Open Mic for the week of 9/16/2024
On this day in 1620, the Mayflower departed England.
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.
Another day, another Trump assassination attempt.
This one would be even less notable than the first one except for the fact that this guy was *ALSO* in a propaganda video a few months back.Report
It’s also notable in that he was captured alive and he’s apparently a very Pro-Ukraine guy.
I suppose its too soon to talk about how a permissive gun culture and a dismissive mental health culture don’t respond well to rhetoric about political violence being necessary?Report
Hey, I’m just saying that nobody tries to assassinate *GOOD* people.Report
Actually they do. Unless you happen to think MLK doesn’t qualify . . . or Lincoln …Report
Also: Jesus.Report
and Galileo!Report
Galileo’s assassin’s we subtle, you’ve gotta give them that.
“Make it look like a heart attack.”
And they did.Report
I agree. We need to halt all this permissive gun culture that’s killing all the inner city youths who only want to sell their product on the street corner without being harassed by rival groups, most a lot of big city administrations seem ok with not prosecuting them. Wadda ya gonna do?Report
I want to do the unsexy thing of taxing appropriately to fund education for those youths, and making sure they have jobs to go to when they are done. I also want to make it harder to buy guns in the US, including spending money to both enforce current laws and actually study violence patterns with firearms. And finally I want to tax for and then fund quality mental health services that could reduce the number of people who try to commit suicide, so that gun deaths actually drop.Report
“unsexy thing of taxing appropriately to fund education for those youths” The residents of those cities are ALREADY taxed for this…Report
This is why I bring up Baltimore in these education discussions, Phil. By some measures, it’s the 4th most funded school district in the country, spending more than $22k/student.
Recently, they found that 65% of the schools in Baltimore got the lowest possible scores for student testing.
Unless there’s a way to get a handle on the obvious graft and corruption stealing money out of the system in Baltimore, I don’t know that more taxation will help.
The problem is not “how much money are we taxing”.Report
In fairness, that spending was the result of a massive increase in funding 2 years ago (so we’re at the beginning of the 3rd school year). So the interesting question is whether performance has gone up over the last two school years. Unfortunately, we only have the first year (2022-2023) data, and there was some improvement over the previous year, but as pretty much anyone from that district will tell you, a big part of what they need is capital improvements, so that’ll take even longer.
I’m not saying that the school district doesn’t have a problem with misuse of funds, but I am saying we don’t have enough data after the large increase in funding to say whether the funding is helping.Report
I’ve got a story from 2019 talking about how it was the third most funded school system 5 years ago.
A paragraph from the story:
The problem isn’t whether we’re taxing people enough.
The problem is the graft and corruption.Report
Idly curious, I wondered about inflation.
According to the government’s own inflation calculator, 16,184.00 in August 2019 would be worth 19,857.73 in August 2024.
So we can’t say that the spending might be technically higher but inflation took an equivalent bite out of it.
Spending exceeds inflation .Report
$15,000 is around the national average per student in FY22. I’m skeptical that it was in the top 3 3 years earlier. It certainly wouldn’t have been in FY22, when the top large school districts were spending well over $20k per student. This article looking at 2021 spending doesn;t put them in the top 25. I find a bunch of sources that put Baltimore slightly above average before the 2022-2023 school year (a year in which they're still not in the top 3), but I can't find anything that puts them in the top 3. Not saying it's not possible; I'm just deeply skeptical, and your link doesn't link to any source.Report
I think it’s the whole “among the 100 largest” thing.
I remember reading an article where the Baltimore Mayor was saying “that’s not fair, it’s not the 4th most funded in the country! It’s just the 4th most funded out of the largest 100 in the country!”Report
The 2022 link discusses the top 100. Again, no Baltimore near the top. Perhaps they’re using other criteria to determine the top, or just looking at a particular kind of school?
I do believe the extra hundred plus million that Baltimore got at the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year (so FY23) would have put them closer to the top, but they’re still outspent by the real big guns (NY, LA, Boston, DC, etc.). I can’t imagine there’s been any time in the last century in which Baltimore has beat out NY, LA, and Boston.Report
I went to the interactive visualization and it said that Maryland was in the 4th Quartile of spending…
Consistently more than $2k above the average for the country.Report
Finding the actual numbers, it looks like Baltimore was in fact 11th among the largest 100 in 2019. Still pretty highly ranked, but not top 4, or top 10.
This per-student spending unfortunately does not make up for what looks like hundreds of millions of dollars in underspending on capital projects (building schools, renovating schools, etc.), and spending on students can’t solve the biggest issue in Baltimore: poverty (75% served with Title 1 funds, almost all students eligible for free or reduced lunch).
Obviously, throwing money at schools isn’t the only solution: if you want to make schools better, you need a lot of money in the schools both for regular school functions and for capital projects, but you also need to seriously address poverty and its symptoms in a district. Throwing money at schools without addressing poverty is easier, though.Report
So it was only the 11th highest of the largest 100 in 2019.
I’m pretty sure that bumping it up to 4th would not, in fact, have helped a whole lot. Even at the time.
Making sure that people are paying more in taxes ain’t gonna fix this.
As for the underspending on capital projects… well, I suppose that that’s where graft and corruption comes into play.
Throwing money at schools without addressing poverty is easier, though.
It seems to be the preferred solution to the point where people will argue for it not matter the circumstances of the current funding.
Even in the face of 2 out of 3 schools receiving the lowest possible score.
For what it’s worth, I can give you the lowest possible score for those schools for a lot lower than 4th Quartile in funding.
I can do it for 3rd Quartile.Report
Is the reason you keep using Baltimore because it is the only talking point you have that matches your priors? Like the one classic grim inner city school district that still exists and you are milking it for all it’s worth? Because if Baltimore is literally the only example of this in a country our size than we are doing a pretty damn good job.Report
No, I keep using Baltimore because it is one of the highest funded school districts in the country.
The argument “we need to increase funding!” is an argument that falls apart when you show a school district with 2 out of 3 schools with the LOWEST POSSIBLE SCORES despite having some of the highest funding in the country.
“Let’s do something else” is the conversation that I continually try to introduce.
And the counter-argument is always “increase funding! Increase funding!”
It’s not a funding problem.Report
The flaw in this logic becomes apparent when you apply it to policing, or national defense.Report
It does? Because I’m pretty sure that the whole “we need to get rid of the corruption and graft” is a pretty easy thing to apply to both policing and national defense.
I mean, if you want an article talking about reforming how policing is done that does not talk about funding levels, I’m pretty sure I can find you one that was written on this very site.Report
OK so we should eliminate the corruption in Baltimore schools while not talking about funding levels.Report
I’d be happy if we could talk about education in Baltimore without someone talking about the need to tax people more. But it always comes up anyway.Report
Its funding is fine. It’s heavily subsidized by the rest of the state which is very, very wealthy. The problem is the students and the problems that they have are not something a school can fix.Report
We’re not prepared for that conversation.
Let’s have the graft/corruption one instead.Report
Heh, fair enough.Report
You realize that violent crime, especially the type leading to great injury and death, is way down from the mid to late 20th century peak, right? Things have changed immensely.Report
There’s more:
“According to the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, somebody with Routh’s same full name and date of birth racked up more than a dozen criminal charges in 2001 and 2002, including for carrying a concealed weapon and hit and run.
He also picked up a particularly alarming felony in April 2002 for “possessing a weapon of mass destruction,” records show.”
https://nypost.com/2024/09/15/us-news/shooting-reported-at-donald-trumps-golf-club-while-ex-president-was-on-grounds/Report
The guy seems like an obvious nutter without a clear political motive.
But lets assume he had one.
1. Assume for the moment that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to give citizens the ability to overthrow a dictator and water the tree of liberty;
2. Trump has declared his intention to be a dictator;
3. An armed citizen uses his gun to try to overthrow the dictator.
Can an argument be made justifying this?
The strongest argument against assassinating Trump rests on the idea that all the other options have not yet been exhausted, and this is the argument I would make.
Which makes Roberts’ immunity decision all the more ominous because it removes one of the main options for preventing exactly the dictatorship faced by the drafters of the 2nd Amendment.Report
“give citizens the ability to overthrow a dictator”
Assumes said individual is ALREADY in a place of power/been elected so that he could become a dictator, not state that he WOULD be a dictator. This means that the public choice/vote has not yet been exercised and determined, nor is there a violent militant group of people working to install said future dictator.Report
“nor is there a violent militant group of people working to install said future dictator.”
You were asleep on Jan 6, I guess.Report
Many people see legitimately elected Democratic politicians exercising their mandate as dictatorship because reasons. Republicans who try to prevent Democratic action are not dictatorial because they believe Republicans stand for freedom. Naturally, I don’t believe this myself but more than a few Americans see it this way.Report
You and I seem to have wide differences in the definition of “violent gov’t overthrow”. In no was was Jan 6 near a violent attempt. Riot, yes. Hell, there was more violence in Baltimore several years ago when “all that stuff happened”.Report
Really? SO you don’t think the folks who put the gallows up actually intended to hang the VP? Or the ones who forced their way into the Capitol weren’t trying to stop government processes?
Fascinating.Report
I’m not sure what they intended, but the violence well a hell of a lot less than 2015.
“During that 16-day period of rioting and peaceful protests at least 113 police officers were injured and two civilians were shot, 486 people were arrested, and 350 businesses were damaged.”
So, yeah, I’m saying the “freddie grey” riots in bmore were a hell of a lot more violent, and lasted longer, than the Jan 6 riot.Report
A violent, armed mob storms the US capitol on the day they are certifying the election results that make their guy the loser, and you don’t know what they intended?
You live in an interesting reality man.Report
“and you don’t know what they intended”
No, I don’t KNOW what they intended.
Did they intend to hang people or did they intend to intimidate / threaten people, or something else?
You and I can make conclusions, but we can’t KNOW unless you’ve got transcripts from the culprits there stating what they planned to do. Cite?Report
You know how people say don’t point a gun unless you intend to shoot? I imagine the same goes for a gallows.Report
To me the only defense for them is that they were too stupid to understand the ramifications of what they were doing. I don’t buy that for all of them, and it’s also no defense as far as the law is concerned.Report
Actually, I believe the phrase don’t point a gun at someone unless you intend to kill them. At least that’s how I’ve always approached it. YMMV. Regardless, my comments to Phillip was more in the legal aspects, as in what can be proved in a court of law.Report
Since nearly a thousand of them have been convicted of various crimes – including sedition – I actually believe we know the motives.Report
There is a ton of evidence that they intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power. That evidence includes a lot of social media and we have had trials on this subject.
The most troubling part is they were doing this because of Trump’s instigation and as part of a plan to overturn the election.
It is correct to say that there was more violence in Baltimore (etc) than there was at the capital. It’s also correct to point out that attempting to overturn an election is a bigger deal.Report
” This means that the public choice/vote has not yet been exercised and determined, nor is there a violent militant group of people working to install said future dictator.”
buddy, the election had happened and Biden was the winner; that the transfer-of-power ceremony had not yet been held did not mean that Trump wasn’t hoping the normal mechanisms of government would be subverted.Report
Let’s look at who is getting starbursts from Rich Lowry and ignored hot mic moments: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/jd-vances-racist-pogrom-gives-rich-lowry-starburstsReport
For those of us unfamiliar with the lingo of the cesspit that is LG&M, what is a “starburst?”Report
I think that that’s when your pager blows up?Report
The term is taken directly from Rich Lowry’s embarassing masturbatory references to Sarah Palin back in 2008.Report
how dare he start to say the word “migrants”, get confused for a second and think he should have said “immigrants”, then change his mind and keep going with the original word!
clearly racist.Report
SO the price of “safety” in NYC these days is four people shot over a $2.90 subway fair. Gotta love modern policing!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/16/new-york-fare-evasion-shooting/Report
yeah it really does suck how police just randomly pull out their pistols and gun some dude down without warning or notice or even a really good reason, right? like i didn’t read the article or anything but im sure it went down exactly like the people on twitter said it did, it’s only those icky racist Republicans who would leave relevant details out of a story because they want people to think by bellyfeel right?Report
The man jumped a fair gate in the NYC subway. So to start he’s getting hassled over $2.90. And he ended up not being shot when the cops drew their service weapons.Report
Raise the taxes on Wall Street and make the subways free!Report
I seem to recall that the relationship between the state, the city, and the MTA is quite twisted, to the point where implementing something like this becomes next thing to impossible.
I recall times when I worked for the Colorado state legislature on the budget staff and having closed-door discussions with some member of the General Assembly that included things like, “Yes, ma’am. I understand that what you want to do sounds simple. But there are several statutes and a couple of things in the state constitution that are intended to make that sort of flow of funds impossible.”Report
Let’s look at more not so subtle rhetoric from JD Vance: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/jd-vance-laura-loomer-racist-comments-immigration-conspiracyReport
I guess if it takes a Republican doing it for you to learn about “spin”, well, at least now you’ve learned it.Report
lying about immigrants isn’t spin. Its lying that foments real threats to real people living in the US.
Try again.Report
We knew it was coming, I guess. The Wikipedia edit war on “Zionism“.
Report
They haven not managed to do much to the rest of the very long article but the problem with a lack of gate keepers is that Wikipedia is frequently used to fight ideological battles. Generally, I find that Pro-Palestinian activists like direct confrontation in places that have to do with Zionism or Israel or any Pro-Israel memes and posts on social media than Pro-Israel people do. They are relentless. Many of them also get money for doing this.Report
Like many ideological wars against Jewish self-determination, the edited opening manages to make the emergence of Zionism without context. No mention of the anti-Semitism in Europe and exclusion of the Jews where we lived. It is just something that we decided to get up and do on our own because of reasons. These anti-Zionist activists can explain to you at great length why Jewish self-determination is evil but get immensely dense with not understanding why Jews do not like being second class citizens under officially Muslim polities. Even if you assume that Jews are a mere religious group, it should be a no brainer that we don’t want to live as second class citizens of another religious polity.Report
Best of luck with that. Diversity is a strength you should be more willing to embrace.Report
Now if only this diversity was more than a one way street where Jews have to listen to anti-Zionists but anti-Zionists don’t have to listen to Jews.Report
Ah, glad they’re making it more accurate.Report
Your daily dose of GOP voter intimidation, by a county sheriff whose conduct wouldn’t be constrained by ditching qualified immunity:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/16/ohio-harris-walz-political-sign/Report
Ghislaine Maxwell’s convictions and sentence for her Jeffrey Epstein-related sex trafficking and other crimes were affirmed on appeal. The decision itself is entirely about procedural minutiae that only a lawyer could love, so I’ll spare you a link.Report
Hezbollah vows revenge against Israel after a series of pagers used by Hezbollah for communication explodes. This reminds me a lot of the accusations about Israel training dolphins to harm Egypt from several years ago. The amount of conspiracy theorizing in the Muslim world, mainly aimed at Jews, is amazing. It never occurs to them that they might be the messed up ones. Everything that goes wrong for them is the fault of Israel and Jews.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-members-wounded-lebanon-when-pagers-exploded-sources-witnesses-2024-09-17/Report
Seems like a logical operation carried off by Mosad to me. I mean they planted a bomb in Iran months before it killed a terrorist leader so I don’t see why this is such a stretch.Report
It was most likely done by Israel but I find it really difficult to be sympathetic with Hezbollah in this. Hezbollah did not have to enter the Israel-Hamas War on the side of Hamas but they elected to. They are then shocked that Israel retaliates back including after Hezbollah kills a dozen, checks notes, Arab Israeli children with their rockets.
There is a a lot of arrogance that the Islamists and their Further Left sympathizers in the rest have with Jews in general and Israel in particular. They seem genuinely shocked that Israel isn’t just rolling over after the latest glorious push or that Israel strikes back after getting attacked. Even more moderate Muslims seem genuinely confused why Jews don’t want to be subsidiary citizens of an officially Muslim state connected to other officially Muslim states and want a place of our own, which so obviously annoys Muslims to know end and we should really just listen to them.Report
You are the first person I’ve encountered who doesn’t believe that Israel is behind it.Report
The main questions that I have all involve the various logistics.
Okay. So it’s a pager, right? So all of them blew up at the same time (or within a few short minutes of each other… before warnings could have been sent out).
For pagers, this shouldn’t be so tough to do. It’s easy to set it up so that 1000 phone numbers all get called within a minute of each other.
What I’m wondering is if it was a deliberately triggered battery malfunction or whether there were explosives in each of these things.
I’d think that if it were a deliberately triggered battery malfunction that it’d require a handful of things. I imagine that a battery would get really hot before it blew up with that amount of force. So you’d have a minute or so of the pager heating up first. If there is a way to make it happen without getting hot first, I’d think that you’d need some sort of firmware update installed first. Even so, what would the failure rate of inducing this sort of chemical reaction be? How many pager owners fail to fully charge the batteries nightly? Can it blow up a 50% charged battery? 33%?
Does my phone suffers from the same vulnerability?
Now, if it were explosives, then I’d have a handful more questions (but be much more relieved about the possibility that my phone could be similarly targeted)… like, what model of pager was this? At what point would the explosives have to be added to the pager? Could you do it, for example, with a finished pager? Take it apart, put it in there, put it together? Would it be better to put it in there as part of the manufacturing process?
What’s the make and model of the pager?Report
I’m just shocked Hezbollah is carrying pagers. What are they weed dealers in the 90s?Report
Both Google and Twitter are useless for this right now but there was an article a few months back that talked about how low-tech like pagers was a way to circumvent a handful of communication vulnerabilities that cellphones have.
Welp.Report
Found the article. It’s from July 9th of this year.
How Hezbollah used pagers and couriers to counter Israel’s high tech surveillance
I understand that anyone who has ever used the two words “operations” and “security” next to each other unironically has opinions about this story.Report
The IDF is apparently good at hacking and tracking cellphones. Pagers are harder to deal with.Report
Yashar Ali reports:
(He goes on to talk about how PETN was what Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) was using and about a 2010 plot to blow up some planes.)
So, in conclusion, it’s some added explosive. The added explosive was The Good Stuff. You don’t need a whole lot of The Good Stuff.
The Good Stuff can be ignited by a battery heating up enough.
1200 pagers were sufficiently heated within a few short minutes of each other igniting The Good Stuff.
Take Home Message: Your cellphone is probably okay.
Now I just wonder at what point in the process that the pagers got adulterated. Was it in the factory or was there a handful of techs with jewelers’ screwdrivers and some PETN applicators in a lab between the factory and the point of sale?Report
Did a little more research and found a handful of folks showing what a lithium battery blowing up looks like and compared it to the explosions caught on camera aaaaaand…
those aren’t lithium battery explosions.Report
How do you make a phone or pager blow up?Report
It’s a second level spell in D&D.Report
*Fizban mutters under breadth*
“What is that spell again, Firepall, Firehall, Firecandal, Fire…”Report
Trump vows to arrest all who oppose him:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/trump-when-i-win-the-people-who-tried-to-defeat-me-are-going-to-prisonReport
just Trump being Trump. Nothing to see here – move along sheep.Report
Hezbollah seems really shocked about the pager incident. They don’t seem to realize that actually firing rockets into Israel is going to have consequences. There is an arrogance that Muslims possess when it comes to Israel and Jews that they can’t seem to get out of. Like they really don’t understand why Jews want a place of our own and don’t want to be second class citizens in officially Muslim countries and non-trivially Muslim at that. These leads credence to my theory is that a big reason why the I/P conflict has continued for so long is that Muslims can’t admit that they lost to Jews of all people. Losing to the Christians and Hindus might be one thing but the Jews is something else.Report
I’ll never get used to seeing ghoulish Americans celebrating a terrorist attack that killed an 8-year old.Report
As attacks go, I cannot imagine one more precise than one that targets holders of particular beepers.
Compare, for example, to missiles.Report
Then you should probably imagine harder.Report
It’s difficult to find good numbers on this, I’ve seen arguments that there were 9 deaths and 8 were Hezbollah but good reporting is hard to find. You willing to accept a news source from Turkey? At least 9 killed, thousands injured after mass pager explosion in Lebanon reports that Hezbollah says that 2 were Hezbollah members.
The “both sides do it” paragraph at the end of the article, for your convenience:
It’s a war. War sucks.Report
I mean, in one case it’s genocide (in Gaza), and in the other terrorism (Mossad in Lebanon). Or rather, this is what we would call these two things were anyone else doing it. When Israel or the U.S. does it, it’s “war,” and “bad things happen in war.”Report
The argument that violence that targets belligerents is terrorism doesn’t exactly move me much.
Non-belligerents? Absolutely.
But “collateral damage” has long been a thing (even when “we” did it).
Assuming the targets were primarily Hezbollah (not necessarily a fair assumption, mind, but one that seems to not be contradicted by Hezbollah’s own announcements), means that this is a lot closer to a fairly complex series of targeted assassinations.
Which strikes me as being vaguely more moral than the whole “missile” thing (that is ongoing).Report
How many of your friends cheered the act of resistance when Hamas killed Jewish babies and children on October 7th or took children as hostages?
How many accused Jews of lying when they brought this up?
https://www.ajc.org/news/meet-the-brave-israeli-children-who-survived-hamas-imprisonmentReport
My theory and it is mine is that the anti-Semitic Left thinks that the Jews take up way too much oxygen based on our numbers and they want us to be more like the Zoroastrians or Assyrians, one of those small groups that just meekly accept our subordination in the world.Report
When the first info was that Hamas had broken out of Gaza, some. When the concert info came out, none.
But if you’re still cheering at the murder of children at this point, over some people you don’t even know cheering on October 7, then you’re at least as sick as the sickest of them.Report
“In the warmest of hearts, there is always a cold-spot reserved for Jews”-Ben HechtReport
Luckily, we Jews couldn’t care less what the International Caring Community and Chattering Classes think about us. These are people who demand our support for their causes because of our history but also conspire to destroy all forms of culture and identity. They look at decades, centuries, or millennia old Jewish communities being destroyed in a blink of an instant and say it doesn’t matter because of anti-colonialism and the Jews have a portable culture so it really isn’t that bad anyway. Damn them to hell.Report
John Updike had a famous quote about a true New Yorker being somebody who upon hearing believes that a person who lives somewhere else is in a sense just kidding. The true anti-Semite is the same. They believe that when they hear about Jews like being Jews, they believe that we are just kidding.Report
You mean like the people who were out and about on October 8th celebrating the death of Jewish kids? Or maybe there is no such thing as a Jewish baby or kid in your cosmology and we are all old people who need to die or at least accept our second class citizenship stnadard under the banner of Islam?
Hezbollah’s rockets killed Israeli kids and those kids weren’t even Jews. They were Israeli Arabs. Nobody on the Left seemed to care about that.Report
Killing Israeli children is wrong. If only you recognized that was true in reverse. That you don’t, and clearly never have, should greatly disturb you, and watching you do mental gymnastics in order to not face that fact, in this thread and any thread on the subject, is nausea-inducing.Report
The death of a child is a tragedy. Whether it’s a war crime depends on whether or not that child was targeted. It is heinous to target them. It’s beyond heinous for military forces to hide behind them.Report
When it comes to the beepers blowing up, the military forces weren’t hiding behind the children.
They merely happened to be standing nearby.
Given the circumstances of the explosions that made it to twitter, I’d say that it was reasonable for these guys to be doing stuff like “shopping for groceries”.
If you want to criticize Israel for putting bombs on people that might have blown up while they were driving a car or grocery shopping or holding a baby or something like that, there are some criticisms to be made there.
Personally, I think that they pale in comparison to the criticisms of the whole “shooting rockets at each other” thing but if you want to focus like a laser pointer at something, there is a criticism to be made there.
And, in this case, the military forces weren’t using human shields. They were just, you know, buying bananas.Report
Like Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Western fan boys and girls ever cared about Israeli citizens just going about their business when they attacked them? Instead they dance, laugh, and sing when Israelis get slaughtered.
I am utterly tired of the people who think that they have unlimited right to wage war against Israel and Jews world wide have us respond like both our hands are tied around our backs. They demand that we respect and love them while going to the bathroom on us behind our backs.
Western liberals are so tied up in knots about not saying anything racist or Islamophobic that they have no way of dealing with the vast amounts of Jew hatred that exists among Muslim’s world wide. Instead, we Jews are expected to deal with all of this with a stiff upper lip and wait patient centuries for it to change but nothing can be done or said to hasten the change. Meanwhile, our enemies get to wage unlimited war.Report
It’s a war and wars suck and the quickest way to end a war is to lose it.
And I understand why “your side should lose!” is not a particularly persuasive argument.
When I keep iterating the various possibilities out in my head, I’d say that 90% of them (or more) end up in bad places. Like, *BAD* places.
The ones that don’t are the ones that rely rather heavily on turning down the heat.
Which brings us to how persuasive “your side should turn down the heat!” arguments are.Report
It is more than wanting my side to lose. It is wanting Jews to embrace second-class citizenship status that liberals and leftists would find intolerable for anybody else while pretending we are living in a secular multicultural democracy.Report
Second-class citizenship?
In America?
Be careful that you’re not confusing equality under a secular multicultural democracy with second-class citizenship.Report
What on earth are you 2 going on about?Report
Lee believes that western liberals want Israel to give up being its own country that’s majority Jewish, and become second class citizens in an Arab run country.Report
“You guys shouldn’t have a religious ethnostate in the current year!” is an interesting argument.
It’s fair to ask why it’s yelled at Israel but not the other religious ethnostates in the region.
If it’s only yelled at Israel but not Saud-occupied Arabia or the Arabian peninsula referred to as “Qatar”, it’s fair to ask “why?”Report
Right. Muslim countries, famous for not being sneered at for their backwards theocratic governments.Report
If the criticisms of Israel were limited to sneering, I think we’d all be better off.Report
They are sneered at by some but others defend them. Nobody does anything about it.Report
Nearly Muslim majority country on this planet declares itself to be an officially Muslim country and in non-trival ways. They have enforced blasphemy and apostacy laws and Muslim state symbolism everywhere. Many political parties that declare themselves to be Muslim political parties. The Palestinians themselves say that they see Palestine as a Muslim country connected to other Muslims countries with any non-Muslim just kind of being there like a piece of furniture. The Muslim countries have an entire international organization where they go and chest thump about being Muslim. Why should Jews want to live in countries like this?
They say this openly and in English. On my social media feed, since the algorithm gives me Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian propaganda, I’ve seen numerous posts trying to pass what is clearly Tel Aviv, both now and pre-state, as a “Palestinian beach city.” A few years ago, the Pro-Palestinian propagandists tried to present the Zionist and all Jewish mandate football team as a Palestinian football team and evidence that Palestine was a real country destroyed by the vile “Zionists”. The Palestinians and their Muslim allies aren’t being exactly subtle about this.
The Western liberals and leftists just refuse to believe that they might actually be serious about this. “Muslim Palestine” and Islamist rhetoric goes in one ear and gets scrambled in the brains into ANC, multicultural rainbow Palestine with no evidence.
Even in contexts not related to the I/P conflict, we see that the entire burden of good Jewish-Muslim relations is placed on Jews. The Algerians kicked out their Jews to France than when they immigrate to France themselves continued to terrorize the Jews their. It is the Jews that are supposed to reach out and deal with this patiently while the Muslim responsibility to confront their own crazies is zero.Report
JayBird: Which brings us to how persuasive “your side should turn down the heat!” arguments are.
Most “turn down the heat” arguments come down to “don’t target people attacking civilians if you might kill civilians”.
Or to put it differently, “don’t go to war over terrorism”.
JayBird: the military forces weren’t using human shields. They were just, you know, buying bananas.
The beepers are military communication gear. Boobie trapping and/or blowing up military gear is fair play.Report
Only silly people are complaining about Hezbollah members being targeted.
The complaint is that some of the pagers might have found their way into the pockets of doctors, lawyers, and taxi drivers.
Calling the pagers “Hezbollah Pagers” is a textbook example of well-formed question-begging.
I’m not opposed to blowing up Hezbollah Pagers, after all.
If these were consumer electronics that found their way into the pockets of anybody who plopped down twenty bucks at the Apollo store, I’m much less sanguine about it.
But the information that I’ve seen so far is that Hezbollah specifically switched to pagers recently (and two-way radios!) in an effort to not get blowed up.
And this well-publicized fact got capitalized on.
And part of what followed is a guy having his pager blow up in the produce section when children were standing nearby.
And this is one of those things that happens in war.
I suppose it’s all the more terrible that we’re seeing the video of people as individuals doing normal stuff like shopping rather than belligerents and collatoral damage as numbers on an excel worksheet.Report
Jay: When it comes to the beepers blowing up, the military forces weren’t hiding behind the children.
True that. However they’re supporting Hamas who is famous for it and they’re insisting that their conflict with Israel will go on until the Gaza war stops.Report
What Hezbollah is doing is slightly different, though I’m not sure any less of an invitation to this kind of thing. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon almost 25 years ago. There’s no fight over territory there anymore and Hezbollah itself is a player in what passes for legitimate politics within Lebanon.
However they’re also an Iranian proxy and accept Iranian funding and weapons for the purpose of attacking Israel with them. On the one hand, this kind of thing raises all the questions Jaybird brings up about Israel’s tactics, and whether they really are intended to de-escalate. On the other Hezbollah is not Hamas, is not an interested party in the territorial dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, and could always stop firing rockets into Israel and focus it’s efforts on its other goals in Lebanon. If they did that then would Israel did here would be impossible to excuse. But they don’t, and so their agents make themselves targets for asymmetrical attacks, of the same sort that they carry out at the behest of Iran.Report
Have you ever considered that a lot of them are being very serious with their metaphysical understanding of the conflict and they really see Israel’s existence as a blot on all of Islam?Report
Sure. They probably take the aid for help with something they want to do anyway.
But that’s kind of my point. If I put myself in the position of a Palestinian in occupied and/or strangled territroy I can’t completely dismiss violence against Israel as illegitimate, by Hamas or whatever other militia. Hezbollah has no similar excuse. They’re in a state and enfranchised to the extent anyone in that state is.Report
Hezbollah has been sending rockets into Israel on a nearly daily basis. They have killed civilians. This is an act of war/aggression. If Israel is responsible for the pager attack, it was designed to go after known Hezbollah operatives, not civilians.
But hey, dead Israeli civilians are okay because they are icky Israelis even if they aren’t Jewish but the civilians deaths in Lebanon should be used as an attack against Israel because everything should be an attack against Israel especially if they are icky eews.Report
This sort of very targeted response is what people wanted Israel to do after October 7th. But when Israel actually does this very targeted response, it is “no, no, not like that.”Report
Again, who is saying this?Report
Chris for one thing on this blog. Lots of people on LGM are crying that this is terrorism while others are defending it as basically the best possible way to deal with terrorism because it hurts less than bombing Hizbollah areas in Lebanon. Lots of the very online.Report
It’s less “they can’t understand” and more “you’re supposed to lose”.Report
As mentioned previously, one of my theories on why the Israel-Palestinian/Jewish-Muslim conflict has gone on for so long is that losing to the Jews of all people, and after the Holocaust at that, was too much of a psychological impossibility to Palestinians, other Arabs, and Muslims. Sure they could lose to the Christians and the Hindus but those are warrior peoples like them. The Jews? Jews haven’t won any battles in nearly two thousand years. We were crushed since antiquity. To lose to them is like a young muscular guy in his twenties losing to a middle aged, pudgy accountant with a receding hair line and a mustache. Who loses to them?Report
Okay. This may be crazy.
The Somali Institute of Chinese Studies has a thread in which they claim that the pagers were:
Apollo Gold pagers
Modified at the factory
With the knowledge of the factory
I don’t know if any of this is true (or how the Somali Institute of Chinese Studies (seriously, what the heck?) would get their hands on this information first) but…
It answers the questions of “what kind of pagers?” and “how did the explosives get in there?” and if, in the days to come, it turns out that they weren’t Apollo?
You know that the rest of the assertions are also wishcasting.Report
Why is this a valid source of information?
I can only find they have a twitter page. That hardly seems to make their info trustworthy.
You posted it. Why is it trustworthy?Report
I don’t know whether it’s trustworthy. I do know that I wanted to know the answer to two questions:
1. What kind of pagers were they?
2. At what point were the pagers modified with explosives.
This thread answers those two questions which is why I found it notable.Report
That is weak tea from which to assert we need to pay attention to it. Though I suppose it is consistent that you would choose it since it gives you what you believe are answers.Report
Do you have answers to those two questions from any source?
I would be interested in reading it, if you do!
If you don’t, I will continue to look for answers to those questions and if I find any, I’ll do my best to share them.Report
NPR and CNN both have the what kind of pagers are they story on their landing pages … I’m sure others do as well. Unless the Budapest licensee they reference comes clean, anyone purporting to know when they were modified is dealing in pure speculation.Report
NPR is reporting that they were Apollo pagers.
I couldn’t find anything on CNN except for this:
Thanks for telling me about NPR.
So far, their news gels with The Somali Institute of Chinese Studies.Report
Modifying them at the factory seems unlikely and unneeded. You’re one soldering iron away from killing random factory workers and you’re also running the risk of factory workers posting this on youtube.
My guess is they bought a batch of them, modified them, then swapped them. That swap might be in the warehouse but it might also be on the ship going to the middle east.
In terms of “spook” infrastructure I’d think it more useful to have guys on ships that service the Middle East than some warehouse.Report
Modifying them at the factory might not require a soldering iron if, as theorized, the ignition is the sudden heat of the battery.
We don’t know where they were modified… the warehouse people are praying that it wasn’t them, the port people are praying that it didn’t happen when a shipping container was compromises when it was in their particular ports, the ship owners are praying it didn’t happen in transit, and BAC Consulting isn’t returning phone calls.Report
RE: the ignition is the sudden heat of the battery.
They don’t go off every time they’re used. They need a message sent to them saying “boom now”.
Thus they need to open the case, add/remove stuff, move wires around, add wires, reprogram chips, and/or so on. Setting it up might have involved a soldering iron. It certainly involves a high level of skill.
If we’re doing this to 1000 units then it means we have 1000 units of explosives around.
It involves testing them to make sure that they work. That testing includes putting them in a bomb proof container so if they go off accidently the developer doesn’t get killed.
At this scale you will break some of the pagers that you’re trying to alter and thus bomb disposal.
This requires a high degree of control over the surroundings. Ideally it happened at the lab/machine shop which developed this technology.Report
No, they don’t go off every time they’re used. There has to be some sort of internal trigger to ignite what is theorized to be PETN.
So, like, there has to be a signal sent that tells the battery to heat up above a certain point.
This strikes me as something likely to require, at the very least, a firmware update but if you’ve got access to the factory, you can just add a secondary trigger for when a particular text message is a received.Report
Its very early after the incident.
The route of the pagers from manufacture in Taiwan to the end user in Lebanon is long and tangled and absolutely no one who knows that route has come forward.
So any source that confidently tells us how the explosives got into the pagers is lying, and anyone who believes them is stupid and can be ignored.Report
CNN and NPR have confidently informed us that the pagers weren’t manufactured in Taiwan, Chip.Report
Its very early after the incident.
The route of the pagers from manufacture to the end user in Lebanon is long and tangled and absolutely no one who knows that route has come forward.
So any source that confidently tells us how the explosives got into the pagers is lying, and anyone who believes them is stupid and can be ignored.Report
Yeah, that’s why we’re stuck doing stuff like looking at investigative reporters investigating and giving their preliminary findings.
There’s only a handful of people who confidently know what happened and they’re deleting tweets.Report
“We” aren’t looking at anything, or stuck doing anything.
Smart people are keeping silent until they get reliable information.
Stupid people are chattering.Report
As one of the stupid, I’ll keep posting the stuff that I find.
And you can keep complaining that you’re getting new information that hasn’t been vetted for you yet.Report
It would be awfully quiet around the internet if people waited until they knew what they were talking about before they talked.Report
In my day, stupid people bloviated and spread rumors from a barstool at Cheers, like God intended.Report
You weren’t looking hard enough. This was on the landing page on the left about 5 headline down.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/18/business/gold-apollo-taiwan-lebanon-exploding-pagers-hnk-intl/index.htmlReport
Oh! Thank you for linking it!
Yep. So far it gels with what The Somali Institute of Chinese Studies said too.Report
Sounds like Muslim doing conspiracy theories about the Jews again.Report
I’m pretty sure that the conspiracy theory, in this case, is about Taiwan.
The part about “Jews are blowing up beepers!” is the part that is *NOT* a conspiracy theory anymore.Report
The plagiarism case against Robin D’Angelo has been dismissed:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/books/robin-diangelo-plagiarism-charge-dismissed.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Lk4.vRgP.MdqCyIjOKyQo&smid=url-sharReport
White Privilege.Report
Okay, from the twitters: BREAKING IN LEBANON: Israel just blew up thousands of two-way radios which were used by Hezbollah terrorists in a second wave of its intelligence operation which started on Tuesday with the explosions of Hezbollah pager devices.
If you can get past the editorializing, the main message underneath seems to be “two-way radios blew up today”.
“Guys, guys… we can’t trust the pagers anymore… Switch to the two-way radios!”Report
Hezbollah is getting off lightly if Israel is only making it harder for them to communicate with each other. After October 7th, these types of old school Mossad actions are how many people wanted Israel to respond to it. Now that Israel is doing these old school Mossad actions, everybody is like “no, no. not like that.”Report
Who, exactly, is “everybody?”Report
Well, part of the eternal problem is the “when we do it, it’s okay” thing.
If Hezbollah sends a dozen rockets into Israel, hey. It’s a war.
If Israel sends a dozen rockets into Lebanon, OH MY GOSH THIS IS THE WORST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED.
The pagers thing strikes me as a fairly precise way to target fairly precise people.
The July article talked about how Hezbollah folks were abandoning smartphones following some panjandrum getting blowed up due to his GPS coordinates being used and they made a big deal about switching to pagers and WRITING ABOUT IT AND BRAGGING ABOUT IT.
So of course pagers get targeted. And, in a plot too dumb to make it past even a Marvel Movie scriptwriter, they waited a day and then started blowing up the walkie-talkies.
Anyway, in this morning’s Cybersecurity meeting, they mentioned the importance of Secure Supply Chain Management.
I digress.
Yeah, it’s a war and using a technique that might get a handful of people to yell “That’s not fair!” will result in people yelling “That’s not fair!”
It’s just the stuff that happens next week and next month and the month after that that might inspire you, yes you, to yell “that’s not fair!” will have to realize now: the claim is likely to fall on deaf ears.Report
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/18/politics/justice-department-francis-scott-key-bridge/index.htmlReport
Too lazy to look right now, but do you know if any criminal charges were brought to bear? A half-dozen people lost their lives.Report
The death toll from the pagers is now up to 12, I’ve seen, including one child.
I also saw this report of Hezbollah’s reports that 10 of their soldiers were killed:
If accurate, this is one hell of a targeted operation.Report
Yes it was. Makes you wonder why Mosad couldn’t do something like this for Hamas . . . .Report
I think it is more likely that Israel wishes it could take the approach to Hezbollah that it does to Hamas. I would further speculate that the difference is that Israel has at least some respect for Lebanon’s sovereignty and/or is concerned it can’t violate that sovereignty with the same level of impunity it gets away with in Gaza.Report
Hamas leadership is in Qatar, so there’s probably a different supply chain there.
If you’re talking about Gaza itself and the mid-level Hamas management, it’d probably involve them having reason to switch to new tech rather than their old tech (and I’m not sure how much access they have to smartphones currently, let along pagers).
Does everybody in Gaza have access to the internet? I admit that my assumption is that they don’t. There’s too many things that could go wrong for too many people if there were something even vaguely adjacent to Freedom of Speech over there.Report
Different comms networks technique and the existence of hostages.Report
given recent revelations, I think the hostages thing is becoming more and more an excuse. And before Israel went scorched earth, I suspect the network in Gaza may well have looked like the one in Lebanon.Report
Several hostages have been found recently. I find the idea that Israel should just give up the ghost about hostages very disturbing. I don’t think you understand how much 10/7 was the straw that broke the camel’s back not just for Jews in Israel regarding Hamas and Hezbollah but with Diaspora Jews and Further Left determined to go more and more into open anti-Semitism. Like there are many people who seem to believe and not say the following:
1. Israel should agree to the creation of a Palestinian state with maximum generosity and zero suspicion.
2. Deal with Palestinian dead enders and Islamist terrorists with grace and a stiff upper lip.
3. Jews should control our crazies but the Muslim responsibility to control their crazies is zero.
4. Wait for things to be better.
There is a lot of arrogance and anti-Semitism towards the Jews in that part of the World and Western liberals seem utterly unable to deal with it. The imperative not to sound Islamophobic is so strong that they simply can’t comment about all the anti-Semitism among Muslims. Jews are just given the entire burden of doing everything to create peace in the I/P conflict and good Jewish-Muslim relations.Report
You have no idea how utterly vile I and many Jews find it that the people who were out and about celebrating 10/7 as an act of “kinetic decolonization” are wailing and wailing about the Palestinians in Gaza or the people in Lebanon. They have agency as well. They can actually try a different approach than “Israel is just one more glorious push to the sea.” Instead they have not done that. I have seen Pro-Palestinian propaganda in my feed that tries to present what is clearly Tel Aviv as a “Palestinian city.” I’ve seen this for pre-state Tel Aviv and 21st century Tel Aviv.
The Palestinians and other Muslims have been saying “No Israel, No Jews” and that the entire thing is an Arab Muslim state connected to other Arab Muslim states for decades before I was born. People in the West seem not to be willing to believe that they might be serious about this and really, really mean it. Instead the burden is always placed on Israel and the Jews to reach out and make peace.Report
Some of those guys look rather pasty.Report
Here’s a joke you can tell the next time you’re in a safe place:
“I guess the Jews *ARE* responsible for multiple gender reassignment surgeries.”
But don’t tell it in front of most of the folks I’m imagining San Francisco is full of.Report
Here is a thing that I really don’t understand. The Palestinians along with many other Muslim majority countries from Morocco to Indonesia and from Kazakhstan down to whatever the southern most Muslim majority country in sub-Sahara Africa has have made it clear that close connections between Islam and state are important to them even if the non-Muslim population is very substantial like it was in Sudan before South Sudanese independence, Nigeria, and Malaysia. They aren’t exactly shy about their overwhelmingly Islamic orientation in those places complete with laws against blasphemy and apostacy. Most state symbols are Muslim and Islam appears in the official wording somewhere.
There are a lot of well meaning Westerners that simply seem to refuse to get this. All the clear statements from the Palestinians and other Muslims of “we want Muslim Palestine” gets scrambled in the heads into “we want multicultural rainbow Palestine” despite a lot of easy to find statements that show the exact opposite. As mentioned previously, there is Pro-Palestinian propaganda on social media that depicts Tel Aviv as a “Palestinian” city. But whenever this gets pointed out, and no matter how much evidence is presented, it gets dismissed as Islamophobia. It is like certain imperatives in liberalism just prevent Westerners from dealing with all the extremely obvious to Jews anti-Semitism among Muslims or how utterly dominate Islam is.Report
To take this more broadly, there seem to be certain liberal imperatives that prevent the small broad small-l coalition from realizing that different types of illiberals might be serious about what they believe no matter how much they say it or what actions they take. The usual response whether it is from a fascist in the West or an Islamist or a Hinduvata nationalist or whatever else is “oh, nobody can really believe something that ridiculous” and “these things are just ways for so and so to maintain power by fear and terror” or if sympathetic to the illiberal, “poverty and oppression are driving these beliefs and once those go away they will become eusocial liberals.” The idea that people can really believe in ridiculous things and in large numbers is just treated as an impossibility.Report