Open Mic for the week of 5/6/2024
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
May the Sixth be with you!
Towards the end of this YouTube video, J.J. McCullough talks a bit about a traditional Korean story telling art called pansori. He makes a point that many actual South Koreans see this as rather old fashioned and stuff that only really cultured old people are into, similar to kabuki in Japan, and not modern. This raises an interesting point on whether there are any Western art forms that are basically the same as pansori or Kabuki but we don’t recognize them as museum pieces because of the global dominance of Western culture. I’d argue that at this point things like ballet, opera, and non-musical stage plays fall into the category of things preserved rather than actively liked. Any other thoughts?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZX7STuDXIQReport
I don’t feel like non-musical stage plays fit because they’re still widespread as a cultural phenomenon and are, frankly, not necessarily that expensive to put on. Ballet and Opera, on the other hand, strike me as extremely rarified/niche and expensive and they strike me as not widely appreciated in the way that (even non-musical) theater is.Report
It is just an interesting thought process. We see things like Kabuki or Pansori as preserved art forms that very few people actually like because Western cultural modes have become globalized. It is very unusual for people in the West to see any of our cultural modes as being outdated and basically preserved art. However, there has to be things that are preserved in the West that generally a lot of people won’t really mind that much if they go away. Things are opera, ballet, and Western art music seem like good examples of our Kabuki.
I’d add plays as well because even though they aren’t expensive to put on, they are still not really mainstream entertainment anymore. Most people can go through their entire lives without seeing any serious drama or even a non-musical comedy on a stage. Non-musical stage plays are basically done as a matter of prestige. Even with new plays, you have a lot of old plays that basically dominate the theater.Report
Yes I think I understand your line of thinking. Would you put, say, ballroom dancing into that same category? Because I think non-musical theater falls into a similar category: not widespread or culturally common like it once may have been but also not restricted to a tiny niche and still economical to practice/watch/enjoy without needing a non-market actor to subsidize it. In my urban area, for instance, I can google up a good two dozen non-musical plays showing across the twin cities in various modest theaters. It is not a huge cultural behemoth but it isn’t vanishing either.Report
Kabuki: Well, this American guy is planning a trip especially to Kyoto to see Noh theatre and Kabuki.
Non musical theatre. Been to quite a bit of it when I was friendly with a “professional” actor/director who did small black box versions of plays. I’d also rate is higher up than musicals, opera, and ballet.Report
I hope you have fun! I’ve heard amazing things about Japan- all of them good.Report
Ballroom dancing in the form of waltz, foxtrot, and other non-swing or non-Latin partner dances definitely fall into the preserved art category. I can’t find any current statistics but a prefer google search had a thread estimating the number of hobby partner dancers in the United States in 2003 as 12,000. That is a teeny tiny number of people. I think the popularity increased since then because of Dancing with the Stars but it would not surprise me if the number of hobby partner dances is under 50,000.Report
Ah I see. I consulted Google and I got that 19% of adult Americans attend a live theater performance every four months or so and 10% go monthly. That actually surprised me, the numbers are far bigger than I expected and, yet, I didn’t feel -deeply- surprised when I mused on it. There is a lot of live theater kicking around still.Report
My college roommate was a theater major and has had a career doing carpentry work for live plays and various local theaters (plus doing the occasional small part, dreams never die, nor should they). Due to the connection I end up seeing something or another one or two times a year. My take on the audience is that it’s a horseshoe, with a big chunk of younger industry people attending to support their friends and colleagues and a big chunk of grey hairs who either were involved or are generally interested in supporting the arts. What I don’t see too many of is people of family age, with the exception of when what I attended was expressly for children.
All purely anecdotal of course.Report
I mean, that’s not surprising, kids and live plays not designed for kids probably aren’t a good combination.Report
Definitely not! But there is such a thing as date night!
My take is that many of those with the inclination for live theater go a lot when they’re young, age out of it for a while, then age back in when their schedules become more flexible.Report
IME, the audience for all three is generally very white-haired. By this I mean, generally 65 and over.Report
I definitely see plenty of grey hairs! Maybe it’s just that some of my social circles overlap with theater geeks but I see a decent amount of middle aged and young theater goers. Maybe twin cities has some cultural cachet or something.Report
I don’t know many Italians under 40, but all of the Italians (like, in Italy, not in New Jersey) I know over 40 are opera fans. Town in Emilia-Romagna have annual Verdi fests that are very well attended, La Scala sells out every night during its season pretty much regardless of what opera they’re putting on there (I saw Ali Baba e i 40 Ladroni there, which is an opera you won’t see in American opera houses often, if ever, but in Milan it was packed), and there are bits and pieces of opera and other classical or renaissance music every night in every town over 100k. The last time I was in northern Italy (2018; I need to get back), attendance at such events spanned the generations (though the evening events had no children, which is typical of pretty much everything in Italy at night).
The last time I went to the opera in the U.S., it was to a packed house in Houston to see Götterdämmerung, and I might have been one of the youngest people in that room.
No real point here, other than that if a society wants to devote resources to art, it will. Also, another way in which Italy is vastly superior. Qualcuno vorrebbe mi offrire un lavoro a Parma, Modena, o Bologna?Report
I’d believe it and, frankly, it’s heartening to hear. My own thoughts were strictly in the North American context.
And if anyone is handing out Italian jobs I’d consider it too.Report
Prior to the pandemic, Maribou and I would get out and see a play a year. Shakespeare in the Park, maybe. Sometimes one of her friends would be in a local ensemble and we’d watch a play in a little black box theater. Occasionally I would go to a high school musical.
Remember Les Mis? Dang. We saw Les Mis back in 1999. That was a great time. The soundtrack didn’t leave the cd player for months.
That’s cultured, now?
Back in the 90’s, it was middlebrow to do such things…Report
Going to the movies is rapidly becoming this.Report
I don’t think that counts because movies still exist. We are just watching them in different ways.Report
Depends on the movie.
“We’re watching Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new meditation on growing old!” vs. “We’re watching Titanic 2: Two Titanics!”Report
Classical music concerts generally. Very white-haired audience. Same with Opera, Ballet, and even a lot of modern dance.Report
Mississippi is so hamstrung by Republicans who can’t support their constituents for fear the “wrong” people will be helped that they have again scuttles Medicaid expansion. Despite the state’s Republican appointed economist repeatedly testifying that it would pump millions into the state economy and generate upwards of 11K new jobs in the medical profession. Even with the support of the religious and business communities, this efforts falls flat again in the poorest and most unhealthy state in the union.
https://mississippitoday.org/2024/05/04/how-medicaid-expansion-effort-failed/Report
Hamas finally accepts a ceasefire deal.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-hamas-war-humanitarian-aid-8659eae6e0a7362504f0aa4aa4be53e0Report
Has Israel accepted this — or any — ceasefire deal?Report
There was the one back in November.Report
So, both sides agreed to that one.
Has Israel agreed to a ceasefire that Hamas has not?
Has Hamas agreed to a ceasefire that Israel has not?
ETA: My curiosity here is around the framing. Lee notes that Hamas has “finally” accepted a ceasefire. But… they accepted it before Israel has. The implication is that Hamas has been holding up any and all ceasefire agreements. But it does not seem to me that the facts show that to be the case.Report
Um. What?
A ceasefire that only one side agrees to?
I’m not understanding how that works. I don’t know that I’m familiar with that sort of thing.
The only ceasefires that I know about are the ones that are agreed upon between two parties.Report
Perhaps you can then help me parse out Lee’s statement: “Hamas finally accepts a ceasefire deal”… that Israel has not accepted.
I didn’t post that. Lee did.Report
Lemme read the article…
Okay, as far as I can tell, a third party (Egypt/Qatar) has offered a Ceasefire proposal.
Hamas wants it and Israel doesn’t.Report
Can you see why the framing of “Hamas *finally* agrees to a ceasefire deal” seems… odd… given that?Report
Sure. Especially given the handful of ceasefire deals that both sides agreed to.
Including the one I linked to from last November that lasted a matter of minutes.Report
I’m not really sure what you are arguing here.
My argument is that Lee’s framing of the current ceasefire negotiations doesn’t accurately capture what is actually happening.Report
That the question “Has Israel accepted this — or any — ceasefire deal?” has affirmative answers.
I linked to one of the ceasefire deals.Report
So… a question asked and answered. I didn’t dispute your answer. Maybe you thought I meant something other than a question by my question. I didn’t. It was a question.
Both sides accepted that initial ceasefire agreement which lasted very little time. Since then, as best we seem to know, Hamas has agreed to this most recent one whereas Israel has not agreed to any.Report
Hamas has agreed to this most recent one whereas Israel has not agreed to any.
How do we measure whether a ceasefire that Egypt, Qatar, and Gaza agree upon is a “good” ceasefire agreement?
Surely the measure is not “Well, Gaza agreed to it!”Report
Kazzy: The implication is that Hamas has been holding up any and all ceasefire agreements.
“Ceasefire” means: a temporary suspension of fighting
Hamas has been insisting that it won’t release the hostages until it gets a “permanent ceasefire” with Israel withdrawing and not coming back.
So it doesn’t want a “ceasefire”, it wants to end the war. It has also promised to stage 10-7 again.
In a normal conflict the losing side would surrender and not call for the winning side to surrender.Report
I dunno! But I’m not the person saying, “Hamas has finally agreed.”
We understand what words mean, right?Report
Israel keeps rejecting the “the war will end and then Hamas will continue terrorism” aspect to these proposals.
If that’s still the hang up, then we will probably see a Rafa attack. The “deal” was made shortly after Israel ordered 100k civilians to leave.
Israel thinks it can kill about 10k Hamas soldiers in Rafa at the cost of a few tens of thousands of civilians. So we might see the number of dead double.
From Israel’s point of view that probably looks like a bargain.Report
This is correct. Israel wants at least some insurance that Hamas isn’t going to keep being Hamas in the future.Report
Then the Israeli’s are delusional or, in Bibi’s case, not at all delusional just also not interested in stopping the conflict and facing the music for his incredible failures.Report
The Israeli public is insisting on “deal with Hamas this time”. The war is popular even if Bibi himself is not.
Put a dove in there and there’s a good chance we’d still see a Rafa invasion.Report
If you’re correct, which I doubt, then the Israeli electorate is irrational. Continuing the war for as long as “Hamas remains Hamas” means indefinite war and also technically puts control of when the war ends in Hamas’ hands.
But I doubt this is something that can be blamed on the Israeli public. If they got their hostages back they’d probably accept it. This is mostly on Bibi trying to put off accounting to his voters for his government and ideologies incredibly poor judgement regarding Hamas, Gaza, the West Bank and everything.Report
What they think is letting Hamas govern Gaza gives them the resources to commit mass murder/terror.
The interesting question is what happens after Hamas is taken down.
The ideas I’ve heard are…
1) Set up a corrupt dictatorship (i.e. let the PA run things).
2) Multiple Clans running things.
3) De-nazification like Germany after WW2
4) Push all of them in Egypt
5) Have Saudi Arabia rule for a while.
From the Israeli point of view any of those would arguably be better than Hamas.Report
Well Bibi and his minions would blow the whole thing up before they’d tolerate #1 since it’d quickly jack up pressure for a two state solution to levels they’d struggle to resist and the Israeli right has been propping up Hamas for decades to preclude that very thing.
#2 would not last long before it’d likely regress to something similar to #1.
#3 is laughable- The Allies weren’t planning on expropriating German land while they were trying to “de-nazify” Germany.
#4 would cause a war with Egypt and other neighbors and probably would be the end of Israel as a modern integrated western nation (which in turn would, in time, quite possibly destroy Israel qua Iseal. I don’t think even Bibi is dumb enough to try it.
#5 is equally laughable as the Saudi’s would never agree to do it and, if the Israeli’s tried to make them do it, would just lead to the Saudi’s handing Gaza back to the PA which is #1 option which is a non-starter for the Israeli right.Report
Agreed that all options are bad.
However #6, i.e. make a deal that leaves Hamas in charge and doing the occasional 10-6, is viewed as a 2nd holocaust. Options can be horrible and still much better than that.
RE: #5
I think this was the US’ idea. It seems breath takingly unrealistic but whatever.
RE: #3
For Gaza, the land was taken 70+ years ago. That’s what the bulk of the population wants back. However with Germany, with the benefit of hindsight, I think our efforts and re-educating them failed and they changed their minds on their own.
RE: #4
Egypt is building “temporary” housing for them in case this happens. They are already a brutal dictatorship. They put them in camps, wait a decade for Hamas to come back, and then they go in and commit genocide when that’s a problem. World would live with that.
However I think we’ll see a corrupt dictatorship of some flavor.Report
It bears noting that the 10/6 attack was, like the 9/11 plane jackings, a very unique event in two events aligned: Hamas preparing a massive attack and Israel, under Bibi, reallocating their military to protest settlers in the West Bank and, thus, leaving their pants around their collective ankles for Hamas to kick them in the posterior.
Without both those events, Hamas’s attack paired with historic Israeli incompetence, occurring simultaneously again another 10/7 is exceedingly unlikely to occur.Report
This is what happens when you pretend the Gaza Strip is not the same country as the West Bank.
For Palestinians, the actual group of people we’re talking about, land was taken *checks notes* literally yesterday as settlers continue to illegally steal more of Palestine and viciously attack, terrorize, and sometimes even murder Palestinians with the full support and even encouragement of the Israeli government.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/17/west-bank-israel-responsible-rising-settler-violence
Important note in that article, it’s not just retribution: “Settler attacks on Palestinians increased in 2023 to their highest level since the UN began recording this data in 2006. This was the case even before the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 that killed about 1,100 people inside Israel.”
‘Re-education’ is not a solution if the crimes committed against them that they are violently opposed to are ongoing.Report
Denazification was overblown. The actual changes came a lot latter and were done by the West Germans themselves. East Germany never really embarked on an examination process. This is why all sorts of questionable politics have a bigger audience there.
There is no way to get the Muslim majority countries to modernize in a more liberal direction beyond the slow gruel of them doing it themselves. I don’t like it either. It is going to cause problems for too many people while this happens.Report
I didn’t give links to show Israeli support on my other post.
“There’s a consensus in Israel that the war should continue until Hamas is not a military threat on Israel and does not control the Gaza Strip as such,”
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/09/1236537541/israel-five-months-hamas-war
They view the war as existential. They know the war is hard on the Palestinians but whatever.Report
They also know war is hard on them. They can’t keep their reserves going forever and if they set the goals as “destroying Hamas” then they’ll be at it forever. An administration worth a bucket of warm spit would cut a deal to get out of there quicker- though Israel doesn’t currently have such such an Administration in place. It’s not like everyone doesn’t remember who propped up Hamas and put them in place in the first place- the same people screeching about destroying Hamas root and branch now.Report
North: They also know war is hard on them.
Not as hard as a second holocaust would be.
FAICT, the only people in Israel to oppose the war are the families of the hostages. They have to use language like “make a deal” because saying “end the war” is a non-starter.
However Hamas never had the ability to return all of the hostages and they’re mostly dead.
68% of Israeli Jews don’t want aid trucks sent into Gaza because it will help Hamas. The killing of the peace activists at the music concert has sent the message that peace isn’t an option.Report
Do you think a second Holocaust is actually possible against a nuclear weapons state which, as we saw recently with the barrage from Iran, is also defended not just by the US but also, effectively, NATO?Report
Nah, it’s just Israeli right wing agit-prop. They throw this out constantly and especially a lot now that their own pet monster (Hamas) has bit them so hard on the posterior.Report
I would hope that the Israeli people eventually see through it. I guess we will find out.Report
InMD: Do you think a second Holocaust is actually possible against a nuclear weapons state…
Me? Of course I don’t. I’m not Jewish and I’m not there.
But that’s where Israel’s head is at and will be for years.
They currently view Hamas as an existential threat. The idea that Israel is going to give up the war because it’s hard for Israel is nonsense.
Israel thinks it’s in a serious war for it’s survival. That basic concept need to frame what is happening and what can happen.Report
That and not actual facts? I’m not sure ‘sorry but we can’t think straight right now’ is a convincing justification for strategic military action.Report
To say nothing of it not being a convincing reason for the US to support the Israeli’s in their self destruction delusions.Report
InMD: I’m not sure ‘sorry but we can’t think straight right now’ is a convincing justification for strategic military action.
The “convincing justification” for the war is 10-7.
A war that removes Hamas is also a war that shatters Gazania society, but that’s fine. We’ve hit that point.
Hamas really are Na.zis. Claiming they should be left in charge of Gaza is the equiv of claiming Hit.ler should have been left in charge of Germany post ww2.
Israel doesn’t need to kill every supporter of Hamas anymore than we needed to kill every supporter of Adolf.
The question asked was how long will the Israeli public support the war given how hard it is on them. The answer is “many years”.Report
Sorry, that should have been “removes Hamas from power”.Report
Calling Hamas Na.zis only invites a comparison between the conduct of the WWII Allies and Israel today.
The goal of defeating and de-Naz.ifying Germany had a clear set of measurable goals and objectives.
I’m not seeing anything like that wrt Hamas.
In fact, just the opposite. In 945, the Allies installed a German government stocked with leaders who had opposed the Na.zi party, akin to the Palestinian Authority.
Yet Likud seems determined to prevent the PA from taking any power.
So I really have no idea what goal they are trying to achieve here; “Defeating Hamas” needs a second clause of “Installing X as a replacement” otherwise its just “Lets keep killing people indefinitely.”Report
Bibi is in a serious war for political survival – both because he really wants to avoid a bribery conviction and because Likud messed seriously by paying off Hamas on the side so it could gather more land through illegal settlements.
What the population of the nation state thinks is probably a very different matter.Report
Philip: What the population of the nation state thinks is probably a very different matter.
I thought that and then tried to find out what the population really thinks. Far as I can tell, they view the war as fundamental for the survival of the state of Israel.
Yes, Bibi probably views it as fundamental for his own personal political survival, but that’s a different issue.
The calls for Bibi to step down shouldn’t be viewed as a lack of support for the war. We had unified public support for the 911 war until we decided to expand it to Iraq.
We had a lot less at stake and had fewer dead adjusted for population. The Israeli population would support the war for the next few years.Report
The issue with Hamas is this. They might not be physically capable of taking on Israel but they are capable of inflicting minor to major harm. The rhetoric that Hamas uses is genocidal against Jews. Since Jews suffered a lot of persecution, we really don’t like having to deal with that repeatedly. There is a certain element of “oh Jews, why won’t you take this like a man” and “it’s just blowing steam” that doesn’t exist for other minorities.Report
Out of interest, if Israel agrees to the ceasefire and withdraws from the West Bank, how much terrorism should Israel be expected to live with? Like I realize having Hamas be Hamas is going to be a thing but the promise has been land for peace. Israelis now see the offer as land for low grade with occasional medium to high grade terrorism during a very long and slow process of Palestinian deradicalization rather than peace. This is not really that popular in Israel.Report
Well, looking at the global reaction to the Gazan withdrawal under Sharon in 2005, I think it’d be safe to say that Israel wildly and disproportionately reacting to rocket attacks or raids with heavy destruction in the Palestinian areas that launched them would be readily accepted by the world and Israels’ Arab neighbors. A comparatively modest withdrawal with modest settlement removal from Gaza earned Israel close on to twenty years of the worlds’ tolerance and that was with Israels continued occupation and expropriation of land in the territories steadily undermining Israel’s moral position and with Gaza being under a near total siege.
So, the answer is complicated I suppose but, so long as Israel stuck to just viciously and disproportionately responding without re-occupying or trying to steal land, I’d guess global tolerance would be very high. As for how much specific terrorism they’d be expected to tolerate? That’s an open question but the answer is “not very much before they’d strike back” and the Palestinians would likely tire very quickly of the cost of such terrorism in the absence of the occupation to sustain their resentment.Report
North: Israel wildly and disproportionately reacting to rocket attacks
Every time there is a rocket attack, between hundreds and tens of thousands of civilians need to take shelter.
What is a “proportional” reaction to that. Then after we have figured out what the reaction for one rocket should be, there have been thousands or tens of thousands.
Far as I can tell, we’re in “all out war” territory right there. That would be the US’s reaction to tens of thousands of our civilians being terrorized thousands of times.Report
Our reaction to 9/11 was in large part to invade Iraq and try to rebuild it as a nation. A mission we failed miserably at. To say nothing of the aligned failure in Afghanistan. Both of which were of the same irrational nature that Israel has tripped into.Report
The “failure” in Afghanistan depends on what the goals were. Killing OBL was enough reason to invade. Revenge and showcasing that 911 was a bad idea from the attackers point of view is a fine reason for a war.
The failure was in not leaving sooner.
Similarly, Israel had to invade and attack Hamas after 10-7.
Killing 100 Palestinians for every Jew Hamas killed and shattering Palestinian society is fine.
It’s showcasing “this is what war with Israel looks like and what should be expected”.
The real temptation for Israel is to stay there and run the place. That won’t end well.Report
The Palestinians also have to flee and take shelter in large numbers when Israeli reprisals occur. So, they’re both equally miserable.
Lebanon demonstrates pretty clearly that Israel’s neighbors can be deterred when there isn’t land on the line. It is the Israeli rights deranged fetish for land that keeps the Palestinian question from becoming a semi-settled matter like Lebanon is.
And we’re nowhere near “all out war” because only one side is capable of prosecuting a war. We’re in a filthy mess of the Israeli’s trying to figure out a way to eliminate a terrorist organization that they, themselves, nurtured and encouraged. And that comes with all the difficulties that insurgent combatants present.Report
North: It is the Israeli rights deranged fetish for land
The people of Gaza talk about “the occupation” going on for 70+ years. They’re very clear that the RoR needs to undo that. That the conflict is over that land.
Hamas’ actions and charter back that up. Ditto the timeline of the conflict. Ditto the multiple refusals to make peace and set up a state of their own.
To think that we could settle this if we stopped the settlers is to believe the people of Gaza are lying about what they want and why.
only one side is capable of prosecuting a war.
10-7 showed otherwise.
And that comes with all the difficulties that insurgent combatants present.
This insurgency ran a gov which controlled millions of people. If they were a country then they’d be #142 or so. A hair less than Qatar. Their military budget is roughly $350 million a year.Report
You keep pointing back to 10-7 while ignoring that 50% of the extremity and drama of 10-7 was due to the Israeli’s, specifically Netanyahu’s, decision to draw down their presence on the Gazan border to focus on supporting their settlers’ antics in the West Bank. Absent that horrible decision, and his subsequent decisions to ignore the warnings of the Israeli military and intelligence services, 10-7 would have been simply a particularly large and ineffective raid. The Israeli right and their handmaidens do not get to jujitsu their colossal errors and failures into some kind of post hoc justification for their idiocy- at least not without pushback. Nor should we forget who one of Hamas’ early backers was. Hamas will always be the monsters primarily responsible for 10/7 but the Israeli right empowered and enabled Hamas for decades.
Likewise, you keep leaning on Palestinian revanchism as if that puts them on equal footing with the Israeli settlers. It doesn’t, because the Israeli land grabbers have the power to prosecute their land grabbing whereas the Palestinians have no similar capacity. The Gazans have nothing to lose so of course they embrace maximalist rhetoric. So what? And, as Dave pointed out pertinently upthread, you keep trying to pretend that the Gazans are distinct from the Palestinians of the West Bank when they’re not- they’re the same folks.
Sharon pulled out of Gaza, but he wasn’t able to get the Israeli’s out of the West Bank so the occupation continued. If we look at the rewards, both morally, politically and strategically, that the Israeli’s reaped from withdrawing physically from Gaza the lessons of history are pretty stark no matter how much the Israeli right and their enablers try to obfuscate it: untangling Israel from Palestinian lands and ceasing its land grabbing from Palestinians is a huge strategic, moral and political boon for the State of Israel. Nothing else comes close. Gaza is a comparatively small territory and, yet, withdrawing from it earned Israel a respite of nearly two decades.
And what else is on tap as options? Perverse sweaty palmed allusions to ethnic cleansing or delusional fantasies that other Arab states can be induced to come in and police Gaza for the Israeli’s? That’s what’s so ludicrous about the whole thing- the Israeli right doesn’t even have a plausible option to suggest and neither do you.Report
North: 50% of the extremity and drama of 10-7 was due to the Israeli’s… draw down
This is like saying 911 was the USA’s fault for not putting metal doors in the airplanes.
It’s true, there was a failure of imagination.
The Gazans have nothing to lose so of course they embrace maximalist rhetoric.
The current war showcases that they do have lots to lose.
They have lost more land with every war and with every failed peace offer where they could have set up a state.
It’s not just rhetoric, they really do believe what they say and they really do act accordingly.
untangling Israel from Palestinian lands and ceasing its land grabbing from Palestinians is a huge strategic, moral and political boon for the State of Israel.
Agreed. But that won’t lead to peace this generation and probably not the next several.Report
This is not remotely equivalent to the failures of 9/11. It’s not like it was a secret that Hamas wanted to attack and it’s not like the US had planes secured and then diverted those resources so they could go steal land from the Canadians. The Israeli’s know perfectly well that Likud is partially to blame for 10/7 which is why Bibi’s name is mud in Israel right now.
As for your mind reading about the Palestinians, I can’t help but be highly doubtful. The West Bank is a larger area with more Palestinians in it than Gaza and they haven’t engaged in wild attacks on Israel despite constant settler provocation. Any point you try to make by pointing at Gaza is reversed and overwhelmed by the larger example of the West Bank.
Heck, I don’t even carry a particular brief for the Palestinians themselves. I don’t have any personal connections to any Palestinians like I do to Israeli’s. My criticisms come solely from a cold eyed view of what is in Israel’s long term interests. I’ve watched this drama for over twenty years and the trajectory looks pretty clear. If the Israelis keep clinging to that land it’s going to be their undoing. It’s been their undoing for decades.Report
North: and they haven’t engaged in wild attacks on Israel despite constant settler provocation.
Almost like the settlers aren’t the biggest problem and the two groups aren’t the same.
Something like 90% of Gaza consider themselves to be refugees from the original war. When they talk about “settlements” or “the occupation”, they mean all of Israel. They’ve been very clear on this point, they’ve been consistent on this point.Report
And you claim that the residents of the West Bank somehow don’t share these same sentiments?
You seem to seesaw wildly between very confusing mass telepathy and dew eyed delusion when it comes to your ability to read the collective minds of the Palestinians, Dark. It might be easier if you just admitted that the Israeli right has enormously fished up Israel’s welfare squandering the decades that Sharon bought them and culminating in 10/7. The tap dancing you have to do to try and put all culpability on Palestinians (oops, sorry, Gazan Palestinians now) and excuse the Israelis land grabbing is getting ludicrous.Report
The Palestinians were literally offered everything they were supposed to want besides the Right of Return twice by Israel in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For whatever reason, they rejected it twice. The evidence that the Palestinians would be productive if Israel totally withdrew from the WB is lacking considering how Gaza was used by the people in control of it. The Israelis, for good reason, don’t trust the Palestinians at all.Report
You know the story about the Israeli offers are more complicated than that Lee, but I don’t need to relitigation it because those are banked decisions and Israel has already spent down its credit. The Palestinians foolishness and poor choices led to Sharon deciding on unilateral withdrawal in the early 2000’s and the Israeli’s were rewarded with -decades- of virtually a free hand in their neighborhood as a result of that. That credit is spent.
And the Palestinians don’t need to be productive nor do I need to prove that they would be to justify Israel withdrawing from the territories because there’s nothing about the occupation that enhances Israeli security. It’s not 1950. If the settlements ever had any military/strategic value it’s long, long since obsolete and all the occupation does is poison Israel’s own politics, undermine their moral standing and make their eventual withdrawal harder.
I mean, for fish’s sake Lee, look at the three of them: Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. It boggles the imagination that of those three the PA (corrupt and schlorerick as it is) is now coming off as the most reasonably of the three parties! I get it, the Palestinians dissapointed the Israeli left and it imploded. That justifies a few years of the behavior we’ve seen from Israel but decades of right wing Israeli administration and settler policy? Come on now, it’s nonsensical. I know you’re not a likudnik.Report
Also, if a Palestinian state is created; how much stupidity should Israel be required to expect from them in order to maintain the global calm?Report
You’d have to define stupidity. If you’re talking about name calling and other unpleasant speech Israel would be expected to tolerate all of it and would be welcome to call them all the horrible names they want in return. If you’re talking about actual physical attacks, I addressed that upthread.Report
I meant engage in military adventurism and terrorism.Report
I’d expect that they’d indulge in some military adventurism and terrorism. Then the Israeli’s would flatten the block where the adventurers or terrorists came from and every block in sight of it. The world would mumble a bit but mostly shrug because Israel would be withdrawn and most everyone would say “What did you expect?” And then, in time, the Palestinian reaction to that kind of adventurism by their peers would go from “Allah Ackbar!” to “What the fish are you thinking you idiot, we’re trying to get on with our lives. Cut it out!” And no, that’s not theory- that’s recent history. The Lebanese have taken that attitude towards Hezbollah.Report
Hezbollah joined a multifactional government and faces pressure to not poke the bear.
Hamas literally was the government. A poll was done before 10-7 and the bulk of Gaza wanted Hamas to do something like that.
The people of Gaza wanted the war.
We are way beyond Trump supporter level of delusion on what the expected result was supposed to be. For that matter the people of Gaza still support Hamas.
A supposedly neutral reporter was explaining how Hamas should get a pass on it’s various misdeeds (i.e. war crimes) because it represents the legit political asperations of the people of Gaza.Report
Your telepathy about the Gazans continues to fail to impress Dark. I’m pretty confident most of those Gazans, if given a vote on the matter, would not have voted for the attack and the consequences that followed.
And it’s bemusing that you keep trying to claim Hamas is the legitimate government of Gaza based on a single narrow electoral victory long before most of Gaza’s populace was even born, yet keep trying to discount and ignore the Palestinian Authority which has the same level of “legitimacy” and the same poll responses from its population, yet doesn’t engage in these kinds of attacks anymore.Report
North: I’m pretty confident most of those Gazans, if given a vote on the matter, would not have voted for the attack and the consequences that followed.
The “consequences” were supposed to be “the Arabs all join the cause and force the Jews out”.
Listening to what the Arab street is saying now, they think that Israel is being unreasonable, genocidal, and breaking all sorts of rules.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Israel isn’t supposed to have the right to defend itself. It’s a Disney villain and at the end of the movie it’s supposed to lose.Report
Which you know how? From reading the entrails of a single election (which Hamas won with 47% support) held a decade before half the population of Gaza was born? With reasoning that flimsy we could just as easily say that Likud wanted the 10/7 attacks because they helped found, and support Hamas and have subsidized it for years.Report
This isn’t what happened with the current Israel-Hamas War and it isn’t going to happen with a withdrawal from the West Bank. There was a lot of screaming about war crimes even before Israel did anything and while it might not have totally changed official response, it did cause it it to be different than previous times. I think the world would expect Israel to take it on the chin until the Palestinians get better.Report
The current Israeli-Hamas war after 10/7 was basically the result of the Israeli right spending the last couple decades squandering the good will that Sharons’ unilateral withdrawal bought Israel.
For years and years bringing up that withdrawal in debates basically flummoxed the Pro-Palestinian side and internationally complaints about Gaza were met with shrugs and “what do you expect after the way they behaved when Sharon withdrew?”. But that reserve of goodwill is clearly running out and has been steadily drawn down every year the Israelis indulged in kicking the can down the road regarding the territories.
You can imagine the world expecting Israeli’s to take it on the chin and, no doubt, the regular suspects would inveigle for the Israeli’s to do so. But when the Israeli’s refused to and struck back what do you honestly think the official response (which- let’s be frank, is the only response that matters) would be. I’d bet that official response would be “Well the Israeli’s withdrew from the West Bank and you attacked them? What did you expect would happen?” and then they’d go back to their more important pursuits. My scenario has happened- time and time again, whereas your scenario has, so far, never occurred. I think my prediction is more grounded in reality.Report
There was an actual plan to eliminate Hamas during the last full war with them in 2014 but Netanyahu, who is generally one of the more cautious PMs despite his reputation, leaked the calculated number of IDF deaths to the press to nix this.Report
The DoJ sure is politicized. This is the second witch hunt against a sitting Democrat yjeu have secured in a year:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/03/henry-cuellar-indicted-bribery-azerbaijan-mexico/Report
That’s illegal now? Everybody does that. If they investigated every congressman who did that there wouldn’t be any congressmen left.Report
Maybe there wouldn’t be.Report
Isolated demands for rigor, man. It sucks.Report
It is, and always was. And it it’s just lazy posturing to say that everybody does that. Most don’t.Report
If that’s true, then this is not a witch hunt.Report
That was my point. That and pushing back hard on the GOP narrative of a witch hunt for TFG.Report
The fact that Cuellar is guilty is good evidence that Trump also is, I guess.
“The system works!”Report
It certainly undermines the narrative that the DoJ only goes after right wing law breakers.Report
Is that what the “Trump Witch Hunt” narrative argues?
For what it’s worth, I think that the “Witch Hunt” narrative is helped by nothingburgers more than anything else.
Maybe this time it’ll result in him going to jail, though.Report
Interesting. Which nothing burgers are you referring to?
Do you think Cuellar is innocent, if so, why?
Or do you think Trump has been innocent of something he’s been charged with? Which things? Or do you mean he’s innocent of some of the fraud he’s been convicted of?Report
The Mueller Report, the Avenatti stuff, the three impeachments…Report
Oddly, mis threaded to a comment below.Report
Ok, well the Avenatti stuff was neither a legal action nor even a Democratic affair. A crooked lawyer tried to make it big on the left with Stormy Daniels dirt and he failed completely. I’m glad he did- it says something good about the left. If he’d been on the right, Avenatti would probably be a candidate for Veep right now.
As far as I’m aware everything in the Mueller Report has been found to be accurate and the people Mueller went after got jail time.
Finally, there were only two Trump impeachments that I’m aware of. So, which one do you think was imaginary? The one where he’s on tape trying to extort Zelenski to dish up dirt on Biden in exchange for armaments or the one where he’s on tape hyping up the mob that then went and attacked Congress during the election certification?Report
OH! It was only twice. (I was sure that he was impeached a third time… maybe it was only threatened.)
I didn’t say it was imaginary. It was about as impactful as Clinton’s, though.Report
So they weren’t nothingburgers then.Report
I have been told that that was a nothingburger as well, believe it or not.Report
You’re assuming that Jaybird cares about what’s true.
Don’t do that.Report
Just using the same definition of “nothingburger” that we’ve been using since 2008.Report
The question of what’s true came up well before the “nothingburger” discussion.Report
I’ll defer to the experts we have at OT on the definition of nothingburger but it seems pretty clear the impeachment card was used in error in the first instance. Everyone knew the Senate wasn’t going to convict over the conduct. We’ll never know the counterfactual but playing it prematurely was potentially a major factor in inability to convict in impeachment 2 where the case was far stronger, even to Republicans.Report
To a layperson, “nothingburger” means something that either isn’t true or is true but of trivial consequence.
In no sense can it mean “something we refuse to care about because of our partisan bias”.Report
In no sense can it mean “something we refuse to care about because of our partisan bias”.
Pretty sure it was used in 2016 using exactly that definition.Report
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https://www.mediamatters.org/daily-wire/bitter-pills-daily-wire-suggests-its-new-vitamins-will-boost-sperm-counts-and-fight
Hurry! The future of the human race depends on YOU!Report
Holy crap, if this is true…
Report
If Iran, Hamas, or similar group has been behind this than the Palestinians or one of their allies have shot themselves in the foot again.Report
We are at the point where Pro-Palestinian protests and Pro-Israel counter-protests in the United States are more about domestic tribal politics than anything that is happening in the Middle East.
https://time.com/6974979/university-of-mississippi-protest-racist-monkey-gesture-fraternity/
I bet you both groups are going to use this to argue why American Jews should support their side rather than do our own thing.Report
I think it’s proof that the summer doldrums have come early that the chattering classes are wasting this much time and ink on both sides.Report
I’m growing increasingly rage filled at the chattering classes. They tend to be antagonistic towards Jews. There are too many people talking about this subject without even something of a relevant chronology. The number of people commenting on Israel-Palestine with even the slightest bit of Jewish, Israeli, or Zionist history is close to zero. The number of Zoomers or people celebrating the Zoomers who can tell you anything about say the Dreyfus Affair and what it meant for the Zionsit movement is a number very close to zero. They can learn but utterly refuse to because of feelings.
I know I can’t do anything about it but they really need a bash and smash. They need to be made to learn about what they did.Report
Interestingly there is reporting here this morning that the fraternity the guy belonged to has expelled him for this.Report
He was expelled.Report
Pro-Palestinian groups are now calling for a boycott of all Jewish groups. Any Jew marching with them is at best a useful idiot.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/americas/artc-pro-palestinian-group-calls-for-boycott-of-jewish-student-organizationsReport
No, they’re calling for a boycott of Zionist groups. They say it themselves in the press release:
The Israel Institute is, believe it or not, rather overtly pro-Israel. Hilariously, not even the people complaining are trying to defend _them_, saying ‘three out of the four groups are Jewish charities and communal groups’, which I guess implicitly is admitting that Israel Institute is not that.
However, Hillel International, while a ‘Jewish communal group’, is _explicitly_ Zionist, and has literally kicked out chapters for cohosting events with Jewish groups that are not.
Koret Foundation not only funds Hillel chapters, but has an explicit goal strengthening ties between Israel and the US.
The Hellen Diller foundation is much less political, but the explanation of why it is included is right there in the list: They have (at least one) endowment for a visiting Israeli scholar, at U.C. Berkeley. (They might have others, I don’t know.)Report
Regardless of what you think of their position on Palestine, the fact that Hillel is officially Zionist, and as a funder of other Jewish student groups, requires Zionism (so, e.g., they don’t fund JVP), makes them an obvious target for the protestors.Report
JVP are at best what you would call useful idiots.Report
I know you can’t help but feel that way, but like the other people who oppose genocide, I couldn’t be prouder of them.Report
The Israel-Hamas War is not a genocide even if you feel that Israel is using extremely excessive force to respond to the initial Simchat Torah massacre. Meanwhile, Hamas literally calls for the expulsions or death of all Jews in the area to create their perfect Islamic Republic of Palestine but this gets overlooked. The people who refer to the Israel-Hamas War as a genocide are the ones that just always hated Israel and also get a lot of jollies by comparing the Jewish State to you know who. The Left does not see Jews as legitimate people or oppressed group like others and is very willing to abandon us to serve their goals.Report
I know your support of a genocidal regime as it is actively committing genocide must create a great deal of dissonance, but that’s what it is.Report
Demanding that all Jewish groups denounce Israel and Zionism, and remember that around 90% plus of Jews support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state means essentially no to nearly every Jewish group, especially anything with mainstream Jewish support. I suspect that you will always deny what is happening though just like you deny what real actual Palestinian leadership is saying about their goals.Report
They do not demand those groups _denounce_ it, they merely demand those groups do not materially support it.
Perhaps social groups should not support political positions, especially those in other countries, or at least alternatives should exist.Report
You know, here’s someone actually pointing out what was going was a problem almost a decade ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20151127203755/https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/23/how-the-israel-lobby-captured-hillel-international-college-campus/Report
Incidentally, there has been a lot of complaint in recent decades how Hillel International and its near-monopoly of Jewish life on a lot of campuses has resulted in campus Jews who are not Zionists feeling a bit homeless. This was already a thing before all this, as new generations start reappraising Zionism.
Here’s the thing: Almost all the wealthier people funding ‘Jewish community’ charities are very openly pro-Zionism, which…that really isn’t a good thing just in general. There seem to be very few apolitical (WRT Zionism) Jewish community groups (At least in areas outside of places with a lot of Jews), because they are all funded by people who are very political and pro-Zionism.
Now, this isn’t to say that community groups don’t often become political internally, but they usually aren’t officially inserting disconnected politics what is supposed to be basically a club. I’m a member of an LGBTQ+ gaming group, and it, officially, has no political positions on anything at all as a _entity_, even if the members would almost certainly poll in certain ways.
And the campus groups I was part of, way back when, had pretty explicit ‘no politics’ rules unless it was actually a political group.Report
What is the definition of “Zionist” here?Report
Any Jew that refuses to totally denounce Israel and call for it’s destruction.Report
The actual answer is ‘Literally straight up says they support Israel and oppose anyone who does not support it’ in their actual documentation. From ‘Hillel International’s Standards of Partnership’:
I guess the question here is LeeEsq lying, or just misinformed.Report
They did a good job of lawyering that. You can criticize Israel, you just can’t deny its right to exist. You can’t apply a double-standard to it.
I presume that “applying a double standard” is defined broadly… like, you’re not allowed to criticize, say, Rafah without talking about 10/7 first.
The last two lines are within the boundaries of “fair enough”. I mean, I would understand why the sci-fi club wouldn’t want to invite the “Sci-Fi Sucks Frat Boys” who overturned tables at the last convention.Report
Hmm… does that make me a “Zionist”? Or do you have to be Jewish?Report
One definitely doesn’t need to be Jewish to be a Zionist.
But in this specific context my understanding, and Lee can confirm here, is that when Israel was founded there was a non-trivial subset of Jewish people who thought it was a bad or even sacrilegious idea and some non-trivial of anti-Zionist Jewish people persist to this day.Report
Before Israel was founded, there were a bunch of Jews who thought Zionism was a bad idea for different reasons. The Ultra-Orthodox didn’t want Israel restored without the Messiah or Temple. Many Reform Jews believed Zionism opened Jews to criticism of dual loyalty and also didn’t like the idea of Jews as a secular nation/ethnicity rather than a mere religious group. The Holocaust basically silenced these groups. There are still anti-Zionist Jews for religious and political reasons but they are a big fringe, less than 10% of the population.
What I can’t stand are Further Leftists who would normally have less than any patience for Ultra-Orthodox Jews but like to parade them about because these “true” Jews are anti-Zionist. This is the only context where they do this and wouldn’t call them the true Jews in regards to say the role of women or LGBT rights but when it comes to Israel, they are presented as the true Jews because of their anti-Zionism.Report
For the record, who is and is not allowed to call Jews idiots because of their beliefs?Report
Occupiers at Portland State University trash the university library: https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2024/05/in-wake-of-psu-library-occupation-students-staff-and-its-new-president-brace-for-whats-next.html
I found this one particularly bone-headed. PSU is a famously progressive university and did not do any bone-headed crackdowns and they still trash the library. You don’t trash the library.Report
Saul, you’re assuming that the idea is to do things that make sense and are productive. But to this sort of person, doing anything while yelling “PALESTINE” makes sense and is productive because it reminds people that Palestine exists.Report
Predictable. You just can’t say anybody on your side might be a tad anti-Semitic or do bone headed things.Report
From what I can tell, the Pro -Palestinian protestors see their cause as so inherently righteous that everything they do advances the cause. There also seems to be a big code of silence where the more moderate or sensible members would tell the radical and extreme members to shut up.Report
Yep.Report
I like how they have to list extremely dumb things to try too make it sound worse, when real damage was done.
My god, furniture was moved and overturned? Entrances were blocked?!?! Oh noes! Not moved furniture!
The protestors were assholes and painted on the walls, broke some glass, and (possibly) broke cameras, although ‘disabled cameras’ can be all sort of things, might have just been unplugged or some breaker flipped off.
I hope the university figures out how to charge them for whatever repairs at needed. And forces them to undo their _horrific_ vandalism of moving chairs and tables around by making them move them back!
And PSU might be a famously progressive university, but they are mostly famous for having extremely dumb protestors that protest utterly random things. They actually are the wackjobs that conservatives seem to think all campuses are.
Let’s check the protestor’s actual demands…ah. It’s to not accept gifts from Boeing (?), and not sell Israeli products on campus. I mean, I sorta agree with that first thing _in general_, keep defense contractors away from the school, but it’s rather disconnected from Palestine, and…Israeli products on campus? Is this…a big thing that is happening? Or, just, like the student quick mart sells some humus?
Note the school actually did agree to the Boeing thing, pausing donations from them until it figures things out, leaving them with a completely moronic demand.
Oh, and they want the campus to call for an immediate ceasefire(1), and…oh…eliminate public safety officers. Oh. Okay. So we see what’s going on here. So this is about the campus police. Hmm.
Yeah, like I thought.
1) As I have pointed out, protests are demands on specific entities, and demanding that said entity state a political position is possibly the stupidest possible demand: 1) that does nothing practice at all, 2) can cause actual legal problems with entities that legally have to be neutral, and 3) everyone knows they only said that due to a threat, so no one actually believes it!
I want to run around slapping people who keep protesting X so ‘X demands a ceasefire’. The only people who it can possibly make sense to demand they ask for a ceasefire would be either the US or Israeli government…or I guess Hamas, if anyone is protesting them.Report
“My god, furniture was moved and overturned? Entrances were blocked?!?! Oh noes! Not moved furniture!”
Some guys stood around with torches! Oh noes!
Some guys were on the sidewalk, a public thoroughfare, and they said some words all out loud! Oh noes!
Some guys held signs indicating their approval of a presidential candidate! Oh noes!
Some guy wrote an editorial suggesting that violent riots and looting were not an appropriate response to an entirely-legal and aboveboard decision by a court! Oh noes!Report
The GOP is the Party of Fertilization according to TFG: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-abortion-fertilization_n_66390772e4b001bbb5106897Report
They interviewed the janitor who was in the building at Columbia when the building was occupied.
Report
Well it just makes sense, right?
How does a guy who owns a New York townhouse worth $2.4 million get the money for a tent?
(((Someone))) must be secretly financing him.
But I can’t say any more. They know where I live. I looked at Google maps and it showed exactly where I am.Report
He’s probably illegal anyway. Look at him! I haven’t listened to him talk but you just know he has a thick accent!Report
Jaybird gonna Jaybird.Report
For what it’s worth, I wish that a real media outlet would have interviewed him instead.Report
The Free Press is not a reputable sourceReport
I’ll let you get back to your Huffpo links.Report
The newest rightwing freakout in 5,4,3,2…
https://apnews.com/article/boy-scouts-new-name-
Boy Scouts of America changing name to more inclusive Scouting America after years of woes
scouting-america-d583f5712680f155b4f6b762128734d3Report
If this polling is correct, the majority of College students do not consider Israel/Palestine a major issue for them this year and a plurality still blame Hamas: https://www.axios.com/2024/05/07/poll-students-israel-hamas-protests
What they found: The survey found that three times as many college students blame Hamas for the current situation in Gaza than they do President Biden.
Some 34% blame Hamas, while 19% blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 12% blame the Israeli people and 12% blame Biden.
Zoom in: A large majority (81%) of students support holding protesters accountable, agreeing with the notion that those who destroyed property or vandalized or illegally occupied buildings should be held responsible by their university, per the survey.
A majority also said they oppose the protest tactics: 67% say occupying campus buildings is unacceptable and 58% say it’s not acceptable to refuse a university’s order to disperse.
Another 90% said blocking pro-Israel students from parts of campus is unacceptable.
The other side: Students were still more likely to say they support the pro-Palestininan encampments than oppose them.
45% said they support them either strongly or a little bit. 30% were neutral, and 24% were strongly or a bit opposed.Report
You mean that the media has spent the last few months grossly overstating the relevance of all of this for American politics and society? Why would they do that?Report
But Her EmailsReport
Report
Exactly.
There was nothing but trivia in her emails.
But hey, feel free to show me that it was otherwise. I mean, after 8 years and endless investigations, maybe the Republicans will still find something.Report
I have this, I guess.Report
Why would you post something that doesn’t have anything supportive of your contention?Report
It was true and it was not of trivial consequence.
But it is something that I have seen partisans refuse to care about.Report
Why do you think it was of more than trivial consequence?
This isn’t Gateway Pundit- You need to actually mount some sort of argument here.Report
Chip, I linked to it.Report
There’s nothing in your link that makes any sort of argument for the emails thing as being anything more than ginned up hysteria.Report
The emails was HRC acting guilty as all get out and also mishandling the political fall out at every stage.
To quote Obama, “Political Malpractice”.
Far as I can tell, she created the server to hide stuff… if/when she had anything to hide. However that never actually happened.
So she had the cover up but not actually the crime. Part that actually caused the most trouble was her needing to explain what she was doing and why.Report
Like, if something is not a crime, you don’t need the director of the FBI to go on national TV and explain how you’re not going to get in trouble for having done it.Report
It wasn’t a crime.
However she’d come out and explain she did it because of “A” (where “A” is the most innocent and self serving explanation), and then we’d find out this wasn’t true.
So she’d come out and explain she did it because of “B”… and we’d repeat the process. I don’t remember how many letters we got through but she herself was the one who kept this in the media.
She couldn’t be honest about why she did it and she couldn’t just say “it was legal so f*** off”.Report
“It wasn’t a crime.”
It absolutely was, and she signed an SCI briefing form saying that she understood it was (the same form everyone else who has access to SCI computer networks has to sign.)
Her explanations were not self-serving attempts to make herself look good, they were attempts to hold off prosecution long enough that she’d be elected President and could order the whole thing to go away. (As it happened, she didn’t get elected and the whole thing went away because what difference, at that point, did it make?)Report
1. The media wants its horse race and will have it and this is a particularly exciting form of trying to generate it;
2. I suspect that there are quite a few liberals who will vote for Biden in November and understand Trump is worse for everything including Gaza. However, they also really dislike Biden still standing by and send arms to Israel and they dislike the tight rope politics he needs to walk on the issue. This group gets very close to kind of/sort of admitting that the current war will hurt Biden despite knowing Trump is worseReport
On the other hand, there’s this polling:
https://twitter.com/aaronnarraph/status/1788215802509869207?t=LjJ8lBSbP7e63-3nD9GZ8g&s=19
In case you don’t want to click the tweet: only 9% of Dems oppose a ceasefire; only 19% oppose ending arm sales to Israel; only 20% think Israel is NOT committing war crimes (60% think they are, and 20% don’t know), and only 22% think it isn’t genocide (56% think it’s genocide, and 22% don’t know).
So, a majority of Dems polled believe that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide, and very strong majority (84%) support a permanent ceasefire (51% strongly support it!).
I don’t think this will be a major electoral issue, in the sense that the vast majority of voters won’t vote (or not vote) based on it, but it will take what will be a non-trivial number of votes from Biden and other Dems in races in which the Democrats don’t have votes to lose.Report
More mere anti-Zionism from protestors:
https://www.dailycardinal.com/article/2024/05/antisemitic-chalkings-promoting-hamas-hezbollah-houthis-found-at-dane-county-farmers-market-alongside-rhetoric-endorsing-violenceReport
A Zionist extremist at UCLA literally drove a car over a pro-Palestinian protestor today, putting them in the hospital. This days after pro-Palestinian protestors had rocks and fireworks thrown at them.
But, sure, two people that do not appear to be part of any protest have chalked some stuff somewhere.
Incidentally, it’s a really fun slight of hand to pretend that someone supporting Hamas is any sort of threat in the US. Hamas does not, and never has in any manner at all, threatened Jews in the US. Neither has any of the other organizations. Nor has anyone operating as a Hamas supporter, at least as far as I’m aware.
Hamas’ stated position is, at the farthest, ‘No Jews in the area that we claim as Palestine’, not ‘No Jews in the entire world’. They have no opinion on Jews anywhere else, or wish that Jews cease to exist entirely. Just that they are not there, in ‘Palestine’.
That’s not to say people should support Hamas, or that they aren’t antisemitic. People should not, and they are. But ‘That is threatening to me, here in America, where Hamas has literally never attacked anyone’ is an insane reaction, and raises the question of why, for example, LGBTQ people can’t claim to be threatened by crosses, because people operating under that ideology _have_ actually posed threats and done direct harm to US queers at various time.
I know that such banners make Jews feel unsafe, but that is because the media repeats propaganda that misrepresents Hamas as being motivated by blind animus against Jews, instead of the resistance movement against Israel that it is.
And just to be clear, being a resistance movement that doesn’t magically justify stuff it does, but that _is_ what it _is_, and people who don’t understand that really should not be talking about Hamas at all. It is a resistance movement that commits terrorism against the perceived occupier of Palestine, aka, Israel, and Israelis…not random terrorism against random campus Jews in the US. It’s never done that, it’s never even tried that. The most it has done is attack US military bases, which, let’s remember, is not terrorism, which is attacks on civilians. (Although it is arguable an act or war and kinda stupid.)
This is unlike, uh, the extremist Zionists, like Kahanism and the ‘Jewish Defense League’, both which this driver at UCLA was linked to, which have murdered and assaulted several Americans in overt terroristic acts.Report
The code of silence prevails. What you are basically saying in this rant is that the Pro-Palestinian is so inherently just that it can do anything it wants and that nobody in the movement must even voice the most minor criticism at it’s most extreme members at all at anytime. This is why the insane members dominate the movement and everybody doesn’t believe the other members when they speak.Report
The irony of this comment is that you find your position so just that you’re willing to overlook, even deny, an ongoing genocide, with tens of thousands dead, and hundreds of thousands of children injured and hungry. So yeah, some chalk drawings are bad, but don’t reflect on the larger movement. Israel, on the other hand, is fully devoted to wiping out Gaza, even as they continue to violently ethnically cleanse Jerusalem and the West Bank, as their leaders and people have repeatedly said.Report
We have no idea how many of those thousands of dead are civilians. Hamas claims all of them. Israel claims for every militant they’re killing between one and two civilians.
If Israel is right, then this is not an “ongoing genocide”.
As of December Israel had dropped two bombs for every person killed. That suggests they’re taking steps to avoid killing civilians and are not attempting to “wipe out Gaza”.
This is a brutal war. The civilians are caught up in it. By the nature of the fighting they’re going to suffer.
Ethically, the question is whether or not 10-7 justifies a brutal war. That’s a no brainer, the answer is “yes”.Report
…again, a Zionist extremist literally just ran over a protestor with a car. I think if we start talking about ‘insane members’, we have to, you know, talk about that.
And that’s not an outlier, it’s just…slightly farther out. A Pro-Israel mob on UCLA violently attacked an encampment, and, yes, it actually was them who started the violence, it’s not disputed.
You keep rambling about how Jewish students feel ‘threatened’, and mean while pro-Palestinian protests have, _repeatedly_, been _literally assaulted_.
You know, at some point people stop believing vague generalizations if you can’t provide any examples, and your entire list of examples appears to be people saying ‘They will not staying ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’.
It’s why there still isn’t footage of the things you are very sure is happening. It’s why a chalk drawing done by random individuals is pointed out. Do you really want to put the chalk drawing up against _driving over protestors_?
The actual campus pro-Palestine movement is actually incredibly tightly controlled. It’s literally one of the tightest protest movements that has happened in decades.
The actual student movements on the campus and anywhere they can actually create a group is, indeed, so tightly controlled that people opposing them have tried to make an issue of the fact that random individuals refuse to talk to the press and refer them to the protest’s public relations people.Report
DavidTC: Hamas’ stated position is, at the farthest, ‘No Jews in the area that we claim as Palestine’, not ‘No Jews in the entire world’.
“Palestine” is defined as “from the river to the sea”, i.e. “all of current Israel”.
The Jews in Israel will flee or die. The “die” part was spelled out in their charter. They have made it clear, most recently on 10-7, that they consider all Jewish civilians to be targets.
Calling them a “resistance movement” ignores that what they’re resisting is the basic existence of a Jewish state and the basic existence of Jews in that area.
Put differently, they’re openly genocidal.Report
I really have no idea why a certain sort of Leftist has a romantic attraction to Islamic theocrats. Even if Hamas had more limited territorial goals than they do or if you think that the end of the Jewish State would be a good idea, Hamas’ overall political ideology is frankly horrible from a liberal-leftist perspective. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. They want Iran but with Sunni rather than Shiite Islam. I’m not sure why in the anti-theocracy rule for the Left, there seems to be a big honking exception for Islamic theocracy.Report
Israel lives in a nasty place and does nasty things, some of them unnecessary.
That’s going to give them bad marketing and in a black-hat vs white-hat worldview, whoever opposes them must get good marketing.Report
I think it goes beyond the I/P issue. Many Islamists are able to cast themselves as the Resistance to Western Imperialism and Capitalism (TM). A hardline Imam certainly looks a lot cooler than an Evangelical Pastor or Rabbi saying essentially the same thing in different wording with their robes and such. This means that a lot of Leftists who should know better have Islamist theocratic talk get scrambled into resistance speech in their brains. Even without Israel existing, I’d think that Political Islam would have a lot of Westerners who should know better romantically attracted to it.Report
“A Zionist extremist at UCLA literally drove a car over a pro-Palestinian protestor today, putting them in the hospital. This days after pro-Palestinian protestors had rocks and fireworks thrown at them.”
so what you’re saying here is, Both Sides Do It?
“Incidentally, it’s a really fun slight of hand to pretend that someone supporting Hamas is any sort of threat in the US.”
brother, if you want to argue that we must take people as individuals rather than suggesting that their having some of the same brush-strokes as The Painting Of A Bad Guy means that they are in fact a Bad Guy, I’m right there with you, but I doubt that’s what you’re actually arguing.Report
Why do you think I have said pro-Palestinian protestors have attacked anyone?
At best I have said ‘Pro-Palestinian protesters write threating chalk, Zionist supporter attempt to murder them’, which I am afraid is not the same side at all.
That is almost what I am saying.
There are causes, that are somewhat disconnected from the people supporting them. Really horrible people and horrible groups can support good causes, and otherwise good groups can support horrible causes.
Then there are actual groups of people that exist in some ‘official’ sense (By which I mean there is some objective list of people that are ‘them’, and they have the ability at add and removing from that list) , and should be judged by what they officially do, and allow and support. …which isn’t really the same as what their members do, but if their members do things and they don’t disavow those members, what they support can be inferred.
And then there are individuals, who indeed should be judged individuals. Of course, what also should be judged is what groups and individuals continue to associate with them.
The pro-Palestine groups, that is, the ones on campus, have been generally…I won’t say well-behaved, there was that group that trashed that library, but they have generally been very careful about what they say and allow to be put forward as positions on those groups. It’s why they control access to encampments and vet people who get on stage and whatnot, it’s why people in the encampments have been told to direct questions from the media to the press officer, etc. It’s actually a very well-run movement, generally speaking, and I don’t think a lot of people understand that. (A _lot_ of lessons were learned from BLM…in fact, the pro-Palestine movement here in Atlanta is basically the same thing, as Stop Cop City, which is a remnant of BLM, basically merged with it.)
This is why the absolute ‘worst’ clips that people have been able to find of it are saying generalize resistance slogans like ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ and talking about an intifada (aka, an uprising), instead of the horrible antisemitism that Lee is completely convinced is being screamed all the time there but no one seems to have recorded.
Meanwhile, there’s the…other side. Who are completely out of control, but…there don’t seem to be any organizations behind them.Report
Details of the ceasefire proposal.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/6/text-of-the-ceasefire-proposal-approved-by-hamas
I find it hard to believe Israel will go for this. This would leave Hamas in charge of Gaza.Report
Hamas is negotiating like they didn’t get pounded really badly.Report
The statement “Hamas has finally agreed” was serious spin, not sure from who.
The proposal they “agreed” to wasn’t what Israel offered. Ergo they made a counter-proposal.
Big differences was they wouldn’t have to hand over any living hostages in the first round (handing people over “dead or alive” means “dead”), the ceasefire would be permanent (although in stages), and Hamas would be left in charge of Gaza.Report
“The statement “Hamas has finally agreed” was serious spin, not sure from who.”
It… it was Lee who said that…Report
Multiple media sources said it. The Gaza people were told it and were dancing in the streets.
They didn’t mention that Hamas was only agreeing to it’s own terms. This was presented in such a way that we’re supposed to think Hamas agreed to Israel’s terms and then Israel itself still refused them.Report
RFK JR. has brain worms apparently. The jokes write themselves.Report
I remain disgusted by all this. Biological men constitute a far greater danger to women then transwomen do. Its why women say they’d rather confront a bear in the woods then a man they don’t know. Yet here we are.
https://www.wusf.org/education/2024-05-08/sarasota-school-board-rejects-title-ix-changes-sex-discrimination-educationReport
Obviously, the Sarasota school board, Governor DeSantis, India Miller, Philip H, Pinky, and whoever wrote the federal rules care about this. The one argument you can’t make is that nobody cares about this.Report
I forgot to ask, as an NPR fan, do you think it was appropriate for the article to mention that a female board member once had a threesome?Report
If she’s spouting off about other than ordinary sexual behavior, absolutely.Report
That was a rhetorical question. Nobody could hold the position you’re claiming, right?Report
Yeah we could. Many people do. Because its a reminder that she’s a moral hypocrite, and thus should not be taken seriously or literally. Yes she’s am elected official, but she fully want to ruin other people’s lives for what she sees a sexual deviance while all the while claiming the same moral rules don’t apply to her.Report
She could have a threesome during the school board meeting and she wouldn’t be a hypocrite unless she was voting against threesomes in school board meetings.Report
You have a very interesting take on morality and ethics. I mean the Catholic Church you so dearly love would and does frown on her sexual activities. And they would further tell you and her she now exists in a state of mortal sin. Last I checked, such folks are the last people who have any authority to pass judgement on … checks notes … the bathroom activities of people in any way.Report
I’m not assessing her as a Catholic. I’m assessing her as a hypocrite. That word means something specific. It doesn’t mean “doing something that Philip approves of and also something that Philip disapproves of”. It doesn’t mean “doing something that the Catholic Church disapproves of”. It doesn’t even mean “doing something that one claims to disapprove of”. It means believing something that one claims to disapprove of. You’ve presented no evidence that she’s a hypocrite.Report
Also, just for clarity, I don’t know if she’s in a state of mortal sin.Report
Well she’s a lustful fornicating adulterer according to the Catholic Church – even if the threesome was consensual.Report
I don’t know the particulars of the event, so I can’t say. Mortal sin requires (a) grave material, (b) full knowledge that the activity is sinful, and (c) full consent to the activity. I can assume the first, but I have no idea of the second or third. I don’t know if she’s confessed her sins or been baptized since the event.Report
Since the standard bearer of conservatism is a rapist and serial adulterer who is sitting at this moment in a courtroom listening to testimony about his sexual harassment of yet another woman I think conservatives should sit down and let the adults in the room discuss sexual morality.Report
One of the most frustrating things in recent years, and this predates the Israel-Hamas War, is that things that the Left understands instinctively with other minorities does not seem to apply to the Jews at all or rather they can get really deliberately obtuse when it comes to anti-Semitism. I think it should be really clear to anybody with half a brain cell why Jews would not want to be subsidiary citizen of an officially Muslim state with blasphemy and apostasy laws that is part of a collection of more officially Muslim states but people who can pontificate on great length about how racist the concept of the Jewish State is go all innocent when you point out this out. If they are Western, they might even go “Yah, yah. Theocratic politics aren’t popular among Muslims and the entire thing will be like a multicultural Disney sitcom if only the Israelis and Jews would allow it.” Things that would be natural concerns from other minority groups are just dismissed when the same concerns come from Jews despite our history.Report
I understand that we all grieve at our own pace. That said, you’ve posted this exact same observation at least 100 times this year. Obviously, as a conservative and someone who takes religion as more than merely cultural, I’d love to see you move in either (or both) directions. But you seem profoundly frozen where you are, and that can’t be healthy.Report
I just can’t shake the feeling that something bad is going to happen to the Jewish People globally soon. We have insurgent “Jews are leftist revolutionary bankers destroying all tradition” on the various forms of the Global Right and an increasingly Left anti-Semitism that sees us as taking up too much oxygen based on our small numbers and that we aren’t a real true persecuted group but wypipo or even hyper-white people. I think other Jews also recognize this but too many are in complete denial and think we can multicultural our way out of this by having empathetic talks. We can’t. We are alone and need to turn to defensive communalism.Report
We are alone and need to turn to defensive communalism.
Don’t call it “Semitism”. That might have negative repercussions down the road.Report
For the Left, virtue and oppression comes from the color of your skin.
This is racist as all fish.
Obama’s kids getting affirmative action is amusing. The Jews not being viewed as having problems after a mass murder is not.
But it shouldn’t be surprising.Report
I think this definitely true for the Western hemisphere at least. The Intersectioanl Left has a really difficult time fitting Jews into their cosmology and basically decided Jews are white out of convenience if nothing else. Since a lot of Left anti-Semitism comes from non-Whites, many White liberals really don’t want to speak out against it, which is why the Women’s March became so hot button when the anti-Semitism was revealed. It seems like there is a literal code of silence in dealing with this in order to keep the coalition together.
One of the issues that Jews have is that we aren’t really the subject of romantic attraction the way other minorities might be. You don’t have a decent number of non-Jewish academics, hobbyists, and bloggers, etc; writing about Jewish culture like they would about South Korean culture or Central American culture. There isn’t a webpage about the bagrut exam in Israel like there is about South Korea’s entrance exams as a topic of fascination or bloggers speaking about their adventures among the Ultra-Orthodox.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this. The good side is that Jews generally don’t have to be performative to non-Jews, although stand up comedy might come as close to performative Jewishness like Native Americans putting on a dance performance in costume. The downside is that the white saviorism that animates the activist spirit means that we don’t register as persecuted to the activist sets despite our history.Report
Hey – dread, I totally get that. I’m from a historically oppressed minority as well, and I’ve seen how it can sink into a culture’s bones. And it’s not wrong. If you live in certain parts of the world, like the Middle East, conflicts are probably inevitable. Even if I think you’ve misread the right (at least, the US version) I can understand the cause of the dread. But it’s not healthy. It’s every bit as draining as panic.Report
If the intersectional left were anything beyond an awkward, noisy fringe (that now appears to be in retreat) I would think that your fears have some merit. But since the intersectional left is an awkward, noisy fringe that now appears to be in retreat I think your dread is unfounded and you might benefit from taking a break from arguing with intersectional leftists on the internet.Report
There are lots of awkward, noisy fringes in political history that appear to be in retreat that manage to come roaring back. I see know evidence of this retreat that you speak about.Report
Roaring back to… awkward noisy fringe status?
Just to remind you of the news from reality as a affectionate service from a friend: the liberal party in this country, of which the fringe you are complaining about is, well, a fringe, has been unswervingly supportive of the Israeli’s in both language and concrete material action and overwhelmingly indifferent to all but the most anodyne and unobjectionable positions of said noisy fringe. This has all occurred despite Israel being government by its most right wing and despicable Prime Minister in that states history- one who’s gone out of his way to try and alienate said party and help its opposition.
The entirety of what you are freaking out over consists of vacuous performative language and behavior of a tiny minority of the most coddled and sheltered elite minority of this country’s student population; a small handful of allied twit professors and the entirety of the chattering media class who have nothing else to talk about because they’re bored of the other subjects. That’s it.
I love ya man but you might want to consider taking a breath or touching grass as the kids say these days.Report
But you’d be fired from most Fortune 500 companies for posting that comment. So maybe they’re not a retreating fringe.Report
For, what, posting that the identarian left is an awkward noisy fringe? Unless you’re in a fortune 500 media company being paid to opine what’re you doing posting anything about political stuff on the company server/website/dime?
Honestly, the rule hasn’t actually changed “don’t discomfort your employer.” It’s just now the people getting spun up about things are often identarian leftists (or rather were since the drumbeat of people getting fired for vague identarian “crimes” has slowed greatly) but in the 80’s and 90’s it was various moral majority right wing culture kooks and in the earlier years it was the pearl clutching conservative housewives or the anticommunist contingent. Companies have fired people for doing things in public that made trouble for the company as long as there’s been a company. Our latest iteration was just that companies had some new venues for whining that they hadn’t yet become inured to. That’s rapidly fading away.Report
280 Jewish students at Columbia pen an open letter about their experiences during the past six months:
https://forward.com/opinion/611038/in-our-name-a-message-from-jewish-students-at-columbia-university-open-letter/Report
It sure is interesting that, for a supposed non-Apartheid nation, a hell of a lot of Zionists weirdly say things like ‘We proudly believe in the Jewish People’s right to self-determination in our historic homeland as a fundamental tenet of our Jewish identity.’
The…Jewish people’s right to self-determination at that location, eh? Just them?
And, holy crap, I can’t believe anyone is still repeating that ‘Al-Qasam’s Next Targets’ nonsense. It’s the exact same thing as the protestor yelling ‘kill the Jews’, it’s a counter-protesting being ‘sarcastic’. We still have absolutely no idea who that was, but what we do know is she was standing, unchallenged, in front of the counter-protest, not with the protestors.
The idea that the pro-Palestine supporters are running around proudly asserting that Hamas was coming next after Israel _and the US_ is almost incomprehensibly stupid.
Hey, Jaybird, this is why you have to be vouched for to enter an encampment. Because counter-protestors think it is fun to ‘sarcastically’ pretend to be the protestors, and whatever horrific thing they say is then presented as what the protestors said. There has been Nazi propaganda yelled, swastikas waved, all on the side of people insisting the _other_ side is antisemitic and they’re showing it by sarcastically being antisemitic right back.
We were _incredibly luckily_ the counter-protestor who yelled ‘Killed the Jews’, (The event that Columbia literally used to crack down on the protestors) was caught on film and everyone could see which side did it…in fact, we know the actual person who did it. If we hadn’t caught that on film, I’m sure it would quickly be established as fact that the protestors were yelling that.Report
In further proof the GOP prefers gaming the system to substantive policy:
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/01/1245563450/census-citizenship-question-noncitizens-redistricting-apportionmentReport
what you are suggesting is that political authority should be assigned to people who aren’t allowed to vote for those who will exercise that authority.
that really doesn’t seem like a good idea.
(quick quiz: who thought slaves shouldn’t count as people, the slave states or the non-slave states? think carefully before you answer!)Report
Like children and, before the 19th amendment, women? Last I looked, no one has advocated subtracting them from the population for purposes of apportionment.Report
Well they are if those women and children are immigrants.Report
Women and children were included in the original Constitution’s apportionment specifically as the Northern states’ move to counter the Southern states’ insistence on counting slaves (otherwise the Southern states would have dominated Congress even with the three-fifths compromise in place.)
And if you want to say “well you have to be CONSISTENT IN YOUR REASONING or else you’re WRONG and therefore YOU HAVE TO SAY THEY SHOULD NOT COUNT MINORS IN APPORTIONMENT”, I’ll shrug and reply “okey-doke”. Of the many positions which some dude’s insistence on intellectual consistency drives me to, this is not one that I feel concerned about.Report
The non-slave states, since it would tilt the balance of power in ways that wouldn’t have favored them.
That aside, passing a law telling Census to violate the 4th Amendment seems a very core principle of the rule of law in the US. And Constitution – that pesky highest law of the land – us unusually clear here.
I also don’t think your political authority argument holds water. Whether anyone like sit or not, immigrants live here. They use public services like roads and transit and water and libraries. They often pay taxes to support those services especially the legal immigrants. So to say they shouldn’t be counted in apportioning representatives is to say we want to shrink our tax base AND shrink our service base to only citizens. That doesn’t work practically, no matter how much lipstick you try to put on it.Report
“Whether anyone like sit or not, immigrants live here.”
Do they get to vote in the elections that determine political leadership of the country?
If not, then they shouldn’t count in the determination of electoral apportionment.
Like, one of the criticisms of the Senate is that low-population states have disproportionate political power because they get the same two Senators as high-population states. This would produce the same result in the House of Representatives, in that they’d get the representation due a high-population state despite the actual voting population being a low(er) number.
“to say they shouldn’t be counted in apportioning representatives is to say we want to shrink our tax base AND shrink our service base to only citizens. ”
this law doesn’t affect local services you idiotReport
Local services increasingly depend on federal dollars. Just look at the Sarasota school board decision on transgender bathrooms – they admit that taking the decision they have will likely short them $50-80 Million in their budget due to loss of federal funds. They will not be able to cover that for locals. Writ large, federal funds account for around 17% of local budgets. Changing congressional representation most definitely a has a local bottom line impact.Report
So do children count or not?Report
Charles Pinckney of South Carolina?
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/pinckney.aspReport
By the very definition of slavery, slaves are not people.
There is a vast amount of testimony from the Confederates themselves to this very fact.Report
It won’t pass the Senate or a vetoReport
Its also not the only such legislation. There are already – checks notes – 6 states who have amended their state Constitutions to performatively prohibit non-citizen voting, and 4 more where its on the ballot this fall. I expect all 4 of those will pass, meaning 20% of states will have a law that is quite likely to be used to disenfranchise (albeit “accidently” mind you) former immigrants, likely of Hispanic dissent. To say nothing of its potential eventual use against folks like me who are not (as Koz used to say) “real Americans.”
It’s not a door or window that people who actually care about democracy can or should ignore.Report
I am not a lawyer, but the Constitution seems to say we can’t count (non-citizen) immigrants for the purposes of the House.
Fourteenth Amendment, Section 2:
If you can’t vote for a Representative then you can’t be used for increasing the number of people he represents. (Me paraphrasing because it’s long and clunky).Report
It looks like the Suicide Squad game lost WB about $200 million.
What’s crazy is that there were a bunch of people back in 2022 who started yelling that they wanted another Arkham game with Suicide Squad members and *NOT* a live service shooter.
Well, it got bumped to 2024.
And now it seems like WB is saying that it cost them a fifth of a billion, with a b, dollars.
This was avoidable.Report
The idiotic thing was thinking they could somehow leverage the Arkham name into this. The Arkham series was about stealth and street brawling, hell, I don’t even need to explain it, everyone knows it, it was so successful that the Spider-Man series managed to copy it pretty well, from what I could tell.
It truly is astonishing that game companies think that people who like a series literally just like the name. Even if Suicide Squad _was_ a good looter-shooter, it wouldn’t have Arkham players! Except ones who bought it by accident because it was a ‘sequel’, and then got totally disgusted and left.
But it _wasn’t_ a good looter shooter, and also we’d moved past those anyway by now. I think they decided the Arkham name could carry it alone. Nope.
They could have just…made another Arkham game. The nice thing about the series is it doesn’t require Batman (He’s not even in the name!), and of course he isn’t actually dead at the end of the Arkham series anyway.
It is almost surreal that, at the exact same time we were waiting for this to come out, we got Gotham Knights, which itself had a lot of problems in sorta the same direction (The equipment grinding is absurd.), but at least say ‘Hey, we’re going to basically do the same sort of stealth/brawling game as Arkham, but with multiple people who all play different’.
Which would be great, style wise, I never actually liked how Batman played in the OG Arkham stuff, I always liked the faster springier characters when you got to be them, like Catwoman and Barbara.
Same with Gotham Knights, although it was sorta funny there that, while in the Arkham games the women were always slightly faster but weaker than the men, the slowest hard-hitting character in Gotham Knights was…Barbara. She played most like Batman, at least she felt that way. Dick was always a jumpy acrobat flipping around, Tim was stealth nerd guy but very fast if he ended up in the fight, and Jason, while as bulky and strong as Bruce (Or even moreso), tended to just shoot things. (And Barbara even had the same travel system as Bats.)Report
I loved Arkham’s combat. I loved it so much I played and replayed Shadow of War/Mordor. And then I played Arkham again. It’s just so perfectly smooth. It turns combat into a ballet. It was fun to play and, heck, it was fun to *WATCH*.
There were standalone Predator maps and I was pleased to get my times under 3:00. Then I made the mistake of checking the leaderboards and some of those guys were under a minute.
There was one I saw, can’t find it now sadly, that was under 10 seconds. (It had about 3 minutes of setup time, however.)
Gotham Knights? The combat was bad. It was just bad. The sneaking was bad. The cutscenes were okay, I guess… but the game wasn’t fun to play. And even the stuff that involved collectables felt preachy instead of fun. “Take a picture of the mural celebrating green energy!” What? Are we in Metropolis?
The whole thing felt like nobody involved had played (or even watched) the first four games.
Suicide Squad? When I first heard of it, I had it marked as a day one purchase in my heart. After Gotham Knights? Feh.Report
The game isn’t fun because it wants you to grid an absurd amount to keep bumping up armor and weapons.
Gotham Knight was the exact wrong intersection between actual RPG and action.
Incidentally, I’m playing a game that is sorta the exact right intersection, Horizon Forbidden West. Yes, you get armor and weapons you upgrade, but it is both logically leveled and interesting to upgrade and not just constant grinding.
If Gotham Knights was going to add any RPG elements to the setup, it should have been branching paths and unique character missions. Instead, it had completely obvious problems if you switched characters sometimes, where in the future, a different character would pretend that previous thing happened to them.
That’s…sorta a cutscene problem, but it’s really just a problem of a game that seemed to think either you wouldn’t be paying attention to the story, or you’d be playing one character. Whereas I somewhat automatically picked whatever character I thought made the most sense for each mission, either narrative or mechanically (Which is also narratively.).
Also…look, I don’t know what happened in this universe, but in the comics, Talia was very involved in bring Jason back from the dead, and they literally don’t mention it if you use him on the mission, and that’s because all the cutscenes are very vague and generalized, because they don’t actually know what past interactions you’ve had, and it’s all very silly.
They really really needed to have things you had to do as certain characters, if only because they could then plan around that.
Only you would even notice something like that, Jaybird. Collectables are collectables. You really have to get over the idea that games are somehow attacking you personally because they have certain themes in them.
Hey, did you notice that the characters are planning to go to Gotham Pride? In costume? It’s in their emails.
That was…not a good reason to not buy Suicide Squad, because it was completely unconnected to Gotham Knights.
I mean, you certainly shouldn’t have bought it, just that was not the reason.Report
The game isn’t fun because it wants you to grid an absurd amount to keep bumping up armor and weapons.
I didn’t get to that part. I only got to the part where the combat that used to feel like ballet turned into combat that felt like button mashing. Fill your meter, use your special. Fill your meter, use your special.
You really have to get over the idea that games are somehow attacking you personally because they have certain themes in them.
I didn’t say that I felt attacked personally.
I said that they were asking me to do things in Gotham that felt like Metropolis things.
Hey, did you notice that the characters are planning to go to Gotham Pride? In costume? It’s in their emails.
Yes, I did. Jason Todd went out of his way to explain that he hates parades but he will make an exception to support this particular one.Report
Again, it didn’t ‘used to’ feel that way, because the Arkham series are not related to this games in any manner except having the same license. You keep thinking this is some sort of continuation, when it’s an entirely different game made by entirely different people.
A much worse game, made all the worse because we can pretty much directly compare them, and everything that they both did, the Arkham series did better…except, I would argue, some of the plot. Every Arkham series had an utterly insane amount of things happening all in one night, whereas Gotham Knights actually sorta paced itself in a rational way. But this was countered by the weird plot blurriness of ‘who is doing what’ because they wanted to let you character swap but not actually deal with that in the plot.
I did like the ‘Go back home, deal with party stuff’ thing they pulled in from RPGs, I think Arkham could have used that. I never did like the lack of a Batcave.
You also complained they were ‘preachy’.
But let’s see, taking pictures of things (From stupid angles so they make a question mark, no less) was an actual quest in an Arkham game, so that can’t be the complaint.
Which means it’s pretty much limited to ‘I had to take a picture of a place doing green energy’? You think that’s a Metropolis thing? What? There is absolutely no major city in the US without some rather large green energy initiatives.
And Gotham itself is…Gotham has always been presented as an east coast coastal city and, thus, is presumably a somewhat liberal-run city, in possibly a more conservative area. I don’t know to what extent they’ve told us about the local political stuff to that level, but they certainly haven’t told us it’s conservative-run. (Well, extreme law-and-order types keep ending up in office, and predictably end up being either fascist jackholes who try to murder all criminals, or criminals themselves who secretly want to release everyone. But in Gotham, I feel even the Dems are running on extreme law-and-order platforms.)
Now, in Gotham this would be an incredibly corrupt green energy place that Falcone was operating out of to get tax credits and the city government was in on it, and it was all a fraud, but the places would still exist. And the story, at least in the comics, would wrap up with Bruce Wayne buying it and using it to provide actual clean energy.Report
You keep thinking this is some sort of continuation, when it’s an entirely different game made by entirely different people.
Yeah. But they kinda leaned into that. How did Arkham Knight end? With a “dead” Batman/Bruce Wayne. How was Gotham Knights advertised? “Batman is dead. His four wards step up in his absence.”
Seriously. I was excited to get it. I went into it wanting to like it. I went into it wanting to *LOVE* it.
You also complained they were ‘preachy’.
But let’s see, taking pictures of things (From stupid angles so they make a question mark, no less) was an actual quest in an Arkham game, so that can’t be the complaint.
Believe it or not, taking pictures of Riddler Puzzles didn’t feel preachy. It felt like doing dumb Riddler puzzles to prove to him that he wasn’t good enough to put together a tough enough puzzle to stop the Bat.
I only took two pictures of Gotham’s Murals before I put the game down.
A mural celebrating Gotham’s Diversity.
A mural celebrating Gotham’s love of Green Energy.
Let’s look at the website and see what else I missed…
Ah. The “Freedom, Justice, Equality” mural and the “Born This Way” mural.
The rest are, blessedly, generic.
“You didn’t complain about taking pictures of stuff in Spider-Man!”
“The stuff I took pictures of in Spider-Man included NYC landmarks. It felt like taking pictures of NYC stuff in NYC. Also, stuff like The Raft. And the statue of Lockjaw. It felt like I was playing a game set in Spider-Man’s NYC.”
“You didn’t complain about dealing with Riddler puzzles!”
“I complained about having 440 of them in City, if I recall correctly. That was excessive, even for me. But my complaint wasn’t that ‘this doesn’t feel like something Batman would do’. It was that there were too many by about a third.”
I’ll grant that I missed the dull ones. I only stumbled across the ones celebrating Gotham’s Diversity and Green Energy.Report
And Portland’s free alternative newspaper “Willamette Week” has a corker of a story: A Disgraced Philadelphia Activist Landed a Job at a Portland Therapy Clinic. The Therapists Quit.
The story has something for everybody.
Enjoy the whole thing.Report
If you’re gonna compete in the Oppression Olympics you better make sure you’re not in there with the champ!Report
There is a big dose of White Saviorism in activism and a romantic sometimes nearly erotic belief that certain cultures are more inherently authentic than boring white culture. Wanting to be something more interesting than yourself is a very extreme form of this.Report
That’s hysterical. In my more optimistic moments I think the future will include slapstick comedies about our era that feature characters like this woman. People pretending to be another race, walking around offices self seriously denouncing various isms while imitating the most ridiculous woowoo and stereotypes. No daily deliverables to the CEO, just pondering whether the arrangement of k-cups is equitable to groups so obscure and marginalized they may not even exist.Report
I suspect that comedy will also include people so convinced of their positions that they see folks like this as indicative of anything other then mental illness.Report
Heh, no need to attribute to mental illness that which is adequately explained by incentives.Report
It’s weird, ain’t it? Back in the Dolezal times, we all knew that Dolezal was mentally ill.
Now it’s beginning to sink in that… maybe she wasn’t?Report
I remember how people honestly could not understand why anyone might pretend that they were black.Report
Nobody ever cosplays as a Jew to get cool points.Report
You have to know where to look.Report
There are also the Messianic Jews and Anglo-Israelites but this isn’t really the same as the above example. Plus this woman didn’t claim that real Muslims aren’t real Muslims but the Black Hebrew Israelites at least used to claim that they are the real Israel and other Jews are not.Report
Messianic Jews are Jews, Lee.
I mean, if you want to start getting all about beliefs instead of genetics, you might end up finding Orthodox Jews explaining that Conservative Jews are bad Jews and Reform Jews aren’t Jews at all.
Which is crazy talk.Report
Obviously it’s way more fun to pretend to be someone like this.
But yes, it is those of us who are just so sure we are right about how predictable this was that must check ourselves.Report
Certainly seems more fun to many people.Report
So the new popular meme in social media is the bear meme where women say they would rather encounter an angry bear rather than a strange man in certain locations like the Margaret Atwood quote This allows everybody to nod wisely about misogyny, etc.
I just don’t have the right headspace to get this sort of meme/common wisdom culture. Part of this is because I don’t like the self-flagellation form of liberalism and leftism. Yes, I do realize that many women and even a good majority of women might feel this way. It isn’t also hard to find women who would look at the bear meme and go “what are you talking about, I encounter strange men in scary locations all the time and never had a problem, stop imputing your fears on me.”Report
Just repeat it back to them as if you misheard. “You’d rather meet an angry bear than a black man?”
See where it takes you.Report
I think it should be possible to address domestic violence and misogyny without going into these stupid rituals that allow people to nod sagely and recognize that no, not everybody in X class feels like this.Report
The take that I saw that most deftly handled the question was that the bear meme is yet another example of communication differences.
Women are trying to communicate about their fears and feelings.
Men are responding with statistics and trying to solve the problem.Report
This is likely true. What does it tell you?Report
That chicks aren’t any good at realizing that dudes don’t read their minds.Report
I feel like quite enough chicks have patiently sat down and explained this exact thing in the last few weeks that, at this point, it’s more ‘dudes do not actually want to listen to or believe chicks’.
Men who are complete unknown quantities have to be treated as threats by a lot of women. Is this threat _literally_ worse than a bear?
Maybe, actually.
It sorta depends if the bear will leave them alone if they don’t bother it, which is generally true. But a large problem is that people repeating are this question with very different premises, apparently not understanding that those actually change the dangers from the bear and/or man. Sometimes the women ‘run across’ the bear or man, sometimes they’re just ‘in the woods’ together, sometimes the bear/man definitively knows they are there, sometimes it’s made clear that no one knows where they are, etc, etc. Which, obviously, changes any calculation.
There are ways to phrase this question that almost every woman would pick the bear: You are lost in the woods, no one knows where you are, you enter a clearing and notice X across a small ravine. You can immediately re-enter the woods and disappear without them immediately able to follow you, but X did see you and knows you exist now, and would probably be able to track you down if it wanted.
Would you rather that X be a completely unknown man or a bear?
That is a very different question than ‘You walk into a cave and either a man or a bear is there.’, because the calculations about the bear are completely different. Bears do not hunt down random people they’ve seen and kill them. They simply don’t. Humans do, occasionally. Bears might, however, attack a human who walks in on them, or who walks in on them and then flees.
And even some of the information to make calculations about the man are missing…like if he assaults and kills the woman, could this ever be known? Because that’s the actual danger, that’s the part that seriously changes the calculation. Very few men assault women if they think there’s going to be actual consequences for it, a huge part of the question isn’t that they are an unknown man, it is if the man _knows_ they can do this and never face any repercussion.Report
One guy on twitter said something like “I changed it to ‘Bear or Black Guy'” and then the gif of Danny DeVito saying “Oh My God. I Get It.”
Personally, that made the debate absurd enough for me to where I enjoy it now.Report
I’m arguing that the fears and feelings that some women are communicating are probably not universal among women.Report
News at 11.Report
Why there are so few women hanging around here, and this place remains such a sausage fest, is a complete mystery.Report
Women are trying to communicate about their fears and feelings.
Men are responding with statistics and trying to solve the problem.
Jaybird, it’s not about the nail.Report
I’ve been watching Naked and Afraid on the Discovery channel for years and no one ever picks the ferocious wild animal over the human companion.Report
“the bear meme where women say they would rather encounter an angry bear rather than a strange man in certain locations”
That’s only for the 90% of men these women do not find attractive. This doesn’t apply with guys like Justin Waller:
https://socialstarage.com/justin-waller/Report
Among all the discussion about protests and whether they help or hurt, and how this impacts public opinion A New Civil Rights Exhibit Asks: Honestly, What Would You Have Done?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/us/civil-rights-exhibit-alabama-synagogue.html
The contents of the suitcase, more or less, told Emil Hess’s life story.
…
And a recording from his son, describing how his father, in the face of competing protests from Black customers fighting for equality and white patrons opposing it, had moved to desegregate the store.
The suitcase is now part of a new civil rights exhibit at Temple Beth El, the historic synagogue in Birmingham. It was handed to a group visiting the exhibit, along with a challenge: Figure out why he heeded the activists’ call when many others did not.
Did he have a genuine desire for fairness? Did he simply fear a boycott? Or did his intentions even matter?
…
Many of those [museums] expose the horrors of the past or celebrate the activism that rose up in defiance of it. The exhibit at Temple Beth El is concerned less with villains or heroes than with the great many who fell somewhere in between. It is built on the premise that history is the sum of infinite numbers of small decisions that gradually coalesce into profound change — decisions like the one Mr. Hess made to integrate the Parisian.
“What we’re doing is trying to show the messiness,” said Melissa Young, a historian who helped organize the exhibit. “We’re trying to show how complicated history is.”
If you ever wondered how you would have reacted in past eras of injustice, you’re doing it.Report
Help or hurt *WHAT*? Because Biden agreed to stop sending a weapons shipment to Israel and the protests definitely helped him reach that conclusion.
The protests helped Palestine.
Remember when Pelosi voted in Obamacare? “We came here to do a job, not keep a job.”Report
That “stop” looks a lot like “pretend to stop”.
It’s “delay”, not “stop”, only on extremely large bombs that blow up entire neighborhoods.
This is political theater.Report
One of the things that is often overlooked in all this is that the IDF is actually very very bad at actual combat. It’s hard to stress how much they are complete incompetents that have extremely powerful weapons.
They are also very badly understaffed in people who actually know how to fight and are willing, which is somewhat ironic of a force that literally drafts almost everyone….but they aren’t trained in combat. (In fact, they aren’t really trained in anything, because actual trained soldiers do not post pictures of themselves riffling through the enemy’s underwear drawers and mocking their lingerie.)
Or, to put it simpler: Police forces across the US train with the IDF, and the IDF is, at heart, the exact sort of force that police forces in the US are. You know, the sort of force that shoots random unarmed people who ‘look suspicious’ (We do all remember that the IDF has personally shot almost as many Israeli hostages as they have rescued?) but cower outside doors for hours while kids get shot.
Imagine US police force with bombs. (They’d probably drop them on black liberation communes in Philadelphia.)
The IDF has had to repeatedly ‘soften’ areas with bombs before going in, and then not even managed to hold areas. If you actually look at how things are going, the IDF has constantly had to give back up territory it held, it’s why no progress seems to be made. It’s why they are constantly just leveling buildings and then moving out, because they _literally cannot hold territory_.
And it isn’t because Hamas has some amazing fighting force..they’re okay, and fighting off guerrilla warfare is tricky, yes, but it’s not actually impossible to oppose. Israel is just…really bad at it.
The Israeli public, incidentally, has slowly come to learn all this over the past few months. Here in the US, we’re still ignoring it because…we don’t want to know it, I guess. But everyone understand that any sort of moderately competent ground forces would have managed to subdue a completely enclosed location twice the size of Manhattan by now, right?
Taking away the giant bombs would not hurt most militaries. It will, quite notable, hurt Israel’s…assuming they can’t just sub in more but smaller bombs, and I honestly have no idea about that.Report
Since the start of the war the IDF has lost 626 soldiers.
They’ve killed about 35k people. Maybe a third of them Hamas (sources differ).
Those numbers don’t suggest the IDF is really bad at what they’re doing.Report
The IDF has very powerful weapons, and thus they are extremely good at killing people fairly indiscriminately, if that is their goal. I won’t speculate on whether ‘killing people indiscriminately’ is actually their goal or not, but it is not, in fact, a way to win a war.
The way to win, the thing that is traditionally used as a measure if you are winning a war, is to seize and control territory, denying it to the other side, until you eventually pin them down and force surrendering of forces. (1) This isn’t some new definition being applied to this war, go look at how the media talked about Ukraine and Russia back when we cared about that, we talk about who is in control of what areas, what cities.
You notice what we don’t talking about with Israel? That. We talk about their upcoming operations, but never about how much of the area they control, and that’s because they don’t meaningfully control any of it except a very narrow slice. Everyone expected it to happen, here’s the Wall Street Journal starting that when the war goes to ground. (Note that all the territory the IDF controls at the top is, uh, empty.) That map was fully expected to change, constantly, as they kept us updated…and since then, the map has barely changed…the IDF cut a corridor across Gaza (Using bombs), and has mostly managed to hold it. That’s it. They sometimes clam larger areas, but mostly seem to be lying about that, as they often mysteriously have to quickly fall back.
Israel has gained control of almost no territory, at all. They have managed to deny access to the enemy (and all Palestinians, but I repeat myself in their eyes) to huge parts of it by constant bombings, but that’s actually how you’re ‘supposed to’ _get_ territory, not _keep_ territory.
This was a lot of criticism for them taking to long to start ground operations, but it turns out they had a good reason for that, because a good chunk of their ground operations are just seizing prisoners and then blowing up buildings and entire blocks with demolitions instead of bombs, then leaving. I guess destroying things this way could be commended for being a little more discriminate then bombing (While making it obvious that they are deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure and housing, not doing it incidentally.), but it’s not actually making progress towards _winning_ the war.
Israel is so bad at this that they have basically been immediately destroying Palestinian buildings and cities when they seize them, because they are very very aware they cannot hold them.
All of this is why guerrilla wars are, in fact, incredibly stupid to get into on the other side, because it’s nearly impossible to control any territory safely, as they can pop up inside it. And everyone knew Israel would have a problem. But Israel isn’t even managing any near the _normal_ level of that. They aren’t failing because of guerrillas taking potshots, they’re not even really managing to do basic stuff without being overrun by Hamas soldiers opening shooting at them and having to call in airstrikes and then evacuating because their position is unsafe.
Because, and I think this is easy to miss, the IDF are basically what you get if you take cops and give them the ability to call in airstrikes, not actual soldiers.
1) There are other ways to win, like targeting leadership, or creating and arming an internal movement against the current government, but Israel is not doing those things either.Report
That comment caused a weird error when I submitted, site might have gone down for a second, so I didn’t get a chance to fix whatever error that was, that made my URL not show up (and glued to paragraphs together), and I can’t find the URL anymore, but basically, it was a map showing Gaza cut in half by Israel control, and if you want to see it…you can find a map of Gaza right now. It’s the same map, is the point.
But, anyway, here’s something I found when looking for that URl again, where CNN and America finally ‘noticde’ what is happening: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/13/middleeast/israel-restarts-fighting-north-gaza-military-strategy-mime-intl/index.html
Of course, CNN and the American leadership is pretending that Hamas is ‘regrouping’, instead of admitting that Israel never really held the territory and that is why, in fact, it left to start with. (As just wandering away from gained territory mid-war and giving up your gains if you could keep them is, uh, really stupid?)
It’s kinda funny to watch them trying to justify any sort of reason that Israel might be doing this, trying to come up with a strategic plan. It was a stupid and nonsensical to pretend that Israel had a good strategical justification of leaving after ‘cleaning out Hamas’, which isn’t how wars work, but it’s even stupider when it’s clear they, uh, didn’t do that. I guess the official US strategy is to pretend Israel is deeply stupid instead of deeply incompetent.
But, I guess there’s actually two possibilities: Either Israel is, in fact, really REALLY bad at war, either because they are incompetent or stupid, or…Israel does not intend to ‘win’ this war, because if they won the war they’d be in the awkward position of people demanding they _actually_ fulfill their requirements as occupiers.
I mean, pick your poison.Report
Good news!
Report
Siri, show me a picture of people responding to incentives:
New doctors continue to avoid residencies in states with abortion bans
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/09/doctors-residencies-states-abortion-bansReport
I am as at ease with that as I am with doctors refusing to perform an abortion.Report
Looking deeper, of the 14 states with a newly enacted ban (https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/dashboard/abortion-in-the-u-s-dashboard/) only 1, Texas, is likely to be a fertile ground for doctors to see residencies. The data might point to something, but I think we’re working with an as yet small sample size.Report
One of the giants has passed:
Report
On the other blog, we are having a long standing debate on whether the fact that many people inside and outside Israel-Palestine see the I/P conflict in religious-metaphysical terms and whether or not this matters. Naturally, a lot of secular liberal and left types either argue that nobody really sees the I/P conflict in religious-metaphysical terms or if they do so it is basically just dressing for a ethnic/national conflict or if they do see it in those terms it is irrelevant. I am generally prone to believe that there are millions or tens of millions of people that really see the I/P conflict in religious and metaphysical terms and sincerely so. This is why getting a negotiated resolution has been too difficult. Too many people on both sides or associated with either side believes that the ideal order of the universe means that the Israeli Jews or Palestinian Muslims should get the entire thing. The inability to deal with the fact that many perceive the I/P conflict this way is not doing anybody any favors.
This gets to part of my beef with the Secret Disney Liberal worldview and how troublesome it can be. Their inability to comprehend that there are lots of ways humans see the ideal ordering of society and not everybody is coming from the same starting point or has the same end goal. I’d even go as far to argue that humans do not exist in the same world because of our contradictory and oppositional ideas on what the basic facts are in many case or how society should be organized, etc. Assuming that deep down everybody is a secular multiculturalist and you just need the right education to invoke this does not work.Report
When I was a teen, I participated in summer program between my sophomore and junior years in high school. One of the other teens in the program was a fellow Jew from Brazil. Sincere there aren’t really that many Jews in Brazil, I wanted to know what being a Jew there was like. If I’m remembering correctly, he said it was basically just like being there. There wasn’t any anti-Semitism but you were such an irrelevant part of the population and how most non-Brazilians think of Brazil that you sought of just existed as you went about your existence.
In recent years, I’m wondering if this is how many see the ideal paradigm for the Jews. There shouldn’t be active anti-Semitism but at the same time, we should live in small and scattered insular communities that keep to ourselves. The average reaction to walking past a synagogue should be “oh these people still exist” and if Jews feel alienated, so what? We are such small people that it doesn’t really matter whether we feel alienated or not. If the Global Right fears a Jewish conspiracy out to destroy all traditions than the Global Left sees us as taking up way too much oxygen for our numbers and wants us to be more obscure.Report
You’re overthinking it. The “plan” or “paradigm” is there is no plan. The United States has the most aggressively assimulistic culture in the world.
Normal rules apply. You are welcome to be absorbed (consider that a standing offer). You are welcome to keep your culture going. You can even mix those two.Report
Playing with the AI, again. I asked it to make me a modern day Aesop’s fable.
It gave me “the boy who texted ‘wolf'”.
There were no wolves in the story.
And Yet a Trace of the True Self Exists in the False Self.Report