On this day in 1908, the Tunguska Event occurred.
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.
Bob Vylan’s visa to the US has been officially revoked. Of the 20 US venues scheduled to be part of the Inertia Tour, Bob Vylan was listed as scheduled to play at 18 of them.
Sky News reports that Vylan has been dropped by United Talent Agency.
The UTA is *NOT* traded on the stock market so you can’t sell.
Cancel culture is alive and well, huh?
I mean, canceled and had their visas revoked, for political speech? I’m just imagining how circa 2010 OT would react to this.
Freedom of Speech doesn’t mean Freedom from Consequences.
Granted, they aren’t American, or in the U.S., but I think denying visas to people whose politics differ significantly from the current administration goes beyond XKCD consequences, and into the realm of, if not constitutionally problematic ones, then at least consequences that involve the government seriously curtailing freedom of speech in a way that, should it become precedent, will have consequences none of us are going to like.
OK, the super authoritarians here are gonna like it, but most of us won’t.
The talent agency is just yet another example of a particular cancel culture that pre-exists the one that conservatives have been upset about for the last decade or so: canceling supporters of the Palestinians. I have no doubt, however, that someone else will pick them up, because Bob Vylan, not UTA, represent the increasingly global consensus on Palestine.
That’s the problem with the camel, innit?
“I only agreed to the camel putting his head in here.”
Maybe we could explain that what we wanted to normalize was rules that we were in charge of finding exceptions to and not rules that they were in charge of finding exceptions to.
Because “let’s go back to the rules that you were arguing before we won the argument and before you were in charge” is less persuasive than you might think.
I’m not at all sure what you’re saying here. Consequences are inevitable, though we should be careful about them; government consequences are a free speech, and potentially a First Amendment, issue. I don’t think I’ve ever argued anything else.
I’ve always argued that the First Amendment was a Free Speech thing, not that Free Speech was a First Amendment thing.
If you have a culture that is rooted in Enlightenment Values (however imperfectly), then attempts to censor won’t matter.
If you have a culture that is rooted in The Will to Power, then stuff like The First Amendment won’t matter.
And here we are.
What will “Free Speech” look like in 2029?
“I think denying visas to people whose politics differ significantly from the current administration goes beyond XKCD consequences”
so all those dudes from South Africa, it’s cool if they come in then?
Are calls for violence (and even genocide) “political speech”?
Calls for violence against a military currently committing genocide, and committing violent ethnic cleansing for debate before that? I’m not gonna chant it myself, but I don’t think it’s bad when others do.
I’m not sure how Bob Vylan called for genocide though.
What percentage of Israeli citizens are members of the IDF?
Is it a greater percentage than the percentage of Palestinians killed by Israel in the last year or so?
Chris, you know that chants against Israel and Israelis end up being used against local Jews nearly 100% of the time. It rarely stops with just Israel and the Israeli government but Israeli civilians and even non-Israeli Jews get targeted instead. There are plenty of examples of this that I provided above and previously.
Man, that’s simply not true. I mean, I know it has happened, but if we’re condemning chants and political beliefs based on what its worst adherents do, Zionism is in much bigger trouble than people chanting “Free, free Palestine!”
I would have gone with “why do you care?” instead of “that’s not true” pivoting into “I know it has happened”.
Change the subject to him personally.
It’s simply not true that this is a widespread phenomenon. Is that clearer? The chants have meaning. Lee doesn’t like the meaning. Because Lee doesn’t like the meaning, he will impugn them with anything at his disposal, even as the people on his side of this issue are literally committing genocide.
“When X happens, Y happens!”
“Y only happens in isolated pockets. It’s not widespread.”
This is one of those things that looks like disagreement but it’s agreeing.
Like I said, if we’re gonna condemn these two sides for their worst adherents, the pro-Israel side is gonna come off looking much worse. I mean, even if you don’t agree there’s a genocide going on, widespread war crimes, decades of ethnic cleansing, bombing, etc., years of shooting peaceful protesters. the increasing power of the most far right, ethnosupremacist elements of Israeli society and politics, etc., put them way, way further ahead on the “Their worst do bad things” scale.
And now you see why I would have gone with “why do you care?”
Anyway, if you’ve got two separate sets of values, you shouldn’t be aghast that that one makes different tradeoffs than yours does.
I see this stuff ramping up, for what it’s worth. Europe’s gonna have riots.
I’ve been chewing on this all day and I’ve figured out exactly what bugs me about it and it touches on a technique that gets used all the freakin’ time.
Like, when someone asks “I can’t believe that this artist called for genocide! Condemn it!” we’re stuck in a weird frame.
Like, we all know that “death, death to the IDF” is a provocative chant and it’s one that has a handful of historical analogues that aren’t that great.
At the same time, it’s a music festival, yo. It’s a fun chant. You’re in a crowd of hundreds or thousands. Don’t read *THAT* much into it.
That said, if I were an IDF guy on vacation, I would very much not like to be in the middle of that crowd and I would very much not like to be seen as the one freakin’ guy who gets up to leave when the “death death” chant gets going.
At the same time, there’s a current situation in Israel where Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinians who were standing in line for aid. Just normal regular people (including women and children) who ended up dead.
And so this whole “Look at this guy who is saying something *AWFUL* at this concert!” invites this immediate gut feeling that says “IT’S AN ARTIST!!! WHO IS SAYING SOMETHING WITH HIS MOUTH!!! WHICH, NO MATTER WHAT IT WAS, ISN’T AS BAD AS SHOOTING A HUNGRY CHILD!!!! LET’S CONDEMN SHOOTING CHILDREN AND THEN WE CAN CONDEMN SHOOTING WOMEN AND WE CAN CONDEMN STUFF FOR A WHILE BEFORE WE GET DOWN TO THE PART OF THE LIST WHERE ‘STUFF THAT A RAPPER YELLS’ HAPPENS TO BE!!!”
And, of course, that sounds like “whataboutery” but, as whataboutery goes, it’s pretty high quality whataboutery.
(There’s an additional dynamic where this happened in England and people in England are thrown into jail for mean Facebook posts. This guy starts a “Death, Death to the IDF” chant in the same place where whatshername is in jail for posting that a mosque should be blown up with the worshippers inside. As such, some people are arguing that Bob Vylan should either also be in jail *OR* whatshername should not be in jail. But, as an American, that dynamic isn’t swirling here.)
And so here we are where Bob Vylan’s visa gets cancelled and so he won’t be part of his scheduled tour and the question comes “Where are the Libertarians?”
And, in the same way that the guy who is asked to condemn a chant calling for death to the IDF immediately starts thinking about the kids getting shot in line, I’m stuck thinking about the stuff like the Dr. Seuss book bans, the movement to get Joe Rogan taken off of whatever platform he was on, and volumes of discussions during the whole Covid thing and my immediate thought is “you’re not asking this because you believe it… you’re asking this because I believe it.”
This isn’t being called because of some shared belief in the importance of Enlightenment Culture and the importance of people to be able to say things out loud but because it’ll provide some temporary political advantage (if that… we’re on a message board, after all) that won’t be reciprocated when my oxen start getting gored again (any minute now).
So I don’t hear the question “where are the principled people?” as much as I hear “where are the collaboration suckers? I need the suckers to collaborate!”
And when it comes to the march that we’re inevitably going to have to make sure that Bob Vylan can do his setlist in Portland, it’s somehow hypocritical of me to say “I’m busy that day” when I remember the last five years.
How’s this? I dont’ think that Bob Vylan should be in jail for it (but I also think that whatshername shouldn’t be in jail for what was obviously not a true threat).
If we want to argue that we should have a foundation vaguely pointing at Enlightenment Culture, I’d be 100% down with that. If you want me to argue that we should let Bob Vylan in, I’m not interested in that argument. I’d rather argue that we should have a culture that doesn’t mind when people say things. Even offensive things.
You don’t want to have that conversation? Fair enough. It’s not like I can make you.
It’s going to be a hot summer.
I’m not sure how Bob Vylan called for genocide though.
He’s up there chanting “from the river to the sea”, and “death to the IDF”. I’m pretty sure you can’t destroy Israel without genocide.
If you’re going to lower the bar so that the IDF is committing “genocide” by having a war, then removing all Jews from the Middle East is going to cross that line too.
I didn’t hear him chant “From the River to the Sea”, a slogan that, ironically, Israelis have adopted while Americans continue to insist that Palestinians mean it in a genocidal way, which is a call for freedom, not genocide.
And the IDF is a military, not an ethnic group that can be genocided.
And you call it a low bar, but pretty much every genocide scholar on the planet, including the Israeli ones, agrees with me, not you, at this point, so who’s bar is misplaced?
“Death to the IDF” doesn’t mean that he wants the *SOLDIERS* to die. He’s talking about the institution passing on. He’s obviously wishing for a world where militaries didn’t exist. It’s a Lennon-esque sentiment, if you think about it.
Deliberately misconstruing “Death to the IDF” as talking about hoping that individuals die is the most dishonest misinterpretation since “Defund the Police” was interpreted to mean that the police should be defunded.
I mean, I would actually like a world in which the IDF, a brutal, terroristic organization with little regard for human life, including in many cases the lives of the citizens of its own country, didn’t exist, but that chant might have had a bit more in it. Still not a genocidal chant.
Well, two things. The first is that Bob Vylan clarified that “Death to the IDF” meant “Dismantle the violent military machine”.
The second is that footage surfaced of Bob calling for “death to every single IDF soldier out there” from the stage (granted, at a different concert venue).
This really undercuts the efforts of people who mean “dismantle the violent machine” when they start “Death to the IDF” chants.
The basic problem is that the entire Anti-Israel side decided that the only true justice is the dismantling of Israel. Israelis and most non-Israeli Jews see Israel differently and Zionism/Israel as good things even if they disagree with Netanyahu and his policies towards the Palestinians. They aren’t going to agree with the dismantling of Israel and Israelis showed repeatedly that they will fight. Until the Pro-Palestine/Anti-Israel forces accept that Israel exists and it is not going to stop existing than things will continue as are.
The only full justice would be to dismantle Israel, this is true. This does not mean the expulsion of anyone: everyone should be able to live where they want, and to live with full rights, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion. This is a value I hold universally. It is a value, along with many other basic human values, you reject only when it comes to the state of Israel. And no matter how much you try to turn this around on the victims of Israel’s crimes, or those who support the victims, there’s no way you can get around that. The state you’ve chosen to support has turned you, as ethnonationalism always does, into a monster you are so completely incapable of recognizing in yourself that you must project it onto those whom the monstrosity causes to suffer. It’s truly sick to behold, like it makes me actually sick to read your comments on the subject here. So like I said above, I’m not going to anymore. I look forward to your pulled-out-of-your-ass analyses of the left on other subjects, however, even if those too are undoubtedly tainted by your need to protect yourself from your own reflection on this subject.
Full justice for who? The creation of Israel was just because of the exclusion and persecution Jews in Europe and the Middle East. You anti-Zionists are always trying to have it three ways with us.
1. Jews can’t have self-determination because that is settler-colonialism.
2. At the same time, the host nations are under no obligation whatsoever to include the Jews in their national projects because we are mere bugs of a people.
3. If we keep to our own communities, we get accused of being disloyal and insular.
To put this a bit less personally, and more clearly: Imagine you believe a genocide is happening, have watched it unfold, sometimes in real time, on social media, have heard the experts declare that it’s happening, and further more, it is being carried out by a state that has been openly, as a matter of state policy, committing war crimes, crimes against humanity (ethnic cleansing), committing terrorism, and existing as an Apartheid state, and you came here to find a bunch of people defending the genocide, in fact denying that it can be such, because the side that is not the victim of all of this explicitly racist violence, are too racist, and have therefore brought it on themselves. Meanwhile, the people over here, who are against the genocide, are also racist, for doing so, because the people being genocided are racist (and in fact are being genocided for being racist).
That’s where I am. You don’t have to agree with me, but if you can’t understand how seeing that on a site like this would disgust you to your core, then we probably have nothing to talk about on any other subject either.
word salad
If you start with the assumption that Israel shouldn’t exist, then any action which supports it is illegitimate and any action which attempts to get rid of it is justified and moral.
If you start with the assumption that Israel is a normal country who should be forgiven the crime of it’s creation and evaluated by normal rules, then we get different moral logic.
The anti-Zionists know that a military defeat of Israel is unlikely but can’t stand a negotiated solution to the I/P conflict because it means they are basically going to have to stop their war against Israel. What they want is something that leads to a free Palestine but also allows them to continue the war against Israel.
everyone should be able to live where they want,
Do you support USA and all other countries having open borders then, or it is just Israel that doesn’t get to set it’s immigration policies?
Well, for me, part of the problem is that Israel is acting in a way that undercuts the exact same appeals to morality that it’s making.
“Israel has the right to defend itself!”
Okay, okay. Does it have the right to shoot people standing in line for aid? I appreciate that Hamas may be committing war crimes by hiding out in hospitals, but I also saw footage of an Israeli soldier destroying an ultrasound machine. Was it a Hamas ultrasound machine that revealed Hamas endometriosis?
The other day, there was a picture of an Israeli soldier wearing a confiscated wedding dress while standing with his broskis and everybody in the picture was laughing.
Does Israel have the right to defend itself?
Sure. I wouldn’t argue that it doesn’t.
But we’re talking about “justice”, remember?
If I may wander into D&D territory, Gary Gygax got asked “but what about Goblin children?” way back in the 1970s when the topic of alignment came up and whether it would still be “good” for a fighter to commit Goblincide. You know what his answer was?
“Nits make lice.”
This meant that it was, indeed, okay for Lawful Good Human Fighters to impale a goblin toddler on a spear.
You know that flash of revulsion you just felt while imagining nerdy incels playing D&D in their basement pretending to kill Goblins?
Well, let me remind you that we’re talking about “justice” and Israel sure as hell seems to be taking a “nits make lice” approach to the Palestinian goblins.
You want to appeal to justice? That’s fine.
As it is, I hear your mouth making appeals while your hand waves away inhumane treatment of dehumanized people.
I’m not surprised that Bob is starting “Death to the IDF” chants.
I’m not surprised that people are joining him in them.
What should worry you is what percentage of the people chanting do not mean “we need to dismantle a violent machine” when they chant along with him.
Does it have the right to shoot people standing in line for aid?
Clearly no. That’s a war crime. Ditto many of the other things you talked about.
inhumane treatment of dehumanized people.
I agree this shouldn’t happen. However I can’t think of many serious wars where it hasn’t.
Israel sure as hell seems to be taking a “nits make lice” approach to the Palestinian goblins.
We keep hearing this and yet the body count doesn’t indicate Israel has a policy of killing all civilians it runs into.
We ran into this when we talked about George Floyd. Openly murdered on camera. Talk of that being evidence of police “genocide”.
However the total number of people killed by the police in all situations combined was roughly 1k a year. The numbers don’t support the narrative being true.
Well, remember, Lee was asking about “justice”.
Hey, who among us doesn’t want “justice”?
“Use every man after his desert!”, the bard tells us.
I’m just saying that with enough of those things that, surely, happen in every war, we’re going to find a growing contingent of people who might have the nagging feeling that, maybe, there should have been a plea for mercy in there.
That said, I can’t escape the nagging feeling that there will be.
I didn’t hear him chant “From the River to the Sea”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Vylan#Glastonbury_Festival_2025
is a call for freedom, not genocide.
If you look at a map, “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] Sea” covers every inch of Israel.
Calling it “Palestine” means there will be no Israel. That right there requires genocide. It shouldn’t be a shock that it’s used by groups dedicated to making the area Jew free.
who’s bar is misplaced?
Israel has the power to kill everyone in Gaza. Claiming that they’re trying to kill everyone ignores that they’re not.
If we’re not doing that, then we’re claiming all urban wars are genocide and shouldn’t be fought. That would actively encourage Hamas and other groups to be heinous.
This is why those “experts” typically air-brush Hamas out of the picture. IMHO it’s a mistake to redefine genocide because that results in us unable to distinguish between groups actively trying to kill everyone and others which don’t.
“From the River to the Sea” means what all of what is currently Israel. I assumed that was clear. It does mean there will be no Israel as it is currently constituted, that is, as an ethnonationalist state. It is not a call for genocide.
there will be no Israel as it is currently constituted, that is, as an ethnonationalist state. It is not a call for genocide.
I don’t understand how your 2nd statement doesn’t disagree with your first. This is cheering on openly genocidal groups to victory and putting them in charge.
How do you expect that to work without it resulting in genocide?
Is the acknowledged desire of several Israeli political parties and cabinet members for an Eretz Israel spanning from the sea to the river a call for genocide? How do you expect that to work?
Or is it nothing more than a polite request for several million people to just leave their homes and be Palestinian somewhere else, just not there?
desire of several Israeli political parties and cabinet members for an Eretz Israel spanning from the sea to the river a call for genocide
I think it’s a call for serious ethnic cleansing.
The big question in these sorts of things is how does the military behave towards the other sides civilians?
So October 7th’s “see a civilian, kill them” was an act of genocide to the degree Hamas could.
See a civilian, shoot a civilian, is genocide. OK, I’ll buy that. Here’s the not October 7 version
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-ordered-to-shoot-deliberately-at-unarmed-gazans-waiting-for-humanitarian-aid/00000197-ad8e-de01-a39f-ffbe33780000
Words have meaning. We should use the right ones.
Your link is to something called a “war crime”. It’s worth an investigation and whoever gave that order (and for that matter the ones committing it) should face appropriate punishment. That order breaks Israel’s policy and so on.
You’ll know that Israel has decided to commit genocide when all the civilians are shot. It would take Israel remarkably little time to kill everyone.
Mislabeling every war crime that happens during a war as “genocide” cheapens the word to the point of it being worthless. If every war is genocidal then none of them are.
In order to have these sorts of discussions we need to be able to tell the difference between a government running murder factories and some officer going off leash.
I had a bet with myself, that your answer would bring War Crimes to the table, and explain how it’s different from genocide. You’ll be happy to know I won my bet. Thanks.
Words do have meaning. Killing a couple of thousand people is very bad. You and I agree with that.
At the same time, October 7 doesn’t seem to have had any impact over the power of the nation of Israel. Israel’s ability to respond to this act of “genocide” with their own “war crimes” and they the existence of Israel were not affected by the (so called attempted) genocide, just as the existence of the USA was not affected by 9/11.
October 7 and 9/11 were both acts of terrorism. Acts of violence against innocent civilians with the intent of creating fear in the population as a tool to influence political actors.
I knew people that survived concentration camps. I’ve seen the tattoos with my own eyes. Words matter. Let’s call terrorism terrorism, let’s call war crimes war crimes. Killing unarmed civilians is not genocide
Calling October 7 genocide demeans the meaning of the word, and the suffering of the victims and survivors of true genocides. When everything is genocide, genocide is nothing special. 1,200 victims is genocide, but 50,000 is only war crimes.
your answer would bring War Crimes to the table
I try not to argue against facts. If the facts change then I’ll change my mind.
1,200 victims is genocide, but 50,000 is only war crimes.
Everyone Israel has killed is not a civilian “victim”, and dead civilian human shields are on Hamas for putting them in harms way.
At the moment we have dozens or hundreds of victims from war crimes according to that link.
Genocide (according to google) is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Destroying Israel is Hamas’ stated goal and on 10-7 they showed they’d kill every Jew to the limit of their power.
Arguing they’re not strong enough to commit actual genocide is a fine, respectable stance. However they clearly want to commit genocide and are attempting it to the best of their ability.
That deeply affects all of the other issues and should frame the debate.
Who are the openly genocidal groups? Recall, I do not believe calling for the end of Israel as a state is a genocidal statement (any more than the call for the end of the current state of Iran, which is basically a standard part of American mainstream politics, would be). So what groups are calling for actual genocide? Hamas? I think we’d probably disagree there, though I do view them as bad for Palestinians and for the prospects of a peaceful transition to a one-party state.
Who are the openly genocidal groups?
Hamas put it black letter in their founding charter that they’re going to kill all the Jews. They also have no Jews living in areas they control because everyone assumes they’d be killed.
I do not believe calling for the end of Israel as a state is a genocidal statement
When Israel-the-state is destroyed by Hamas and the various other Islamic Jihadist groups, what do you think will happen to the Jews?
Do you think Hamas can destroy a nuclear Israel? Man, you and I live in different universes. There is no world in which Hamas, which by the way altered its charter some time ago, inflicts any real damage on the Israeli state.
It’s doing a pretty good job in the same way Al Qaeda did a number on the United States, from within.
Yes, though to be fair, that only works when there’s a great deal of rot to work with.
Do you think Hamas can destroy a nuclear Israel?
Of course not. However the question was, “Who are the openly genocidal groups?” and not “is that a possible goal”.
So no, imho it’s not a possible goal. However “openly genocidal” a good description of Hamas.
And Hamas represents the Palestinian aspirations to the point where they’d win an election if one were held.
That shows where the Palestinians heads are at, so it shows what ending the Jewish state results in, and it shows why the Jews are insisting that they keep the state Jewish.
OK, so there is a group that we could argue is openly genocidal (I don’t think they are, but I see the argument that they are). This group has no real power to harm Israel on a large scale or at a structural level, and is entirely a resistance group, so likely doesn’t exist, at least in anything like it’s current form (perhaps as a political party, though?) in a unified Israel.
Where Gazans heads are at: they have lived in an open air prison, a 2-million people concentration camp, for 2 decades, under an extreme blockade, with the IDF entering the strip every few years to incredibly violently, with many civilian deaths, “mew the grass,” or whatever metaphor the IDF uses. On top of that, they’ve watched the people who’ve imprisoned them, who’ve impoverished them, who kill them from above and occasionally on the ground, kill and maim hundreds, even thousands of peaceful protesters. That’s where their mind is. Where would yours be in that situation?
Keep in mind, Hamas’ primary recruitment technique, particularly for their militant wing, is to approach the survivors of people Israel has killed. If Israel stops killing them, Hamas’ recruitment base disappears. Unfortunately, Israel has chosen to kill as many of them as they can (the recent study suggests it could be 150,000 people or more in this genocide).
These are the people you blame for their own brutalization, by the people you support.
Frankly, I’ve said this a few times here, and man I wish this place still had the ignore button, because I’ve reached peak disgust. You’re blaming a people for the violence against them by a country that has cleansed them for decades, that has for almost 2 days brutally kept them in an open-air prison, a concentration camp, severely limited their ability to receive supplies from the outside world, bombed civilians every few years, and now killed by some estimates more than 150,000 in under 2 years. You support evil, over a group of people who understandably hate the people who constantly brutalize them, the people who have cleansed the Jenin refugee camp without a peep from the American media, who supports, with its military, the terrorization of Palestinians in the West Bank by its settlers, who has implemented a brutal Apartheid regime even in the West Bank, who shoots people approaching aid stations (admitted, in their own media), who targets journalists and aid workers.
Feel free to respond to any of this, but my disgust for those of you supporting Israel has reached a point at which I cannot even stand to see your names.
Pretty sure that was addressed to me.
I’ve reached peak disgust
Sorry to hear that. I’m cold, logical, and have no dog in this race. People disagreeing with me in these sorts of arguments is a way to get better at thinking and occasionally I find out that thinking is flawed.
It’s part of the entire thing were media is segmented so we live in our own bubbles. IMHO it’s useful to talk to people in their own.
a group of people who understandably hate the people who constantly brutalize them
“The people”? Question for you, after the Jews got out of camps in 1945, would it have been ethical for them to engage in the widespread slaughter of German civilians?
Certainly they didn’t, but should we be surprised at that?
This group has no real power to harm Israel on a large scale or at a structural level…
If we handwave October 7th, rocket attacks on civilian areas, and previously the occasional suicide bomb, then sure.
Would we allow our civilian population to be terrorized?
and is entirely a resistance group
They are resisting the idea of Jews being in the Middle East.
they have lived in an open air prison, a 2-million people concentration camp
Which they run and could trivially turn into a country if they’d just stop trying to kill Jews because they’re Jews.
If Israel stops killing them, Hamas’ recruitment base disappears.
So Israel shouldn’t have gone to war after 10-7 and simply left Hamas in charge of the educational and economic systems?
“Would we allow our civilian population to be terrorized?”
I know this was rhetorical, but I have to answer since this happened.
After 9/11, what did this country do? Close to 3k died, that was 0.0011% of the population and the US took down two countries in our anger.
On 10/7 in Israel, around 1200 died, that was 0.012% of the population (over ten times greater).
Now, what would this country do if 30k people died to a terrorist’s attack tomorrow?
Chris,
It really shouldn’t take that many brain cells to figure out why most Israeli Jews and most non-Israeli Jews don’t believe that “From the River to the Sea” expresses good intentions towards the Jews. First, the Palestinians themselves do not use ANC multicultural rhetoric. They are very explicit that Palestine will be an ethno-state or a Muslim theocratic state and they aren’t offering any concessions to the Jews even if they are allowed to stay. Second, the treatment of non-Muslims in the surrounding area doesn’t encourage much either.
There is this arrogance with the anti-Zionists where they refuse to believe that Jews, Israeli or not, have things they believe in and want. Instead, the anti-Zionists believe they can dictate conditions towards Jews and we will meekly accept them. Despite this never happening and Israel winning the battles. Nonetheless, the idea of having to negotiate with Israel/Jews is seen as so utterly hateful that it is beyond belief.
Meanwhile, Karen Diamond who was fire bombed in Boulder has died of her wounds:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/06/30/boulder-attack-firebomb-death-karen-diamond/
The entire I/P conflict, outside of Israel/Palestine itself, has reached a fever pitch and nobody is doing anything to quiet it down. Netanyahu’s decision to keep waging the Israel-Hamas War past the point of uselessness is further radicalizing the Pro-Palestinian movement in the West. The Pro-Palestinian movement in the West just latches out enough in verbal anti-Semitism and assaults, murder, and vandalism against Jews that it puts most non-Israeli Jews on the edge. The Pro-Palestinian movement does not want to tear itself apart by self-policing. This lack of self-policing does not place much confidence among Jews in their intentions towards us. Everybody is getting increasingly radicalized.
I mean, how do you self-police a dude who decides to firebomb people without telling anyone? That seems pretty difficult.
I think you’d be surprised at the amount of policing of overt antisemitism on the left, now. Way more than I saw 3 years ago, say, when I think accusations of antisemitism were generally dismissed as bad faith (which they often were, and still are). Now, at least outside of Twitter (though I see it on it as well), open antisemites seem to flock together, and avoid left spaces and groups where antisemites are increasingly unwelcome, because people have come to view actual antisemitism as making it possible for bad faith accusations of antisemitism to stick.
We’re watching that play out right now with Mamdani, who keep disavowing antisemitism, but keeps being accused of it.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/mannys-cafe-ice-protests-20370306.php
https://sfist.com/2025/06/16/anti-semitic-attack-reported-in-marina-district-early-saturday-morning/
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/multiple-sd-jewish-organizations-pull-support-from-pride-over-headliner-kehlani/3842244/
Has it ever occurred to you that there might be a reason why most Jews don’t believe the Pro-Palestinian people when they claim to be “merely anti-Zionist” and not anti-Semitic? They don’t seem to be particularly concerned with controlling the rhetoric or actions of their more passionate members. They also expect Jews to ignore what is happening to other non-Muslims in the Middle East. Things like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar_Elias_Church_attack
As I just said, they do care. You’ve always been incapable of analyzing the left, on this issue or any other, so I don’t expect you to see it.
who keep disavowing antisemitism, but keeps being accused of it.
He dances closer to the line than most.
On October 8th he said to “mourn the hundreds of people killed across Israel and Palestine”, however he also airbrushed Hamas out of the picture and condemned Israel’s various actions at the time including initiation of the war in Gaza.
He did describe Oct 7th as a “horrific war crime”.
On Oct 13th he got arrested in a pro-Palestinian demonstration calling for a “ceasefire”. He believes Israel has a “right to exist” but apparently not as a Jewish state.
Big picture he wants to be seen as antizionist but not antisemitic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohran_Mamdani#Israel%E2%80%93Palestine;_views_on_antisemitism
My post wasn’t also about Mamdani me at all. It was about how everything is at a fever pitch at the moment, so I don’t know why Chris is bringing up Mamdani.
I agree with literally everything he says there (though I would quibble that states don’t have rights). I don’t see any of it as antisemitic, or even remotely so.
I don’t see any of it as antisemitic, or even remotely so.
I said he was dancing up to the line. To his credit he’s trying not to go over it.
I expect the reality of the situation at some point conflicts with that ideal. I.e. if you’re for ending Israel as a Jewish state, then I’m not sure how you expect that to happen without genocide.
At some point the idea that everything would be peaceful if Israel just didn’t attack these “resistance” groups runs into the reality that those groups are serious about No Jews in the Middle East.
I suspect many Westerners who want the end of Israel as the Jewish State are envisioning the end of Israel as a Jewish State are envisioning multicultural secular Palestine. That the real actual Palestinians are not saying this is not much of an issue for them because they think practicality will make mystical and magical multicultural rainbow Palestine a thing.
What is your solution? Israel has proscribed the very idea of an independent Palestinian state, and has continued to terrorize the West Bank while settling an increasingly large portion of it. Many in the country, including with the higher reaches of the government, have made it clear that settling Gaza is also their plan.
The only two solutions possible, now, are a single state, not ruled by any one ethnicity or religious group, a difficult proposition given that Israel is increasingly filled with supremacists, and has spent the last 70 years enforcing its supremacy through extreme violence against every Palestinian; or a single state, completely cleansed of Palestinians. Israel is clearly aiming for the latter, and the people who support their “right to exist” are going to let them do it in the name of “fighting antisemitism.”
What is your solution?
Two states. The Palestinians admit that they’ve lost the war and aren’t getting the Right to Return. They agree to set up a state with Israeli and Western help.
There are various land swaps, the marginal settlements are removed, various groups will be bought off, others will be removed kicking and screaming about how god wants them to keep the land.
So basically the same peace plan that the Palestinians have walked away from repeatedly in favor of “No Israel, No Jews”. Yes, the Palestinians get less land than they could have gotten earlier but whatever.
The Palestinians will need security help dealing with their extremists for a generation or three. They’ll also need to reform their educational system so they’re not teaching children that dying fighting the Jews is a ticket to heaven and their sacred duty.
As I’ve said, I do not believe 2 states are possible. Israel has said 2 states are not possible. There are strong voices for a two-state solution among Palestinians, at least in the West Bank, but their cause is undermined by Israel’s actions. Furthermore, Israel has said there will never be a Palestinian state except under its conditions, which look scarcely different from the current occupation.
How do you propose getting to a 2-state solution?
I’ll add that if you’d asked me on October 6, 2023, I’d have said that a two-state solution is a deeply immoral one, but probably the most likely one, Israel’s militant language not withstanding, but almost 2 years on, I’m increasingly convinced that the viability of an ethnonationalist Israel is diminishing rapidly, and now a single-state solution is the most likely.
I understand Lee’s and many other’s concerns about violence that would inevitably come, from both sides, in a unification of the Palestinians and Israelis, but I think this could be managed, and if done right, the end of the Israel Occupation and Apartheid could be at least as peaceful as the aftermath of South Africa’s Apartheid, if not more so.
There are strong voices for a two-state solution among Palestinians…
The follow up question when hearing this should be “will one of the states be Jewish?”
Israel has said there will never be a Palestinian state
I agree that the current Israeli gov (and the settler wings) don’t want peace. However Israel does have a peace wing, and they’ve occasionally gotten enough support to make serious peace offers.
The rock that keeps destroying peace negotiations is the Right to Return, not Israel’s security concerns.
If the Palestinians would drop the right of return, i.e. the “right to destroy Israel”, then we’d see a lot more support to Israel’s peace wing. As it is I find it amazing that wing manages to get in power at all.
the end of the Israel Occupation and Apartheid could be at least as peaceful as the aftermath of South Africa’s Apartheid, if not more so.
Yugoslavia is a better example, and that happened with a lot less hate and history. The Palestinians are not fighting to join a Jewish state and the Jews have scores of examples on what happens to them if they don’t control the state.
I agree that the current Israeli gov (and the settler wings) don’t want peace. However Israel does have a peace wing, and they’ve occasionally gotten enough support to make serious peace offers.
Yeah, one of them made real progress once with Oslo.
Too bad he got assassinated afterward for doing that.
The rock that keeps destroying peace negotiations is the Right to Return, not Israel’s security concerns.
The thing that keeps destroying peace negotiation is that Israel has _never_, the entire time, stopped making new illegal settlements.
The myth that the Israeli people in general prefer peace to Apartheid and ethnic cleansing is a strictly American one, not shared by any of the small minority of Israelis who actually want a lasting peace based in equality.
The thing that keeps destroying peace negotiation is that Israel has _never_, the entire time, stopped making new illegal settlements.
What you’d call “settlements” started in the 80’s. The Palestinians being dialed up to eleven by the Jewish state started before the state itself was created. The PLO spelled that out in their charter years before the six day war.
When I listen to what actual Palestinians say and read their charters, it’s clear they consider all of Israel “an illegal settlement” and think the entire thing has to go.
However that It is a Western fantasy to think that Israel stops the settlements and we get peace. That ignores what actual Palestinians have said they want, their charters, peace negotiators’ offers, etc.
They insist on a RoR into Green line Israel. The closest we got to peace was in 2000 when they offered to only exercise that right slowly. I think it was 150k immigrants per year forever. So Israel would be destroyed as a Jewish state slowly over a few decades rather than all at once.
A lack of that was why the Trump Peace Plan was dismissed as “hot garbage” in his first term.
The only real hope for peace is maybe the war has changed minds… but that’s also probably wishful thinking. We’d need a different Israeli government but that’s what elections are for.
Plenty of Western activists also have come to the conclusion that all of Israel is an illegal settlement. It’s why we keep getting the settler-colonialsit rhetoric regarding the Zionist movement but nothing on the forces that led the Zionist movement to emerge in the first place, and yes the Zionist movement also existed among Mizrahi Jews.
On LGM, one of the more symapthetic posters has an interesting argument that the Pro-Palestinian movement or at least it’s dimmer elements considers that Pro-Israel arguments are not merely just wrong but illegitimate. They can’t understand why any argument for Israel including as a place of refuge for Jews exists. They just don’t get it. We see this with Chris and David TC basically not getting real actual Jews explaining to them what the majority opinion of most Jews are regarding Israel and how we see it.
If you talk enough about the people who said “Israel is illegitimate” on October 6th, you won’t have to deal with the people who say “if Israel keeps shooting women and children standing in line for food, they’re going to make themselves illegitimate in the eyes of normal people”.
Plenty of Western activists also have come to the conclusion that all of Israel is an illegal settlement.
Plenty of Western activists also have come to the conclusion that all of Israel is an illegal settlement.
Too much of the Left’s world view is invalidated in this conflict.
We have “repressed” people… however they’re being repressed because they keep insisting on trying to commit genocide on their whiter, richer, and more powerful neighbors.
Their motivation can’t simply be Jew hatred because that would mean the rich, white, & powerful are in fact the more ethical ones here. So something must cause that hatred which makes them the ethical side and the richer side the unethical one.
Everything the Palestinians write and say about their own motivations is replaced with the “the repressed are always ethical and moral” insert author reasoning.
It’s the same reasoning that occasionally decides “all criminals should be treated as victims of society and released” with the expected outcome that crime goes down.
Plenty of Western activists also have come to the conclusion that all of Israel is an illegal settlement.
It sure is fun how every time I mention ‘Israel has been creating illegal settlements the entire time, which completely screws up the peace process’, you then deflect into ‘Well, some people say the whole thing is an illegal settlement’.
Yeah, let’s pretend that’s the issue under discussion instead of the fact that the _very minute_ Israel got control of Palestine territory in 1967, it started actively stealing it. Making the peace process near impossible, not just because of the obvious wrongdoing, but because it results in Israel policing Palestinians harshly, and it allows far-right Israeli settlers to engage in warfare with Palestinians, who then fight back, escalating things.
Even _ignoring_ the fact it’s flatly illegal, and _ignoring_ the fact that merely doing so indicates that Israel will never leave Palestine alone, it very very clearly inflames tensions to have Israel kick people out of their houses and set up have walled Israeli enclaves that then have to be defended from people.
But you can’t even come up with any sort of hypothetical reason that’s a good idea, or why Israel would be doing except with ‘To break the peace process’ or ‘Because they want all the land of Palestine’ (Spoiler, it’s both!), so have to deflated to things being said by people who are not here.
They can’t understand why any argument for Israel including as a place of refuge for Jews exists.
If Jews wanted a place of refuge , _taking that place by violence_ by people who remained neighbors was a spectacularly bad plan.
Or, maybe I should say ‘Negotiating with British colonizers to have them do that’ was a spectacularly bad plan, and when that failed to work and the British fled, taking it by force was an even worse plan.
What you’d call “settlements” started in the 80’s. The Palestinians being dialed up to eleven by the Jewish state started before the state itself was created. The PLO spelled that out in their charter years before the six day war.
The first settlement was proposed in September Kfar Etzion, established in 1967, the year that Israel got control of the territory in the Six-Day War.
Literally as soon as Israel could make illegal settlements, it did. Before that point, _it did not control Palestine_, so could not…Jordan and Eygpt would not have been accommodating about Israel attempting to seize part of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank from _them_.
What you’d call “settlements” started in the 80’s. The Palestinians being dialed up to eleven by the Jewish state started before the state itself was created. The PLO spelled that out in their charter years before the six day war.
What does the PLO have to do with the time before the state was established? The PLO was established long after Israel. And why are you pretending the PLO _back then_ represents the Palestine people? The PLO was created by the Arab League and there have not actually ever been any elections to it, although confusing the elected head of the PA is also the chair of the PLO. But obviously that wasn’t true in 1967, the PA didn’t exist. The Arab League just sorta picked Arafat.
Anyway, Palestinians were dialed up to 11 before the creation of Israel because Zionists had signed a document with the British government in 1917, the Balfour Agreement.
That, in 1917, was an open declaration that a group of people who had just started moving there enmass, going from 10% of the population to 20% in three decades, would be given a chunk of _Palestine_ and allowed to make a specific government out of it…and, everyone suspected, they’d do that by removing Palestinians. Which turned out to be entirely correct as a guess!
Yeah, the people who had been living there for generations got pretty pissed about the British promising to give some of their land away to a minority of people who had just moved there. Pissed at both the Jews who were literally moving there to take advantage of the theft, and the Biritish government.
In fact, they got so pissed at the British, and annoyed them so much, that British government, contrary to a lot of people’s understanding, _did not actually do what they said they’d do_, (Which by then the planning had been turned over to the League of Nations and then the UN) and instead of formally creating Israel they fled and just left the land terra nullis. The Zionist militias then started the Nakba and declared the existence of the state of Israel. (A lot of people are _very_ confused about this and think the UN formally divided the land and created the state of Israel. No.)
What does the PLO have to do with the time before the state was established?
I am pointing out that the “No Israel, No Jews” reasoning was done by various groups long before the “illegal settlements” were a thing, and that reasoning continues to this day unchanged even if different groups use it.
The Arabs are dialed up to eleven by the existence of Israel as a whole and consider the entire thing an illegal settlement.
Pointing to the settlements and claiming things would be fine without them ignores that Palestinians won’t make a deal unless all of Israel goes.
Something else to point out is Brittain getting out of the empire business created multiple countries. There were enough Jews there to create a small country if the lines were drawn correctly. I’m not sure why the lines needed to be drawn so that didn’t happen.
I think absent breathtakingly high levels of antisemitism in the region Israel wouldn’t be the powerhouse it is today. It wouldn’t have have the population it got when the Arabs kicked their Jews out. However population exchanges often happen when countries are created so there’s that.
I think absent breathtakingly high levels of antisemitism in the region Israel wouldn’t be the powerhouse it is today. It wouldn’t have have the population it got when the Arabs kicked their Jews out. However population exchanges often happen when countries are created so there’s that.
Hey, you figured out _half_ the thing.
I want show how you something. For some context, go read the first two paraphrase here about the Junta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Argentina#Junta_rule
Israel made an agreement with an actual fascist military junta, comprise of, to be clear, both actual fleeing Na.zis and was full of the ideology in general. This agreement was…to let Jewish people leave Argentina. Well, that seems…reasonable, right. I mean, negotiating with Na.zis, but to save Jews.
Just…now read this: https://maki.org.il/en/?p=19937
News of Israel’s ties to the junta is increasingly coming to light. In 2012 Argentina’s largest newspaper, Clarin, reported on retired Argentine pilots and military officers who testified that in 1982 they secretly flew to Israel, where they met with representatives from the Israeli military and defense manufacturers and returned with their plane loaded with light arms, mortars, air-to-air missiles and anti-tank weapons.
This was, again, the military junta that was disappearing Jews at the time…but under agreement with Israel, letting them flee, mostly to Israel.
Come to whatever conclusions you want about that, as long as you remember that ‘Arabs kicked their Jews out.’ because Israel _kicked out and murdered a bunch of Arabs_ first.
as long as you remember that ‘Arabs kicked their Jews out.’ because Israel _kicked out and murdered a bunch of Arabs_ first.
I check for antisemitism by seeing if rules, ethics, or expectations make any sense when applied to non-Jews.
For example, if a Christen ruler (Bush) invaded a Muslim country (Afghanistan, Iraq), overthrew the gov and killed lots of people, would it be expected and ethical for Muslims in other countries to take it out on their local Christens?
How about if an African warlord did something nasty? Wouldn’t it be seriously racist for us to take get upset over him and take it out on our own Blacks?
The Muslims decided to take out what happened in Israel on their local Jews. The local Jews weren’t involved. Ethically this was heinous. No, those Jews were not to blame for others antisemitism.
You can’t really believe this. That the only reasons Jews were kicked out of the MENA countries was because Israel won the war for independence? That really makes no historical sense. There were anti-Jewish riots in Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and other places before Israel declared independence. The treatment of other non-Muslims has been horrible. Algerians kicked their Jews out along with the Pied-Noirs because the Jews were colonists despite being from a community that predated Islam. Even without Israel, the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa would be pressured out even if it was on a longer time scale.
I’d add to my point that even if your assumption is correct, it doesn’t make the Left look good. “We are against all ethnic cleansing, unless it is done to Jews in retaliation for what other Jews did” is not a good look. You can’t claim to be merely anti-Zionist , not anti-Semitic while endorsing anti-Semitic action.
Something else to point out is Brittain getting out of the empire business created multiple countries.
No, Britain was required to leave 29 April, 1948. That was the end of the mandate they had been given by the League of Nations to implement the Balfour Declaration. (And the UN later formalized the borders of.) That was literally the last moment they were allowed to be there. The question is: Why did they not follow the Mandate and create Israel..and Palestine, which they also were supposed to do!
The answer is here: https://ancientwarhistory.com/the-jewish-revolt-against-british-rule-in-palestine-a-pivotal-chapter-in-the-birth-of-israel/
Basically, Jewish militias drove them out. Now, to be fair, a chunk of that started as sheer panic at the Holocaust and Britain refusing to allow Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine, which was horrific behavior, but that excuse wears out quickly when the war ends and the militias kept escalating the violence into literal bombings and assassinations. (There’s an reasonable argument that modern terrorism started in action of Israeli militias.)
There were enough Jews there to create a small country if the lines were drawn correctly. I’m not sure why the lines needed to be drawn so that didn’t happen.
Because Israel wanted as much of the land as it could have. That’s why it forced Arabs out enough to create a Jewish majority on 78% of Mandate Palestine at the end of the Nakba, leaving only the west bank of the Jordan river as controlled by Jordan (Named Transjordan at the time.) and a strip of coastline near Egypt called Gaza. If those two countries hadn’t been threats, it’s unclear it would have stopped _at all_…in other directions, Arabs got forced entirely out of the country, ending up in Syria and Lebanon.
This 22%-size Palestine, incidentally, is called the ‘pre-1967 boundaries’, and that number might give you some indication why Palestine, which has a larger population than Israel, is unhappy with it, and how utterly surreal it is that Israel not only has huge sections of _that 22%_ off limits, but has settlements within it.
Yes, Jews could have had a small country rather successfully. The UN partition plan had very carefully drawn lines that would have given Jews a moderate majority in Israel (At the moment, at least), and the idea was to _buy out_ some of the Arabs and let them move to Palestine to make sure of that. That…is not what the Jewish militias want.
To be fair, it wasn’t what the Arab militias wanted either, I don’t want to give that impression, and Arabs were _also_ at war with Britain, but they were vastly outgunned by Jews (As evidenced later) and seemed willing to settle with the UN plan. And by the 1940s Britain, while not getting out of the colonization business, had somewhat belated realized Arabs did exists and they’d have to work with them. (Which is was one of the things Jews were pissed about.)
“how do you self-police a dude who decides to firebomb people without telling anyone? That seems pretty difficult.”
Does this mean we don’t have to worry about Calls For Stochastic Terrorism anymore?
Does this mean we don’t have to worry about Calls For Stochastic Terrorism anymore?
Why, have we started doing anything about Calls For Stochastic Terrorism? Because I heard repeatedly that was just free speech and we couldn’t do anything about it.
*checks notes*
Oh, we’ve started deporting immigrants who aim those calls towards Zionists. Or even all Jews.
Wow, that seems like a great way to run the system. Let’s pick one specific type of Stochastic Terrorism victim, and punish only immigrants for making the calls to harm them. I see no holes in that, it should fix everything.
Violent Crime in Boulder County has been on a steady decline since the spike in 2021 and 2025 is on track to be even lower than 2024.
Zohran has tweeted:
https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/ice-raid-california-fear-july-4-cancellation-20397692.php
Several Southern California cities and suburbs cancel their Fourth of July celebrations because of fears of ICE raids. Good job everyone!! Way to show how much the United States cares for freedom by making people quake in fear.
Club World Cup group sales are also down because of ICE/Trump and no one wanting to come here because of fear that they will be thrown in a detention center for sh##s and giggles. Good job everyone!
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/soccer/2025/06/28/club-world-cup-million-empty-seats/84400798007/
I think this played a role, but mostly they’re down because it’s friggin’ hot and the prices are insane. Some of the teams traveled really well, as well as they might to their continental competitions, or better (watch video of the fans of Brazilian clubs in Nashville or NYC), but Americans aren’t gonna pay out the ass for European, much less South American or African club soccer in this heat. You can see this in the USMNT’s sparsely-attended Gold Cup knockout round matchups as well.
Marshall has a good piece on Mamdani, NYC politics, and Zionism. The money section:
“But much more scarily to me is that this worldview connects the litany of not only global but local city ills to the Jewish State, like police abuse in NYC is because of Israel (the “Deadly Exchange”), the water crisis in Ferguson was because of Israel (“From Ferguson to Palestine”), the fires in LA were because of Israel (climate change because of the war, war spending meant no money for LA fire department, take your pick), NYC libraries are underfunded because of funding for Israel (cities have no impact on funding any part of the Israeli military) — these are not just random signs at marches, they are part of scholarly journals and part of the talking points of the leaders of the movement(s) which then end up as Instagram infographics — and to Within Our Lifetime, even cancer hospitals should be targeted by marches accusing them of collaborating with genocide because of a donor also giving money to Israel. In this way of looking at the world’s ills, since everything is ultimately interconnected, the message is often expressly but most of the time implied, that if we could only get rid of this one thing — Zionism and the Zionist state (not the fantasy Israel he is ok with existing, the one with all of its issues like all nation states that currently actually in the real world exists where half of the remnant of world Jewry live most as refugees from the Judenrein world) then we could not only free, free Palestine but we could free the whole entire world from all its evils. I hear the message of this logic loud and clear. Maybe to others they can’t hear it because they agree with it, or it sounds like a mere whisper but to me it is quite literally shouting in my ear that the “Jewish Problem” still exists and eradication is the only solution.
Not only does it echo with every ancient antisemitic trope and conspiracy theory since time and immemorial, that type of rhetoric and the politics behind it are expressly used to demonize “Zionism” and its proponents (🙋🏻♀️) (although their definition has very little to do with mine) here in NYC making them unwelcome in polite society, although in this modern day version, it’s righteous society, the good people society. And mainstream Jews with their petty worries about their own survival after millennia of near constant attempted destruction should just get over it and sit down and stop centering themselves and anyway we’ve given you an opportunity to enter our embrace, just reject that place and those people and unlearn your “lifetime of indoctrination”, and how you see your religion and ethnic identity, and accept not only another narrative as essentially important and open your eyes to often ugly truths that must be reckoned with and work together to create a better future out of shared trauma, but instead accept as the only truth the opposite one, replace your myth with our myth, and work to dismantle everything you think is important about you to you, make your religion universalist, and that place where your family lives, where your religious texts and language started, where your religious calendar and holidays are based, that you know is a complicated beautiful diverse place, it is really a white supremacist caricature, it is the root of all evil and you have just a made up colonial connection to it. Just say those words and you can come sit at our table and you can even practice your religion just the version that ends every seder with “Next Year in Jerusalem” as only a metaphor. Echoes are loud sometimes.
All of this at the same time that the politics are — for good reason! I believe in much of the policy goals — anti bankers, developers, and “money interests” and once you add to that “Zionists” are working against the campaign and it all feels very, very familiar. Suffocatingly familiar.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/another-perspective-on-nyc-politics-zionism-jews-and-everything-else
A few years back, there was this thing that a bunch of folks argued that they hated how “everything was getting political”.
I don’t want to watch a show that gets all political. I want to play a video game without it getting all political. The last thing in the world I want to do is go to see a Marvel movie and then have it get all political.
Remember that?
I’m sure you remember the counter-arguments too. “The choice to make an apolitical entertainment product is itself a political choice!” was the least confrontational counter-argument that I saw. Other ones involved how only people who oppose good policies could possibly oppose putting a “defund the police” message in a movie about the toxic relationship between Dracula and his ghoul set in a modern day group therapy culture.
Well, Palestine is the new hotness.
“I just want to protest police abuse without talking about Palestine!”
“I just want to support clean water in Ferguson without talking about Palestine!”
“I just want to protect our environment without talking about Palestine!”
Yeah, I hear ya. Gotham Knights was an awful disappointment.
Since the I/P issue is by definition a political issue, how does the politicization of say comic books or football, no matter what version of it, have to do with this?
You don’t see how “I’m just trying to protest food deserts!” contains the same sentiment as “I’m just trying to watch a soccer game!”?
Huh.
Anyway, the flag has been updated again.
Seems entirely fake. No product available currently, no reviews and no indication who is peddling the thing.
Jaybird going to Jaybird.
There’s this one too, but I don’t think it looks as good. The good news is: It’s in stock!
Did you scroll down and notice you can get everyone’s country imposed on a Pride flag? (Although weirdly I can’t find Israel’s.)
The Palestine one looks exceptionally stupid because of the double slight-different green.Although the flag that is merely an image of the Palestine flag on black which has the words ‘I stand with Palestine’ on it takes a close second. ” What should we put on our flag to show Palestine support?” We could put the Palestine flag?” “Perfect!” *inserts a picture of Palestine flag on a black background* “Wait, maybe people could just use _the Palestine flag_ as a _flag_?” “Too late, already typed it into the database.”
Although my favorite has to be the ‘Florida’ flag. That’s not Florida’s flag: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CWLNJZTZ
Also, I am certain that no one in existence would want this flag: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLGQY7PF
Ah yes, the proud queer people from the *checks wikipedia* Tuvan People’s Republic, which as we all know is *checks wikipedia* partially recognized socialist republic that existed between 1921 and 1944 in North Asia. And contained *checks Wikpedia* only 100,000 people in 1944, when it was folded in the USSR, then continued to be part of Russia after.
We’re _really_ playing the statistical longshot here, I guess. Of the 100,000 people alive 81 years ago, how many of those are still alive, and how many of them remember fondly this barely existing country and want to wave a (very ugly) flag of it, and how many of those people are queer and out? (Only like 2% of the population over 65 are out.) There might, hypothetical, possibly, be one person?
What a strange choice to make a flag of.
Alternately, this is someone running a ‘country and state flag database’ through a program to generate a bunch of combinations and images of the flags.
The Colonel had a business selling “I Love Elvis” buttons and he had a side business selling “I Hate Elvis” buttons.
Your haters are fans too.
Anyway, if you want an Israeli Pride Flag, they make them.
can i get a confederate-flag symbol on there to show my Southern Pride
They make them, just not available from Amazon. Can I interest you, instead, in a rainbow Gasden flag?
It doesn’t have the black or brown stripes so it’s still the white supremacist version of the rainbow flag.
So, in other words, the flag has not been updated at all but you found some either mercenary, fake or venal things on the internet that can make pride flags that have Palestinian symbiology on it.
To be fair, I am still in a mental space where I see the addition of the black and brown stripes to the bottom of the flag as a strawman (and that’s not even talking about the addition of the triangle thing with the purple circle which still strikes me as a 4chan joke that got out of hand).
Would a Palestinian Pride flag flying in the wild count as anything or would it just be us moving from “that’s a strawman” to “you’re nutpicking”?
To the same extent that, for example, a libertarian flag flying at a white nationalist or anti-semetic demonstration indicates that libertarianism is now officially pro-white nationalist and/or anti-semetic. I would aver that such a display would -not- demonstrate that- it’d simply demonstrate the opinions of the people who cobbled it together.
Now, if your link had taken us to GLAAD or the HRC or some other significant LGBTQ+ organization I’d have considerably greater difficulty brushing it off. The examples you have found, however? Effortlessly brushed off as cookery, nuttery or mercenary.
I certainly would not want to communicate that I don’t also consider it cookery, nuttery, or mercenary.
But I still feel that way about the addition of the black and brown stripe (and the triangle thingy).
I did, of course, jump on the google and see what the HRC and GLAAD had to say about Palestine (because I couldn’t believe that it’d be nothing) but GLAAD has done a good enough job of saying “look, we’re about the gay thing” that ACT UP has protested it and the HRC is, apparently, sufficiently wishy-washy that ACT UP protested them too.
So, dude. You’re right. I’ll wait until the end of the summer to see if the flag gets an *OFFICIAL* update.
GLAAD has done a good enough job of saying “look, we’re about the gay thing” that ACT UP has protested it and the HRC is, apparently, sufficiently wishy-washy that ACT UP protested them too.
I don’t think GLAAD should be saying anything about Palestine, that is not what they are for. But they sure as hell need to stop partnering with the ADL, which is one of ACT UP’s issues. GLAAD shouldn’t be anywhere _near_ anyone defending Elon Musk’s salute.
Granted, ACT UP has always hated the ADL, every since, you know, the ADL spied on them, along with basically half the civil rights organizations that existed, in cooperation with the police.
The additional elements that have been added are… ehh for me too but I think that’s largely just a getting older thing and looking askance at what the kids are doing. Objectively, adding stuff to the flag isn’t bad per say though I’d certainly say the older version is more aesthetically pleasant to me.
Also the product picture is an _image of the design_, not a flag at all.
It also, incidentally, calls the flag ‘Progressive Gay Pride LGBT…’. That is…not proper terminology at all. That image is a modified ‘Progress Pride’ flag, that is the name of that flag. Granted, a lot of things on Amazon are badly named, but that’s rather amazing…and it’s worth mentioning that, at minimum, that should be LGBTQ, not LGBT. (They do manage that in the description, at least.)
The manufacturer is listed as ‘BIG Trading’, and the only one I can find is this: https://bigtradinglimited.com/
They don’t actually appear to make anything, and instead trade a very absurd selection of products (Thai sauces, Office Chairs, and Clog Shoes) that they buy in Asia. That, while an insane selection, does not seem to include flags, and I suspect that’s not the right people.
“Scoop of chocolate, scoop of vanilla. Don’t waste my time.”
Unilever cuts off funding for Ben & Jerry’s foundation amid tensions over Gaza, audit
The Lancet reports that the closure of USAID could lead to an additional 14 million deaths by 2030. A third of those will be children: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jul/01/obama-bush-trump-usaid-closure-lancet-report-warns-extra-deaths
Let’s hear it for the Party of Life everyone!!!
I for one consider our failure to monitor deep space for large asteroids a clear sign by the Trump Administration that they don’t care about human lives. After all, a large impact could result in more than seven billion deaths!
If we were trying to situate various leftish Democratic politicians via comparison to magazines, I think AOC might be The Nation, or perhaps New Republic, and Mamdani might be Jacobin.
If you don’t know Jacobin, or know it only from center-right and right wing sources, you may not know that it was founded by a long-time, which is to say well before 2015, DSA member. If you don’t know DSA, or know it only in post-2015 form, or know it only from center-right or right wing sources, you may not know that for decades, DSA was effectively a modestly progressive, labor-focused group working within the Democratic Party. I remember going to a DSA co-chair’s house, circa 2014 or 2015, before Bernie made the party more visible (indirectly; I don’t think he’s ever been affiliated with DSA), and it was filled (and I mean filled, like every surface covered with) photos of Democratic politicians, including both Clintons, Obama, Kerry, Carter, Dukakis, and many more. Point being, pre-2015 DSA was not a hotbed of scary socialism, just regular old Welfare State capitalism with a desire for more and better unions.
So out of that wing of the Democratic Party came Jacobin, but after 2015, its leadership seized the moment, and explicitly began running articles by authors who ranged from moderately progressive Democrats to social anarchists and full-blown communists, though its overall leanings were, and remain, mostly in the realm of Scandinavian social democracy. And with all of that said, I think that’s where I’d situation Mamdani: Scandinavian social democracy with a bit of a taste for the harder left, and a bit of an appeal to the squishier progressive liberal.
Meanwhile, The Nation and The New Republic are publications that you might catch some leftists reading, but which are aimed firmly at progressive liberals.
Ah crap, meant to link to Jacobin’s latest take on Mamdani, in the context of the comparison: https://jacobin.com/2025/06/zohran-mamdani-national-lessons-progressive-democrats
Partial verdict in Sean Combs case. The jury has reached a verdict on everything but the racketeering charge. The substance of the verdict was not announced, apparently, though it seems that the judge and lawyers know what it is. (My guess is that the verdict was guilty on at least some charges because the racketeering charge requires underlying predicate acts and there would be no point deliberating racketeering without at least some convictions on the other charges.) The jury will continue to deliberate on the racketeering charge.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/arts/music/sean-combs-diddy-trial-partial-verdict.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20250701&instance_id=157644&nl=breaking-news®i_id=55253477&segment_id=201037&user_id=b9ab17a3692cdf24769d77ce14fa3052
Is there a post anywhere about Alligator Auschwitz, or should I just reminisce here about back when righties were panicking about Obama putting people in FEMA concentration camps? Good times, good times.
What could possibly go wrong with housing people in cages, in tents, in an isolated swamp, in a hurricane-prone state, during hurricane season?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/01/us/what-is-alligator-alcatraz-florida
I think that what’s wrong with it now is the same things that were wrong with it back then, which means that people criticizing it now are, just like back then, nothing more than conspiracy-theory idiots concerned over Facebook fake photos, mouth-pooping a reflexively-contrarian response to something That Guy They Don’t Like did (which was what we heard when we said “maybe this isn’t a good idea” between 2008 and 2016.)
The photos are from both the Admin itself, and CNN.
(so were the photos we saw in the Obama admin and we were confidently assured that those were used out of context, framed for shock effect, didn’t represent the current situation, or were just straight-up fake)
They are also described verbally and in text by the Admin.
” “Alligator-Alcatraz,” according to the governor’s office, is designed to be “completely self-contained.” Migrants will be housed in repurposed FEMA trailers and “soft-sided temporary facilities,” a Department of Homeland Security official told CNN.
The same tents are often used to house those displaced by natural disasters, like hurricanes, DeSantis’ office said. Indeed, they will provide the only shelter from the elements, as temperatures soar into the 90s and powerful storms move across the Everglades. “
Yes, and I’m sure that’s being overblown by reporting and there are plenty of less-confrontational messages and the overall situation is much less hazardous then you’re implying and you’re just cherry-picking the worst parts of it in bad faith, like the racist critics of Obama did at the time.
I’m a little confused here about the point you’re making. You seem to be agreeing that creating FEMA concentration camps, here reported by both the Admin and CNN, is bad (and if I read that right, that agreement is very good!); but we seem to be parting ways when I observe that Obama was not in fact creating FEMA concentration camps while Trump is, which seems to me a rather material difference and a striking irony.
You’re right, Obama didn’t create concentration camps, in the same way that Trump is not now creating concentration camps.
What is happening _here_ is that you are talking about the actual conspiracies theories under Obama about FEMA concentraction camps, whereas DensityDuck has confused those _conspiracy theories_ with actual pictures of migrant detention centers.
And he ignores all the differences between those things under Obama and Trump, like the fact that under Obama, being housed in those conditions was extremely temporary, 72-hours at most. Trump was criticized for continuing to keep people there long-term, but mostly about the fact he was separating children from their parents to put them in there.
Seven of those children died under Trump. There are no reported deaths there, either children or adults, there under Obama.
Oh, and this exceptionally stupid because you’re talking about _tent cities_ and the outrage over Trump and Obama was _chain length fences erected inside_, which are entirely different things. Inside chain length fences are just cheap walls with no privacy and somewhat dehumanizing, tents in a swamp can actually get people killed.
Hey, why do you misremember Obama putting migrants in tents?
The libertarians have definitely all left this building.
Hey, *I* stopped being one in 2015. Wrote an essay about it and everything.
It might be nice to go back to argue against people who were frozen in amber in 2007, though.
“Do you support detaining undocumented visitors in a cruel prison?”
“Absolutely not! What a horrible question!”
“Do you support tax dollars being used to pay for gender affirming surgeries for undocumented visitors?”
“Um, what? What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Some of the LatinX undocumented need gender affirming surgeries.”
“What in the hell is ‘LatinX’? What in the hell is gender affirming surgery?”
(Note: The use of ‘LatinX’ in 2025 is a strawman. Everybody dropped using that term the *SECOND* Biden lost and it was on its way out for a year or so before that.)
I admit that, as someone who finds the metaphysics of American libertarianism problematic (to the point of naivety), and the political-economic beliefs of American libertarianism abhorrent (something I used to say here as well, occasionally), the fact that all it took to break up libertarianism as an American political moment was a paranoia about racial equality and the visibility of transgender people, has been a real “I told you so!” moment for me.
That said, I wish we had some people among American conservatism who actually cared about rights while we continue to live in a political system that so easily collapses into authoritarianism without them.
Well, back in 2015, my conclusion was that Libertarianism was something that was only possible in a very small set of circumstances and requires one hell of a lot of pre-reqs to even make it possible.
If you get rid of the pre-reqs, Libertarianism isn’t even wrong.
Now that I think about it, socialism has somewhat similar pre-reqs.
Get rid of those pre-reqs and, after a decade or so, you’ll find yourself saying “that wasn’t *REAL* socialism” from a place that still has those pre-reqs in place.
What are we defining as socialism here?
I think you’d be surprised at the nuance and sophistication with which socialists have dealt with the history of actual socialism, starting in the 19th century. Hell, there are whole intellectual traditions within socialist scholarship that are focused entirely on reckoning with the history of socialism.
I mean, you’d have to read some socialists to know these things, and I get the impression absolutely no one here is interested in doing so, so this is the equivalent of me typing to a tree, but whatever.
Yeah, I’m familiar with the whole “you’re not a *REAL* Scotsman!” thing that happens among Libertarian/Socialists and I’m also familiar with the whole issue of how you should read the real ones and not the fake ones to get an accurate picture.
Remember the Black Panther tweet?
Black Panther was a fine movie but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end the Black Panther turned to the camera & said “i am communist now” & then specified hes the exact kind of communist i am
I’m also familiar with that phenomenon too.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I should read another book.
This is sort of the opposite of what I was saying: socialists actually deal with actual socialism. I mean, you might, in an online conversation, encounter people who don’t, but I can’t think of a political tendency that is more self-critical. But like I said, talking to trees.
Wait, so if I have spoken with people who used the “that wasn’t *REAL* socialism” argument as a defense against this or that criticism of this or that country, then those people weren’t actual socialists?
Because I think that something like “look, I know that there are quite a few people out there who argued quite a few very bad arguments in defense of socialism and, I get it. For what it’s worth, you should also engage with much better arguments in defense of socialism and while I agree with you that it’s sad that these arguments are much more rare than the bad ones, I’d ask you to help with the good arguments by merely acknowledging that they exist!” would do a lot more to acknowledge that, yes, this is not my first goat rodeo.
You can’t see me, but I’m banging my head against the desk.
Yeah, you’ll encounter people, even genuine socialists, who’ll argue that. Sometimes they have a point (e.g., there are aspects of the Soviet Union that betrayed its own revolution pretty much from the start), sometimes they don’t (I don’t think it makes much sense to say that the Soviet Union wasn’t largely socialist, even if that socialism turned into state capitalism). But unlike libertarians, who, when they still existed, lived in a world built by their own ideas, and whose only criticism of that world was that it wasn’t true enough to those ideas, socialists have spent pretty much the entire last century, and even much of the 19th, analyzing what went wrong in what they consider to be actual examples of socialism. Hell, if you talk to socialists seriously, without carrying this baggage you obviously have, you’ll have no problem hearing even a lot of just regular, everyday socialists do this. If you talk to socialist intellectuals, you’ll probably find it’s what they talk about the most (or at least, actual examples of socialism along with actual socialists today will be what they talk about the most).
MattY just had a pretty good tweet where he said It’s confusing for everyone that “socialism” applies to a set of ideas that ranges from “copy Canada’s health care system” to “copy Mao’s Great Leap Forward.”
Back when one of my professors sang us The Internationale, he explained to us that one of the most vexing things about Communism was that the agrarian countries adopted it and the industrialist countries failed to. “Capitalism is really good at improvising and making tradeoffs”, he told us.
The fact that half of GenX remembers East Germany probably doesn’t help much either… so when there’s a “look, we should try it *WITHOUT* a Stasi”, there’s a huge problem the second there’s a movement to ban a handful of Dr. Seuss books made by people who don’t remember East Germany.
All that to say: The elder socialists might have learned their lessons but the younger ones have not.
I read your Schumer book review and clicked on the main page. The first essay I saw when I scrolled down?
Queer Is Total, Baby! Toward a Communist Universalism and the Militancy We Desire
Ah, the October Revolution. Slava Ukraini!
You may just have to wait for enough old people to die and then the revolution will have fewer cynics to put up against the wall.
chris
you are doing exactly the thing jaybird says that you do
you are epitomizing the criticism
“The libertarians have definitely all left this building.”
we tried to say “don’t give the government the power to do this kind of thing” and we were told that the government needed this power, that it was necessary to the government’s mission that it have this power, and that it was pointless intransigence at best and more likely an attack on the fundamental concept of society to suggest the government should not have this power, and plus which we were racists who just wanted racism to be legal
…are you seriously arguing that libertarians have argued that the US government should not have the power to detain people and deport people who came into this country in violation of US border policy? Since when?
Why don’t you explain exactly what thing Obama shouldn’t have been able to do with immigration policy that violates libertarian ideals about the government use of power? The actual thing that libertarianism says that the government cannot do.
I’m not actually sure anyone is arguing that the government _shouldn’t have the power_ to detain and deport undocumented people except anarchists. People opposed to what Trump is doing is mostly asserting that a) the government should not do that (Aka, the policy is bad, not that is is unconstitutional), and b) also the government has to actually use due process to do so, not random allegations, which actually _is_ unconstitutional, and c) a lot of these people have not, in fact, violated any law at all, and a lot of them appear to be arrested while complying with the law, which the courts literally agree with. (And d), you shouldn’t be absurdly blatantly over-the-top racist while doing this.)
Here’s an essay I found about it: https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-argument-open-borders
You may notice the arguments there are not based in any sort of ‘The government should not be allowed to do this’. The closest it comes is asserting that the government would not be particularity good at determine who is asset to the county and who is not, which, yeah, that’s a libertarian position, but it sure as hell is not ‘The government should not have this discretionary power’, and the essay is very clear the US government has the right to keep out people for objective things, like finding criminality in a court of law.
And note this entire essay is an attempt to convince libertarians on an issue that they do not agree on, it’s not presented as ‘here is libertarian thought’. And one thinks if they had some slam-dunk ‘The government should not be allowed to police this stuff under basic libertarian principles’, they’d be using that instead of ‘It has economic benefits’
are you seriously arguing that libertarians have argued that the US government should not have the power to (insert policy here)
Yes.
It is breathtakingly easy to say that libertarians have argued that.
“But not all of them have!”
“Yes. Not all of them have.”
“Q.E.D.”
“I guess.”
Happy Canadian 4th of July (observed).
The Diddy Verdict is *IN*.
Guilty on the two counts of “Transport for Prostitution”, Not Guilty on the sex trafficking ones or the RICO one.
While this absolutely brutal review is specifically about the Schumer book, much of what it says applies to many of the Israel supporters here: https://spectrejournal.com/chuck-schumer-in-america-a-warning/
Welp, Microsoft just cancelled a buncha games and is laying off a buncha devs at 343 and Rare and The Initiative.
The only way out is through.
G/O Media has just sold Kotaku to the guys who own Gizmodo. This might be a “out of the fire, back in the frying pan” situation.
The only G/O property left is The Root.
Danish authorities arrest man for allegedly gathering intelligence on Jewish sites in Germany for Iran:
https://apnews.com/article/germany-berlin-denmark-iran-jews-6eaaec0849c60043cfb16077c6f1db53
I have no idea what Iran thought it would get by attacking Jewish sites outside of Israel.
Laura Loomer posted on Twitter June 30th in reference to the migrant detention camp that just opened.
“Alligator lives matter.
The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.”
In addition to it being utterly deranged to threaten to feed people to alligators, it’s important to notice that there are not 65 million undocumented immigrants in the US. That number is somewhere between 11-13 million.
There are, however, about 65 million Hispanic people in the US.
No one ever gets to complain about people calling Trumpism ‘White Nationalism’ again, or pretend this isn’t actually about race. Loomer just came out and said it, and said where this entire thing is going. Just straight up ethnic cleansing.
RIP to Michael Madsen. He was always one of my favorite B list or character actors or however you’d classify him. He’s also one of few celebrities I have seen in real life (albeit at a distance), during filming of what I believe was Species II.
I am sorry that we will never see Humdinger.
He was terrifying in Reservoir Dogs and amazingly complex in Kill Bill. He did a good job of communicating that he was thinking of a hell of a lot more violence than he was acting on.
It’s too bad that he had so many demons. He could have been in a hell of a lot more good, solid flicks. I suppose we should feel grateful for the ones we got.
The BBB passed in the House. Looks like we might have an Independence Day signing.
Some theorize that if fewer old Democrats had not died in office, the bill might not have passed. Others ask “MURC’S LAW!”
The important thing is that pot is still Schedule 1 and Daylight Saving Time remains untouched.
The most optimistic take is that it is moving us a few more steps towards a fiscal crisis that might in theory prompt the seriousness we need to get the country on something like a sustainable footing. We probably won’t though. This feels like one of those episodes you read about in history where a country or a people had real but manageable problems yet inexplicably decided to implode on themselves.
Seriously, after we raise the debt ceiling this time, we’ll finally be in a good position to tackle spending.
I think that’s part of the equation but I think we can all appreciate that there are differences between good and bad spending. The idea that it’s going to be good to let China take over the future of energy production while we stand on the sidelines doesn’t add up to me. We also may need to accept that tax rates need to bear some relationship with what we are democratically choosing to spend.
And look I’m not a fanatic on this subject. Knocking a bunch of low income women and children off of their health insurance is not where I’d start with respect to cuts but if the GOP was doing it in combination with letting the 2017 tax cuts expire as a step to getting our house in order I’d at least respect it. Tax and spend has its flaws but they pale in comparison to don’t tax and spend anyway.
Bring back the confiscatory tax rates of the Clinton years. Hell, we might be better off with the Reagan tax program.
They made sure the worst cuts won’t take effect until after the midterms. That should tell you everything you need to know about how this goes down.
No Jay – the most important thing g is how big they made ICE. That sort of force is not being assembled to just deport people who committed a
Misdemeanor by crossing the border without permission.
Ranked against countries’ defense budgets, ICE is now 16th in the world. Just behind South Korea, which has an existential threat across the border, and Canada, which has to meet NATO requirements. In terms of authorized FTE personnel, ICE is now bigger than the US Marine Corps.
The tragic part of this is that the overwhelming amount of that expansion is going to be used for corruption so brazen it makes Teapot Dome look like the height of good government.
And that is the best case scenario if the money is just used to line pockets.
Argentina to try 10 Iranians and Lebanese in absentia for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires.
https://apnews.com/article/argentina-amia-jewish-center-bombing-iran-israel-mieli-attack-79673bdf0b30e8f90e8fb3eb7223adf5
I just read the Wikipedia summary of the history of this case, and it looks like a compete mess. We’ll see if any conclusions come out of it.
Unlikely. It’s been 30 years and “in absentia” really means they haven’t even started yet. Everyone involved will be dead before anything happens… assuming they’re not already.
In today’s merely anti-Zionist not anti-Semitic, Jewish students in public high schools in New England face gas chamber taunts, you know what salutes, and teams of bullies calling themselves Team Auschwitz and Team Hamas. Meanwhile, the usual suspects on the Left will cast their eyes innocently about and pretend that they aren’t encouraging anti-Semitism.
https://www.today.com/parents/family/civil-rights-complaint-antisemitism-concord-school-rcna216476
So “the left” is to blame for this and not bad parents. Do tell.
Teachers have been encouraging this with unofficial lessons about Zionism as settler-colonialism. Also teaching that Jews aren’t a real minority or oppresssed group but wypipo doing wypipo things. This has happened in the Bay Area as well. You want the Right to take responsibility for anti-Semitism from it’s side but you want the Left to be free of all responsibiltiy.
https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/massachusetts-crime-statistics-data-shows-anti-jewish-hate-crimes-spiking/3757150/
What I want is for accountability to be placed accurately.
Trump is going into straight up Jew bashing by using the term shylock.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/04/trump-rally-jewish-stereotype/
Footage of Mamdani talking about “seizing the means of production” was circulating over the last day or so. If you’re completely unfamiliar with the phrase, Politifact has you covered: In Context: Zohran Mamdani’s use of phrase ‘seizing the means of production.’ What’s it mean?
The Red-Baiting begins.
Yeah, it’s really unfair that people call the members of the DSA “commies”.
The real question is what even are the means of production in 21st century America? Servers and espresso machines?
Location, location, location.
Software is a bit wacky on it’s “location” but that doesn’t change someone owns it. You’d seize the “means of production” of software by just seizing the ownership of the company.
If we’re talking about Mamdani, that seemed to be something mentioned, in passing, not even as a potential policy proposal so he should be given a pass on it.
I’ve seen nothing suggesting he’s an outright communist.
He isn’t. But it’s so easy to troll low information voters with that word. Because explains what democratic socialism is is too much to take in.
You’d seize the “means of production” of software by just seizing the ownership of the company.
Yeah, and communism is generally understood to be when _everyone_ owns _all_ the means of production, collectively. All of society owns all the means, collectively. The Workers own the Means of Production.
Democratic Socialists instead emphasis worker-owned companies. People own the company they work at, or at least have a large say in it via a powerful union. ‘The Workers’ do not own every company.
It’s worth pointing out that, even if this was implemented, absolutely no one is suggesting ‘seizing’ anything from anyone, at least not without compensation. It isn’t ‘We are taking this company from you’, and is more ‘You are required to start reserving a certain percentage of your stock to employees’. And the DSA doesn’t even have any plans for anything like that, it’s just that is, in theory, vaguely, what Democractic Socialists _might_ do if they magically were in charge.
Honestly, the DSA website currently mostly talks about things like stronger unions and more housing and better election processes and environmental stuff, and it’s hard to see any ‘socialism’ at all. I don’t even see them arguing for free healthcare. Kind of disappointing. Libertarians are somehow more organized.
They are calling for “Green Social Housing”, not “more housing”. That website used to be a lot more informative and interesting.
The cynic in me wonders if this is what’s left after they removed the outright communist sections.
Do you have a link for DSA calling for reserving (significant) percentage of stock for employees?
I know I and some crazy 21st century distributists have called for that… but I can’t say I’ve seen the DSA or other socialist go beyond boring ESOP or general ’employee owned businesses’
I’m definitely in favor of diluting existing shares (a ‘taking’ that happens all the time by and among VC) as a rolling one-time event for existing corporations… so I’d be willing to lend written support, even if I doubt I’d back much else from the DSA. 🙂
Oh, and it has surfaced that Mamdani put himself down as “African-American” when he applied to Columbia.
I think that this is supposed to be a smear but, as a Native American, I don’t think that this is a big deal.
from NYT “Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application”, a tasty little nugget you edited. Since you’re here shall we call Elon Musk African-American?
Eon Musk can indeed be properly described as an African-America.
Mamdani is from Uganda. That’s a country South of South Sudan.
I don’t recognize any of their ethnic groups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Uganda#Ethnic_groups
He’s literally an “African American” but I’m not sure his ethnic group has an American translation.
The article itself also seems to make a big deal that he checked ‘Asian’ _also_, which is weird to mention because…uh…India is in Asia. And he is of Indian ethnicity, everyone knows this. Even within our stupid social construct of races, he’s Indian. He ‘looks Indian’, his parents were from India, his fricking name is Indian in origin, there’s no way he doesn’t count. Like, why even mention he checked ‘Asian’
…oh, wait, I know. A lot of American are _really ignorant_ and when they hear Asian, think only of ‘People from China or Japan or Korea or Vietnam or all those Asian countries I don’t know the name of’. (I’m reminded of Kahn on King of the Hill having to explain what the hell Laos was.)
Pretty sure the NYT is counting on their readers to not actually understand that, and vaguely think that India is the Middle East, and jump to the assumption that Mamdani was lying about being Asian also.
India is generally not considered part of the Middle East, but the Middle East _also_ is Asia, anyway! The Middle East is Southwest Asia, India is South Asia, and the places that American often think of as ‘Asia’ in America are in Southeast Asia. And those are just the places in ‘southern’ Asia. Asia is actually pretty damn big and has a wide variety of ethnic groups, including a bunch of white people living up in Russia.
But the NYT is trying to pull a double-fast one there, getting negative-information voters to go ‘He’s not African-American or Asian! The liar!’
(b4 someone corrects me, I just noticed that I somehow left out the word ‘mainly’, and yes, I am aware that the Middle East extends into Africa with Egypt and into Europe with tiny part of Turkey. I just know someone would nitpick if I didn’t mention that.)
I think that there are two *ENTIRELY* different ways to look at the whole “African-American” thing.
One is from the perspective of the Progressive. “We put these slots aside for BIPOC and AAPI peoples. Mamdani totally qualifies.”
One is from the perspective of the African-American. “Holy crap! That was *OUR* setaside! He was trying to take a slot that was meant for *US*.”
If you look at the various responses of the various people that the NYT finds to be outraged about this, they’re almost all African-American. The people who don’t find it a big deal? Almost all Progressive.
Oh, _that’s_ the mode you’re in. It’s sometimes very hard to tell what media universe you exist within. There’s a _reason_ we keep complaining about how no one knows what you are talking about.
The reason here is that conservatives are just lying to you. Not only is that not how anything works, but there is absolutely no actual person on the left outraged by this.
Mostly because people on the left are actually aware that ‘slots’ do not work like that, and that entire complaint is nonsense. If the school decides that ‘enough’ Black students for a year to not get sued and now they can do what their racist hearts want and admit only white students, that’s the school doing that.
In addition, minorities actually understand how complicated identity can be. Have an article: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-it-means-to-check-the-race-box-on-college-applications
I’m sure there are plenty of Black who are outraged, and they’re probably mostly conservatives who are somewhat motivated to be outraged…or Eric Adams, mysteriously.
The left is mostly outraged by the NYT trying to race-bait with implication.
I’m sure there are plenty of Black who are outraged, and they’re probably mostly conservatives who are somewhat motivated to be outraged…or Eric Adams, mysteriously.
The sampling of Black that gets represented does seem to be fans of Adams. I’m not sure what kind of “conservatives”, though. If we went digging we might find them opposed to stuff like “Defund the Police” but we might also find them to have voted for New York Democrats in the past.
“Insufficiently Progressive” is a term that probably fits.
But which is the cart and which is the horse?
Patrick Healy, Assistant Managing Editor, has been manthreading about why the New York Times reported true information about the readers’ preferred candidate.
If I recall correctly, a fair number of Indians living in Uganda when it was part of the British Empire. Idi Amin drove them out when he took power.
Better than eating them, I guess.
It really is amazing watching the NYT flailing around trying to defend this attack, and it’s been amazing watching others try to justify their _feelings_ as to why someone who was born in Uganda, which is in Africa, and is an American citizen is somehow not really an African-America.
Hey, folks: Race is a social construct. That’s why y’all are having trouble with someone answering the question in a manner that is _literally correct_, but not fitting into the social construct of how America’s magically ‘know’ how race works. (And it’s why Mamdani then wrote in there that he was from Uganda, because he knew they’d misunderstand him to be Black and wanted to explain he wasn’t Black, just literally from Africa. Which means the entire implication of this story that he was trying to lie is, indeed, a lie.)
In college, I had a Kenyan roommate who was _doubly_ pissed about being classified as African-American, because, firstly, he wasn’t American, and secondly, because he considered himself Kenyan, not ‘African’, and thought Americans were racists for thinking Africa was one place, but somehow knowing the difference between Irish-Americans and Italian-American, etc.
I don’t think he ever understood that was just what we were calling Black people at the time.
Yes, all that.
Yeah, there’s always a funny kerfuffle when someone in Europe refers to “African-Americans” when they’re talking about Africans who happen to have dark skin.
Anyway, the worst part of this is not that it’s an attack.
It’s that it’s funny.
It’s that it’s funny.
I don’t know if you’re serious there, but it actually is darkly funny that Uganda’s brutal dictotor, Idi Amin, violently expelled 50,000 Asians, mostly from India, including 23,000 _citizens_, and seized their property.(1) On the grounds they were not truly Ugandan. As part of a campaign of anti-Indian sentiment and black supremacy that was running wild in Uganda at the time.
And 50 years later, the US is now arguing if ‘people from India living in Uganda can count as truly African’.
Maybe let’s _not_ try to mainstream basically the same idea as the horrifically evil ethnic cleansing guy?
…ah, New York Times, I can’t say that to you with a straight face, I know you guys are such lovable bigoted scamps. Weird to see you on board with _black_ supremacy, though, that’s an interesting change of pace!
1) If anyone is wondering why the hell there were so many Indians in Uganda, it’s the same answer as it always was in the 70s: The British. They had brought 32,000 of them there as _indentured servants_.
Oh, I wasn’t laughing at Idi Amin’s cannibalism! (Which, let me point out to the racists in the audience, was never confirmed! All we have are examples of him bragging about literally eating his enemies and describing the flavor of the meat but he could easily have just been doing that as a negotiating tactic the way that Trump does which, may I point out, you don’t mind.)
I was laughing at Mamdani putting “African-American” on there.
You’d think that we’d have a bunch of repurposable Elizabeth Warren jokes handy but none of them quite fit.
Idi Amin is a mass murdering authoritarian (Arguable fascist, at least fascist-adjacent, but tilted more military junta.) despot who disappeared between 80,000 and 300,000 people under his regime.
I don’t really know why you’re bring the fairly-unsupported allegations of cannibalism into this.
You’d think that we’d have a bunch of repurposable Elizabeth Warren jokes handy but none of them quite fit.
Yeah, the racism has failed this time and you guys all look stupid. (Not sure why you’re putting yourself on the stupid side, but, hey, you did that.)
It’s not racist to make fun of him for claiming to be African-American.
Neither was it racist to make fun of Elizabeth Warren for claiming to be Native American.
For him, not racist but also not correct. For a form that limits explanations to “check this box”, “African-American” is likely the most accurate answer.
For her, still not racist and absolutely correct since her claims were factually incorrect (at best) and (more likely) a self serving deception.
Idi Amin’s cannibalism! (Which, let me point out to the racists in the audience, was never confirmed!
Still not “racism”. Idi Amin was a rule-by-fear dictator who bragged about this.
It is possible (likely?) he was lying to increase his legend because killing tens or hundreds of thousands of people wasn’t enough. However since he owned and wanted the reputation it’s not “racist” to accuse him of it.
And now bad people are digging deep into Mamdani’s social medias and finding stuff from as far back as December 2024. Here’s a post where he and his friends made a video celebrating Night 3 of Hannukah.
There are arguments over whether or not this is offensive or whether it is funny or, of course, whether it is both.
And that’s not even touching on whether it’s fair to dig into stuff that people may have said when they weren’t expecting to win a primary.
You think _he_ made that? That he’s a member of the Geeta Brothers, a *check duckduckgo AI summary* “a duet group known for their contributions to Punjabi music, including popular Christmas album hits. They have a diverse appeal, reaching audiences in various languages and cultures.”
Big if true!
Or, considering this was on the Christmas album ‘Punjabi Christmas Album Hits’ ( https://open.spotify.com/track/6TXMjG1SphiuhPO0eNnhVV ), we can consider what this _actually_ is, which is just this music group singing a (I assume Punjabi.) song about Hanukkah.
I can’t find any of the lyrics typed out anywhere to run them through the google translate, ad the great thing about not understanding the words and finding the music unfamiliar and the low-budget dancing comedic, is we can pretend this is a deliberate mocking of Jews. Instead of just a non-Jewish group (We assume!) singing a upbeat song about Hanukkah on a holiday album, and making not-very-good, but not offensive, music video to go along with it!
They also have a Kwanzaa song on there, let’s be sure to be outraged by that also.
Oh, and of course, a bunch of Christmas songs, and they’re unlikely to be Christians.
I live in a universe totally devoid of culture existing and do not approve of people singing religious songs they don’t actually believe in, or even songs _about_ religious things. And I assume anything said in a language I don’t understand about a thing is mocking that thing.
Barbara Streisand’s Christmas album?
I’m not outraged! Why in the world would you assume that?
I’m one of the guys who thinks it’s funny!
Ahem. You said this There are arguments over whether or not this is offensive or whether it is funny or, of course, whether it is both..
This song is not offensive. At all. Nor it maybe ‘offensive and funny’, and including that as if it was one of the option also makes it sound like the ‘funny’ is because it is slightly mocking, instead of it just being ‘not very good as a music video and thus inadvertently funny’.
In other words, you positioned this as ‘Here is a song where Mamdani and his friend mildly mocked Hanukkah. Opinions are split on if it’s funny or if it’s offensive’.
That is how anyone reading your post would understand it, that there a thing that _some people_ might find offensive but others interpret it as an attempt at humor. We’ve all seen that, a joke maybe taken too far, and people are debating it. Furthermore, you stated Mamdani was part of _making_ this joke.
That is wrong in every possible way. The actual situation is: Last Hanukkah, Mamdani wished everyone a happy Hanukkah and linked to a video of a song about Hanukkah from a Christmas album by some normal-ish Punjabi musicians. It looks somewhat amateurish as a music video, but it does not appear to be any manner offensive, and watching it and what they do in it, it’s pretty easy to guess they’re probably just singing about some Hanukkah stuff like spinning a dreidel and lighting a menorah one candle at a time. (Like, we all know what a generic ‘song about Hanukkah’ written by non-Jews trying to explain the holiday talks about.)
And you also said this And now bad people are digging deep into Mamdani’s social medias and finding stuff from as far back as December 2024 and this was the example.
There is absolutely no reason for anyone to be criticized for linking to a amateur-ish music video of a song about Hanukkah on Hanukkah! That is not ‘stuff that has been found’.
In other words, you positioned this as ‘Here is a song where Mamdani and his friend mildly mocked Hanukkah. Opinions are split on if it’s funny or if it’s offensive’.
If I were to say that the guys in the video did anything, I’d say that they were appropriating some kind of -face.
I specifically did *NOT* say that they were mocking Hanukkah. I said that they were celebrating it.
Were they wearing -face? Eh. I suppose, if there’s offense to be made, it’s in whether or not you think that there was. While I think that there are arguments to be made that everything was all in good fun and anybody who is ticked off about the video should calm down and lighten up, I don’t think that it’s a “HOW DARE YOU BE OFFENDED” situation.
I mean, for one, “HOW DARE YOU BE OFFENDED” just doesn’t work. At all.
I do think that his social media feed communicates that he had no idea that he was going to come *CLOSE* to winning, though. “I don’t need to clean up anything that might cause a problem… I’m going up against Cuomo, for Vinayaki’s sake!”
And now here we are.
Oh, and I’m more likely to see stuff like this as likely to help him than hurt him.
The regular dems have no idea why Cuomo was an offensive choice and Mamdani was preferable to the old sclerotic party machinery.
The old sclerotic party machinery keeps digging stuff like this up and, unfortunately, they think “this makes him look *BAD*” and, instead, it makes him look “authentic” and, just like Trump, they’re throwing attacks at him that bounce off and they can’t comprehend why.
“Something like this would have ended Cuomo’s career.”
(The “African-American” thing is going to remain a problem, though. Not because it, itself, is a big deal… it’s because of some of the defenses of it will be given by white progressives to Black liberals and the semiotic content will speak much louder than any given semantic content.)
I think “the African-American thing” is going to be as much of a problem as Liz Warren Claiming Cherokee Heritage was, in that people will forever be bringing it up because it just confirms too many of their priors for them to ever stop enjoying it.
I specifically did *NOT* say that they were mocking Hanukkah. I said that they were celebrating it.
You may not have said that, but everyone talking about this video is. They keep talking, over and over, about how it’s ‘satire’ and a ‘spoof’ and ‘sick’. (While not bothering to release any translation.)
Were they wearing -face? Eh. I suppose, if there’s offense to be made, it’s in whether or not you think that there was. While I think that there are arguments to be made that everything was all in good fun and anybody who is ticked off about the video should calm down and lighten up, I don’t think that it’s a “HOW DARE YOU BE OFFENDED” situation.
It’s not ‘how dare you be offended’ situation, it’s ‘pretty much all the ‘offense’ at this manipulating people’.
Aimee Mann has sung a Hannukkah song. She is not Jewish. Do I need to link to _Glee_ singing Oh Hannukkah? It is not any sort of -face for non-believers to sing a holiday song, much merely less singing _about_ a holiday. I am sure there are some actual sacred worship songs or whatever that people shouldn’t sing, but holiday songs are not that. There isn’t any framework where people could find that non-believers singing about Hannukkah. No one would even suggest that!
…unless the song was mocking in some manner.
And maybe it is. The group does do comedy. But…there are different kinds of comedy, not all of it is mocking something, and it’s even possible to mock _yourself_ instead of the thing you’re singing about.
And here’s a clip from their Kwanzaa song:
https://youtu.be/lHOM-6O2XOw?t=154
The people being made fun of in that video are very clearly the singers, making fun of themselves, with the Black people in the video just glaring or rolling their eyes at the nonsense.
…hey, wait. Are those two other people in the Hannukkah video Jewish? Is this the exact same concept, where these guys come in and celebrate a holiday they aren’t part of, and the actual members of the group are somewhat annoyed at the interlopers who have decided they’re part of the group?
Is this just ‘White and Nerdy’?
Addition: Wait wait wait. Was _Mamdani_ posting this to make fun of the fact that he himself was wishing Jewish people Happy Hannukkah while not, himself, being Jewish? A self-aware ‘I shall, like everyone else, wish you a happy holiday with entirely rote words, because I am an outsider and do not understand the actual meaning of this for you’. Huh.
Oh, you think that my references to “-face” was that they were singing a song?
Allow me to clear that part up. It was not. It involved the outfits and activities. *NOT* the song.
Maybe if we just establish that the types of folks pretending to be offended are Eve Barlow-level grifters, we can make pretending to be offended a low-status act again.
Allow me to clear that part up. It was not. It involved the outfits and activities. *NOT* the song.
…the outfits? Do you mean the wigs they wear in _all_ their videos? I don’t really get the wigs, they just look silly, but they certainly did not put them on to ‘look Jewish’. Or the outfits, which appear to be normal shirts with white pants is…actually a common Indian style. (And in Miami, weirdly. Patterned shirt and white pants. Maybe it’s a heat thing.)
Do you mean the _other_ two guys? The musicians for the video? The group is actually the two singers, it’s why it’s called the Geeta Brother’s Duet Group right there in the title of the video. They get other people to be in their videos.
And those two…could actually be Jewish, as I pointed out. They got actual Black people to play Black people in their Kwanzaa video, to roll their eyes at what is going one, like those two musicians do here, and it would be basically the same gag as _that_ video.
Yeah, that should wrap it up. We can say that the people who are pretending to be offended can be dismissed entirely.
(Hey, do you think we could get away with calling them “woke”?)
“Ahem. You said this There are arguments over whether or not this is offensive or whether it is funny or, of course, whether it is both..”
Yes, he did say that.
You’re reading an awful lot into it based mostly on you being triggered by Jaybird doing anything at all.
Oh, remember the Kennedy thing? They’ve released a document admitting that George Joannides had a fake ID with the name Howard Gebler.
I mean, who hasn’t had a fake ID? If you go visit Mother Muffs in Old Colorado City, you’ll see a wall with confiscated IDs all over it.
George was CIA. The way to bet is he had more than one.