Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024
On this day in 1938, The League of Nations unanimously outlawed “intentional bombings of civilian populations”.
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.
California just legalized marijuana cafes. (This is after the governor vetoed Farmer’s Markets for weed.)
The sticking point was California’s “no smoking” laws.
So they hammered out that the staff in the back that makes the food would be protected from the smokers in the front.
I guess that, to this point, California’s lounges worked like Colorado’s taprooms. You could buy the beer and drink the beer in the taproom but the taproom couldn’t produce or serve food.
So there was usually a food truck parked next to the taproom and you could wander back and forth between the two.
I don’t understand the farmer’s market veto but, hey. If those farmer’s markets were like the farmer’s markets when I was a kid, it’s probably related to the whole haggling/cash thing. It was easy to sweet talk a farmer and get an extra ear of corn or a bonus pint of blueberries. Doing that with stuff that’s still federally regulated? That’s just asking for trouble. Probably.Report
Yeah, farmer’s markets (and craft fairs) are one of the last bastion of the fiddle where you get a “discount” for paying cash. I could understand how the state would not want a highly-regulated (and -taxed) good being sold there.Report
One of the many downstream impacts of Biden’s intervening in the railroad workers strike last year is that business will now expect him to intervene in everything for the rest of his term – and by extension will expect Harris to do so as well.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/27/nx-s1-5124956/dockworkers-strike-shipping-east-gulf-coast-portsReport
The two sides haven’t held negotiations since June. Docker workers want an 80% pay increase and for there to NOT have automation in ports.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/consumer/article-13907379/warning-dockworkers-strike-price-rises-shelves.htmlReport
The media continues to sanewash for Trump. CNN is stating that Trump is offering a message for unity after Helene. He is doing nothing of the sort: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/more-sanewashing-from-the-national-mediaReport
None of the MSM should be accused of liberal bias ever again. This has been a disgusting slide into profits before mission that debases the fourth estate – a collection of self important ninnies who longer deserve our deference.Report
There have to be internal memos and emails on how to cover Trump and whitewash over his reactionary-authoritarian outbursts. There have to be. My thought is this:
1. The owners of the MSM are generally Trump friendly.
2. At the very least, they are anti-tax increase friendly.
3. Journalism has horrible careers prospects now and it is continuing to go down. If someone is really brave and enterprising, they can start a substack but that is hard.
4. So people with the brass ring jobs will do anything to keep them because the prospects for successful journalism careers might be lower than the prospects for successful acting careers.Report
Please stop doing this thing where you use mental-illness terminology to criticize Trump. I know you really want to dunk on him with the Trendy Online Jargon but this (and all the “sundowning” that we heard about back in 2016) is conflating him with people who have actual trouble.Report
Have you seen the article about the giant statue of the Naked Emperor outside Las Vegas?
https://news.sky.com/story/naked-donald-trump-statue-near-las-vegas-branded-deplorable-13225684Report
But it was perfectly OK to call President Biden “senile”, right? No. Trendy MSM jargon sucks, too.Report
Glass house. Stone.Report
You’re suggesting that people with bipolar depression or schizophrenia are senile? Interesting. Go on, I’d like to hear more of your thoughts on that subject.Report
Eh???Report
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/30/politics/georgia-abortion-ban/index.htmlReport
Trump apparently watched the purge recently: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/us/politics/trump-property-crime-crackdown.htmlReport
He’s gone full Travis Bickle, and yet if one simply read WaPo or NYT they would have no idea.Report
Yes but the NY Times did write about it.Report
Considering that even sapphire blue cities are souring on police reform, it might be a winning issue for him.Report
I don’t think going full Travis Bickle is a winning issue for him especially because this kind of violence goes both ways and it is just going to be innocent civilians hurt in the end.Report
I said it might work. I don’t think it will work but he is basically throw everything at Harris and hope it works.Report
There seems to be a genre of Anti-Israel propaganda that I see on my facebook feed where they take photos from the British Mandate period and try to present it as “the Palestine that used to be.” The propagandists, who may or may not be actual Palestinians, tend to use photos that come from the Jewish community in Eretz Israel/Palestine though. For instance, today I saw a post from one of these propaganda groups that was an old photo of a plane from Palestine Airways. This is how Wikipedia introduces Palestine Airways:
Palestine Airways (Hebrew: נתיבי אוויר ארץ ישראל, romanized: Netivéy Avír Éretz Yisraél, lit. ‘Land of Israel Airways’; Arabic: شركة الطرق الجوية بفلسطين, romanized: Šarikat aṭ-Ṭuruq al-Jawwiyya bi-Filasṭīn, lit. ‘Airline Company in Palestine’) was an airline founded by Zionist Pinhas Rutenberg in British Palestine, in conjunction with the Histadrut and the Jewish Agency.[1][2][3] In 1937 the airline was taken over by British Government’s Air Ministry, with the intention of it eventually being transferred back into private hands.[4]
In other words, Palestine Airways was part of the project to create a Jewish State and was founded by Jews. The propagandists are relying on people being too lazy to look up even this and accepting it at face value. Same with passing what is clearly Tel Avi, the jewell of the Jewish community/Yishuv as a “Palestinian beach city.”Report
The definition of “Palestine” was different in the 1920s. Same guy created “The Palestine Electric Corporation” in 1923 to bring power to the region.Report
Pro-Palestinian propaganda expertly uses a combination of historical ignorance and laziness to confuse Mandate Palestine and what Palestine means today.Report
That’s ripe.Report
https://aish.com/palestine-soccer-team-and-other-appropriations-of-jewish-history/
This is the first example I am aware of the phenomenon. It is from before the Israel-Hamas War. Other examples that my algorithm gave me is trying to present Tel Aviv, one of the crown jewels of the Zionist movement, as a “Palestinian beach city” and finally presenting “Palestine Airways”, again founded by a Zionist, as a way to “prove” a false history and steal Jewish work for themselves.Report
Mayor Pete has been selected to play J.D Vance in the practice for the VP debates for the Democratic side.Report
“Israel goes in: IDF confirms boots on the ground in southern Lebanon as bombs rain down from the sky after day of ratcheting tensions”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13909477/Israel-goes-IDF-confirms-boots-ground-southern-Lebanon-bombs-rain-sky-day-ratcheting-tensions.htmlReport
A two front war. This won’t end well.Report
At this point, how much resource does a Gaza front require? A bit of infantry to keep things bottled up, some artillery, some spotting drones?Report
Welp, Ta-Nehisi had an interview on CBS.
I don’t *THINK* that this will impact the election?
Report
Ignoring the subject matter, what annoys me about this type of reporting is “distorts our reality”. No, it doesn’t distort relativity, it distorts our PERCEPTION of reality. Reality is reality. People’s biases distort facts to suit their own personal preferences/choices/prejudices.Report
Very true statement sir.Report
I think he did incredibly well there, especially in the face of hostile, downright disgusting questioning.Report
The interviewer came off as an idiot.
CBS is also the guys hosting the VP debate tonight and I’m sure that there will be no end to the opportunities to point to stuff like this and say “this is what CBS is actually like” during tonight’s debate as well.
There are a *LOT* of people who were really into Ta-Nehisi back during the Obama era.
Well, part of the point of Moral Capital is to spend it. I’m really interested in seeing where this goes over the next month or so.
(The most interesting line of attack that I’ve seen so far is the digging up of what he wrote after October 7th. Unsurprisingly, he took a “well, you have to understand…” tone instead of an unequivocal one. So the folks who are fans of the “WHAT DID YOU DO ON OCTOBER 8TH?!?” question have an answer.)Report
Yeah, as someone who was not into Coates back then, I’m really excited to see this turn, or rather, as he correctly notes, expansion of his focus, because the people who were really into him 10 years ago are precisely the people who need to hear him now.
As for October 8, there are a lot of people who haven’t been paying attention to the Middle East, or at least haven’t been paying close attention, who reacted to October 7 similarly to the way Americans reacted to September 11: there is no history, there is no pre-October 7 reality, October 7 is entirely ahistorical). Anyone who has been paying close attention (which pretty much excludes the people who comment on it here) couldn’t not see the history. So if you say, “Killing the civilians was inexcusable, but…” the people who see October 7 arising out of nothing will get upset with you. I think what happened after 9/11 shows what the consequences of ignoring history, and we’ve seen that even clearer after 10/7.Report
They weren’t hearing him ten years ago. They just liked it that an angry Holy Man was yelling that they were all inherently Sinnners who’d burn in Hell unless they shaped up real quick.Report
As of right now, if you go to Amazon’s Best Seller list, The Message is sitting at #2.Report
America’s last real liberal president turns 100 today.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/01/jimmy-carter-birthday-plains-georgia/Report
Jimmy Carter was well to the right of the Democratic majority in Congress.Report
Carter faced a tectonic shift in the political climate.
In hindsight, the 1976 election was a fluke, since Ford was tainted by his association with and pardon of, Nixon.
The New Deal coalition was crumbling as early as the 1960s and the collapse of American manufacturing economy was just starting by the mid 70s.
About the only possible strategy for goosing the economy Carter could have done is a massive government spending spree like Reagan, but the political climate of 76-80 wouldn’t have allowed for that.Report
Ford almost managed to pull off a victory. He carried more states and the popular vote was very close. If Ford managed not to screw up with dumb comment about not knowing if Poland was under Soviet domination, he might have won the election.Report
I think this is a bit of received wisdom. Carter was actually to the right of his Congress in many important ways. He was the miser, not Congress. It is his post-Presidential legacy which cemented him as “the last liberal.” During his time, he was more of a proto-DLC technocrat.Report
I’m vaguely surprised… there’s a point after which a husband doesn’t tend to live for a year after his wife dies and Jimmy passed it more than a decade ago.
Well, it was only November, I guess.Report
You know the whole “what is the point of higher education?” question that shows up from time to time? Well, here’s a fun article from The Atlantic:
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
At first, I was a little confused reading the title. “Then they’re not elite college students!”
But then I remembered a funny Jack in the Box commercial from a few years back about the “Really Big Chicken Sandwich”.
Jack was explaining to this guy about the Really Big Chicken Sandwich and the guy kept talking about how he wanted to see a really big chicken. Like, would the really big chicken have really big eggs?
Jack explained that it wasn’t a really-big-chicken sandwich but a really big CHICKEN SANDWICH.
Anyway, all that to say, these aren’t elite college students.
They’re just students at an elite college.
Or it used to be one.
Report
Anecdotally this is consistent with what I have heard from DC area elite lawyer types, many of whom have children they hope to see accepted into the Ivies and exclusive SLACs. It would be interesting to see if anyone can measure it in a scientific way.
I will say a factor to consider is that those students whose educational lives were most turned upside down by Covid at critical points are now reaching college age.Report
Not to brag but I was reading crap like the Belgariad when I was in elementary school. Like THE WHOLE THING.Report
How dare you call The Belgariad “crap.”Report
Oh I expect the anecdotes will be way worse when they get to the kids who were in elementary school.Report
Maybe it’s their damn phones?Report
Those aren’t helping either.Report
News item:
Crusty old fart throws a temper tantrum and smashes a Taylor Swift guitar:
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/north-texas-man-smashes-signed-taylor-swift-guitar-after-buying-it/287-a1e538f9-fb00-4689-9a98-6a807bf69b45
No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the people I spoke to agreed that there is a noticeable and alarming decline in the quality of old codgers’ rants about kids these days.
“It used to be, in the old days, when a crusty old fart threw a temper tantrum and went on a rant about kids, it was really something to see”, said Gloria Bunker. “They would throw in all sorts of colorful language like “Shup up Meathead” and even spew some authentic frontier gibberish.”
Eric Forman, another middle aged person who remembers the old days was even more blunt. “Old people today are just a bunch of coddled crybabies who aren’t able to experience things that challenge their beliefs without throwing a petty tantrum. It used to be they would rant and say “You’re a dumbass” but those days are gone.”
Experts agree that unless the decline is halted, prospects for the next generation of old farts is grim. “Some places are already lost, like the Villages in Florida” lamented one expert.Report
Do you think he could finish a book or nah?Report
You mean the old fart who shut down when presented with a challenging idea?Report
Yeah. I mean something like Tom Clancy or Lee Child.Report
Anecdotally, no.
What I’m hearing from people is that this generation of old farts were raised on USA Today and Readers Digest and can’t read anything longer.
Plus, old folks are sexually promiscuous and have no sense of morality.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna145332Report
The old farts who surrounded me read. They read a *LOT*.
Like, and encouraged *ME* to read.
Out of curiosity… have you experience with reading a book to completion? I understand that you’re old enough to have voted for Reagan.
I’m just trying to get a baseline here.
(Anecdotally, I have experience with asking you to read stuff and, lemme tell ya, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.)Report
How can you explain the fact that while you were curled up reading a book, there were essays and articles and entire books stating flatly that the kids (meaning YOU) were unable to read, unwilling to read, were generally slow and incurious boobs?
And that there has never been a point in human history in which the article you linked to wasn’t accepted as fact?
How can you explain any of this?
Do you want us to believe that the claims of idle corrupted yoots wrong the first 10,209,487 times they were written, but this one- THIS ONE- is suddenly true?Report
Do you have a link to one of these stories you claim exist?
Please note: I’d prefer one talking about college students.
And I still don’t know whether you read books to the end. Do you?Report
Are you disagreeing with me, that these sorts of claims are as old as the hills, repeatedly made every generation?Report
That the kids in the elite colleges can’t read an entire freakin’ book?
Yeah, that is new.
Do you have any examples of the things you say are ubiquitous?
And I still don’t know whether you read books to the end. Do you?Report
So if I presented you with evidence that claims of young people not reading properly is a recurring claim made throughout history, you would accept it?
I just want to make sure this isn’t one of those bring me a rock things.Report
If you can bring me an example of professors at elite colleges complaining that their students aren’t prepared to read a book, I will accept that.
You know, like the example that kicked all this stuff off.
Complaints that reading levels at 9th grade aren’t as high as they were five years ago will be insufficient.
It has to be:
College professors
At an elite college
Complaining that students can’t read a book
So the community college professor complaining that students don’t care about The Great Gatsby anymore will be insufficient.
Do you have any examples of the things you say are ubiquitous?
And I still don’t know whether you read books to the end. Do you?Report
Karl Shapiro, the eminent poet-professor who has taught creative writing for more than 20 years, told the California Library Association in 1970: “What is really distressing is that this generation cannot and does not read. I am speaking of university students in what are supposed to be our best universities. Their illiteracy is staggering.…We are experiencing a literary breakdown which is unlike anything I know of in the history of letters.”
Literacy skills are now so poor among high school graduates that about two-thirds of US colleges and universities, including Harvard, MIT, and the University of California at Berkeley, provide remedial reading and writing courses for their freshmen.
This was from half a century ago.
When your parents were in college. Apparently they were part of a generation that couldn’t read a book, so its all the more amazing you learned how.Report
Huh. Interesting. Do you have a link to that story that we can read it for ourselves? I can’t find it with a quick google. Just profiles of Karl Shapiro.Report
https://reason.com/1982/10/01/the-victims-of-dick-and-jane/Report
The dirty truth that nobody wants to admit is that most people don’t like reading for pleasure. Never have and never will. To the extent that there was a Golden Age of Reading for Pleasure (TM), it was because other entertainment options did not exist and a lot of what was read was either received wisdom or trash.Report
Very true. You have to MAKE readers, not expect them to grow spontaneously.Report
You tell them to not read Harry Potter or Stephen King and then you walk away.Report
Overheard granddaughter #1 (fifth grade) telling granddaughter #2 (second grade) the other day: “You can’t watch the first Harry Potter movie, you haven’t read the book!”
If it were my decision, I wouldn’t let them have Stephen King for some years. I was a college student when I read Salem’s Lot. Finished it in bed at 2:00 am. Would have had to go across the room to turn off the light, then walk back to bed in the dark. Left the light on and slept with my head under the pillow.Report
I can’t believe that I was terrified by Christine.
“A haunted car? Ooooh! *SCARY*!” I joked.
“No wonder Mom didn’t want me to read this”, I said halfway through.Report
Early on during the years where I made an annual week-long trip to my Mom’s south of Omaha to do all the handyman chores, staying awake on the part of the return drive on I-76, straight into the July/August sun, was hard. Then I started listening to the audio book version of Salem’s Lot, four hours per year, and had no problem staying awake. Also no problem picking it up a year later and remembering exactly where in the story I had been.Report
He’s America’s Dickens.
Also, apparently, America’s Simpsons.
I don’t know anybody who read anything of his after Insomnia but he keeps having bigger numbers for his best sellers.Report
In one of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes books, he makes the point that newspapers even in the Golden Age were really just comics, sports, celebrity gossip and classified ads, with the Hard News layered over the top for respectability.
Cultural critics sneered at the Hearst syndicate for being essentially that, just a lowbrow mashup of lurid stories and childish comics, basically the Fox News/ Fox Entertainment of its day.
Walter Cronkite didn’t pay the bills for CBS but Jed Clampett did.
I can’t find it now but I know there was a couple essays in the 1950s lamenting that the GI Bill opened the hallowed doors of academia to the common rabble, the sons of pipefitters and bricklayers who could perform engineering calculations, but had no idea who Aeschylus was.Report
This is absolutely correct and something that a lot of people refuse to accept, especially a certain sort of liberal. The Golden Age of the Metropolitan Daily (TM) was fueled by what we would call the lifestyle sections todays. People didn’t want worthy analysis but light entertainment.
Most people have a very pragmatic take on education and high humanities education does not appeal to them.Report
OH! Reason Magazine! I’m a big fan of them. I’m cool that we’re establishing that we can quote them again.
Let’s read it…
Wow, it’s a really good article. (Tackling whole word reading approaches versus phonics approaches.)
Yep. Karl Shapiro did tell the California Library Association in 1970 exactly that. “What is really distressing is that this generation cannot and does not read.”
You’re right.Report
There’s also the usual issue with the definition of “reading”, being “can you generate vocal sounds for each word on the page” versus “can you identify the intended meaning of the text and perform analytical reasoning tasks based on that meaning”.
Like, “maybe the kid can’t say ‘Antidiestablishmenarianism’ out loud, but if you ask them ‘is this passage describing a political philosophy’ they are able to say ‘yes’, which is the correct answer…”Report
Welp, Iranian missiles in Tel Aviv. At least one shooting incident.Report
Nobody has any idea on what to do about Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iran Clerical Regime. I might be open to the idea that military force won’t do anything. I remain unconvinced that a final peace deal will do anything either. Once groups like the Iranian clerical regime or Hezbollah or Hamas are in, they remained entrenched until they are removed. Even if a final deal or withdrawal from the West Bank is done, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah will remain defiant forever.Report
Is WWIII on the table? Because if World War III is on the table, maybe we could kill a billion people.Report
Iran apparently warned Israel about the strike. They are ideologically bound to look like they are doing something even though much if not a majority of the Iranian population doesn’t want them to do anything against Israel.Report
Iran needs to appear to look strong.
Iran also needs to have Israel not blow up their ONE oil handling seaport.Report
These are honor cultures after all. People should probably pay more attention to that fact.Report
There’s no meaningful difference between cultures other than food.Report
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
That has to be the most unthoughtful thing you’ve ever written.
Made me laugh spit though.Report
Are there any differences sufficient to require thorough vetting of immigrants and lock down the border to make sure that ones from bad cultures don’t get in?Report
One of the reasons we have such a screwed up border condition is precisely that we over scrutinize people coming for manual labor from the global south – who represent minimal threat to the US – and under scrutinize those seeking technical jobs. You will recall that the 9/11 attackers all entered the country legally and mostly from Saudi Arabia.Report
That doesn’t answer my question.Report
Wait, the king of non-linear conversation wants direct answers?
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
No.
Figure it out yourself.Report
Hrm. If the answer was convenient to him, then he would have given the answer that was convenient to him.
He did not give an answer that was convenient to him.
Therefore the answer was not convenient to him.
Modus tollens.Report
I answered the question. There are culture s that should require more vetting through our already locked up system. We don’t vet those people because they are coming to perform high technology jobs we claim are more important, or they are coming from allies and trading partners we don’t want to upset. Yet we do vet – and reject – significant numbers of laborers from cultures that are non-threatening. So much so that 11 to 15 million of them had to cross our borders illegally to meet economic demand.
Which is exactly what I said above.Report
Serious question:
Is the “basket of deplorables” an example of a “bad culture”, one that we should exclude and shun from elite universities and positions of power?
Again, I’m being serious. If we accept the idea that someone from an illiberal culture like Syria is unable to participate in the liberal democracy that is the US, then logically we should look at like-minded bad cultures which are homegrown, and work to exclude them from participation.
For example, in vetting applicants to elite universities, should we comb through their social media to see if there are any warning signs of illiberal or bigoted behavior?Report
Sounds like they’ve done a good enough job of doing that to the point where they’re left with the ones who don’t read books.Report
The loudest yelps for tolerance come from those who give none.Report
This but unironically.Report
I assume we’re already looking through social media to see if there is any illiberal or bigoted behavior.Report
This why I asked, because such a practice seems…controversial.
But if we all agree there exist such things as “Bad cultures” which are illiberal and dangerous to democracy, wouldn’t that definition necessarily include a few domestic cultures?
Keep in mind I don’t support this. I’ve heard fascism defined as when the practices of the colonizers are applied to the homeland.Report
Chip: wouldn’t that definition necessarily include a few domestic cultures?
Yes, however nailing down what “culture” someone has is often hard.
“Culture” describes a group and we’re talking about how individuals should be treated and evaluated. “Individual” doesn’t mean “is in the same geographic area”.
If a school administrator finds out that someone is an active neo-naz.i and posting things best described as hate-speech then I expect their admission will be rejected.
That’s a world of difference from “he knows a neo-naz.i” much less “there is a neo-naz.i living within a half mile of him”.
We shouldn’t be rejecting people based on which country they’re from nor which culture we think they might be a member of.Report
I agree unreservedly.
Immigration hawks disagree with this approach.Report
This is almost a rightist statement from you. The entire honor culture thing is considered a big shibboleth on the liberal-left side of the aisle to even consider it. Many people on the Broad Left side are positively allergic to any sort of cultural analysis.Report
As a historian’s son, you will find that I tend to be way more reality based then many of my far left fellow travelers. Bit of a handicap I suppose.
But understanding existing cultures – and thus forces driving decisions – gets to a practical ability to deal with challenges created by those cultures. Which is what I sort of thought the whole game was about.Report
I suspect that Israel knows that most Iranian citizens do not like the military adventurism of their government and aren’t going to do anything to make the clerical regime more popular.Report
Speaking of education: 19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz, a student with a disability, alleges Hartford Public Schools failed to teach her to read or write despite her enrollment since age 6. Ortiz, now studying at UConn, has filed for due process against the district.
Does she have a case?Report
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe the state has a legal obligation to ensure you learned anything at public school. Maybe if this case calls within the ADA, but I’d doubt it.
“Ortiz’s lawyer, Courtney Spencer, said the young woman’s story may be one of the “most shocking cases” of educational neglect she has seen in 24 years.” Doubtful. I’m sure there are many such cases.Report
Personally, I think that an inability to read would be something that would disqualify a person from getting a high school diploma.
But we got into this back when we were talking about high school graduation rates versus proficiency tests.
If you aren’t proficient, you shouldn’t graduate (was my argument).
But I guess I don’t understand what the point of a high school diploma is. Maybe it’s like one of those old “perfect attendance” certificates they handed out in 2nd grade.Report
“But I guess I don’t understand what the point of a high school diploma is.”
But I guess I don’t understand what the point of a high school diploma is for now.
Fixed that for ya. It used to be a sign of some basic learning. Now, I doubt it’s even that.Report
She started not speaking English, having learning/behavioral disabilities, and not having a parent who could/would advocate for her who apparently ignored the situation.
That school system had 42% of it’s students not speaking English?
I guess this is a really good example of why I keep saying the school system works for me and not the other way around. My kid. My responsibility.Report
“My kid. My responsibility.”
What a foreign concept!Report
I agree with the implied snark. I have long ago stopped counting the number of parents in Gen X and below who don’t seem to know that game systems, ipads and smart devices have off switches that parents can use.Report
I’ve had that problem with women friends I was dating, who were in their 40s!Report
The state can provide a building. It can (in theory at least) provide minimally competent teachers and staff. It can provide equipment, supplies, and some special accommodations. It can, and should, provide some other basics through the school system like food.
What it will never be able to do is guarantee an outcome. That’s on the student and the parents.Report
The schools interests and my interests can conflict although normally they don’t.Report
I don’t blame the school district for not teaching this kiddo how to read.
I blame the school district for giving her a diploma.Report
Of course not. The primary, and unromantic, purpose of public schools is to warehouse kiddos safely while their parents work. Educating them, socializing them and such other delightful goods are desirable but second order purposes. Is she alive and unharmed? Seems so. No case.Report
If that’s true, I think that I can understand why a lot of parents are willing to push for school choice.Report
I think you’re succumbing to romance yourself. A parent who’s going to be pushing for school choice is going to have successful kids virtually no matter what school said kiddo is put in because that kid has parents who care about how they do in school.
Consider, if you will, one of the biggest and widest spread beefs parents had during the Covid years- it was that the schools were remote and they were remote for a long time. I will tap the sign again “Schools first order purpose is to safely warehouse kids while their parents work”.Report
I’m meh about school choice, largely for the reasons you mention. But school choice means choosing from among existing schools. The individual kids who get to a different school might — might — be better off, and good for them, but unless there is some alchemy by which school choice results in more “good” schools to choose from, you’re rearranging the deck chairs.Report
To the extent there’s a case for it I think it’s less about individual outcomes and more about keeping existing schools and school systems honest. I have my doubts about whether that’s in fact what would happen under existing proposals, but I suppose ymmv.Report
The parents who care can send their kids to *THIS* school and the parents who don’t care can send their kids to *THAT* school and then we can talk about how we need to raise the funding for *THAT* school.Report
And as has been pointed out many times, school choice really just means dumping the low performing kids overboard to languish.
I haven’t seen anyone demonstrate a school choice model which resulted in the low performers becoming successful.
School choice is the affirmative action of the right- it works mostly for people who don’t need it.Report
I haven’t seen anyone demonstrate a school choice model which resulted in the low performers becoming successful.
“More funding.”Report
Aren’t the best schools generally more expensive?
I agree that funding isn’t a magic bullet, but isn’t it also true that people who have the most deficiencies and need the most help, by definition will require more funding?
We accept this in every other realm from machine repair to health care so I don’t know why people struggle so much against it here.Report
I went to five colleges in five years (long story).
My experience was that the quality of the instruction had nothing to do with the amount of money I was paying. Instead it seemed to be inversely related to the size of the college. I.e. the smaller the better.
The issue seemed to be that bad teachers at the smaller colleges (especially community college) were quickly fired.
Similarly, past a certain point in a local school level, more money doesn’t seem to help and is just virtue signaling. It’s like how if you give someone 10x more food than is adequate you’re not really improving them.Report
Are the most expensive schools usually the best?
If the answer is “there ain’t much of a correlation here”, you’re going to be stuck looking at issues like whoa holy shit yeah let’s get back to talking about funding.Report
Yes, there is generally a high correlation.
I stand by my theory that the biggest driver of educational outcome is parental motivation and involvement but yes very high performing schools are also very high priced.
Which is almost a tautology: The parents who are willing to sacrifice a lot of time on their child’s education are also the ones willing to spend a lot of money.Report
Which is why Baltimore is always such an interesting item.
Why do you think that it’s failing so hard?
It’s certainly in the top quintile of funding of the country.Report
It’s like asking why an obese smokers health is failing despite recieving vast amounts of health care funding.
We can point to the smoking and obesity as things to be avoided but he will require large amounts of funding anyway.
And again, school choice doesn’t even claim to do anything but toss kids overboard.Report
“I don’t want my kid hanging around fat smokers. I want them to hang out with the kids on the track team.”
This seems a reasonable, even admirable, position for a parent to take.
“No! The fat kids need your kids around to tell them to quit smoking!” seems a strange thing to claim.Report
You’re right, that is a reasonable position, which is why I’m not claiming otherwise.
“What to do about the fat smokers” is a question choice advocates need to answer.Report
And if they can’t answer, they have to have their kids go to school with the fat smokers?Report
If they can’t answer then why bother listening to them?
“This new system works great for me and people like me” isn’t anything we don’t already hear, and ignore, in every other walk of life.Report
We don’t have to listen to them because they’re not within earshot of us anymore.Report
Chip: I haven’t seen anyone demonstrate a school choice model which resulted in the low performers becoming successful.
Largely because of school choice, my low performing kid became a high performing kid.
Even functional systems can fail specific kids and/or have the needs of the child diverge from the needs of the system.
The school system as a whole was high functioning but it was in the process of giving daughter #3 a sub-standard outcome. Certainly less than she was capable of.
School choice was a club that I used to beat the administration with until they agreed to do things my way. However that required us to pull the girls out of the system for 2 years.Report
Regardless of her performance, your child performed at a much higher level by virtue of having a highly engaged, motivated and attentive parent than had she had a neglectful or abusive one.
Those other kids, the disruptive ones in her class?
School choice has nothing to offer them.Report
Chip: School choice has nothing to offer them.
Giving me (& my clan) the tools we need to force the administration to serve children better help everyone.
Ideally the school improves. At a minimum I’m not forced to flee the school district.
Although the source of a lot of school inequality, my clan also creates enriching activities. The baseball coach does it to help his kid but there are 8+ other kids on the team.Report
Again, what to do about the troubled and disruptive kids?
We know what the consequences of not dealing with them are and they are much much worse.Report
Increase funding?Report
Chip: We know what the consequences of not dealing with them are and they are much much worse.
No, it’s not more expensive to do nothing because doing nothing is free and most of them will muddle through on their own. For every 1 we send to prison there are another 30x plus that we don’t.
You’ll get a budget to help them. It won’t be enough. Some will get helped. A lot won’t. Most of the ones helped will be kids that respond/want to be helped.
We don’t have the budget to spend unlimited amounts of money on kids that don’t respond to help.
It is better for society if the money that we could spend on helping them fail less bad was spent making the high achievers go further.Report
You’re speaking in future tense hypotheticals.
As I asked of socialists, where is a working model of what you suggest, where high performers are segregated and the low ones simply allowed to languish?
I can’t think of a high performing First World nation that follows your suggested model.
They all have the same struggles we do, and achieve results similar to ours, where they have pockets of poor performers who consume resources far in excess of their peers.Report
I’m pretty sure this kid’s parents would have been happy to have them sit in a different deck chair.Report
Probably. And your point is?Report
oh, so now you’re the guy with the reading-comprehension issues?Report
The article is quite clear. It’s you, and whatever your point is, that’s obscure.Report
This is even more true for ultra-prestigious boarding schools as well as the lowest inner city public schools. These are the kids of busy and important people who need to totally outsource all parenting.Report
Judith Butler apparently has an interview in an intellectual journal or something somewhere where she describes 10/7 as an act of resistance. This is the same woman who said that Hamas and Hezbollah are more progressive than liberal Zionists several years ago. I just don’t get the Further Left on the I/P conflict. I get sympathy towards the Palestinians but the Further Left insists on playing these rhetorical games and fitting the I/P conflict in an intellectual framework that doesn’t really do justice to either the Palestinians or the Israels, plus ignores the actual facts on the ground*, that it is worse than useless.
Another thing that I do not like are the Radical Ashkenazi Jews who are so into maintaining their radical credentials that they would be willing to throw millions of their fellow Jews to death so that they may burnish their radical credentials. This is despite the fact that previous times radical Jews did this, the Soviet Union, they quickly got tossed aside when no longer needed by the people in control because they were Jews. All those Bolshevik Jews found out that their devotion to the revolution amounted to nothing under Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders while Jews who merely wanted to be Jews got to suffer. These Radical Ashkenazi Jews would have their Mizrahi brothers and sisters as second class citizens to maintain their anti-colonial credentials.
*I am utterly convinced that the Further Left’s knowledge of 21st century Israel is basically zilch. They do not seem to realize that the majority of Israel’s 7.2 million Jews come from the MENA region ancestry wise, that MENA Jews are the base of Likud and other Rightist parties, or that the majority of Netanyahu’s cabinet are Mizrahi Jews. You can point this all out to them and they don’t believe it. It is just all white settler-colonialists from Europe, never mind what happened to the Jews of Europe, against the brave and indigenous people of color Palestinians. I can’t stand the stupidity of it.Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler#Comments_on_Hamas,_Hezbollah_and_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
After having “condemned without qualification” the 10-7 attacks she then proceeds to put down a lot of you-have-to-understand, this-was-justified, and “this was not terrorism nor antisemitic” arguments. Of course she also claims Hamas is a member of the global Left.
So lots of own goals and self contradictions there.Report
This is the same woman who said that Hamas and Hezbollah are more progressive than liberal Zionists several years ago
What she said (in 2006):
“Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence. So again, a critical, important engagement. I mean, I certainly think it should be entered into the conversation on the Left. I similarly think boycotts and divestment procedures are, again, an essential component of any resistance movement.”
Judith Butler apparently has an interview in an intellectual journal or something somewhere where she describes 10/7 as an act of resistance.
That it was an act of resistance is factually true. That does not mean the attacks on civilians were justified (I do not believe they were; I cannot speak for Butler), but to pretend it wasn’t an act of resistance against a brutally violent siege and blockade is to live in an ahistorical fantasy world.Report
They are “resisting” the idea of Jews being there at all. Them “resisting” the idea of Jews predates the blockade and the blockade was created because of that.
If we get rid of the blockade we should expect that the “resistance” to the idea of Jews being in Israel would continue.
Calling this “resistance” is heavy spin to make them excusable. I call them “openly genocidal” because that’s a more accurate way to describe the situation.Report
Like many people who hate Israel, Chris really really hates Israel. The Further Left goes a lot stronger against Israel than other countries because it is the conflict where the tools they use to analyze who is the good guy and who is the bad guy align in their minds.
1. Imperialist vs. Anti-Imperialist-Israel is associated with the United States and the West while the Palestinians were seen as allied with the Communists and the Developing World.
2. White vs. Brown-Most people on the Further Left have a really poor grasp of Israel’s demographics and think it is a bunch of Ashkenazi Jews on timeshares that could easily “go back to Poland” vs. the brown indigenous Palestinians. They don’t know that there are 7.2 million Jews in Israel and half to sixty percent of them aren’t from Europe. Nor do they know that 61% of Israel’s current cabinet is Mizrahi.
3. Goliath vs. David-Being a well-organized and wealthy nation state, Israel is clearly Goliath.
For the other big international conflicts of the moment, Russia v. Ukraine and PRC v. Taiwan, the race axis is neutral and the other axis and 3 is unclear so this causes some pause on who to support or not.Report
I abhor any ethnostate, and in particular, any ethno-supremacist state, which is what Israel is. Not only is it bad on its face, but ethno-supremacism always leads to the sort of far right politics that have long been popular in Israel and now dominate it completely. You are right that I believe Israel does fall neatly into an anti-imperialist framework, but a someone who is unequivocally anti-Apartheid, anti-ethnic cleansing, and anti-genocide, I mostly oppose it on those grounds, recognizing that the imperialism makes those things inevitable.Report
As I’ve asked before, even if I were to uncritically accept your statement, so where does this leave us?
What policy does this suggest, what action should we as a nation take?
Once you’ve vented your rage, righteous or not, you’re left with just a range of choices of actions.Report
from an anti-apartheid stance, we know what worked in South Africa . . . .Report
Why is that the proper analogy?
Would France circa 1939 be a closer parallel?
A brutal, racist, settler- colonialist ethnostate being attacked by an equally illiberal ethnostate, in a battle for control of disputed territory?
Or maybe Russia/Ukraine 2024.
Or the Balkans 1990s.Report
Your other analogies fall way short since they feature some level of state parity between the actors. Israel is not presently under attack by a state level actor with a standing army.
And honestly – if you want to use the Russia/Ukraine analogy Israel isn’t Ukraine . . .Report
(Does Phil know that missiles were launched from Iran yesterday? Maybe he doesn’t. Or, maybe, he thinks that that was then and this is now and why are we still talking about it.)Report
What Phil knows is that when discussing the Israeli – Palestinian conflict, once side is a nuclear weapons possessing, mandatory army serving UN recognized ethnostate, and the other side is a displaced in their homeland cultural and ethnically homogeneous refugee group who builds rockets out of plumbing pipes.
Iran and Israel is a different conflict. If we want to talk about hat I’m happy to describe the analogy I see that best fits.Report
I guess I didn’t understand what you meant when you said “Israel is not presently under attack by a state level actor with a standing army”, then.Report
we were discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians are not a state level actor with a standing Army, much less nuclear capabilities. This isn’t hard.Report
You’d think.Report
Like I said, if you want to talk about the Iranian – Israeli conflict I’m happy to do so. This thread isn’t on that topic.Report
I’d only bring it up in response to a statement like “Israel is not presently under attack by a state level actor with a standing army”.
If the statement was “Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is not a conflict against a state level actor with a standing army”, I’d have probably nodded.Report
If the people attacking France were a smaller insurgency proclaiming their intent to create a Lebensraum in the area formerly known as France, should that cause us reconsider our support for the brutal racist settler colonialist power?Report
You’re forgetting how violent anti-Apartheid resistance was in South Africa, including the group led by Mandela. South Africa is a very good analogy.Report
And violent to itself internally. You remember Necklacing don’t you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NecklacingReport
I know what I would prefer: a single state with equal citizenship for anyone who wants to live there, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and the right of return. How you get there is a difficult question, but no less difficult than a two-state solution, particularly given Israel’s firmly entrenched political supermajority (Israeli politics now ranges from center right to far right). There are literal books on the topic, and ultimately, it’s not my say. What I do have a stake in is the U.S.’s involvement, and I’d like for all military aid to cease immediately, and a cessation of all economic support for Israel until the the Apartheid ends.
I realize Lee thinks all of this would mean the wiping out of all Jewish Israelis, but that’s because he’s extremely racist, and he can’t help but see non-Jewish people in the region as violent brutes.Report
You and I want the same thing, then.
I just don’t think anyone in a position of power in Israel or Palestine shares our view.
Do you?Report
The Further Left deals with the Israelis and Palestinians that exist in their headspace rather than actual Israelis and Palestinians. As noted on the other blog, it is all 1960s and France in Algeria to them. They ignore that the Palestinians have grown more Islamist in their rhetoric or that Israel is much more populous and wealthy. Their solution is for all the Jews to go “home” even though most Israeli Jews were born in Israel and those that weren’t don’t have fond memories of home.Report
Do you believe modern Palestinians have fond memories of home?Report
The Palestinians (correctly) view themselves as the victims of ethnic cleansing. Of course so do the Jews.
We have two sets of indigenous natives there.
We also had all of the surrounding Arabic nations kick out their Jews who mostly fled to Israel.Report
One set of those natives has nukes and the support of the US military industrial complex and one doesn’t. They lost equity decades ago.Report
Philip: They lost equity decades ago.
So what? The Palestinians being weak doesn’t make them less genocidal or less opposed to our ideals. Nor does it change that the ME states where they’ve set up states are places I find problematic.
Thus the absurdity of LGBTQ groups trying to ally themselves with them and so on.
As a non-(Muslim/Jew/Christian), if I had to pick a place in the Middle East to live as a minority it’d be a no brainer that I’d want Israel.Report
Part of the problem is that different Palestinian groups keep trying to negotiate like they win every battle despite losing every battle. Different groups sympathetic to the Palestinians in the Muslim world or the West encourage them in this. The idea that losing a battle or several might come with consequences doesn’t seem to occur to people because everything is operating on a justice scale.Report
If you haven’t seen any of Avi Shlaim’s interviews or dialogs, I recommend them. For example, this excellent conversation:
https://youtu.be/nUjdDYoTZG0?si=2ejdYuTPALh-RRFNReport
Thank you.Report
In power? No. Unfortunately, the conflict and ethno-supremacism have created two groups of extremists.Report
I think this wasn’t viable in 1948. Look at where Ghada Karmi’s head is at. She’s a moderate (great link by the way).
(Paraphrasing her) This mess was set up by Great Britton so Israel’s Jews are colonialists.
The Jews aren’t indigenous to this region.
They came into “our country” and took it.
The only just solution is for there to be a RoR.
She’s sitting right next to a Jew who was forced to flee from Iraq (that was Israel’s fault of course) and she thinks she should have an RoR while he wouldn’t be compensated.
The peace wing of Israel wouldn’t be able to make peace with her because there’s no way they’d agree to an RoR that would in practice result in an Islamic State.
Even if we end up with the one state solution because the settlers have taken so much land, there would still not be an RoR.Report
I think the right of return remains both a practically (as in, the conflict won’t end without it) and morally necessary part of any solution. The reason Israel clings to the idea that it is impossible is because they cling to the idea of an ethnostate.
She’s sitting right next to a Jew who was forced to flee from Iraq (that was Israel’s fault of course)
Interestingly, the guy who was forced to flee as a child also blames Israel, though obviously, there’s plenty of blame to go around (the Muslim Iraqis, the British, the UN, etc., all played their part).Report
I think this component of it is misguided, and inconsistent with the way these kinds of issues have been settled in a sustainable way. The trend in the old world for the last two centuries has been towards ever smaller self governing nation and/or creed states. The places that work differently tend to either be in the new world or are loose federations with convenient geography like Indonesia.
There’s also the problem that no one is really indigenous to anywhere. Not as far as the archeological records are concerned. The claim is a political one, and not one that usually stands up well to historical scrutiny. It isn’t a realistic organizing principle and the Palestinian claim to it is no stronger than to numerous other ethnic groups caught on the wrong side of changing borders over the last 100 years. Justice and fairness demands they have a state to be citizens of, not a particular plot of land their grandparents may have lived on in a time quickly fading from living memory.Report
Checking my own facts it appears Indonesia is in fact a unitary state. Oh well. I think the point still stands.Report
The militant insistence on the Right of Return makes sense when you realize that the goal is to destroy Israel and hurt Jews more than help the Palestinians. Even the Palestinians seem to care more about destroying Israel and hurting Jews than helping themselves.
The idea of Jews being a majority somewhere, having tax funded schools like other people, and a place where the culture and time revolves around Jewishness is too much for hundreds of millions of people world wide. They need us degraded.Report
Don’t see it as Israel being destroyed. See it as Israel being *IMPROVED*.
The food will be better, the festivals will be better, and there will be a more vibrant culture than the stultified one that is there now.
Better music, better poetry, and, on top of all that, it’s more moral.
Why in the hell would you oppose having better food options?Report
If you could create a true culture neutral binational state in Israel/Palestine, that might not be a bad solution to the conflict. I don’t think it will be culture neutral state though. It will be an Arab and Muslim state with maybe a large Jewish population.Report
I fail to see why Israel as an ethnostate gets treated as the most evil thing in the world while dozens of countries officially proclaiming themselves to be Islamic, complete with international organization is not.
The Palestinian rhetoric is not of multi-cultural Palestine. It is explicitly that they the Arab Muslim Palestinians are the real true Palestinians and everybody else just lives there. It shouldn’t take that many brain cells to figure out why Jews inside and outside of Israel find this a bad deal and don’t want to be second class citizens of an officially Muslim state.Report
Especially since there aren’t really any states in the region which AREN”T ethnostates.
In fact, most of the Arab states are really ruled as confederations of clans and factions and tribes.Report
Most states in the world are de facto or de jure ethno-states. Israel is just the one that gets called out for it. I have not heard Japan or South Korea being lambasted as ethnostates despite the fact that both are way more ethnostates than Israel is. Like I wrote InMD, I think that many people just find the idea of Jews having a place of our own repellant and don’t like the idea of school system teaching Jewish history and literature the way you would teach other history and literature. That the public holidays are Jewish holidays is another thing they can’t stand.Report
There are states like that in the area. There are also states based around the lines drawn by Ottoman and European colonial powers. The result has tended to be either hopelessly weak governments perpetually on the verge of collapse and/or civil war or countries held together by a strongman and/or the military. It isn’t an approach that inspires a lot of confidence.Report
Chris: the guy who was forced to flee as a child also blames Israel
He wouldn’t be there making the video if he weren’t.
Ethically, it’s heinous to mistreat your local Jews because a different group of Jews in another country created a state. It’s like the USA mistreating our local Blacks because we don’t like some African dictator.
Having said that, antisemitism is the rocket fuel behind Israel’s creation and growth. Without the Arab states kicking out their Jews, Israel wouldn’t have had enough of a population to be viable.
Chris:I think the right of return remains both a practically (as in, the conflict won’t end without it) and morally necessary part of any solution.
I don’t see why they should get a right of return while my children don’t have it. My children are Polish through their mother. Poland was forced to change it’s borders after WW2. If everyone had put their lives on hold waiting for the borders to move back, then in theory my kids could be in a refugee camp somewhere.
A lack of a right to return, which is normally the way the world deals with this, means everyone gets on with their lives and it doesn’t become a multigenerational mess.
For example that’s the way the world is dealing with the Arab countries kicking out their Jews.
Chris: The reason Israel clings to the idea that it is impossible is because they cling to the idea of an ethnostate.
Normal countries are able to decide who immigrates there. Israel wanting to be an ethnostate is a normal country reason to refuse.
Them accepting millions of people who are going to want the State to be an Islamic Republic is a non-starter.Report
I don’t see why they should get a right of return while my children don’t have it. My children are Polish through their mother. Poland was forced to change it’s borders after WW2.
The post WWII migrations in Europe are one of the least discussed and most impactful consequences of that war. There are a lot of discussions that need to be had that aren’t.
Coincidentally, though, a friend of mine just got a Polish passport, because his grandparents were born in Poland, and fled after the war. I recommend checking out the Polish rules for citizenship for descendants if you’re really interested in your kids going back (and why wouldn’t you be; the perogies alone are worth it).
Similarly, my partner is an Italian citizen because her paternal grandparents were born there. I believe this is true of many European countries with large 20th century diaspora, for both demographic and moral reasons.
Israel presents a different moral issue, though (and, as you correctly note, not just for Israel): the formation of Israel resulted in the forcible expulsion of hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish residents from what is now Israel, and the (as you correctly note, anti-semitic) expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jewish people from the surrounding (mostly) Arab states. That level of forced ethnic cleansing should be rectified. I realize 70 years of Israeli-Arab conflict means that rectifying it is difficult, but I refuse to believe that these are two groups of people who can’t live together, despite the fact that prior to 1948 they had done so for millennia, more or less peacefully.
There’s a lot of work to be done, but to start that work, they have to stop killing each other, and the best way to get them to stop killing each other is for Israel to end the Occupation, blockade, and siege, and to treat its Arab citizens as equal. From there, the possibility of dialog opens, not only between Jewish Israelis and non-Jewish Palestinians, but between those two groups of people and the rest of the region. It will take time and a lot of healing, but I remain convinced it can be done.Report
I forgot to add, I don’t think most Palestinians want an Islamic Republic, or at least are not committed to one. There might be issues of courts, because of religious differences, but I don’t think that’s an insurmountable obstacle.Report
How would you even know what “most Palestinians” want?
And from what we do know, they are perfectly willing to accept or acquiesce to a rigid corrupt illiberal Islamic-flavored regime.
This sounds to me a lot like the Secret Disney Liberal theory.Report
My synagogue decided to slut the difference between the Pro-Israel side and the more sympathetic to the Palestinian side by offering prayers for Israel’s protection and the healing of Gaza.
There was a lot of Secret Disney Liberal in the prayer of Gaza. It’s just imaging that there have to be a majority of Palestinians that share the same world view as a liberal Bay Area congregation and want co-existence despite all evidence to the contrary.Report
There are several I/P conflicts that are going on at the same time. You have the actual conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the ground and the competing factions within Israel and Palestine.
You also have the I/P conflict that is playing out in different head spaces. You have Muslims who see the I/P conflict in theocratic terms and see Israel as a plot upon Islam. You have Western Leftists who see it as White Settler-Colonialists vs. Brown Wretched of the Earth. You have well-meaning Western liberals with different degrees of sympathy for Israel but who want co-existence and multiculturalism to reign supreme despite nobody using those terms.Report
Add to this the Persian/Arab divide, the Sunni/Shiite divide, and various factions within each.Report
Those are ancillary conflicts that might effect your position on the I/P conflict but aren’t part of it.Report
A lot of the Western Pro-Palestinian activists, especially if they more chattering class liberal rather Further Leftist, remind me of the well meaning dupes who feel for Stalin during the 1930s to 1950s. They assume the Western facing front people are the people who represent majority opinion and aren’t mere front pieces to say one thing to another audience while Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims get another message.Report
RE: Polish Citizenship
My kids got Polish citizenship when they were babies. Their mother insisted.
That’s worked out really well, most don’t speak enough Polish to get it now. Two of them live in the EU.
Chris: That level of forced ethnic cleansing should be rectified.
I can’t think of anywhere this has been attempted much less made things better. The creation of every country is a crime. The land was always owned by someone else.
Normally we forgive countries the crime of their creation because it requires a war to move the borders back and because countries are good things.
Further, we’re not talking about rectifying all ethnic cleansing. The countries that kicked out their Jews won’t make it up to them. The Jews are expected to always be on the losing side.
The crimes of the father don’t transfer onto his children. My children shouldn’t be compensated for anything that happened to their grandparents and they shouldn’t be expected to pay for anything their grandparents did. If it happened 70 years ago then it’s a settled issue.
Chris: the best way to get them to stop killing each other is for Israel to end the Occupation, blockade, and siege…
And what happens on day two when the various terror groups continue attempting to terrorize Jews into fleeing the Middle East?
Those groups mean what they say. The state of Israel has the duty to protect it’s citizens from terror groups. These groups are not fighting to become minorities in a Jewish state.Report
I really wish the Jews are colonists brigade would address what would happen to the Jews if they stayed in Europe. If they really believe that the Jews who migrated to Israel/Palestine between 1918 to 1948 are colonists and that’s bad than they should come out and see “we think it is more moral if they stayed in Europe and died.” They are way too cowardly to do this though.Report
Ghada Karmi was born in 1939 according to Wikipedia. She might be a moderate but she is also too old to update her political beliefs that Israel must be destroyed. She is the type that accepted Oslo in so far that they viewed it as a necessary first step to destroy Israel and send the Jews packing. They say one thing to the West, another thing to themselves, and avoid taking any responsibility for their own failures.Report
Interesting that you read her Wikipedia page and already know all of her secret views that she doesn’t say anywhere you could have read.
Your mental gymnastics remain impressive.Report
You should stop with the personal attacks and let Chris state his own reasoning.Report
Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.
This is one of those things that I don’t understand.
“The enemy of my enemy can be a useful alliance in the short term” is something that I understand.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is something that I guess I understand but I see it as a mistake.
She seriously seems to be saying the latter.Report
I think she probably regrets calling them “progressive,” which has a fairly specific valence, if not definition, in American politics, and can be separated from the left, and especially the global left, more generally. Here’s her explanation (from the Wikipedia page Dark Matter linked above:
My first point was merely descriptive: those political organizations define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one characteristic of the global left, so on that basis one could describe them as part of the global left. My second point was then critical: as with any group on the left, one has to decide whether one is for that group or against that group, and one needs to critically evaluate their stand.Report
If we define the left by what it’s anti-, you’re going to find yourself in a “enemy of my enemy is also on the left” situation.
And there are a *LOT* of directions out there.Report
Being on the left, like being anywhere else in the political universe, will result in strange bedfellows, for sure. There are a lot of arguments on the left about what this should entail, and whom we should criticize and how. I tend to be more of a universalist, at least philosophically, which makes me skeptical of religious and ethnic nationalists, whether they’re white nationalists or Jewish nationalists or Arab nationalists, and it makes me skeptical of repressive religious regimes and cultures, regardless of the religion or culture. I get a lot of heat for this from some people who see my position as imperialist. I very much dislike Hamas and Hezbollah, but I am also aware of the situation, very familiar with its history and its present, so I understand also that they are products of circumstance, and unless circumstances change dramatically, it will be very difficult to get better groups.Report
Lotta circumstances out there.
Lotta products.Report
Life is complicated, and in very few circumstances is anyone all good or all bad. That we treat so much of the world as so black and white, outside of the very obvious moral abominations (say, genocide), is a failing in itself.Report
Yeah. It’s rough. “You’ve got to understand”.Report
Understanding is a good thing. Or perhaps I was reading sardonicism into the scare quotes.Report
One of the comparisons I tend to make is to note, in any given conflict, who gets the “Well, you have to understand…” and who gets the “THIS IS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE!”
Sometimes it’s Israel.
Sometimes it’s Hamas.
It’s complicated.Report
You’re making a category error here: Hamas is a militant resistance group in Gaza, only loosely representing the Palestinian people (regardless of whether a majority of Palestinians support their acts of resistance), elected once but ruling since ’08 by force, having defeated all rivals for power in combat. Israel is a democratic state, run by a repeatedly elected government, and populated by people who overwhelmingly support the Occupation, the settlements, the Apartheid, the ethnic cleansing, and now the genocide.
All you have to understand is that one side is committing genocide by popular demand, and the other side is being violently oppressed and killed, with very little or no say in the matter.Report
No! Your utility function should be more like my utility function!Report
“You’re making a category error here…”
it is always so funny to me when someone says “liberals are always (doing something intellectually dishonest in an effort to continue portraying themselves as being morally-superior)” and a liberal immediately rolls in and does exactly that thing, for exactly that reason.Report
Is the liberal in the room with us?Report
Sir! This is a Wendy’s! lolReport
I mean, at least he didn’t call me a Texan.Report
That is exactly the criticism that people have of Undocumented Migrants.
You find it meaningful? Like, you maintain in your heart that you’ll never be one of those people around you?Report
I choose never to be one. I mean, I’ve lived her just over half my life, but please, no.Report
Don’t act like you aren’t walking around down there in cowboy boots, a 10 gallon hat, and a belt buckle the size of a toddler.Report
You forgot the bolo tie.
I’m trying so hard not to look like a Texan that I’m currently wearing an Oregon t-shirt. (technically Clear Lake).Report
Yeah. That’s something one hears a lot.Report
Back before the pandemic, I used to go to lunch once every week or two at a kinda bourgie taco spot about a 10 minute walk from my work. I’d met a couple of Australian women who were also regulars who were usually there when I’d stop in, so we had gotten in the habit of eating our delicious (and, in hindsight, pretty cheap given the price of fancy tacos now) tacos at a table together and chatting. They had, when I first met them, been in the Austin for 10 years, and i had been here for about 15 (from Tennessee, via Kentucky). One of our first conversations, to which we frequently returned over the next few years, was whether we were Austinites. I said I’m wasn’t, and they, from literally the other side of the planet, swore that having been here for 10 years, they were. They believed they were Austinites because they’d thoroughly embraced Austin as home, and I believed I wasn’t an Austinite because despite having been here longer, I had not. I still think we were both right.Report
A similar dynamic plays out in Fante’s novel Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Svevo and Maria are Italian immigrants trying to scrape by in Colorado in the late 1930s. Svevo has thoroughly embraced America, to such an extent that he tries to distance himself from other Italian immigrants (even looking down on his Maria), while Maria, his wife, still thinks of herself as Italian (not Italian-American).
I think this is a pretty common split in immigrant attitudes (though it’s obviously a continuum, not just the two poles), and in a way the Australians and I are all immigrants in Texas.Report
Is anyone else qualified to make that determination?Report
I mean, putting aside people who’ve never even lived here, no. If you’re here, or if you were once here, and you want to think of yourself as an Austinite, no one should be able to tell you you aren’t.
This has actually become a non-hypothetical situation, here and back in my hometown in Tennessee, two places that have grown a great deal over the last few decades (Austin from about 450k at the turn of the century to a million now; my hometown from about 13k in 1990 to about 85k now). In both cases, a lot of older residents, or even some newer ones, blame changes in the city on people who aren’t really Austinites, or Frankliners (Franklinites? Franklinoganders?), and in particular, “Californians.” This creates some really ugly political and social dynamics, especially in my much smaller hometown.Report
So a Vonneguttian “Granfalloon”?
It’s surprising that anybody anywhere sees a difference between all of us. We’re all the same person, kinda. If you zoom out.Report
It would be very bad if being an Austinite, or New Yorker, or even an American or an Iranian or a Bhutanean defined us so completely that everyone to whom such a label could be applied was exactly the same. Fortunately…Report
This be said of any side in any conflict, though.
“We incinerated one hundred thousand women and children in a single day”
“Well, you have understand.”Report
To be fair, this is pretty much exactly what we said about the fire bombing of Tokyo, and the “you have to understand” was some MBAs and economists doing a twisted a cost-benefit analysis.Report
We teach this to every school child, that however horrific the slaughter, that it was legitimate.
And I’m not even disagreeing.
Nothing that Israel or Hamas has done even comes close to the indiscriminate slaughter committed by the Allies.
What makes the comparison useful is to ask why we consider it legitimate.
The reason we consider it so was because the Allies had a “Day After” vision that made the slaughter better than the alternative.
So far I’m not seeing that in the I/P conflict.Report
Hamas has a day after version. It is the state of Israel is vanquished, all the Jews leave the Middle East, and the glorious Islamic Republic of Palestine is established.
Israel has a bunch of competing visions of the Day After. The number of Israelis that believe in the Two-State solution aren’t that great anymore. The most liberal probably see some type of independent Palestine with hard borders maintained by Israel rather than co-prosperity. Others want Israel to annex the West Bank without the Palestinians somehow. There might be a few genocidal Israelis but I think most of them just want the issue to go away or for the Palestinians to admit defeat and live quietly as they are now. Obviously neither of these things are going to happen.Report
This is probably correct which is why I am of the opinion there can be no realistic solution to the conflict anytime soon.Report
A big problem with solving the I/P conflict that very few people in the West want to address is what if both sides have significant numbers of people that really do see the I/P conflict in religious terms. Like there are large numbers of Israeli Jews who see Israel as the place promised to them by God and there are large numbers of Palestinians and other Muslims that really do see Israel as a theocratic plot on all of Islam.
Partisans of one side or the other, including myself, are willing to see the side they don’t like as possessing weird true believers but both sides. An ethnic or colonial conflict is solvable but a theocratic conflict is not.Report
The Troubles are over in Ulster and have been for 30 years. Obviously, neither party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is interested in seeing and end to it or we’d be there.Report
Ireland doesn’t quite produce the same level of fanaticism as the Holy Land and Jerusalem does. Also while you had a bit of the same issues regarding settler-colonialism or not, it wasn’t nearly as intense as the I/P conflict.Report
As the Spaniard born husband of an Ulster Church of Ireland dude who grew up during the troubles, I can tell you that you are wrong.
The fanaticism in both sides, even in the Ian Paisley Presbyterians despising Anglican Church of Ireland of my in-laws, is still huge. I can tell you that my in-laws had a bigger issue with me coming from a nominally Catholic country than with me being a guy.
It took me years to get my husband to walk with me into a Catholic Church just to look at some paintings. And I believe both my in-laws died without knowing he once sat through a Mass, just out of curiosity. I’ll refrain to tell you what he thought of it.
Just today we were talking about the disposition of our remains, and he said he didn’t really want his ashes in my family’s niche, because it’s attached to a Catholic church.
The Troubles are not really in the past. It’s just that no one wants to the one that restarts them. And yes, the EU was a big relief valve and Brexit was a disaster to NI.Report
You aren’t wrong but I believe a key component to ending that conflict was freedom of movement in the context of both the UK and Ireland being EU member states. One of the concerns about Brexit has been that friction at the border could spark a resurgence in violence and dormant secessionist elements.
Freedom of movement is of course among the most hot button issues in the I/P conflict and there’s no bigger multinational organization or agreement presenting a solution.Report
First, you’d need “both parties” interested in seeing an end.
2nd, the Palestinian cause gets a ton of international funding. That UN agency makes sure the Palestinians don’t suffer too much. The hardline people get lots of money (some of which goes into their pockets) to “resist”.
Until those funding sources are removed it’s more profitable for their leaders to “resist” than to make peace.Report
“The Troubles are over in Ulster and have been for 30 years.”
That’s because in 1989 when the Cold War ended the Great Powers no longer had more important things to worry about than a bunch of car-bombers. Gerry Adams got the message and Ireland glide-pathed to a half-assed reconciliation; Arafat didn’t and Palestine went to hell.Report
The other issue with finding a realistic solution to the I/P conflict or really many other conflicts in the post-WWII world is that a lot of traditional solutions to things like power vacuums, failed states, and other such problems are seen as no longer permissible but nobody came up with a working alternative to the traditional solutions.
Like with the I/P conflict. The Arab states lost big to Israel in 1949 and 1967. Traditionally, this would mean that Israel got to dictate peace terms towards the defeated Arab states but what happened was that you got an armistice in 1949 and the Three No declarations in 1967. As mentioned above, the Palestinian side tends to negotiate like the lost no battle even after losing every battle and have people willing to prop them up on this or prohibit Israel from imposing the terms because things aren’t done that way anymore. But the ways that things are supposed to be done don’t exactly work if you have people looking for victory. The I/P conflict has people on both sides looking for victory.Report
The one glimmer of hope is that prior to 10/7 the major Arab states were moving towards a de facto recognition with Israel. It’s said this may have been the triggering event in fact.
Which means that Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranians are swimming against the tide.
Notice how all the Arab nation are sitting on their hands and refusing to join the fight.
And what doesn’t get discussed much is the emnity between Iran and the Arab states, and how much they dislike the idea of Iran becoming a regional hegemon with a proxy state of Palestine.Report
The Arab states are generally moving slowly towards accepting Israel as a presence. I think that going for diplomatic relationships between Israel and the other Arab states even while the I/P remained unresolved was a good idea even though lots of Western liberals and leftists thought it was terrible. Western liberals also prefer a lot softer take against Iran than everybody else in the MENA region.
\Report
It sure is weird how you bend over backwards to include what Israeli _citizens_ might want, and even there are forced to admit that most of them do not believe in the thing actually required under international law, but on the other side you only talk about _Hamas_.
Hey, what does the _current Israeli government_ want? What do they outright say they want? What actions do they take WRT achieving that goal?
It starts getting a lot less ambigious at that point, once you start listing what the people in the Israeli government want…the government, I should add, that the Israeli have voted into power and kept in power _despite_ patently obviously corruption. Corruption that isn’t actually relevant here except to point out _just how much_ Israelis like what the government is doing in Palestine, so much they are willing to ignore that corruption.
Meanwhile, Hamas is literally in power because they _won a civil war_ in Gaza. Apparently, enough Palestinians disagreed with them that they literally fought a civil war.
Also, since we’re talking about governments, it also is odd how you see to think there’s only one Palestinian government, and have completely missed that the PA exists. What do _they_ say about Israel? And how do they feel about Hamas…should I point out they were on the other side of that civil war?
It turns out, if you cherry pick Hamas as the representative of ‘Palestinian views’, and meanwhile desperately try to track down the most reasonable random Israeli with no power, you end up with Israelis sounding almost like the reasonable ones (Despite the fact you’re still sorta forced to admit they won’t even meet their obligations under international law and are, at best, willing to keep Palestine as some sort of semi-independent client state that has no actual sovereignty.)
In fact, it’s somewhat amazing how people can, with a straight face, pretend that Palestinians will never turn away from Hamas’s mode of thinking when _a large amount of Palestinians do not have Hamas as a government_ and in fact have a government that is largely seen as an Israeli puppet. Weird.Report
For what it’s worth, I googled “israel’s plans for gaza after the war wiki” and the AI came up with…
Israel’s Post-War Gaza Plans
Based on the provided search results, here is a summary of Israel’s plans for Gaza after the war:
Temporary Administration: Israel plans to temporarily administer Gaza, establishing security, removing Hamas’ control of civil governance, and starting Gaza’s physical and social reconstruction.
Strategic Objectives: Any plan for post-war Gaza should:
Prevent future Hamas- and Gaza-based attacks by conventional, terrorist, or asymmetric means.
End the cycle of wars between Israelis and Gazans.
Security Control: Israel intends to maintain security control over Palestinian areas in Gaza, as outlined in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “day after” plan.
Demilitarization: Reconstruction efforts in Gaza will be dependent on demilitarization, implying that Israel will insist on the disarming of Hamas and other militant groups.
Transition to Local Governance: The ultimate goal is to transition to local Palestinian governance and security responsibility once conditions are met, allowing for a more stable and secure environment.
It is essential to note that these plans are subject to change and may be influenced by various factors, including international pressure, diplomatic efforts, and the evolving situation on the ground.Report
In short, and I know that plenty of people aren’t going to believe Israel on this, Israel’s post-war plans are bog standard for a victorious side. These plans probably won’t work but they aren’t objectionable on the face of it.Report
Israel’s plans at the moment are “win the war and take over”.
That’s pretty normal and should be expected since the alternative is “leave Hamas in charge and wait for the next mass terror attack”.
Hamas doesn’t care about it’s people, isn’t going to surrender, and intends to win by dragging the war on.
This could drag on for months or even years.
If various people insist on a “cease fire”, then we should expect that Israel is going to prevent Hamas from rearming and digging more tunnels.
Which would mean no rebuilding infrastructure and Gaza is going to be kept in poverty.Report
I am being perfectly serious that many people both inside and outside the corridors of power want the three following things to happen:
1. Israel agrees to the creation of the Palestinian state with maximum generosity besides maybe the right of return.
2. Israel endures a certain amount, and by that we mean a lot of terrorism, from dead enders with a stiff upper lip and grace.
3. Things eventually, over decades or centuries, get better.
They just don’t want to come out and say it because it sounds bad. Even Jews who are critical of Israel might realize that this is bad deal being offered to the Jewish people. It is sort of like how the anti-Zionists wanted the preferred timeline for “the Jews of Continental Europe and the MENA region take a big hit rather than go for a Jewish state but nobody acknowledges it.”Report
..why are you doing asking an AI? You are aware that a lot of misinformation about the situation is out there, right? All using an AI does is repeat that.
Maybe we should actually just quote the current leadership of Israel:
In case you’re not aware who Ben Gvir is, he is the convicted racism inciter and convicted terrorism supporter who is currently the Minister of National Security of Israel.
Don;t get him confused with Amihai Eliyahu, the current Minister of Heritage, who also wants to to reestablish settlements in Gaza, but thinks it’s not the time to do that. He has, however suggested using nukes on Gaza, and is currently living, in violation for international law, in a West Bank settlement, and he wishes to entirely annex, aka, steal, the West Bank.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-minister-calls-for-israel-to-fully-occupy-gaza-reestablish-settlements/
These is, again, the actual Israeli government, and I remind people that Israeli held an election in 2022, unlike Gaza who last held one a two decades ago. This is the government that Israel wants, these are positions that people they elect hold.Report
In fact, maybe just rad this entire article:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/return-to-gush-katif-determined-movement-emerges-to-resettle-israelis-in-gaza/
Some interesting fact:
Netanyahu calls the the idea of resettling Gaza “unrealistic”. Not wrong, or a immoral, or a massive mistake, but ‘It’s not possible’.
But here’s even more of the government:
Well, that is a…not denial.
That is…even less of a denial. That’s outright basically saying ‘Yes, we’re doing that, but don’t say it.’
He added, however, that it is still too early to plan for Israeli settlements in Gaza.
So, at this point, we have, drumroll please: Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, and National Security Minister Ben Gvir all either saying ‘We should annex or at least continue to control and put settlers in Gaza’, or winking at that being the plan while trying to get people to stop talking about it.
Those are just the actual top-ranking government officials. It’s also something that 32% of the population wants.Report
Radical Jews like Judith Butler are more into putting their fellow Jews in danger of death and persecution to keep their radical credentials buttressed more than anything else. There also does seem to be this weird sub-group of the LGBT radical community that seeks an alliance with Islam despite the homophobia in Muslim majority countries or even in Muslim communities in the West.Report
All oppressed people should be with Team Blue and can reasonably be expected to support each other.Report
There also does seem to be this weird sub-group of the LGBT radical community that seeks an alliance with Islam despite the homophobia in Muslim majority countries or even in Muslim communities in the West.
Looking past your Islamophobia to your flailing attempts at criticizing Butler, it would help if you had read or listened to what she’s said about Islam and Muslims generally and on the subjects of women and LGBT specifically.Report
According to an Israeli commentator on the other blog, the IDF has found plans for a 10/7 type attack in northern Israel from Hezbollah. I can’t find any confirmation of this by a google search yet though. This person is rather critical of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians so I have no reason to doubt it though.Report
I would be shocked if that sort of plan didn’t exist. Similarly we have plans to invade and overthrow all countries that we’re not allied with and some what we are.
Where we get into justification is if they’re making preparations for that sort of thing.Report
Equally important I’d be shocked if the IDF is telling the truth about this.Report
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel and makes no secret that they believe justice is “No Israel, No Jews.” I have no reason to believe the IDF is lying about it. That doesn’t mean Hezbollah was just about to carry out this plan but it would be something they would want to do.Report
Trump’s plan to help with housing includes “making deportation easier to ease demand.”
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c96dc8d11b88e779ee44be7a2f3eb1b44cb1a2cb903d4a8e918f75588d8eff86.jpgReport
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/college/article/fourth-school-joins-wave-women-s-volleyball-19812157.php
New method of winning conference championship discovered.Report
Trump wanted to withhold aide for California in 2018 because they did not vote for him until an aide (now endorsing Harris) showed him there were still lots of Republicans in California. If Trump wins in 2024, he won’t be so convinced: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/03/helene-trump-politics-natural-disaster-00182419Report
The YouTube channel Kings & Generals decided to put on a video about how Judaism and Christianity separated. This is all well and good I suppose but a brief sentence a bit after the 10 minute mark in the video about how God is cruel in the Hebrew Bible but of seemingly different character in the NT shows how hard it is to get over stereotypes. Cruel vengeful Jewish God vs.Loving Hippie Jesus is such a cliche that even atheists voice it. Jews obviously do not see God as being cruel as depicted in the Hebrew Bible but no matter how much we explain things in plain language there is always a sort of “yeah, we aren’t buying it and the Hebrew Bible God is an asshole” vibe going on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCyQmLd7xAQReport
Holy books explain very little about the culture. The books are flexible enough to be on every side of every issue. Ergo the Christians can reasonably claim OT is cruel by quoting selectively and the Jews can claim the opposite also by quoting selectively.
If you want to counter claim with the NT then everything about torturing his son to death up on the cross is fair game.
Big picture your culture is for helping your people. Part of that is a degree of isolation so you don’t assimilate so there’s that.Report
Oh, and Hell is a NT thing. That raises “cruel” to infinity.Report
When I was a kid in Catholic school they read us the new testament to make us feel guilty and the old testament to terrify us.Report
I don’t find the Hebrew Bible terrifying at all. It is awe-inspiring.Report
I’m just giving you a hard time.Report
When you break the law, you generally pay the price:
https://www.cpr.org/2024/10/03/tina-peters-former-mesa-county-clerk-prison/Report
MTG is back with another anti-Semitism:
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1842047515450876221?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1842047515450876221%7Ctwgr%5E6d98cc4e58445537b3bd48942578956ff95ce46e%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%2F2024%2F10%2Fthe-party-of-ideas-2Report
Tina Peters gets nine years in prison and very righteous denunciation.
https://x.com/CoffinItUp/status/1841909132778942632?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1841909132778942632%7Ctwgr%5E5ba3265c7a9f841a5532ad7bf311b612a85f7ce0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%2F2024%2F10%2Fnine-years-in-prison-for-supporting-donald-trumpReport
Peters asked the judge to sentence her to probation while continuing to maintain her innocence. She called the accusations against her “vile.” She complained about the victims and state officials asking for prison time, and said that she was a “child of God” and that God doesn’t like people “messing with his children.” She continued to maintain that the election was stolen and votes were “flipped” despite the fact that she presented no evidence. The judge finally cut her off and said he wasn’t going to allow her to continue to present her conspiracy theories at a sentencing hearing.
At one point the judge got a little upset after Peters challenged him to read the “reports” that she submitted about fraud. He told Peters than he did read them. Peters seemed surprised and then remarked that she was glad he read them because that meant that he must agree with her. The judge scolded her not to claim that he agreed with her theories when he never said that.
Peters then said that she has to sleep on a special magnetic mattress because of a car accident so she should not be sentenced to prison because they don’t have those mattresses in prison.
https://meidasnews.com/news/maga-election-clerk-sentenced-to-prisonReport
Her wiki has a massive amount of drama and interactions with the law. I’d say we’re in mental illness territory but it seems deliberate.
She seems like someone who should be in prison for her various crimes so good going legal system.Report
There does seem to be a really high percentage of Trump operatives who have a mental issue .
Which shouldn’t be surprising since the entrance requirement for being a Trumpist in good standing is that one must swear allegiance to an outlandish conspiracy theory.Report
Their only mental issue is unabashed rage that our multi-cultural democracy won’t let them just run the place as they see fit. They simply aren’t resilient enough to not being treated like the alphas they believe they are.Report
Given the unfortunately large number of hacks, incompetents, and petty tyrants on the bench, it is heartening to see some judge no one has ever heard of do such a good job.Report
They seem to believe some rather out there stuff sincerely.Report
What they believe is entirely consistent with assuming that because of economic status, political affiliation, and race they should always be in charge and thus deferred to.Report
They are racist as heck but I don’t think ignoring sincere nuttery is a good idea anymore. We have to deal with the fact that tens of millions of Americans have a deluded sense of reality whether we like it or not.Report
They aren’t delusional. Not by a long shot. They are focused on preserving systems they believe they are entitled to. That makes them worse.Report
I think we’re in “part of the human condition” territory here and not “mental illness”. There are too many people who think irrationally about politics, religion, and their combo.
Some of her legal drama suggests we can add “unethical” to her list which might be the real problem. She tried some illegal stuff (maybe in the heat of the moment, maybe not), got caught, and is now trying to drama her way through it.Report
I am not going for this downplay.Report
In the weeks after the attack, as a broken country searched for answers, it became clear that the observers in Nahal Oz had been warning of something unprecedented — and were disregarded.
The IDF utterly failed its citizens leading up to 7 October:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/04/israel-female-field-observers-october-7-attacks-hamas-gaza/Report
Today’s Twitter Main Character seems to be a false flag on the part of Team Evil. An AI generated silly person saying things that confirm all of their priors:
Report
Why do you believe this is AI generated?Report
Because surely someone who believed such things would mask them this close to the most important election of our lifetimes.Report
Why would you expect that?Report
Because I assume that people are smarter than me rather than much, much stupider.Report
It is a twitter word salad but she appears to be a real person as I just confirmed with a two second Google: https://ispu.org/scholars/sabreena-ghaffar-siddiqui/Report
The name seems vaguely familiar from other utterances I kind of remember but I don’t feel like looking it up. I have a feeling that this isn’t the first time this blog encountered Dr. Ghaffar-Siddiqui.Report
I’m not on twitter and Elmo made it harder to search but if I am parsing her I spent too much time in grad school language correctly, she is writing “and we will sink Harris’ chances in Michigan BWA HA HA HA”Report
It’s amazing how often the Further Left continues to shoot itself in the foot politically but refuse to recognize it. This person manages to combine Further Left shooting yourself in the foot with “the Palestinians, and their sympathizers, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”Report
She’s in Canada.Report
That doesn’t mean this is the general implication of her point.Report
No! What she’s saying should be interpreted as if she were opposing Justin Trudeau!Report
Justin Trudeau is going to face defeat because of gas prices and his administration basic Canadian liberalism on too online speak. There is this thing where everybody knows what a person is talking about but plays dumb about it because they know that speaking it out loud will make the cause they support looking really dumb at best.Report
I don’t think she is talking about partisan politics at all, Canadian or American. It’s sad that the spectacle of American partisan politics has become so consuming that a lot of people can’t see any political discourse, however melodramatic (and man is that tweet over the top), except through that lens. It’s all the sadder given how limited the American partisan political discourse is.Report
I don’t understand what her point even is. That post reads like it’s a conclusion where I’m missing ten pages of introduction and 30 pages of body.
What “colonies”, what “freedom”, what “empire”, what “tools”.Report
She looks younger than me, so born way after the colonial era ended but there are a lot of radicals and intellectuals that just want some sort of grand revenge against the West to suit their neat little theories and fantasies.Report
Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui
Expert in…
Islamophobia, Race and ethnicity, Ethno-religious identity, Immigration, Social Justice, Gender, Mental health, Media representation, Politics, Refugees, Extremism, Radicalisation, Community engagement, Public speaking, Leadership
Dr. Ghaffar-Siddiqui is a globally recognized multiple award-winning public-speaker, media pundit, researcher, and a passionate social justice advocate. As well as being a professor of sociology, criminology, and criminal-psychology, she is currently directing one of Canada’s largest government-funded Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives at Colleges and Institutes Canada’s National EDI Knowledge Mobilization Centre hosted at Sheridan College…
As a postcolonial scholar, her intersectional research concentrates on the impacts of colonialism and imperialism on the lives of diasporic peoples in the West. Focusing in the areas of migration, race/ethnicity and ethno-religio identity,…
Dr Ghaffar-Siddiqui’s ongoing contribution to knowledge building around anti-racism and decolonization studies includes many academic, legislative, and editorial publications. …
Google’s AI says:…???
Oh. She has the exact same name as an actress. Amusingly Google’s robot says she’s a DEI professor, actress, and a dance instructor who started out as a law student.
Both of them have pictures so I can see they’re different people.Report
Here is here Web-Site:
https://drsabreena.com/
It’s all graft.Report
Yes, looks that way. The amount buzz words without enough research to justify a wiki page is strongly suggestive.
For someone who should be treated a lot more seriously, listen to Roland G. Fryer Jr. He’s that Harvard Economist who collects data about things like DEI so he can point out where they’re right and wrong.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/roland-fryer-refuses-to-lie-to-black-america/
I found this to be a very good listen.Report
Respectfully, I think you guys are letting yourselves be twitter brained. She’s obviously an idiot. Academia seems to be teeming with flakey people like this. That’s annoying for various reasons and there are areas where it is a real problem.
But let me gently suggest that if you’re letting her stupidity influence your own opinions about reality, even if it is in a way that is in opposition to her, that you too may he losing perspective.Report
I know that she is a nobody but I’d prefer if we could go back to a system where people like her and her Rightist equivalents had less broadcast power.Report
Sorry Lee, the internet is not going away. If it’s any help, though, odds are that people are going to increasingly ignore the winger loons even though they’re more visible. Though, first, the right will need to dislodge their own wingers from, ya know, their actual institutional cores.Report
I have no idea what anything in this statement means whether it is real or AI generated. It just seems like high academic further leftist verbiage. The thing that Tweeter/X does is take things that used to be only said in the secret corners of academia, activism, journals, and their Further Right counter points and blasts them to the public for the bewilderment of anything else. The Right generally does a better job of nut picking the Further Left and linking them to Center-Left parties in the popular imagination than liberals and center-leftists do for the Right nuts.Report
I also wonder whether people like Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui realize that most of her fellow American citizens of colonized origins, for lack of a better term, generally have bog standard politics and look at her like she is nuts. Hell, the Yemeni mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan endorsed Trump. This is just “there are something so dumb, only intellectuals believe them.”Report
21 year old Yazidi women who was captured by ISIS ten years ago, when she was 11, was rescued by the IDF from Gaza. Even the BBC acknowledges it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw5v077nyjoReport