up Trump’s tweets and talk-show appearances. “He also endorsed the use of torture (again), flip-flopped on whether he would shut down the border were he president today, and warned that a similar violence was coming to the U.S.”
Read all of Slate’s coverage of the Brussels attacks—photos, a live-blog, and more analysis—at this link.
Watching Fox News, which he rarely does, Reihan Salam muses on the average age of the network’s viewers and wonders how the grayness of the Grand Old Party may be contributing to its current identity crisis. “The advanced age of Republican voters explains the contours of the GOP agenda,” Salam writes.”The beauty of the over-65 set is that they are reliable voters. The bad news about them is that they are not long for this Earth, and they are not always in tune with the fears, hopes, and dreams of voters who will be around for decades to come.”
Are the news media to blame for the Trump phenomenon? Not really, says Daniel Okrent, former public editor of the New York Times, in an interview with Isaac Chotiner: “Tell me when he has a rally and somebody gets punched in the face for protesting that we shouldn’t cover that. Every time there’s another explosion, I’m wondering, how could you not cover it? He’s making news. The news media are not making the news; he’s making the news.”
Ah, bros! They don’t want love, only sex. Right? Wrong, writes Nora Caplan-Bricker, and our refusal to think about young men as “human beings, hungry for a rich and mutually pleasurable connection” is contributing to “a culture of sexual misogyny, and even assault.”
For fun: Let’s all watch Steph Curry fly, writes Charles P. Pierce. His winning streak is a rare source of uncomplicated human joy.
Three points—again?!?
Rebecca
