On this day in 1862, Mexico repelled the French forces of Napoleon III at the Battle of Puebla. Please drink responsibly.
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.
On Saturday night, Palm Beach TV apparently showed Escape from Alcatraz. Sometime later, also on Saturday night, Trump announced we should re-open and expand Alcatraz.
He also announced a 100 percent tariff on foreign movies so now incels will be against him for taking anime waifu.Report
I hope the left does a better job of welcoming that incel energy than the right did.
What’s your thoughts on the best ways to welcome them into the big tent?Report
In this week’s “we’re all going to die” news, Mark Zuckerberg explains that AI will be able to help friendships in the future. “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.”
I hung out with buddies on Saturday. Two of them, not three.
I’ve got some ideas about how we’d have incorporated a fourth person into the soirée but none for how we’d have incorporated an AI. Or a dozen.
Maybe he means “after you hung out, you could go home and talk to Alexa about hanging out with your buddies.”Report
They say Jesus’ greatest miracle was being a guy in his 30s with 12 close friends.
More seriously we need the resurgence of the neighborhood public house. A buddy and I have been casually playing darts for a few years now. Over the last 3 or so months we’ve started doing it more regularly and have thought it might be fun to go to a bar with darts and challenge people to friendly games. But damned if anywhere has darts anymore, not even the friendly neighborhood place we do have!Report
A couple of co-workers made noises about joining the Freemasons (and one bugged me to join as well) and after I explained the whole “atheism” thing being a blocker, I did some quick and dirty research into various other fraternal organizations here in town.
You know, the Elks, the Lions, the Eagles… I put together a handful of paragraphs about the history of each one and talked about when they met and how we’d likely be the youngest people there and… well, it fizzled out shortly thereafter.
None have the cachet of the Masons, I guess. (It’s one thing to set up for a spaghetti dinner, quite another to assassinate politicians and get away with it.)Report
they’re going to be very disappointed to learn that you do more stonework when you’ve been banned from the Masons than when you’re in themReport
I have a friend from my hometown who I knew since elementary school who is a Mason. He’s only two years older than me. The fraternal orders gained a reputation of being dodgy and uncool during the 1960s. They weren’t replaced with much as a replacement though.Report
I actually have a bar where I am a regular. It’s nice. From what I’ve read, the English pub is undergoing a crisis that started because of high land prices and got worse because of COVID. The increased social intolerance against casual drinking and the fact that there are easier ways to earn a living, especially if big breweries can’t legally subsidize pubs, doesn’t help.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/30/number-of-pubs-in-england-and-wales-falls-below-39000-for-first-timeReport
I’ve been thinking about this some more and the issue of hanging out with multiple AIs is still opaque to me.
Let’s say you can get somewhere between 5 and 10 AIs together to hang out with you (and, presumably, each other).
I’ve hung out with AIs, don’t get me wrong, if I were to compare it to anything, it’d be to compare it to an intimate 1-on-1 date (or bro-date). You go see a movie (a Tarantino movie! A Jason Statham movie!) and then you go out to dinner to discuss it and argue about it and the conversation evolves from the movie to the hot chick in the movie to the soundtrack to the compromises made by the screenwriter to the concessions made by the director and it’s a good evening.
What does doing that with an AI look like? I go and watch The Godfather and then I talk to the AI about The Godfather? Then talk about food? Then write some collaborative erotica and off to bed?
And a *DOZEN* of them? I don’t think I could handle a collaborative conversation with much more than six people at a time (the current size of my D&D group).
Much larger than that and you’ve got… what? A Battle Royale game? A blogging comment section?
I admit, *I* could see the benefit to hanging out with a couple dozen people in a comment section… but surely that is not what the Z is talking about.Report
I still think that a big reason for the current problems is the decline of malls and hangout culture teaching teens in general and young men in particular how to socialize.Report
Left without commment:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3lof5h56yus2r?ref_src=embed&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%252F2025%252F05%252Fthe-cognitive-fitness-and-in-touch-with-the-working-american-candidateReport
Conclave week… the ‘smart’ money is on a short conclave with Friday May 9th as the decision day. Three – Five ballots is the modern norm.
I haven’t seen any good ‘smart takes’ on who exactly will corral the required 67% super majority… people tend to glom on to the ‘big names’ like Parolin and Tagle … but the success of front runners is very limited… Pacelli (Pius XII), Montini (Paul VI) and Ratzinger (BXVI) were the only real ‘obvious front runners’ to win in the past 125 years.
Mostly it’s just projection and wish-casting on Cardinals people know very little about. Projecting how they think a particular cardinal will advance a particular agenda that usually has little to do with how the (new) Pope will set his agenda.
The best Catholic news site to follow, if interested is The Pillar: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/
My prevaricating take is that I could see a fairly fast Conclave settled on Friday… but I would not at all be surprised to see it bleed into the second week. The wildcard, IMO is the scrambled consistories that Francis convened and the lack of collegiality among the Cardinals post 2014. There are a lot of unknown unknowns in this lot.Report
As an American, I hear the name “Pierbattista Pizzaballa” and I hope that it’s him because I want to talk about Pope Pizzaballa for the next couple of decades.Report
Heh… but you’d probably be talking about Pope Baldwin not Pierbattista Pizzaballa. Only historians and sede vacantists use the Pope’s prior name.
Of course, without good PR counsel in the conclave, he might cross the cultural divide and accidentally chose John XXIV effectively making himself Papa John.Report
(thank you for writing “counsel” and not “council” there, although in this case the latter might be less incorrect than usual)Report
Luigi Mangione’s defense team is arguing that Mangione’s backpack was searched illegally.
If this holds up, then the 3D-printed gun, fake IDs, and silencer become inadmissable!
Good news for fans of Luigi.Report
And good news for fans of due process.Report
Indeed.
It’s occurred to me, and it’s really no surprise, either, that the glee with which law enforcement has taken to enforcing Trump’s immigration executive orders is a nice indication of which way they’d go if DJT, or anyone else they support, gave orders to do something unlawful.Report
“Oh wait, he shot a moderately rich guy? Hey, now I love the idea of violent vigilantes using 3D-printed firearms and homemade silencers, I totally support it! And Due Process is really important, I definitely think that process is the basis of justice!”Report
The allegedly Pro-Palestinian protestors apparently have no regret about going against Biden and latter Harris despite the fact that the people in the White House are egging Netanyahu on in his worse and things would be very different if Harris was President. These people don’t care about the Palestinians accept as totems for their self-actualization and their rants against America and capitalism. I live in an area that was thick with Pro-Palestinian protests from 10/8/2023 to 11/5/2024. After Trump got elected they all just went away despite the fact that Trump is persecuting real actual Palestinians in the United States and talked about America annexing Gaza. They will re-emerge in 2026 when “Anybody but Kamala” becomes “anybody but a Democratic politician.”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/pro-palestinian-activists-gave-trump-boost-no-2024-regrets-biden-harris-gaza-israelReport
It occurs to me that the Protestors care about Palestinians in the same way that Evangelicals care about Israelis.Report
That was one of the more bizarre electoral positions in 2024. DJT has openly broadcast his position vis-a-vis Israel for many years, and it has never been friendly to the Palestinian cause.Report
It makes sense when you realize that a lot of these people don’t care for Palestinians per se but mainly take up the Pro-Palestinian stance because it fits into the anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-West narrative running in their heads. Some or many of them also believe that the Democratic Party is the only thing preventing too true leftism from breaking out in American politics.Report
Imagine going to a Palestinian-American and telling them, “You must vote for the person who has effectively authorized the murder of your people, and continues to give the murderers the weapons to carry it out,” a person whom, we now know, made no efforts to rein in Netanyahu or push for a ceasefire (things the administration said they were doing), “because the next person will murder them worse.” To me, this electoral position makes a lot less sense than the one adopted by the people who refused to vote for a genocidal administration. What’s more, it makes no sense to me to blame an election loss on the people who refused to vote for genocide when you could blame the people who were facilitating a genocide.
I know there aren’t many Kantians here, but it seems to me that if there is anything like a categorical imperative upon which we should be operating, as voters, then with apologies to Adorno (p. 219 of the pdf), it is that we don’t vote for people who facilitate genocide.Report
But we’ve spent so much effort on calling the people who brag about voting third party “pretentious”. Are you suggesting we just flush all of that hard work down the commode?!?Report
I have voted for third party candidates before (including in 2000 and 2016, the two elections for which people get the most heat over voting for third party candidates), and I have been called pretentious many times (I mean, I’ve cited Adorno and Kant in this subthread), but I don’t recall ever being called pretentious for voting third party.Report
“Above it all”?
“Holier than thou”?Report
I suspect Lee has used these adjectives to describe third-party voters, but mostly he just says they don’t actually care.Report
For candidates who had a chance to win the presidential election, there was no policy difference regarding the Palestine/Israel conflict. Voting 3rd party was the only way to signal disagreement.
Harris lost by 2.3 million votes. In the unlikely event that every 3 party vote was cast solely for the Middle East conflict issue, then Harris having a position different that Trump, the 2.9 million 3rd party votes may have made a difference.
It’s going to take a lot more than what’s going on in Gaza, which is pretty terrible, to get the United States to turn away from Israel. I’d even posit that it’s well nigh impossible.Report
Don’t think of it in terms of policy, and especially not in terms of potential policy.
Imagine the situation were a bit closer to home: imagine that instead of killing my family over there, they’re killing my family here. And them I’m asked to vote either for the person who is killing my family, right now, in front of me (and the entire world), or the person who will likely kill my family in the future. For whom do I vote? There are no policy questions here: my family is being murdered, and will likely continue to be murdered if the other guy wins as well. Why would I vote for either my family’s murderer or my family’s potential future murderer? Why am I not in fact given the opportunity to vote for someone who won’t murder my family?
Obviously it’s not my family being murdered right now, under Trump, or previously, under Biden, but I feel genuinely bound by the above categorical imperative, and I find it extremely depressing that we live in a country where the only options are to vote for genocide or to vote for potentially even more genocide. I personally am never going to give those two options the tiny bit of legitimacy my vote bestows, and I will not fault anyone who makes the same decision, regardless of where I live: it’s easy for me, because I live in a state that is a foregone conclusion, but I can’t judge the people in Michigan or Wisconsin for making the same decision. In fact, I applaud them for it, and blame literally all of you for forcing us to make this choice.Report
…imagine that instead of killing my family over there, they’re killing my family here…
OK, let’s picture that. Mexican drug gangs take over a city in Northern Mexico and invade, slaughter, and kidnap thousands of Americans in South Texas.
We go to war and level the city in Mexico that they’re in. They refuse to surrender, return the hostages, and even brag about how they’re going to come back and repeat the entire mess until every American is dead.
There are claims of “genocide” because of the realities on how the war has to be fought and how every death is claimed by the gang to be a civilian.
The international community agrees with those claims and asks us to stop.
What would it take for us to agree?Report
I’m going to fix your analogy for you:
Imagine that after removing much of the population of the surrounding area, some of whom have settled into refugee camps Mexico City, we have violently controlled the city for decades via military occupation. We finally allow the city to vote, and they vote for the people who are most militantly opposed to the military occupation. So we leave, but besiege the city, forcibly impoverishing it even further than we already had for decades prior. Every few years, carrying out bloody, indiscriminate bombing campaigns on the entire population because the group that was elected because it most militantly opposes the occupation continues to do so even as the occupation changes from one with boots on the ground to one in which we merely determine everything that goes in and out of the city, and repress its people violently any time they complain. We have turned the city into a massive open-air prison, because the people hated being violently oppressed to such an extent that they voted for the group that opposed that oppression the most militantly.
Then, one day, the group who most militantly oppose the occupation break out of their open-air prison, and kill a lot of American citizens who have settled into the areas around the city in the process. So we decide to level the entire city, killing tens of thousands of children in the process, destroying their schools, their hospitals, starving the entire population by severely limiting the amount of food and other supplies that can enter the city.
There are claims of “genocide” by pretty much every person who studies genocide, even many of the ones in the the country committing what’s being called “genocide” (us, in the analogy), and the international community agrees with those claims and asks us to stop.
What would it take for us to agree?
I suspect that one thing it would take is for us to stop pretending that this war began the day the people in the open-air prison broke out. We’d probably also have to stop believing that we are inherently superior to the people who live in the Open Air prison simply because they were not born American. I think if we admitted those two things to ourselves: that this war is decades old, and that we are no better than they, the reasons we continue to murder them indiscriminately would melt away pretty quickly, and we’d stop. That, or we’d confirm ourselves to be even greater monsters than we’ve already shown we are by justifying our genocide through falsity and myth.Report
All of that abuse and “repression” goes away if the Palestinians are willing to drop the Right Of Return (i.e. the Right to Destroy Israel) and make peace.
As long as the end goal is “No Israel, No Jews”, peace is impossible and they live with the side effects.
It’s also not a good idea to describe normal wars as “genocide”. Since we have no way to stop war, that will result in the various conventions which stop actual genocide being dismantled.Report
There were also Israeli governments in willing memory that were willing to negotiate a final deal with the PLO. The PLO rejected these deals. Sharon withdrew from Gaza and Hamas decided to turn it into a quixotic attempt to destroy Israel. Although to be fair to the Palestinian leadership, I also think they didn’t want to start a Palestinian Civil War by signing such a treaty.
The Palestinians and their allies seem to have a real need for a psychological victory against Israel. They want Israel to be punished in some way rather than a negotiated deal.Report
“As long as you don’t want to be ethnically cleaned, you will be,” is not much of an argument.Report
“As long as you don’t want to be ethnically cleaned, you will be,” is not much of an argument.
As long as the war goes on, the much weaker side is going to suffer more for it than the stronger side.
The war is going to go on until the Palestinians stop trying to destroy Israel.
Given that there were two native groups to that area, someone was always going to get “ethnically cleansed”… and having population exchanges is pretty normal in the context of country creation.Report
Chris, how on earth does this level of ideological dogmatism help the Palestinians? Israel exists. It is not going to stop existing. Something like 45% of the world’s Jews live in Israel and they aren’t going anywhere.
The Pro-Palestinian forces can scream ethnic cleansing, while ignoring the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Europe and the MENA region, and settler-colonialism as much as they want. It won’t do anything to help the Palestinians. Nobody is going to swoop down and force the solution you want on Israel.Report
Chris, there are somewhere between 7.4 million to 7.7 million Israeli Jews. They have a government, army, most likely the bomb, and a long history of showing that they are going to stay and fight to stay. Every attempt at physical force or military force to get the Jews out since 1920 failed even when the power levels were more equivalent.
The Israelis aren’t going anywhere. The Palestinians aren’t going anywhere but everybody seems intent on acting out a repeated bad Greek tragedy again and again. The alleged allies of both groups encourage the most obstinate and unrealistic thinking rather than something that could result in a functional but cold peace.
What good does a bunch of activists and college students yelling genocide and settler-colonialism and Jews go home to Poland do for the Palestinians? The world isn’t going to come down swooping in to resolve the I/P conflict anymore than they do for other ethnic conflicts? This is like a weird area where Saudi Arabia is being the most sensible.Report
I do not get the strategy of the Pro-Palestinian side at all. Attempts to use force to defeat Jews/Israelis have basically failed since 1920 but they idea of actual negotiations to resolve the situation seem intolerable to contemplate. The times where Israeli governments were willing to negotiate an end of the Occupation including taking the Settlers away were just deemed to be not real because the Israeli governments had some demands of their own like no return flood of refugees that would basically be a back door one-state solution. There seems to be a real emotional need for Israel to be defeated in someway.
The Pro-Palestinian movement in the West seems to use Palestinians in the same way that Evangelicals use Israelis. As a way to fulfill their fantasies. They have adopted rhetoric that alienates both the hundreds of thousands of Israelis that were protesting Netanyahu before 10/7 and after 10/7 and also the majority of Diaspora Jews. People who might be useful allies but have Greenline Israel gets to exist. Instead, they went all in on settler-colonialism and Israel needs to be destroyed with the Jews needing to go arguments.Report
I do not get the strategy of the Pro-Palestinian side at all.
It seems fairly straightforward.
Just wait until sufficient numbers of people oppose Israel. It’s a waiting game and a numbers game.
Do you think that Israel will have more US support next year than it has this year?
How about in two years?
Boomers aren’t the largest demographic in the US and haven’t been for a while… Millennials are. But you know where the lion’s share of the support for Israel is? The Boomers.
How about in ten years?Report
These sorts of conflicts can last generations. This one already has and shows no sign of stopping.Report
The Pro-Israel and the Pro-Palestine side are being extremely stupid and ignoring facts on the ground.
1. There are 10.1 million Israelis. Around 77% of them are Jews. It is a wealthy developed democracy with a government, army, and citizenry willing to fight for their country. They also have the bomb.
2. There are 5 to 6 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
3. Nobody is going anywhere.
4. The Palestinians can’t militarily defeat Israel and nobody is going to swoop down and save them.
5. Israel can’t bomb it’s way out of this.
6. This means that the I/P conflict will end by unilateral Israel withdrawal or negotiation.
7. The negotiations means settlers out of the WB and No Right of Return for Palestinians.
8. Not recoginizing this and rigidly adhering to ideology means the conflict continues forever.Report
Nobody is going anywhere.
Israel has the power to engage in ethnic cleansing and might to win the war in Gaza. I.e. force the civilians to leave and assume everyone left is going to martyr themselves.
Not recognizing this and rigidly adhering to ideology means the conflict continues forever.
Rule #34: War is good for business
The head of Hamas gets to hide in another country and “earn” billions of dollars. The Priests have enemies to oppose and feel important.
No one needs to admit they could have accepted a better peace plan in 1948, 2000, 2007, and so on. No one needs to admit they lost to Jews or that their god failed them.
There are a lot of sunk costs they’ve already paid.
I’d say their plan is to keep the conflict going for centuries until they win.
That’s fine. Different cultures have different priorities and this is clearly theirs. However IMHO we the West should allocate blame fairly and not let this issue corrupt our institutions.
Our tax dollars in the UN shouldn’t be paying for Palestinians to be doing this sort of thing. We should also be clearly pointing out that there is no moral equivalence and the various crimes are ethically and legally on Hamas.
So if Israel shoots up an ambulance because Hamas uses them as troop carriers and Israel can’t tell the difference, then that’s on Hamas, not Israel.
Hamas could surrender and disarm, like the Axis did after WW2.Report
Israel can ethnically cleanse Gaza but Israel should absolutely not ethnically cleanse Gaza. That would be extremely immoral and evil. It would be useless. Hamas is holding on by the skin of it’s teeth and is going to lose power in Gaza sooner than latter. Nobody wants them there besides a few activists in the West and themselves.
What Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir are doing now is wrong and excessive. I was a big supporter of Israel during the Israel-Hamas War but further brutal action despite some hostages is not going to do anything but make Israel look bad. It will be immoral as well.Report
It will be immoral as well.
It’s a war. Israel removes the civilians, kills the militants, then lets the civilians back.
Assuming they want to come back to a bombed out parking lot with lots of unexploded ordinance around.
There is no reason Israel has to lose give up the war because Hamas refuses to surrender. There is also no reason Israel has to fight it in a way that maximizes civilian deaths.
Moving the civilians out is more ethical, not less ethical, than the alternatives.Report
Remove all the civilians where? Netanyahu’s government might be able to do this if the civilians were removed to Green Line Israel. The current Israeli government did not do this during the earlier phases of the Israel-Hamas War. Egypt isn’t going to take them in.Report
Remove all the civilians where?
There is a big empty desert right over the border. Egypt has been building camps as a contingency if this happens.
Egypt isn’t going to take them in
Because the Palestinians go to war with whatever their host country is. However we shouldn’t have any sympathy for Egypt.
Egypt has been the main source of weapons and whatever via those tunnels. If they’re going to support Hamas over the border then forcing them to be involved in the cleanup is reasonable.Report
I think this is a bad idea that will hurt Israel more than it helps Israel in the short and long run.Report
Depends on whether or not they’re allowed (forced?) to go back to Gaza.
In a normal war, we allow and encourage civilians to flee the combat zone.
And what are the alternatives? A “cease fire” where Hamas is left in charge and does this again in a decade or so? Israel keeps chasing the civilians from the North to the South and then back again?
The people of Gaza are suffering but Israel also has the right (and duty) to continue the war.Report
Even if there is a collapse in support for Israel, doesn’t mean that the world would be willing to swoop in either. They aren’t doing this for the Uyghurs in China or Rohingya in Myanmar. It still seems like a lot of magical thinking.
It also assumes that Israel won’t be able to find support elsewhere. Israel and India have been getting a lot closer. Hindus and the Israeli or even Jewish Right are finding things to bond over.
So basically I think even if that is the goal, it still shows bad strategic thinking. The Palestinians won’t be stronger. The world isn’t going to rush in. Israel can find allies elsewhere.Report
Willing to swoop in to do *WHAT*?
I mean, sure. The plan is doomed. They’re showing the same poor long-term planning that they’ve showed the last couple of millennia.Report
Swoop down and enforce the preferred solution of Pro-Palestinian forces on Israel.Report
I don’t know where the tipping point is but I think it’s somewhere between “actively aiding Palestinians” and “ceasing to sell weapons systems to Israel”.
But maybe India will be able to come up with some good stuff worth selling.Report
Israel has it’s own defense/weapons industry. Stoping to sell weapons to Israel won’t actually change the power levels. There are too many people indulging both the Israelis and Palestinians on in stupid fantasies but Israel has a lot more power to carry on those stupid fantasies.Report
Those arguments will accelerate political pressure to get USG to stop selling weapon systems to Israel. Right?
You get that if that argument gets popular, that’s the result, right?Report
See also this. Iranian high school principal tries to lead students in saying Death to Israel and they respond by Death to Palestine. Other Muslims are not that into the Palestinian cause anymore. So any strategy based on a collapse of Western support and assuming that no where else supports Israel is just dumb strategically.
https://jihadwatch.org/2024/12/iran-students-shout-death-to-palestine-to-show-their-opposition-to-the-islamic-regimeReport
Trump doesn’t want one of his crazy right-wing appointees making an abortion related ruling in time for the midterms: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/health/trump-abortion-pill-case.html
The Trump administration on Monday asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit that seeks to sharply restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone — taking the same position as the Biden administration in a closely watched case that has major implications for abortion access….
The Trump administration’s request made no mention of the merits of the case, which have not yet been considered by the courts. Rather, echoing the argument that the Biden administration made shortly before Mr. Trump took office, the court filing asserts that the case does not meet the legal standard to be heard in the federal district court in which it was filed.
The plaintiffs in the case are the conservative attorneys general of three states: Missouri, Idaho and Kansas, and the case was filed in a federal district court in Texas.
“The states do not dispute that their claims have no connection to the Northern District of Texas,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote in the filing.
“Regardless of the merits of the states’ claims, the states cannot proceed in this court,” they concluded, adding that the complaint “should be dismissed or transferred for lack of venue.”Report
Let’s hope Texas continues its streak of judicial activist independence and ignores him.Report
Because we as a nation need more reasons to commit political violence:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/05/weather/weather-weapons-nws-radar-attackReport
Harvard’s report on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the wake of 10/7 is out:
he antisemitism report was produced by a task force made up mainly of faculty, but that also included students, a former Hillel director and Harvard’s chief community and campus life officer, whose title was changed from chief diversity and inclusion officer on Tuesday. The report said that bias incidents had been occurring before the Hamas attack and were intensified by the war in Gaza. It found that antisemitism seemed to be more pronounced in branches of the university with a social justice bent, including the graduate school of education, the divinity school and the school of public health.
A similar task force held hundreds of conversations with Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students, staff and faculty members about anti-Muslim bias. That task force summed up the feelings expressed by many of those people in two words: “abandoned and silenced.”
The antisemitism report recounted an episode in which a student asked not to work with an Israeli partner, and an instructor granted the request because “in their view, a student who supported the cause of an oppressed group should not be forced to work with a student identified as a member of an ‘oppressor group.’”
In another episode in the report, a recently admitted medical student recounted arriving for a visitation day and encountering students yelling “Free Palestine” from a walkway, apparently to discourage Zionists from attending the school.
The report said that some courses on Israel and Palestine were partisan and politicized. These courses were disproportionately taught by nontenure track faculty members, who were not as carefully vetted as more senior faculty are, the report said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/harvard-antisemitism-islamophobia-reports.html
On the other blog, my brother pointed out that non-tenure track faculty feeling more free to be extremely partisan seems counterintuitive.Report
non-tenure track faculty feeling more free to be extremely partisan seems counterintuitive.
They have less to lose. Often a lot less. There’s also the issue of whether being extremely partisan is a problem at becoming tenure track.Report
On the other hand, they have a lot to lose because a lot of them only get income per a class taught.Report
That’s true per person. If the Lion’s share of the family’s money comes from someone else, then it doesn’t really matter what happens to their job.
These are part time jobs to avoid paying benefits and they’re deliberately structured so it’s very hard to live off of them. So they don’t live off of them.Report
The report said that some courses on Israel and Palestine were partisan and politicized.
According to whom? Whites?Report
I look forward to seeing the actual report, but it seems odd that the Times would single out for special mention students yelling a political slogan at passers-by from a distance without, as reported, anything more to it.Report
It seems like the Trump era involves finding out about a new horrible thing multiple-times a day: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/she-called-a-five-year-old-the-n-word-crowdfunding
N-word–slinging woman becomes right-wing hero
OVER THE PAST WEEK, portions of the American right have embraced a Minnesota woman whose claim to fame is that she allegedly called a 5-year-old boy the n-word, going so far as to help her raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But the development has also confounded others in the MAGA movement, including some well-known personalities who warn that it’s not the best of looks to celebrate an overtly racist, highly viral rant.
The episode centers on Shiloh Hendrix, who shot to infamy last week after a video showed her arguing with a Somali-American man on a playground.
In the video, a man claims he had just seen Hendrix call a black child the n-word before the recording started. Hendrix then confirms on video that she did, indeed, call the child the slur because he tried to steal from her bag. She then proceeds to call the man the same racial slur.
There aren’t really extenuating circumstances here. Hendrix, again, admits to deploying the racist epithet. Yet significant portions of MAGA media have championed her, arguing that they should do so as a matter of free speech and to fight the spread of “anti-white” racism.Report
What legal recourse are you looking for?
I imagine that there might be something of a civil rights violation… what statute covers this?Report
Saul can speak for himself, but it doesn’t seem to me that he was looking for legal recourse at all. As a lawyer, he probably would have mentioned it if he were. And as a lawyer myself, I don’t think there is any, whatever you might “imagine.”Report
Wait, so a bad thing happened for which there is nothing to be done except be offered as an example of how bad The Outgroup is?
I can dig it.Report
You make that sound like a bad thing.Report
Is it not?Report
Shiloh Hendrix is a deplorable human being who did a bad thing, and lots of other deplorable human beings put up serious money to support her. Not to defend her against some threat of anything more than self-inflicted reputational harm, but for what, exactly?
Sound like bad people to me, and giving them a pretentious title with a capital letter doesn’t change that. They said what they said, they did what they did, they reap what they sow. Some folks with unusually or selectively delicate sensibilities may have a problem with calling a spade a spade, but that’s a them problem.Report
Not to defend her against some threat of anything more than self-inflicted reputational harm, but for what, exactly?
I have seen folks make implicit threats against the woman on twitter. Some variant of “someone ought to do something violent”.
I imagine that if someone did do something violent, we’d hear explanations of how this could have been avoided on her part and how the person who engaged in the violence had justification for doing so, not that we support violence, of course.
Have you not seen examples of such?
Would it matter if you did?Report
Imagination does a lot of work here. Threats, if they occur, are bad and there are ways to deal with them. Crowd sourcing six-figure rewards and loudly approving her are not among themReport
“there are ways to deal with them”
Social disapproval?Report
The way I read it, it’s to allow her to get set up in another location, where, no doubt, shouting the N word at a 5 year old boy would get her a lot friendlier reception.Report
No, it is not a bad thing to call out behavior like this.Report
And boy it sure is a good thing you called it out here, because if there’s one thing you can say about the Ordinary Times crew is that they definitely don’t recognize how those cracker broads are racist as all hell.Report
“You make that sound like a bad thing.”
I can doomscroll all day on Twitter, bro.Report
If that’s your idea of a good time, knock yourself out.Report
Why are you defending a woman who called a 5 year old kid the n-word?
Do you think it speaks well of right-wingers that they are turning this woman into a hero and giving her hundreds of thousands of dollars apparently?
You should face social shame for calling anyone a slur but especially a small child?
I get that you convinced others that your are loveable cuddly knee-jerk contrarian but it really isn’t cute.Report
I’m not defending her. But neither am I particularly willing to attack her beyond a social “oh, she shouldn’t have done that” admonition.
Saul, she shouldn’t have done that.
Do you think it speaks well of right-wingers that they are turning this woman into a hero and giving her hundreds of thousands of dollars apparently?
I think that it’s an indicator of some sort of tribalism returning after having been suppressed for a while. It strikes me as something that is likely to come to a head, actually.
You should face social shame for calling anyone a slur but especially a small child?
She did something awful but it’s not like she stabbed the kid. She shouldn’t have done that.
What punishments do you feel she should have applied beyond society saying “nope, you shouldn’t have done that”?
If you don’t have an answer to that question, would you think it silly of me to ask “Why are you defending a woman who called a 5 year old kid the n-word?”Report
So your opinion is that societal improvement is impossible and nothing can or should be done to make humans better? Taboos about what can’t be said have tremendous power.Report
Taboos about what can’t be said have tremendous power.
Oh, I agree. But if the power is squandered and used less than judiciously, I think you’re going to find yourself in a backlash.
You know how accusations of antisemitism don’t seem to work as well as they used to? Even against seriously egregious examples of actual antisemitism that go waaaaaay beyond criticism of Israeli military policy?
I think that something like that could happen.
And I think that something like this would be an indicator of something like that has started happening.Report
“So your opinion is that societal improvement is impossible and nothing can or should be done to make humans better? ”
Lee, she shouldn’t have done that.
What do you think should happen to her?
(Also, she shouldn’t have done that.)Report
From my perspective it’s a matter of being the change you want to see in the world. I’m sympathetic to the idea that we’ve had too much punishment, too much rush to judgment, and too much projecting of our own pet issues and grievances into people’s worst moments randomly caught on video and gone viral. The way to deal with that is simply to not click, not to participate in the frenzy, one way or the other. People donating and/or making her into some kind of martyr are doing the opposite of what would be helpful, either due to their own blindness or as suggested by Saul, their own personal shortcomings. There’s no larger story here or meta point.Report
There has been a metapoint made about how we know about this story in the first place.
A guy filmed it, posted it to the internet, and said “internet, do your thing”.
Since then, the internet has done many things.
Maybe the pendulum will start swinging back soon.Report
Don’t say racial slurs to anyone but especially 5-year olds should be a basic point of consensus.
I find it revealing that JB wants to turn Shiloh Hendrix into a member of the “outgroup” (TM) as opposed to a 5-year old boy who is part of an actual minority group that has been the victim of racial persecution and in many ways continues to be such.
I find Jaybird’s constant attempts to turn everything into being about Ingroups and Outgroups tiresome and problematic. It is also cowardly because he just doesn’t want to admit to what he is defending.Report
I am not particularly sympathetic to her.Report
My position is that she shouldn’t have said it.
That poor five year old boy shouldn’t have to hear that word and it’s distressing that it was targeted at him.
And I’m also not particularly surprised that this turned into a major big deal. Did you see River Page’s article on the issue in The Free Press?Report
“The excesses of the woke era created a backlash so intense that the right now celebrates racism.”
This is why I think the Free Press is trash. They can’t defend her but they just don’t want to do the right thing so they find a way to blame liberals, their favorite targetReport
The phenomenon he’s describing does seem to exist, though. The accuracy of that particular point seems to be there.
But that’s an “is” statement, not an “ought” statement.Report
I don’t think anyone donating money to a stranger due to some ugly interpersonal incident shared online is proving anything other than how foolish they are.Report
It’s up to $700,000, according to twitter. When it passed Karmelo Anthony’s, that was seen as a moral victory of some sort.
The foolishness has become competitive.Report
No it is an apology for abuser’s logic of “Look at what you made me do.”Report
It’s an “is” statement.
Not an “ought” statement.Report
I was describing The “Free” “Press” article and what it was doingReport
Eh, the “by explaining the dynamic, you’re excusing it!” is a poor argument.
I mean, would you buy it in service to why Israel shouldn’t be bombing Occupied Palestine?
“What about October 7th? YES OR NO? WHAT ABOUT OCTOBER 7TH?!?”
“That’s abuser logic.”Report
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/5/6/no-more-federal-grants/
U.S. Government states no more federal grants for Harvard in bone-headed/bonkers letter which will be introduced into evidence. Linda MacMahon’s letter simultaneously accused Harvard of having too large an endowment and being secretly bankrupt.Report
How Trump’s WH strangles research: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/conspiracy-of-silence-how-trump-is-covertly-strangling-billions-in-disease-cure-research
Here’s the mechanics of how these payments work: Payment comes at the end of each month and covers expenses for the research done over that month. So you do January’s work on your own dime and then at the end of January you get paid for the work you did. The stop work orders for the NIH grants never came at Northwestern. So the research continued. But at the end of the month (late April) the payments never came. So they not only had no warning the payments were getting stopped, it’s not entirely clear to me that they had permission to stop the research at all.
There was one news report saying this would happen. Last month Max Kozlov, a reporter for Nature, published an internal NIH email dated April 17th in which instructions were given to stop sending all money to the targeted universities. Critically it also included instructions not to “provide any communications to these schools about whether or why the funds are frozen.” So the strategy was intentional: create confusion about the status of grants and just have the money stop coming.
I know based on my own reporting that this is what happened at Northwestern, as Wu himself reported in the school paper yesterday. It seems almost certain that this happened at all the targeted universities but that everyone is being quiet about it. (See below for more evidence of this.) Why would the other schools be quiet about it? Well, that’s what’s happening at Northwestern. The University, both formally and informally, is itself remaining silent and doing everything it can to keep its researchers and faculty silent. Why? Because they’re still hoping something can be worked out with the administration to keep the money flowing. Meanwhile, I’m told that the White House (technically one of the several entities managing these cut-offs for the White House) has been following the same playbook as it did with Harvard. They’re refusing to say what it is they actually want and are thus making ‘negotiations’ difficult or impossible. The White House already has its freeze. So they’re not in any rush to solve anything. It is easy and correct to say that these Universities are timid or cowardly. But what you see when you look up close is that the universities simply lack the institutional muscle memory to handle a fight like this. There’s no institutional experience and they lack institutional cohesion between administrations, boards of trustees, faculties and major funders.Report
India attacks Pakistan over the militant strike in India Kashmir:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/multiple-loud-explosions-heard-pakistani-kashmir-reuters-witness-2025-05-06/Report
Lemme guess at where the battle lines are being drawn…
India is being painted as the aggressor and comparisons are being made to Israel/Pakistan. Pakistan, of course, is Palestine in this situation.
The Omnicause demands solidarity with Pakistan against the colonialist India.
How close am I?Report
There is a rather large literature on Kashmir from a left perspective. I recommend checking it out.Report
I’m not asking about the narrative among those who have done the required reading and are familiar with the history of the region (including China’s interest in Kashmir).
I’m asking about how the lines are being drawn in the minutes following the attack. The Tiktok/Insta folks.Report
Actually, most people are just scared about this escalating out of control.Report
What the hell are you talking about with the Omniclause?Report
The Omnicause. It’s a phenomenon that I’m sure you’re familiar with.
Here’s lifted from Google: “Omnicause” refers to the tendency in some activist and progressive circles to view all social justice issues as interconnected and equally important, often leading to a broad, encompassing approach that can dilute focus and effectiveness.
You know how Greta Thunberg is a big Palestine supporter now and how that’s just as important as Global Climate Change?
That phenomenon.
Surely you’ve encountered the phenomenon, if not the term, on the other blog when the topic of Genocide comes up.Report
The Treasury Secretary was on Fox “News” quadrupling down on the little girls will be better off for having fewer dolls line: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3lojz7vblox2a?ref_src=embed&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%252F2025%252F05%252Fdonald-trumps-economic-policy-is-based-on-the-principle-that-suffering-is-caused-by-desire
I am morbidly curious on the decision to take this stance and quadruple down on it because it is the most obvious way in which they are digging a hole for themselvesReport
Who knew that Trump was trying to teach Americans Buddhist dharma?Report
The email security administration:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d49bd4585dd7f1f908b685c0c7a63aa470e09d15defda21f1a31eb5bde100c8a.pngReport
One of the theories of AI that I’ve seen is that we’ll have super-persuasive AI prior to having super-intelligent AI and that is when things will *REALLY* start getting weird.
Anyway: Family uses AI to create video for deadly Chandler road rage victim’s own impact statement.
Report
They forgot to have him say “also I guess I’m sorry I jumped out of the car to go yell at you after I cut you off and you honked at me, maybe threatening a stranger with violence was a bad idea after all”.Report
More from the email security administration:
https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-uses-was-hacked/Report
Seattle Times reports: “UW protest ends with 31 arrests at occupied building on campus”
Where are the Free Speech Warriors now?
Anyway, I’ve seen arguments that the students who damaged these machines should be held accountable.
But who will be held accountable for Mumia Abu-Jamal?Report
Jefferson Griffin concedes North Carolina Supreme Court election to Allison Riggs after months of sour grapes and anti-democratic shenanigans: https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/politics/north-carolina-politics/jefferson-griffin-concedes-north-carolina-supreme-court-race/275-28c53d27-f72b-4397-b317-d5e2a7d59608Report
The War in Ukraine came for Isaac Babel in Odessa: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/world/europe/odesa-ukraine-russia-culture.html?unlocked_article_code=1.E08.5BTo.qZWnPA-rTMad&smid=url-share
The writer Isaac Babel is memorialized in the act of creative thinking, eyes on the horizon and pen resting on a stack of paper, in a bronze statue in downtown Odesa — his home city on Ukraine’s Black Sea shore.
The statue may soon be dismantled. To Ukrainian authorities, it is a threat that must be eliminated under a so-called decolonization law ordering the removal of “symbols of Russian imperial politics” to protect Ukrainian culture. The law ensnared the statue of Babel, who served in the Soviet Red Army and built part of his literary career in Russia early last century.
The planned removal has prompted strong pushback from many Odesa residents. They argue that in his classic “Odessa Stories” and elsewhere, Babel’s writings about the city’s Jewish heritage and its gritty world of smugglers and artists of every ethnicity helped make Odesa famous and showcased its multicultural identity.
Much as they oppose Russia’s war, they fear that the law will erase Odesa’s character. “You can’t remove Babel,” said Antonina Poletti, 41, the editor of a local news outlet and a sixth-generation Odesan. “If you remove him, you remove the soul of the city.”Report
Journalist harassed by the dirtbag left for covering a May Day protest in Manhattan.Report
No link and the stories popping up in the Google are from last year or earlier.Report
Luigi fans should be pleased: His legal fund has officially passed one million dollars.Report
Just in time for finals, Columbia’s Butler Library has been reclaimed by the people.Report
the protesters have five demands: divestment from “Zionist occupation, apartheid, and genocide,” an academic boycott of “all complicit institutions, including the cancellation of the Tel Aviv Global Center,” “cops and ICE off our campus,” an end to “Columbia’s occupation of Harlem; return land to Harlemites and open the gates,” and amnesty for all students, staff, and faculty “targeted by Columbia University’s discipline.”
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/05/07/pro-palestinian-protesters-and-public-safety-officers-clash-at-emergency-rally-in-butler-library/Report
It would be nice if Pro-Palestinian forces can come out and actually describe what they mean by Zionist occupation in geographic terms rather than just rallying at the Occupation. I suspect that the keep talking about the Occupation vaguely because they don’t want to show a division in the Pro-Palestinian movement between those that realize that they can’t destroy Israel and the best the Palestinians are going to get is the WB and Gaza and the people who believe that “No Israel” or “No Israel/No Jews” is the only just solution.
It’s somewhat odd that the Pro-Palestinian movement feels the need to keep a united face while the Pro-Israel movement openly argues between the Two States and the Israel gets WB/Gaza factions. I don’t think this unity helps Palestinians but the movement feels the need to keep it up.
One of my theories on why Arafat and Abbas could not come to final agreement with Israel under Barak and Olmert respectively is that neither of them wanted to start a Palestinian Civil War. A final deal with Israel would always meet with hollowing denial from the more militant factions because there was no Right of Return and Israel remained in tact. The Pro-Palestine faction in the West resembles this in that the more militant are in control and the one that might be more accommodating to reality keep silent out of fear for their lives and not wanting to divide the movement.Report
It wouldn’t be “a civil war”. It’s more “they, personally, would be killed”.
We’ve seen the peacemaker get killed at least twice.
And that issue is a lot worse for the Palestinians because they are the heads of militia/terror groups as opposed to functioning states.
They’ve also done no ideological preparing for it. They can’t take that to their people without betraying everything they’ve told them thus far.Report
No, I think it would be a civil war like in Ireland in the 1920s between the people who accepted the Irish Free State and those that did not. You analysis is also spot on. Lots of people including Palestinian leadership, other Muslims, and their Western allies have been telling the Palestinians for decades that only total victory would do for them. Israelis have also been getting a total victory message but also other messages. Nobody brings this stuff up when talking about a final deal.Report
I’d also like them to answer why the dozens of self-proclaimed Muslim states, where they can’t even treat the wrong type of Muslim well let alone non-Muslims are not apartheid states but Israel it is. It’s similar to how apparently Israel is the only ethno-state in the world while the self-proclaimed Arab states are not or other states with ethnic favoring laws stronger than Israel’s are not. Jews and the Jewish State are held to the standard of absolute perfection while the the other countries get graded on a sliding scale.Report
It seems that Columbia has reclaimed the library from the people.Report
Social media completely missed how this story went down. Columbia got tipped on this, you can see in the video public safety standing aside letting the protestors in. But they had a plan this time. They locked the disruptors in so they couldn’t get out, cleared the rest of the building, then told the locked in protestors they had to show their IDs to be released. This confused, then angered, then freaked out the protestors who had planned on being allowed to just dissipate after causing mayhem. Protestors then tried to rough up the public safety officers, injuring two and causing damage, and Columbia had the reason they needed/wanted to let the NYPD come in and cuff & stuff them. Evolving tactics in real time.Report
That is pretty clever, gotta admit.Report
This is clever. It couldn’t happen to a bunch of nicer people.Report
Arrests include Maggie Gyllenhaal’s daughter, Ramona Sarsgaard.
Your opinion of The Dark Knight may color what you wish to happen next.Report
I don’t really get why today’s youth is so afraid of a night in the tank for their beliefs. Civil disobedience is a powerful tool.Report
When I was a kid, “permanent record” meant “until you graduated”.
In a worst case scenario, it meant that you *MIGHT* have to move states.
Remember the song “Kiss Off”? Yeah. That.
Now? Jeez, cancellation is forever. Your main hope is to have a name like “Matt Smith” and when someone asks if you’re the one who was arrested for public urination every week for two years straight, you can make a joke about how you usually get asked if you’re the Doctor Who actor.Report
I guess? We’ve had background check tools for many years though before social media. It’s possible this says more about me and the people I associate with than the world at large but essentially everyone I know had an adventure growing up, especially us dudes. If it’s going to come up seems more honorable to say you were passionate but immature as opposed to trying to tiptoe around the fact that everyone was drunk or partying or whatever all the time.Report
Everybody used to be a lot more forgiving about youthful indiscretions. These days not so much. It is a much more punishing system. It is also unclear whether a night in the tank is the worse they can expect these days.Report
Part of it is what Jaybird says and part of it is a privilege so exceedingly high that they can’t even comprehend good faith disagreement let alone punishment.Report
Final exams at Columbia started today. More than one night in the tank would have meant they’re missing their finals because they’ve been arrested.
Missing the Finals => Failing the Course.Report
Haven’t they already conceded that though? Is the expectation that someone would bring their finals to the library or the drum circle or whatever?Report
You are assuming a very generous ability to connect the dots. During 2024, the protestors at Columbia were privileged to demand being fed at the buildings they were holding hostage. So yes, I suspect that they expected people to bend to them because they are so righteous.
I just don’t get the thought process of the Palestinians or their so called allies. It should be obvious to anybody with half a brain cell that the Palestinians can’t defeat Israel militarily and nobody is going to come down to save the Palestinians and impose a solution on Israel.
This means that the final settlement would be Israel vanquishing the Palestinians, which would be morally horrible, Israel unilaterally deciding the borders of a Palestinian state, or a negotiated deal. The Palestinians and their allies seem to think that a negotiated deal with Israel is too horrible to contemplate.Report
The Palestinians and their allies seem to think that a negotiated deal with Israel is too horrible to contemplate.
The negotiated part is fine, it’s Israel being allowed to exist as a Jewish state which is the problem.
The closest we got to a peace deal was in 2000 where the Palestinians formal suggested Israel could be destroyed slowly over the course of decades.
If we stop substituting wishful thinking for facts, we end up with the conclusion that
they’re serious. Their actions, words, charters, and negotiation stances all line up.
That doesn’t mean they’re stupid, or that they don’t understand that Israel is stronger. It just means their first priority is getting rid of the Jews, not doing good things for their children and economies.
Different people can have different mindsets and different priorities that we do. It’s a mistake to think they secretly think the way I do or that they haven’t thought it through.Report
I’m generally inclined to agree with that but that leaves us with the problem without a solution phase. Maintaining the Occupation forever isn’t really a good thing for Israel. It distorts the society and you are never going to convince enough people elsewhere that it is a necessity.
A unilateral withdrawal and settling from the boundaries will lead to what is happening with Gaza on a larger scale. You can’t just get rid of the Palestinians because that would be a moral atrocity. They won’t negotiate a settlement because they see “No Israel” as the just solution.Report
The status quo is fine. Israel gets stronger, the Palestinians choose to not.
If things really get out of hand Israel won’t kill all of them but it will make them flee. We might see that happen this time if Israel empties out Gaza and then levels it.
And no, it won’t be “a moral atrocity”. It’s a war. Normal rules apply, even with Jews.
Afaict, by normal military ethics Israel is doing fine adjusted for the situation they’re in.
Compare what they’re doing to what we did in WW2. If we get a pass on all that stuff because we’re fighting Na.zis and a Japanese death cult, then so does Israel.
Just because it’s Jews fighting Islamic Na.zis and an Islamic death cult doesn’t mean the rules change.Report
To be blunt about, the Anti-Israel people could argue that the Palestinians and their allies are going to out number Jews, so the sensible thing would be for the Jews to depart because the Palestinians and their allies will never change.Report
Palestinian terrorism causes poverty. Not on Israel, but on the Palestinians. Ditto these wars.
They’re not going to learn until they’re allowed to actually lose one of these wars, but part of “poverty” is “can’t build an army functional enough to destroy Israel”.Report
This means that the final settlement would be Israel vanquishing the Palestinians, which would be morally horrible, Israel unilaterally deciding the borders of a Palestinian state, or a negotiated deal.
Israel not only isn’t offering the last option, they’re not even offering the second.Report
Than the Palestinian leadership should negotiate with the Israeli government rather than go on quixotic quests to destroy Israel. Even if they think a final settlement would cause a Palestinian Civil War.Report
Palestinian leadership should negotiate with the Israeli government rather than go on quixotic quests to destroy Israel.
Why? There’s nothing to negotiate.
As recently as in the first Trump term, the Palestinians have made it clear their bottom line is “Israel is destroyed as a Jewish state”. The Jews obviously aren’t going to agree to that.
The Palestinians are trying to terrorize the Jewish state until their citizens flee the area.
That means engaging in either large scale terrorism or lots of small scale terrorism.
They don’t need to actually destroy the state of Israel in [this push] for them to be successful long term.Report
I am not remembering this from the first Trump administration at all. I suppose it has to do something with the allegedly sacred right of return for Palestinians.Report
First term it was a “blink and you’ll miss it” thing, but yes it was on the RoR.
I can’t google up a link because Trump proposed again the Palestinians not have a right to return back in Feb but that was in the context of the Gaza war.
I interpret a “Right to Return to Green Line Israel” (and rejections of that lack) as “Israel can’t be a Jewish state”. The clearest black letter summation of that stance was their bottom line in the 2000 peace talks.
In practice that means the Jews would be forced to live as minorities in an Islamic state gradually, with a transition over the course of decades.
The RoR (i.e. the right to destroy Israel) is the rock that keeps destroying a negotiated deal.Report
The Palestinian leadership has not gone on any quest to destroy Israel, and has in fact been unable to get Israel to even _stop stealing West Bank land_ for the past two decades, which is an obvious prerequisite to even discussing any sort of agreement.Report
they’re not even offering the second [a negotiated deal]
If the Palestinians were to offer to match the last deal in 2007 or something like that including a RoR to a Palestinian state, then we’d see the Jewish peace wing re-elected to take it.
As recently as Trump’s first term they’ve made it clear the Right of Return can’t only be to a Palestinian state, it needs to destroy Israel as a Jewish one.
As long as they’re still fighting over whether or not the Jews get a state, they also have to take ownership on not being able to negotiate a deal.Report
You take a few hours off and take over the library. That doesn’t have to affect your studies at all. It’s no different from hanging out with your friends or whatever.
A zero on the final is the wrath of god. An “E” (60%) might drop you a rank or two but a zero probably means you fail the entire class.
There aren’t supposed to be consequences to this.Report
I have more sympathy for the kids who aren’t going to miss their finals but weren’t allowed access to the library for a critical day.Report
There have been a few things about the protest movement that confuses me and nobody seems to have an answer.
1. If MAGA were to say that they were not anti-Semitic because there are MAGA Jews than a lot of people on the liberal-left side would laugh at them. Yet, they want Jews to believe that the Pro-Palestinian movements are not anti-Semitic because there are some Jews in them.
2. The Pro-Palestinians in the West would have us believe that the Palestinians want a secular and multicultural Palestine. We have decades of statements from real actual Palestinian leaders about what they want plus how other Muslim majority countries are set up and that won’t be friendly towards the Jews. Why should we believe people who aren’t in control on what they say the Palestinians want and not the actual Palestinians?Report
1. You have the option of laughing at them.
2. Asking people to do the background reading is ableist.Report
Remember when we thought police bodycams would restrain bad behavior? These guys literally beat a man to death on camera.
https://apnews.com/article/tyre-nichols-death-memphis-officers-trial-bad7bc4273fcc272f7b884d5d7386261Report
Reading the story, it seems like there were five cops, two of them pled guilty, this is about one of the remaining three of the five.
While I am 100% down with the whole “the getaway driver gets charged with murder even if he was outside waiting in the car when the guy got shot inside” thing, this isn’t exactly a complete miscarriage of justice.
Merely a more minor one.Report
There are so many charges against those 5 it’s hard to see what’s going on in detail.
Bottom line is all 5 will be sentenced June 16th and we’ll get summations then.
One of them pled or was has been found guilty of basically everything and is expected to do 15 years. Another has also pled guilty to various charges. Those two seem to be the most serious. Two of the others were found guilty of not very much (but something). The last is a mix between those two extremes.
Weirdly only 4 of the 5 have been decertified. Not sure if that’s “one was barely involved” or if it’s “we don’t bother with someone going to prison for that long”.Report
The police violence was the miscarriage Jay. These convictions are the corrections for the individuals but will do nothing to correct the system.Report
Maybe there should be a push for police reform that does stuff like weaken police unions.Report
These convictions are the corrections for the individuals but will do nothing to correct the system.
This was an example of the system working.
The cops beat someone to death and got charged with murder, thus the two that pled out. Even one the ones who watched got fired, charged with stuff, and convicted of some stuff.
That’s a sea change right there. The body cams made a huge difference. A few years ago no one would have been fired.
The real issue is what happens without the public attention and outrage, and there we go to JB’s comment about unions.Report
The Trusk administration is sending letters to foreign cities and governments and demanding them to stop DEI initiatives. This is taking the American Empire thing way too literally.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/08/stockholm-rejects-us-letter-urging-city-to-reverse-diversity-initiativesReport
hey, at least he’s keeping his campaign promises and following up on the thing that got him elected!Report
https://bsky.app/profile/ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lor4n3ylfk2h
The Freedom Admin is “looking into” suspending Habeas CorpusReport
Hero exemplar, Ras Baraka arrested protesting ICE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/nyregion/newark-ice-protest-arrest-ras-baraka.htmlReport
Just like what Columbia did to those kids in the library.Report
New Pope is not pro-choice.
Maybe the next one.Report
The Church is in favor of whatever is good for the Church, and the Church needs an enemy.Report
I can’t imagine one more impossible to defeat than “chicks”.Report
It appears the courts won’t let Congress abdicate their responsibilities to check the executive after all. Of course it remains to be seen if the executive or Congress care:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/judge-pauses-trumps-effort-reduce-size-federal-government-rcna205996?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&_branch_referrer=H4sIAAAAAAAAAwXB2w6CIAAA0L%2FpMbstq8011sRlxcoZoi8OCC9DwKCyeujbO6d5PHq38TzNuBaDG9O%2BH3etlh7BOlq8eVulbFsx3rW3YD8UpJmwGjVFNtmd0hCAxJdlviaw2MMLmiu20vCwRLIIaZy5WEzjqwqP33tkkKrOFyzl7JWo9Ilpff%2BAkgpVxujs33ID86HDBJio9x3HYPSzohLWtroumTWDEzaAlAtmjPwDpk3xKbMAAAA%3D&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR7k_Y9XFZIFQN3mb8nFK6NkZEaJWsJe1JUmELzqGoNmfPQVkk2vRmTuVagqyA_aem_JNP7dYoFYwlVXAoGp7scVA&_branch_match_id=1281224086309622960Report
The Daily Princetonian reports: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ’03 ‘plagiarized’ small portions of his senior thesis, experts say. But how serious is it?
There are discussions over plagiarism theory in the article.
People seem to agree that it violates Princeston’s “Rights, Rules, Responsibilities”.Report
> Go to the Plagiarism Story Show
> Ask the ticket lady “is this for-real plagiarism or just using the same facts”
> She doesn’t understand
> Pull out a chart and explain the difference between unattributed copying of substantial reasoning and analysis, and use of the same words to list facts
> She laughs and says “it’s good plagiarism, sir”
> Buy a ticket, sit down
> It’s use of the same words to list factsReport