Open Mic for the week of 10/7/2024

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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151 Responses

  1. LeeEsq
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    We are hopefully on the last day of an epic heat wave in Northern California. Florida seems to be on track for a one-two punch of two massive hurricanes in a row. Republicans still say that climate change is a hoax and Mike Johnson won’t commit to calling back the House to vote on hurricane relief:

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/mike-johnson-wont-commit-bringing-house-back-election-hurricane-relief-rcna174174Report

  2. LeeEsq
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    Might as well get this over with. Today is the first year anniversary of 10/7 attack from Hamas that started the Israel-Hamas War and the Israel-Hezbollah War. My synagogue decided to split the difference between the differences of opinion on the Israel-Hamas War by having a Prayer for Israel and a Prayer for the people of Gaza. Many, not all, but many 10/7 memorial events in the Bay Area and probably throughout the United States have places for both remembering the Israeli and Palestinian victims that came from Hamas’ 10/7 attack.

    I am seeing nothing equivalent on the Pro-Palestinian side in the West. It is all pure and unwavering anger against big, bad Israel and Israelis versus the too true indigenous Palestinians and I guess the Lebanese. Students for Justice in Palestine are planning for a week of rage against Israel while academics and writers keep publishing books whose message is “Israel is all bad and must go and be punished. The Jews will be allowed to keep nothing.” There is simply no indication of what Israel they can live with if any.

    If the attitude of Pro-Palestinian Westerners is this militant and the beliefs in the Muslim world are even more strident because of the theocracy involved than I don’t see how any movement forward is possible. There are too many people who have simply decided that true justice is the complete destruction of Israel and nothing else will do. They might not come out and say this directly, but many do, but it is easily implied in what they say.Report

  3. Saul Degraw
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    In completely unsurprising news, Trump’s crypto scheme might not be on the level: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/us/politics/donald-trump-crypto-2024-campaign.htmlReport

  4. LeeEsq
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    Hurricane Milton looks like it is going to be even worse than Hurricane Helene. People still deny that climate change is happening

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a57a0c9812ecd4040ec0871ba9b28f15b861c6351cae5737822d6e58fd770bbb.pngReport

    • Zack Roe in reply to LeeEsq
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      The atlantic ocean is cooling at an alarming rate! Scientists Baffled!

      yep, people literally printed this. Scientists are supposed to generate hypotheses and come to conclusions. Not sit around drooling in bafflement because “our theories are wrong.” (In this case, La Nina provides a nice “countertheory” to the remarkably ill-defined “climate change”).

      Science no longer means what you were taught in school.Report

  5. Jaybird
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    Remember Ta-Nehisi’s interview last week? Well, I have good news. There are now questions about whether the interviewer didn’t meet CBS’s editorial standards.Report

    • InMD in reply to Jaybird
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      That’s the TNC I remember from the teens. Making controversial assertions then having the media class treat any tough questioning or debate as out of bounds.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to InMD
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        The fundamental problem is that the interviewer was dumb and hostile and it was obvious.

        That said: He is far, far, *FAR* from being the first dumb and hostile journalist out there. Anyway, I saw that they’re bringing in DEI experts to talk to the journalists as a group and explain stuff to them.

        Which is good. Maybe we’ll get Morning Show stories about how DEI is good but it’s just gone too far.Report

        • InMD in reply to Jaybird
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          I’ve watched it several times in light of the tempest in a tea pot that has followed. The questioning was certainly tougher than I’d expect in the context of a light fare morning show but nothing a person that aspires to be a public intellectual with important things to say shouldn’t be able to handle.

          If we’re going to bring DEI into it I’d say it proves the critics to its left correct, that it turns its champions into light weights unable to defend their positions.

          The ironic thing to me is that I actually think Coates’ point is pretty strong on the merits, that the history doesn’t mean squat to the here and now, and the here and now is indefensible. I’m just not sure he is capable of making the argument to someone that doesn’t already worship him like a god.Report

          • InMD in reply to InMD
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            Of course it also occurs to me that the reason he may struggle with that point is the implications it could have for his body of political commentary.

            But that goes back to the lightweight thing.Report

            • InMD in reply to InMD
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              I just watched it again and want to add a final point, which is that I don’t think he comes off like a total fool or anything in that exchange. Far from it. However what he seems unable to do when the heat gets turned up is debate the issue from a place outside of his own personal priors that aren’t necessarily strong parallels and that don’t always stand up that well to scrutiny. It’s why he starts out pretty strong but then falters as it goes on and his lack of command of the larger geopolitical facts become apparent.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to InMD
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                Modern grievance/equity philosophy suggests that there is no such thing as a “larger geopolitical” situation, it’s just a bunch of individual situations with the tools to make their decisions affect a lot of people all at once.Report

              • InMD in reply to DensityDuck
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                That’s not what Coates is saying. He starts with a pretty strong rejoinder about why he doesn’t include any larger context or anything about the Israeli perspective in his essay. He says that story is already widely disseminated in America, everyone knows it, and its the position the powers that be in the US already operate from. I don’t think he’s wrong about that, and he’s right that we could gain valuable perspective from learning what life is actually like for Palestinians in the occupied territories.

                Where he falls apart is when he falls back on his own subjective experience as a ‘child of apartheid’ as if his experience growing up in the US in the late 70s and 80s is some kind of apples to apples comparison, gives him any insight, or even relevant to the topic. In doing this he basically concedes that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about and if the conversation had gone on any longer even a pretty weak apologist for what the Israelis are doing would have made mincemeat of him.

                Edit, to illustrate my point, he mentions where his parents and grandparents were in pre civil rights movement America. Ask the Jews of Israel where their parents and grandparents were in the same time period.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to InMD
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                There are lots of people who think they know the Israeli perspective but barely know anything about the history of Jews, Zionism, or Israel. Like if you hang around a lot in the Further Left corners of the internet, you will find people who sincerely believe that Israel is on the bring of collapse, that 1.4 million Jews already left, and that Zionism is over despite all evidence to the contrary. Very few of the Pro-Palestinian people would be able to tell you anything about Alfred Dreyfus, Theodore Herzl, or really anything. I highly doubt that Coates knows that most Israeli Jews are Miztahi and it is they rather than the Ashkenazi that tend to be most anti-Palestinian.

                What Coates is doing is putting the I/P conflict in a context he understands like many anti-Israel people in the United States. The actual facts on the ground or real history are irrelevant to him. What is relevant is the simple story of white vs. non-white, settler v. Indigenous etc.Report

        • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird
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          perhaps an unexamined aspect of the Vibe Shift is a return to the notion that if an interview makes you look bad it’s the interviewer who was the dumb jerk and not youReport

        • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird
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          Update: CBS News scrapped plan to include Dr. Donald Grant in this morning’s staff meeting about Dokoupil-Coates interview, and opted to hold multiple meetings with smaller groups (presumably to help prevent leaks).Report

    • North in reply to Jaybird
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      A pity, I enjoyed reading him in the glory days of the blogosphere when he blogged at the Atlantic.So… so… long ago. Ugh I need a drink.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to North
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        Coates makes good points! I just wish he were more eloquent and more prepared for pushback!

        Dokoupil might have had good questions if he were less dumb!

        The entire segment was a missed opportunity!

        The Message was #2 on Amazon best sellers last week.
        It’s #9 this week.Report

        • InMD in reply to Jaybird
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          Dokoupil clearly went into it fired up but it wasn’t like he didn’t let Coates speak for himself. I also think you’re overstating how dumb the questions were. In the meat of the discussion he asks basically 3 questions:

          -Do you think Israel has a right to exist, especially in a region where there are a bunch of expressly Muslim countries?

          -Arent the conditions Israel has imposed at least somewhat understandable in light of the first and second Intifada, the suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks that left dead Israeli children?

          -Hasn’t peace been offered to Palestinians on several occasions and they have rejected it?

          I’m not sure anyone can expect to talk about the subject without being able to address these kinds of questions. We debate them here endlessly, as a bunch of middle aged midwits. A guy who published a best selling writing on the subject should be able to talk about them intelligently in a mildly adversarial environment. Instead you’re left wondering if Coates even knows what the Intifadas were.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to InMD
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            The dude opened with talking about how if you took away all of the awards and all that, that the chapter on Israel seemed like it’d belong in the backpack of an extremist.

            That pretty much set the stage for everything that happened after.

            Israel enthusiasts were standing on their couches and cheering and Palestinian enthusiasts were standing on their couches and booing. Pro wrestling doesn’t do as good a job of establishing which side the viewer at home should cheer for.Report

            • InMD in reply to Jaybird
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              It’s certainly not what I’d expect to hear on CBS morning or whatever but isn’t what Coates is doing supposed to be provocative?

              This is exactly what I’m getting at above with the DEI crap, people like Coates claim we need these debates and to get outside of our comfort zones with hard truths, but then require some other authority to intervene when they appear unequipped to handle the conversation they say they want to have.*

              *In fairness I understand it’s CBS calling for that, not, as far as I know, Coates.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird
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              The problem isn’t that the interviewer said it’d belong in the backpack of an extremist, the problem is it seems he was correct.

              We have a best selling book by a “high level” author that said Israel doesn’t have a right to be an ethnostate, i.e. to be Jewish. He seems to not know the Arab states are ethnostates nor that the Palestinians have constantly engaged in terrorism.

              The narrative he’s “giving a voice” to is that of the extremists. I.e. that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist and all Palestinian violence is justified because Jews shouldn’t be in the Middle East.Report

      • Chris in reply to North
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        Is Coates to blame for this? As far as I can tell, CBS just got a lot of backlash, and is doing CYA. I’ve seen nothing from Coates suggesting he complained.

        I’m actually really excited to see Coates doing this on mainstream media, and getting questioned like this. Not only do I think he responds well, but as a darling of mainstream liberals, he’s one of the few people who can actually get mainstream media to air the pro-Palestinian perspective.Report

        • North in reply to Chris
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          Yeah in a lot of these cases it often seems to be the administration figures or third party mobs on social media who go way overboard out of a combination of risk/conflict aversion, stupidity and derp.Report

          • LeeEsq in reply to North
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            The protestors whether they were on campus or not were menacing Jewish students or at least a substantial number of them were and the rest were looking about innocently like “who me.” The Palestinian cause suffers from a big case of ureality. As mentioned above, my synagogue and other Jewish organizations have managed to say at least something about the Palestinians while on the Palestinian side it is all anger and rage against Israel without context. Like they are shocked at the attacks against Hezbollah but fail to mention that Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel since October 2023 and displaced 60,000 plus Israelis from North Israel. It is just wailing against “big bad Israel” against the poor brown indigenous people.

            Palestinian leadership has been following different variants of the same failed strategy against the Jews since long before our parents were born. They failed when they were more numerically superior and Jews did not have a military force and they continue to fail to this day. Their allies tell them to go on and that Israel is about collapse and the Jews will be fleeing despite this not happening and terrorize local Jews whenever they can. The Muslims and the Further Left are just stuck in a particular mind frame about Israel and can’t get out.Report

          • LeeEsq in reply to North
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            Trying to re-state my post but more calmly. One thing that I’ve noticed from the Pro-Palestinian side is that the people who hate Israel, whether they be chattering class liberals, further leftists, or Muslims tend to really hate Israel. There are people on the Pro-Israel side who also really hate the Palestinians and want them punished but it isn’t universal. On the Pro-Palestinian side, raging anger against Israel’s existence seems to be universal. They want Israel gone or at least severely punished in some way in addition to the creation of a Palestinian state and they say so. Their moderates sound like Israeli extremists and it is left to Jews inside and outside of Israel to deal with these unyielding fanatics Palestinian or not.Report

            • North in reply to LeeEsq
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              Sure, but you’re still talking about a generally powerless fringe- albeit one not quite as fringy and small as it used to be.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to North
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                It’s a fringe in the American Further Left.

                If we’re talking about the Arab street in the surrounding countries much less Gaza/WB, then it’s pretty mainstream.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to Dark Matter
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                I’m not sure about this. I don’t think that many Arabs like Israel but a lot of them aren’t into fighting Israel to the death either. Israel doesn’t seem to rouse the crowd in the region that much anymore. It is mainly non-Arab Muslims who seem to get really riled up about Israel.Report

              • North in reply to Dark Matter
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                That’s an assumption not supported by events on the ground. How many major attacks have originated against Israel from within the West Bank in the last decade?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to North
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                There is a massive contradiction between “we demand a robust Right of Return and refuse peace without it” and “we don’t want a massive war”.

                However both of those things are correct.

                The problem is when you say “we need a robust RoR” you are also saying “Israel needs to be gone” (what Lee said).

                Various groups hide that from themselves and/or others. Others try to live the reality and destroy Israel.Report

              • Chris in reply to Dark Matter
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                One could easily say that Israel’s refusal to grant the right of return contradicts any statement that they want peace. Both sides in this conflict have points upon which they will not compromise, and here we are.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chris
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                There is an ethical difference between saying there will be no peace unless a country is destroyed and it’s people scattered and there will be no peace unless that doesn’t happen.Report

              • Chris in reply to Dark Matter
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                I don’t think the right of return requires that the people be scattered. What required the people to be scattered was the creation of, and continued behavior of, the state of Israel.

                Would Israel be the same country, in that it would be an ethno-supremacist state? No. But the return of refugees and their families doesn’t mean that the people who have, either as colonists or refugees themselves, settled the land since 1948 have to leave, or that they will have to be second class citizens, as even the non-Jewish citizens of Israel are today.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chris
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                Chris: I don’t think the right of return requires that the people be scattered.

                All of the serious players who would have to live with this strongly disagree with you.

                No one there wants an non-ethnic state, they just disagree on whether it will be Jewish or Islamic.

                Realistically if Israel becomes an Islamic republic, then it won’t end well for the Jews. Just like it didn’t end well for them in any of the surrounding states.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to Dark Matter
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                The Right of Return is basically a backdoor way to create a one-state solution. Nobody with common sense believes that Western liberals or leftists are going to have any say in how this new one state is organized.

                It is just so freaking stupid like the person I encountered back on the other blog at the start of the conflict who thought we could create a one state where Jewish and Arab kids would learn “true history” together in school. I am not sure whether he realizes that Israelis and Palestinians might both have some very different ideas about what “true history” is than he did or what mechanism would be used to ensure that this “true history” is what gets taught.Report

              • North in reply to Dark Matter
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                So, refuse the right of return. You have this contradiction in your talk about the Palestinians in that you have stated that all Palestinians in Gaza are responsible for and can be assigned responsibility for Hamas’ attacks because they endured Hamas’ governing them and didn’t overthrow Hamas. I think that’s reductive but fair enough. By that exact same reasoning the far larger masses of Palestinians in the West Bank must be given credit for generally peacefully living along side Israel for the last decade or so and for not overthrowing the Palestinian Authority which maintains peaceful relations with Israel and operates security services to suppress other attacks from the West bank despite enormous provocations from the Israeli’s revanchist government.

                Compared to that the talk about rights of return is just that- talk. It’s useful only as an excuse to not resolve the West Bank. The Israeli’s could set their border and drag their settlers out and tell the Palestinians “you can right of return as many Palestinians as you want into Palestine but we’re not letting any into Israel” and that would be that.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to North
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                North: Compared to that the talk about rights of return is just that- talk. It’s useful only as an excuse to not resolve the West Bank.

                Sure. We should sit down and give the Palestinians a chance to make peace again.

                However they made it clear the Trump peace plan was totally unacceptable because it would have the Right of Return only to the Palestinian homeland and not destroy Israel.

                So Israel would need to pull out without a peace deal like they did in Gaza (and maybe Lebanon) and run the risk that they’d instantly see terror camps set up.

                So… we’d have to hope real hard that the PA would be corrupt enough to be bought off, be find being totally unpopular, and competent enough to put down Hamas (etc) without Israel’s help.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to Dark Matter
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                It is going to be very tough to convince Israelis that they should withdraw from the West Bank unilaterally after the experiences of the Gaza and South Lebanon withdrawal. Some like North might think that it is because of good behavior on the part of the PA and West Bank Palestinians but Israelis believe that it is because they are there.

                What most Israelis, and probably Diaspora Jews as well, thinks will happen with a unilateral Israeli withdrawal is that Tulkarm will start firing rockets at Netanya and the world will start wailing about open air prisons and whatever else if Israel attempts to defend itself.

                The idea that the Palestinians might have some agency and that they have basically shoot themselves in the foot for the past century in their “No Jew” campaign doesn’t occur to anybody on the Pro-Palestinian side.Report

              • North in reply to Dark Matter
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                Except Israel already has terror camps set up around it and they survive just fine. What they aren’t surviving, just fine, is the occupation in the West Bank which is steadily and relentlessly undermining their long-term standing. The occupation is basically a government subsidy subsidizing the most right-wing loons in their society to turn Israel into South Africa (but without all the primary resources).

                As for the Palestinians? The occupation is functionally a responsibility subsidy for them too keeping them completely without agency. If Israel withdraws and the West Bank Palestinians attack them, they’ll be responsible for what happens in response and, contra LeeEsq’s wailing, the world won’t stop a single damn missile or artillery shell no matter how much intersectional whining they may do. Any Palestinian who, after Gaza, has any delusions that attacks won’t be met with absolute walls of explosives and shells is deranged.

                A withdrawal, however it turns out, is something Israel can survive assuredly. But continued occupation? I look at how badly the Israeli’s polity has degraded and how badly their standing has eroded in the past couple decades and I can’t say with any confidence they can take another couple decades of it. Likud is working -hard- to make the Israel question into a partisan one and once that happens then all that’ll have to go wrong to fish Israel is for the timing to not line up.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
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                I’m basically for a unilateral West Bank withdrawal but understand why Israelis on the ground might be skeptical about it based on how Gaza and South Lebanon ended up. My basic theory is that the world expects Israel to deal with a certain amount of terrorism and Jews to deal with a certain amount of anti-Semitism. By a certain amount, I mean quite a lot.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
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                Oh I understand it too. But if you think the Palestinians hate Israel and want it destroyed then the logical thing for them to do would be to refuse to make the symbolic gestures the Israeli’s say they need to withdraw. Because any clear sighted student of real politic can see that continuing the occupation is the only plausible was of destroying the Jewish state.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to North
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                You have strong arguments and I agree with a lot of your points.

                However if elections were held right now in the West Bank, Hamas would easily win. A less internally brutal and less corrupt Hamas would always win.

                If Israel pulls out, then we need to expect it’s going to keep many of the settlements and it’s also going to “mow the grass” in the WB like in Gaza and Lebanon.

                It’s deranged for the Palestinians to do this to themselves, but it always has been. If 20% of our country can believe Trump’s obvious lies then it’s reasonable for a higher percentage of them to believe they can win.

                The real question is whether Israel going to war occasionally and doing to the WB what it’s doing to Gaza is really a better solution than this corrosive settlement thing.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to Dark Matter
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                I think this gets to the heart of things. A lot of the West is losing the stomach for Israel doing what it has to do to convince the Islamists to cool it. This includes the political and diplomatic class. I really think that many people want the following to happen:

                1. Israel agrees to the creation of a Palestinian state with maximum generosity.

                2. Israel deals with the dead enders and Islamists with grace and a stiff upper lip or in English, they just keep calm and carry on but never respond.

                3. Things will eventually get better.

                The problem is that 2 is a very big ask for any democratic government. Very few states are just going to tolerate terrorism or violent acts from another state for long. 2 also makes 1 very unlikely. A Palestinian state is probably going to be very reliant on the Iranian Clerical Regime for funding, so is unlikely to do anything about 2.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq
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                A lot of the West is losing the stomach for Israel doing what it has to do to convince the Islamists to cool it.

                From over here, I got pissed off when I saw Israeli soldiers destroying an ultrasound machine and then posting the video to social media for clout.

                Doing this on top of stuff like destroying a tea set and ripping up the intimate clothing that they found in an apartment and posting it to the internet for clout got me to switch from “this isn’t trying to convince the Islamists to cool it” to “this is putting them back in their place”.

                The beeper thing? That was pretty cool.
                The two-way radio thing the next day? That was pretty cool.
                Decapitating Hezbollah the day after that? Fine.

                Smashing an ultrasound? No thanks.

                That has nothing to do with convincing the Islamists to cool it.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird
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                Israel is killing tens of thousands of civilians. That’s part of the whole “brutal war” package, especially with human shields.

                They think a brutal war is justified. The rest of the world thinks there is no situation where you get to kill tens of thousands of civilians and this is genocide.

                A level of violence that high will include the occasional ass hattery.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter
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                A war against Islamists is fine.

                A war to put the Philistines back in their place is not fine.

                There is a specific flavor of ass hattery that communicates that this is a war to put the Philistines back in their place.

                And it’s that flavor that makes me spew this out of my mouth.

                And pretending that this is me being opposed to stuff like the beeper trick is pretending something that is not true.Report

              • North in reply to Dark Matter
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                “However if elections were held right now in the West Bank, Hamas would easily win.”

                That is enormous conjecture on your part based on polls which are, foundationally, talk which is, fundamentally, cheap. If the Palestinian masses in the West Bank truly wanted Hamas in charge Hamas would be in charge. Hamas managed to get in charge in Gaza in the first place because Gaza was a) isolated from Fatahs’ power based -in the west bank- and b) because Fatah themselves were not very interested in governing/controlling Gaza and didn’t put up much of a fight to retain it. Presuming that Hamas, especially a Hamas with the utter disaster of Gaza on their resume, could easily take over the West Bank is an incredible leap. There is a world of difference between telling a stranger on the phone “Yeah I want Israel to vanish into thin air” and actually choosing to put guys in charge who you know are going to get your house, your block and your entire community levelled.

                Baked into the presumption of unilateral withdrawal is a recognition that the party unilaterally withdrawing gets to draw the lines. That is reality and the reality is that if Israel unilaterally withdrew Israel would draw the lines in manners that benefitted them the most which is to say that they’d incorporate all the settlements along the green line that they possibly could. Pretending otherwise is delusional and if the Palestinians and their supporters don’t like that, well the alternative is to negotiate a mutual settlement with land swaps and agreed boundaries as well as the Palestinians agreeing that any “right of return” would apply only to returning to the new Palestinian entity and not Israel.

                Likewise, with “mowing the grass”. If Israel withdraws the Palestinians can absolutely expect that if they host attacks on Israel, those attacks will be returned disproportionately. This is one of the core lessons of the Gazan withdrawal. Sharon withdrew Israel unilaterally from Gaza in 2005. The world gave Israel a virtual blank check with regards to Gaza for almost a full twenty fishing years as a result of that. Frankly, in my opinion, it was only the reality of the continuing occupation of the West Bank that caused that blank check to gradually expire. If Israel withdrew from the West Bank (unilaterally or not) I’d fully expect that international opinion towards “mowing the grass” would be to tell the Palestinians “you play stupid games you win stupid prizes”.

                “The real question is whether Israel going to war occasionally and doing to the WB what it’s doing to Gaza is really a better solution than this corrosive settlement thing.”
                Let us note, first, that Israel having to do to the West Bank what it did in Gaza is pretty much the absolute worst-case scenario for outcomes of withdrawal. With that being recognized let us analyse Israel’s position in that worst case scenario. In that scenario Israel is:
                a) Demographically secure. A right of return is now utterly impossible. There is no grey zone Palestinian population that could potentially, in the future, be incorporated into Israeal. The demographic threat is over.
                b) Reputationally secure. The lesson of Gaza is very clear on this. Israel got 20 years of near carte blanche freedom of action towards Gaza after they withdrew. Israel can entirely survive even significant terror attacks from a worst case scenario West Bank. There is zero doubt of that. Israel can’t economically survive international isolation.
                c) Ideologically secure. The identarian left was rocked back on their heels for a considerable period of time after the Gazan withdrawal. The only thing I’ve seen that resurrected it was the steady drum beat of settler idiocy and Israeli hypocrisy from within the West Bank. The plight of Palestinian refugees away from Israel and the West Bank just didn’t/doesn’t move the needle much. Even the violence in Gaza itself was a side subject. I just don’t think anti-Israeli sentiment can continue its march without the occupation to fuel it. There isn’t enough grist there. The further left will be anti-Israeli as long as Israel is on top but the further left cannot threaten Israels’ well being as a practical sense. It is only by extending anti-Israeli sentiment out of the fringes that it can be a threat and only the occupation is capable of motivating that extension.
                So even the very worst possible outcome of a withdrawal with regards to the behavior of the Palestinians still leaves Israel in a better position than it is now. And Palestinians behaving in that worst case way would reap genuine repercussions that would hold out hope that their unambiguously suffering the consequences of their actions on the body of their own state would eventually change their attitude towards attacks on Israel. We have seen this exact thing happen in Lebanon- we have no reason to think it wouldn’t happen in the West Bank. Moreover it is overwhelmingly more likely that Fatah would remain in control and that the West Bank would not devolve into a worse case outcome.

                Our really big problem is, as Lee notes, that Israeli’s themselves don’t want to withdraw as a matter of course. It used to be that they didn’t want to withdraw without getting assurances in return “we won’t endure the painful costs of unilaterally withdrawing without getting promises in return” but with the right ascendant in Israel right now they’re rapidly approaching a “we don’t want to withdraw, period.” State and that’s a brutal problem.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
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                says:

                The Right of Return is basically where all previous attempts to reach a final deal broke down. Palestinians seem to treat it as sacrosanct and so do their supporters despite the fact that it is nearly going to be impossible to get Israel to accept it.

                I really have no idea how people expect the Right of Return to be implemented. Even if you hate Israel, I think you need to concede that Israel won all the battle since before it existed and this gives Israel a strong upper hand in negotiations. It is also clear that no Israeli government is going to say yes to anything but a symbolic right of return unless forced to and the rest of the world is not going to force this.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                You know what would get Israel unentangled from the west bank with absolutely no hope of a right of return? Withdrawal. And you can’t pretend, Lee, that the ascendant political coalition in Israel doesn’t, nakedly, want to keep the West Bank territories.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                Well that’s not at all a difficult question. Israel would say “You have the right of return to the Palestinian entity, go nuts, we’ll be over here on our side of the green line dealin with all the settler nutters we had to drag kicking and screaming out of the West Bank”. And that would be that.

                Absolutely the online left and the arabists would yelp and scream. Absolutely -you- will be annoyed and enraged by their talk. But in the real world where it actually matters the matter would be settled.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                You might find this side an amusing distraction to be scoffed at but I take them rather seriously because they are part of the bigger complex that encourages the Palestinians to shoot themselves in the foot.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                I didn’t say I find them amusing, I take them quite seriously- more seriously, I suspect, than most Israel rightists and Israel supporting conservatives do.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                I think most of the Pro-Palestinian activists care about punishing “big bad Israel” than helping Palestinians. They certainly wouldn’t encourage them in endless defiance if they did care about the Palestinians.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                If by punishing you mean saying bad things about them? Then yes. It’s all talk and always has been when you’re talking about that crew.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                I want them to shut up.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                And I’d like to be able to flap my arms and fly coast to coast on the cheap. Neither of us are getting what we want.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                Yes, I mean saying bad things about Israel for the most part. They obviously think that their protests are more important than maybe telling the Palestinians that they need to be sensible and give up some stuff or that the Jews aren’t going anywhere.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                Well, let’s be real here, the Palestinians wouldn’t budge even if all the nattering nabobs on the internet said in a chorus that they should. I can assure you the Palestinians aren’t deeply concerned about the opinions of people on twitter.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                And the West in the highest political circles is going to want a formal peace deal to make sure that the occupation is really over rather than a unilateral Israel withdrawal with the border settlements and all of Jerusalem being kept.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                The West would -LIKE- a formal deal because that’s the cleanest neatest way to resolve things. Don’t scoff at them for wanting that because you and the Israeli’s and any person with a lick of sense WANTS a formal peace deal.

                But what the overwhelming majority of people internationally will settle for is to just not have to think about the Israel/Palestinian matter much anymore. And even unilateral withdrawal will meet that need. The world wants wine but they’ll settle for water; but Israel can’t make the word accept salt or sand. It just won’t work.Report

              • Slade the Leveller in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                Exactly. We’ve been devoting a huge amount of money, concern, and column inches to an area the size of Vermont.

                https://maps.cga.harvard.edu/cmes/Map_02.pdfReport

              • LeeEsq in reply to Slade the Leveller
                Ignored
                says:

                It might be the size of Vermont but it also captures the world’s religious imagination.Report

              • Slade the Leveller in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                More like religious hatred. As lovely as the precepts of the 3 faiths that look to that region are, in practice they’ve proven to be more trouble than they’re worth there.Report

              • Chris in reply to Slade the Leveller
                Ignored
                says:

                I suspect when we stop depending on oil, so that it stops being of any real importance economically or strategically, the funding for that country will dry up. We like to think that we’re there for religious reasons, or in support of democracy, or whatever, but Empire always Empires.Report

              • Slade the Leveller in reply to Chris
                Ignored
                says:

                I think this is right. It probably won’t be soon, but the sooner we turn the Middle East into a backwater the better.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                Israel unilaterally withdraws. The stateless Palestinians in the refugee camps remain stateless. Whoever controls the West Bank says they can’t take them all in and Israel must take them. Rocket fires from the border cities into Greenline Israel and Israel invades. A unilateral withdrawal will not end the I/P conflict.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                Rocket fires from the border cities into Israel. Israel flattens the launch site and ten blocks on every side. The Palestinians and the online humanitarians yelp. The world says “*Yawn*, what did you expect?” Some Palestinians yell “Allah Akbar!” but a lot more of them yell “You stupid fishers, what were you thinking?” The next time the Palestinians see some of their local loons fixing to launch rockets they start getting pissy, and not at the Israeli’s.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                And, I’d like to pointedly add, that the current occupation of the West Bank does little to nothing to prevent rocket fire from the West Bank into Israel. The people preventing rocket fire from the West Bank into Israel are predominantly the PA. The idea they’d do that -less- when they had -more- control of the West Bank is silly.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                I am much less certain that things will play out with the PA being in control or the Palestinians doing anything to stop their crazies than you think. Lebanon did not do a great job combatting Hezbollah stupidity.

                The online humanitarians are pissing me off. If people really cared about the Palestinians, they would at least notice that Palestinian strategy has been shooting themselves in the foot for the past 100 years. But it’s all about “big bad Israel” and the Palestinians and other Muslims who can’t quite stop fantasizing about the destruction of Israel despite that not happening.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                The point is that Israels’ worst case scenario would still be, in terms of Israels’ long term interests, better than their current state. There’s a significant chance it’d be a -lot- better and even if it did turn out poorly it’d also have much better odds of improving. The occupation freezes everything in the Middle East in place to Israel’s long term detriment.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                You have a lot of really good points and I find the entire line of logic persuasive.

                I also expect the “worse case” to be pretty close to the expected case. That includes Lee’s prediction that the refugee camps keep pushing for a RoR into Israel proper.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to Dark Matter
                Ignored
                says:

                I basically agree with the idea of withdrawal but I am a lot more skeptical about how it will turn out in the long run. There is a certain amount of underpants gnome thinking in the optimistic withdrawal scenarios. I just think that withdrawal is the most effective way to get a particular albatros off of Israel’s back for the most part but not completely.

                There are still millions of stateless Palestinians spread throughout the Middle East. A WB withdrawal won’t do much for them and independent Palestine won’t be able to handle them. The temptation to argue that it isn’t a true withdrawal for various reasons will be too great.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                Eh, once the 15 million Palestinians in the West Bank have Israels’ boot off their neck the dynamic changes a lot. Not to be crass about it but the Palestinian cause has never been unitary and once the West Bank is its own polity a great deal of FUIGM will set in vis a vis the refugees elsewhere. It also can’t be emphasized enough that while the refugees can make a lot of moral and online noise they simply have very little ability to cause actual, real, trouble for Israel; enormously less than their relatives on the border can.Report

              • North in reply to Dark Matter
                Ignored
                says:

                Very kind Dark. I am not gonna quibble on odds but I suspect history suggests the outcomes will be more muddled than your pessimism may suggest- for one thing once they actually have something to fight over it’s entirely possible the Palestinians may just fight each other instead. It is the middle east after all.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                It can not be emphasized how pissed I am at the sheer dishonestly of Pro-Palestinian propaganda and how it removed all agency from the Palestinians and context from the Israel-Hams and Israel-Hezbollah Wars. Nothing happened on October 7, 2023 and Hezbollah wasn’t firing rockets into north Israel that displaced 60,000 Israelis. It was just that “big bad Israel” got up and decided to invade Gaza and Lebanon and hurt those “poor brown people” for no reason.

                The Palestinians have been using the same tactics and with the same revolts from before my parents were born. Despite a century of continued failure, they keep up the same ultra-rejectionism and demands for the complete destruction of Israel that never stops, too many people keep indulging and saving them. Maybe they should face complete defeat for once and have a deal forced down their throats because they have lost the war. Maybe that might restore some sense of reality.Report

              • InMD in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                I think what North has been suggesting is forcing a resolution and complete defeat of the Palestinians. Unless you think letting the settler movement succeed in de facto incorporating the Palestinians into the country of Israel would be be better. To me that sounds more like holding a gun to your own head.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to InMD
                Ignored
                says:

                I suppose it depends on what you mean by complete defeat of the Palestinians. To me it means something like the end of WWII where the winning side gets to more or less dictate the terms and the losing side accepts it.

                The problem with the Israel-Palestine or really the broader Israel-Arab conflict is that the Palestinians were always allowed to make patently ridiculous demands like they were winning the battles despite getting their rears handed to them. Regardless of the morality of the Right of Return, the facts on the ground suggest that the Palestinians aren’t going to get it but despite this the Palestinians keep demanding it and expect it to be honored. You have several organizations that are still calling for the destruction of Israel and maybe even the expulsion of the Jews as the one true solution despite the fact that this is also patently ridiculous based on the facts of the ground.

                A defeat would mean the Palestinians realize that they basically lost and can’t make maximum and flatly out there demands.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                That kind of victory has always been impossible because Israel has never been capable of totally defeating her Arab neighbors. Smash their armies? Sure. but A) she could never do it without outside support which always made Israels’ successes contingent on outside politics and B) Israel has absolutely never been capable of totally defeating and totally occupying her neighboring countries the way the Allies did post WWII. Absent independence and the power to occupy a total victory along post WWII lines is not possible. Nor, I’d hasten to add, would it have been desirable.Report

              • J_A in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                @LeeEsq

                You said

                “ I suppose it depends on what you mean by complete defeat of the Palestinians. To me it means something like the end of WWII where the winning side gets to more or less dictate the terms and the losing side accepts it.”

                Can you spell out the terms you would like to dictate, or, alternatively, what terms do you think would Israel dictate?

                Because I have the suspicion this is another gnome underpants issue. Most wars in history have ended with some territorial exchanges, very few of those including population displacements. But after those exchanges took place, either the two sides ended more or less how they started, or one of them essentially absorbed the other one.

                So again, what are the terms that Israel would dictate? Incorporation of the WB into Israel? What about the WB population? If you want to remove it, where would you send it? Into third-party non belligerent countries?

                Anything less than that is just for Israel to draw a Green Line and say “We keep this, you get that”. And as others have pointed, Israel can do that tomorrow.

                And of course, there’s a historical example of victors dictating terms that had the objective of crippling the economy and military capability of the defeated to make sure they would stay subservient to the victors.

                That was Versailles. It took only twenty years for that strategy to prove itself disastrous.

                And the Allies learned their lesson. The peace terms imposed after WWII were significantly more lenient that Versailles, and more in line with all that had come before at least since WestphaliaReport

              • Michael Cain in reply to J_A
                Ignored
                says:

                Most wars in history have ended with some territorial exchanges, very few of those including population displacements.

                Many war settlements where there was a religious component to the war required in practice the losers who stayed in place to adopt the winners’ religion, at least in public.Report

              • J_A in reply to Michael Cain
                Ignored
                says:

                I don’t believe this is accurate. I believe only post Constantine Christianity (up to Charlemagne or so) engaged in forced conversions in a massive scale.

                For sure the Muslims have never required forced conversions to Islam, and even in the Spanish Reconquista the Christians did not force the Muslims to convert. (*)

                (*) It’s true that Catholic Spain expulsed its Jewish population in 1492, and the remaining Muslims 150 years later. But these were economic decisions affecting people that were (2nd class) citizens of the state, not the result of a recent war.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to J_A
                Ignored
                says:

                I think one thing that Israel would dictate is stop demanding the Right of Return for Palestinians and their descendants, we aren’t going to commit national suicide. The other thing that might be dictated would be Israel gets Jerusalem and the Palestinian state is demilitarized. I think these are realistic things for Israel to aim for in a forced settlement.Report

              • J_A in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                Re Jerusalem, no one expects that Israel will give back the city. I would think it would be reasonable that Palestinians living in East Jerusalem should become (to the extent they are not) Israeli citizens.

                Re the Right of Return, again, I don’t see a problem with this being an Israeli precondition for peace.

                Now, a demilitarized Palestinian state is a different issue. Without an army how would a Palestinian state defend itself from potential Israeli incursions, be them IDF or just settlers claiming for Judea and Samaria? Would the Palestinian state be protected by the Jordanian, the Egyptian, or the Syrian army? Or is the idea that Israel would retain a permanent right to patrol and police inside Palestine? If so, will Israel also want to control the borders to make sure no arms are imported? To make sure of what? And how is that different from now?

                Remember, we are talking about peace here. At the end of the process there are supposedly two separate sovereign nations at peace.

                Again, friendly reminder. Versailles did include demilitarization obligations and economic restriction to make sure Germany would not be able to rearm itself. It did not work then, it would not work in Palestine.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                Sure, but the Israeli’s have started turning to a land grubbing derangement including their own underpants gnomes theories about how they get that land without the people on it that is new and very dangerous. The Palestinians ineffective absolute refusals can’t endanger Israel beyond the degree that Israel permits it to threaten them. The Israels own demons, though, could kill their state stone dead. A world historic case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                I think it has mainly been impossible because after WWII, the world lost it’s appetite for these types of imposed peace. The world also never came up with an idea on what to do if the losing side in an armed conflict remains defiant and refuses to negotiate in good faith like what happened after the Israeli War for Independence or the Six Day War or even with the Palestinians making some very unrealistic demands.Report

              • North in reply to LeeEsq
                Ignored
                says:

                Maybe, but the primary and principle reason was not world opinion or changing moores. It was because A) Israel depended on the largess of western nations to make war and, most importantly, Israel absolutely, totally, was incapable of prosecuting a total occupation of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the territories the way the allies occupied Germany, Italy and Japan. Eshkol could have shoved a gun into every Israeli man woman and childs’ hands and they still couldn’t have done it. No total victory, no total dictating of terms.

                And let us not forget that a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the territories -IS- a victory by any rational measure of victories since Israel would, mostly by itself, be deciding what the final lines on the map would be, keeping what it desired and abandoning what it didn’t want while making no concessions in return.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to North
                Ignored
                says:

                Total victory over Egypt and Syria is impossible. Gaza is possible. Lebanon only jumped in because it looked like Israel was going to get total victory there.Report

              • North in reply to Dark Matter
                Ignored
                says:

                I agree, but no total victory, no total dictating of terms ala Allies post WWII. And this is without even considering the land question. If the US, and Britain had entertained significant designs on land in Europe post WWII that would have been a very different kettle of fish.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to Dark Matter
                Ignored
                says:

                Hezbollah jumped in rather than Lebanon. Most Lebanese would have preferred if Hezbollah stayed out.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      David Polansky wrote a somewhat withering piece on Coates.

      Indeed, we are already seeing more-in-sorrow-than-anger takes from betrayed fans claiming that Coates has abandoned complexity and nuance in his treatment of the Israel-Palestine situation. But this is, as they say, cope. There was scarcely a shred of nuance or complexity to be found in, say, the pages of Between the World and Me, which hardly prevented it from earning a National Book Award. The simplicity of his message has just become newly apparent because the political cleavages cut in different ways this time around. Or, to put it more bluntly, much of his Jewish audience (and not only them) is far more sensitive to criticisms of Israel than of America, and will be unlikely to read him with the same forbearance as they once did.

      Oof.Report

    • Michael Cain in reply to LeeEsq
      Ignored
      says:

      DeSantis may talk the climate change denier talk, but he doesn’t seem to be walking it. He declared the state-level emergency on Sunday. He obviously made the required calls because FEMA is pre-positioning equipment and personnel which they can’t do until asked. He has had the National Guard outfit Tropicana Field (a covered stadium) to provide space out of which hundreds/thousands of responders can operate once Milton is past.Report

  6. Saul Degraw
    Ignored
    says:

    Pro-Palestinian Group Uncommitted comes out for Harris, noticing correctly that Harris would be far worse: https://archive.is/20241008230205/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/us/politics/palestine-uncommitted-trump.htmlReport

  7. LeeEsq
    Ignored
    says:

    Mondoweiss managed to interview a member of Hamas on their reflections on 10/7 and the year that followed. This is what he had to say:

    Mousa Abu Marzouk of Hamas gave an interesting interview to Mondoweiss two days ago. In it, he said regarding Operation Al-Aqsa Flood that “I did expect such an Israeli response, given my understanding of the Zionist background and the fanatic Jewish mentality.” Moreover, another reason “was the international community’s failure to prevent the occupation from liquidating the Palestinian cause. Our position has been validated because the international community has watched our extermination for a year and has done nothing practical or effective to prevent it.

    The circular reasoning here is amazing in a dismal way. Hamas knew that Israel would smash Gaza because of 10/7 and that they were right to do so because the world’s failure to stop it shows that Hamas is correct about the rest of the world. Hamas is an utterly monstrous organization that needs to be destroyed. They are bad for the Israelis and bad for the Palestinians. Just pure fanatics.

    I also find it extremely rich that a member of Hamas is describing Jews as fanatics.Report

  8. Saul Degraw
    Ignored
    says:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/81dafd1083c73aa93d025cdd9610635f2b8bb79ffae5c53a3a2da09f3a8cb243.png

    Elon or someone like him appears to be betting millions on Trump in Polymarket to manipulate the odds.Report

  9. Dark Matter
    Ignored
    says:

    Judge sentences defiant Tina Peters to 9 years

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXqkOM5VbbwReport

  10. LeeEsq
    Ignored
    says:

    The Facebook algorithm in it’s infinite wisdom has decided to give me both Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian propaganda during the course of the Israel-Hamas War. There is a big difference in spirit between the propaganda. The pro-Israel propaganda is a lot more positive and optimistic. Most of it revolves around the beauty of sights within Greenline Israel, yes this includes Jerusalem, or the accomplishments of the Zionist movement and the Jewish people. There is almost nothing about the terrorism that Israel suffered from the Palestinians or its wars with the surrounding countries.

    Pro-Palestinian propaganda is a lot more negative and dishonest. There is a lot of angry Islamic stuff about how the forces of Islam will finally defeat the perfidious Jewish state, dishonest stuff that tries to pretend that there was a country called Palestine and often tries to pass off the achievements of the Yishuv as “Palestinian”, and the typical woe is us stuff without context.

    There is a big sense that the Palestinian movement suffers from unreality in a really bad way. This is among actual Palestinians and their Muslim and Western allies. There are apparently people on the Further Left internet who seem to really believe that the collapse of Israel is at hand and organizations pushing for the complete destruction of Israel as the only true just solution. I have no idea how Israel is expected to negotiate with people whose sense of reality is that deluded.Report

  11. Saul Degraw
    Ignored
    says:

    Once again, the Noble Prize snubs Murakami.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to Saul Degraw
      Ignored
      says:

      Pro-Palestinian Activists: We are merely anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic.

      Also Pro-Palestinian Activists: We will target any Jew we can find.Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to LeeEsq
        Ignored
        says:

        Zionism: political movement for the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in the area of Palestine, since 1860

        What does “anti-Zionist” even mean in 2024? Israel shouldn’t exist?Report

        • LeeEsq in reply to Dark Matter
          Ignored
          says:

          1881 is usually the given date of the start of the Zionist movement. Moses Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem is a start but didn’t really start the movement. Leon Pinsker’s Automanicipation, the start of the Hovevi Zion, and the First Alyah are when things are really seen as starting.

          There are several groups and people explicitly arguing for the destruction of Israel and even that all the Jews should leave the Middle East. So yes, the anti-Zionists are arguing that Israel should not exist even if that is not obviously going to happen without a world invasion.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to LeeEsq
            Ignored
            says:

            Anti-Zionist seems pretty anti-semitic on the face of it. If you’re “opposed to ethnostates” then there are scores of Islamic (etc) ones and I’ve yet to see someone oppose their existence.

            RE: 1860 v 1881
            That was from Google’s robot and I’m not going to bother figuring out why it thinks that.Report

            • Chris in reply to Dark Matter
              Ignored
              says:

              Let’s lay out a hierarchy of ethno-states from least bad to worst:

              1. Effective ethno-states (think Saudi Arabia or many other states with heavily majority Arab populations; Northern Ireland). These don’t have legally segregated ethnicities, but there is often clear economic and social/cultural segregation.
              2. True ethnocracies. There are only a handful of these (excluding countries with state religions, so e.g., places where citizenship requires you to be Muslim, but not of a specific ethnicity), with Malaysia and Israel the most prominent, though there are some that are heavily trending that way (e.g., Azerbaijan), if they’re not already there.
              3. Apartheid ethnocracies. Pretty much everyone in 2 will already be in 3 if they aren’t already. This involves not only the division of citizens (and non-citizens) into classes with different civil/political and economic liberties, but in every case, the violent enforcement of the class hierarchy. This would again be Israel and maybe Malaysia, with other countries moving in this direction.
              4. Apartheid ethnocracies currently committing genocide. That is Israel.

              Add to that the fact that Israel is the only country currently falling in 2-4 that is receiving significant economic and military aid from the U.S. (we provide a bunch of countries in 1, or at least approaching it, with aid), and you should see why anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitic (I don’t want to say it never is; I see enough among anti-Zionists to know why that’s not the case). It should also tell you something about Zionism as currently constituted, which Lee in particular makes apparent, but that’s another conversation.Report

            • LeeEsq in reply to Dark Matter
              Ignored
              says:

              Anti-Zionism tends towards anti-Semitism because going for “Israel is an evil bad settler-colonialist state” sounds a lot better than “we need the Jews of continental Europe and the MENA region to take a gigantic hit that they will get no credit for.” They have no answers on what the Jews should have done as an alternative to save themselves, so they just ignore the peril that the Jews were in.Report

            • LeeEsq in reply to Dark Matter
              Ignored
              says:

              I am growing utterly disgusted with the continued dishonesty of the Further Left and Chattering Classes when it comes to the Jewish people. They know enough of our history to appeal for us to support their cause but at the same time resolutely refuse to give us any help and treat as an illegitimate group of wypipo cosplaying as an oppressed people. They delight in other oppressed groups fighting to preserve their cultures from forced assimilation, freedom, and liberation but look at the Jews with disgust when we do so. They think we are a bugs of a people getting in the way of their plans because of our insistence on our peculiarity and our refusal to accept even the most minor form of symbolic domination despite our small numbers.Report

  12. Saul Degraw
    Ignored
    says:

    This is ingenious. PAC to place ads before porn warning guys about Project 2025 wanting to ban porn: https://slate.com/life/2024/10/donald-trump-kamala-harris-election-project-2025-ad.htmlReport

  13. Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    They’ve done some DNA analysis and have pretty much concluded who Jack the Ripper was: Aaron Kosminski.

    I was a Gullist, myself. But Kosminski makes sense given that there is still a Masonic connection to the killer.Report

  14. Saul Degraw
    Ignored
    says:

    https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1844783578497818837

    I am not a super fan of Nate Silver but this strikes me as generally correct. Many polls from now until the election might as well be indistinguishable from a random number generator picking a number fro -4 to +4.Report

  15. Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    A new Harris ad targeting men. (You know when I talk about “theory of mind”? This is the sort of thing that I’m talking about.)

    Report

    • InMD in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      I’m man enough to know cringe when I see it.

      That said I thought the thing Saul linked to earlier about advertising on porn sites about conservative aims to restrict access to it isn’t a bad idea.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      Apparently, everybody in the ad is a paid actor.

      As many of you know, Jimmy Kimmel’s writer, Jacob Reed, directed an ad for the Kamala Harris campaign titled ‘Men for Kamala.’ The ad features what are presented as everyday male voters explaining why supporting Kamala Harris is the masculine thing to do. However, none of the men in the ad are actually regular voters—they are paid actors.

      Moreover, their real-life circumstances differ significantly from the individuals they portray in the ad. Here are their stories:

      – Wayland McQueen is a far-left, pro-Antifa comedian and actor who has, until now, found limited success. He does improv gigs at the Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles. In a Twitter post from 2022, he explains what white privilege is and tells you why you need to acknowledge your white privilege. As of 2024 he is single.

      – Lanre Idewu is an immigrant from Nigeria. He is also an actor who works at the D.C.-based OCTET Productions. He has many intimate pictures with the Obamas and the Bidens. Idewu, who is bisexual, has done gay-for-pay movies and nude solo shoots. In the “Men for Kamala” ad, he says he is “man enough to f-ing braid his daughter’s hair,” but the only problem is that he doesn’t have a daughter. Idewu isn’t braiding anyone’s hair.

      – Mike Leffingwell, a gay man, also works at the Upright Citizens Brigade, where McQueen works. He is an acting coach, cartoon writer for Netflix and DreamWorks, and an actor in TV commercials. On his public Instagram page, he showcases his participation in his latest project—the “Men for Kamala” ad.

      – Winston Carter, the heavyset fellow in the ad who claims to be a mechanic and rancher, lives in Los Angeles signed with Taft Broadcasting Company. He has found limited success in the acting world, mainly as an extra in films and as a character in the low-budget superhero film Spaghettiman.

      – Tony Ketcham, the tough, rugged, bearded grandpa in his garage in the “Men for Kamala” ad, is also an actor. He now mainly does low-budget independent films like Car Botz, where he played the role of PePaw. Tony is unmarried in real life. In 2001, he played the extra role of “alcoholic consumer” in the movie Ghost World.

      Report

  16. Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    Jim Cramer has announced that Donald Trump will lose the election.Report

  17. Saul Degraw
    Ignored
    says:

    Jay Caspian Kang has an essay in the New Yorker asking “Has the Presidential Election Become a Game of Random Chance?”

    https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/has-the-presidential-election-become-a-game-of-random-chance

    “In the past couple of months, I’ve written about how much of the election—whether the preferences of the so-called undecided voters, the polls, or the post-Convention agenda of Harris—is mostly unknowable. On November 5th, when the election needle at the Times finally comes to rest, we will manufacture a bunch of reasons why Trump or Harris won, or, more likely, why one of them lost, and those narratives will either disappear within a couple of days or calcify into the prevailing political wisdom. If, for example, Harris loses Pennsylvania, you can imagine a conclusion: She should have talked more about the border instead of just reiterating the same line about the bipartisan bill over and over and over again. If Trump loses the election, the postmortems might focus on his inability to launch what should have been a laser-focussed attack on the Harris campaign’s inability to lead the country in a time of international and domestic crises, her oftentimes wandering answers to direct questions, and what, up until this past week, sure seemed like a reticence to sit in front of a camera and answer difficult questions. This should have been a layup for Trump against a weak candidate. Or, perhaps, they will simply conclude that the country has finally and definitively turned away from Trump’s would-be authoritarianism.

    But, sadly for us pundits, there isn’t a reliable way to explain the chaos of thin margins in an election involving roughly two-thirds of eligible American voters and a bizarre mechanism like the Electoral College. The commentariat seems stuck talking about the same things over and over—Why doesn’t she do more interviews? Why can’t Trump cut down on the inflammatory language and the bizarre asides?—while natural disasters keep happening at home and the bombs keep dropping abroad.

    If this was just about pundits and our predictions and prescriptions, the stakes would be relatively low. But I sense that the electorate also has been wallowing in this epistemic muck since the Democratic National Convention. The coin-flip nature of the election has frozen everyone from taking too hard of a stand on anything, really. The talk about how this is the most important election in our lifetimes is now delivered, for the most part, without much conviction. In prior elections, this would be the time when there would be blanket ads about getting out the vote, for example, but, outside of Taylor Swift’s endorsement on Instagram, there hasn’t really been the same fervor around even something that’s as seemingly anodyne as reminding people to vote. The reports of enthusiastic, overflowing crowds for Harris rallies feel like a distant memory. The coconut memes have receded.

    This stasis, as unsatisfying as it might be, is not all Harris’s fault. She seems to be running a campaign hell-bent on converting Republican voters, which, again, seems like a reasonable enough strategy. When asked by Stephen Colbert how she might differ from Biden, Harris pointed out that she was a different person and that, more important, she was not Trump, which was a perfect encapsulation of her campaign. She is not Biden or Trump, and maybe that’s enough, even if she doesn’t really explain how her policy ambitions or even temperament might lead to change.

    We have seemingly reached an end point in polarization, where any new developments short of swapping out a candidate wholesale will be met with indifference in the polls. The public understands, at least subconsciously, that something must matter to voters, but only really gets evidence that most things—say, Trump’s convictions in court, his litany of bigoted outbursts and lies, or who wins a debate—do not. How does a concerned citizen participate in such seemingly arbitrary and unknowable politics when everything has been winnowed down to the results of one election? How often do they just sit back and wait for the coin to flip? ”

    In this regard, the Times/Sienna polling states Harris is maintaining her lead in Pennsylvania but also stating that Trump has a strong lead in Arizona, one that looks more like McCain and Romney’s comfortable leads over Obama in that state compared to the narrow results of 2016 and 2020. Nate Cohn admits that the Times result in Arizona is an outlier that he can’t fully explain but according to their results, Harris is doing much worse with white voters including white college grads in Arizona compared to the rest of the nation. This is even as Gallego maintains a comfortable 7 point plus lead over Lake.

    And the way pollsters keep writing about the election changes. 538 has had Harris winning 55 times out of 100 and calling it a toss up. Now they write she has a 53 out of 100 probability of winning but are more upbeat because trends are in her direction.Report

  18. LeeEsq
    Ignored
    says:

    Studies show that Christopher Columbus might have been a Sephardic Jew from the Baleric Islands rather than Italian:

    https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/christopher-columbus-jewish-dna-hv0323hdpReport

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