I mean, I'd say sending CPS investigate parents for abuse simply because their kids are trans goes way beyond insisting public schools treating gender identity as "outside their jurisdiction", yet that's exactly what the GOP Governor of Texas has "gotten traction" for.
Likewise, the last time we had a Republican President, he precipitously banned trans people from serving in the military with a Tweet, and funnily enough he's almost certainly going to be the GOP nominee this time around, and has a puncher's chance of winning.
At some point, we as a country have to stop pretending that the GOP is a center-right party with a fanatical fascist fringe.
It's a fanatical fascist party with a center-right fringe.
Trump attorney Christopher Kise called it “a tragic day for the rule of law.” Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, complained that the order was “nothing but attempted election interference, which is failing terribly.”
Engoron imposed the gag order Oct. 3 after Trump posted a derogatory comment about the judge’s law clerk to social media. The post, which included a baseless allegation about the clerk's personal life, came the second day of the trial in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit.
It actually still surprises me how little political price Trump pays for the way the care and feeding of his own ego is his top priority, both when campaigning and (even worse) when in office.
"If the Democrats can reforge Anduril, Flame of the West, the issue is an opportunity to paint Republicans as supporting a pretender to the throne of Gondor."
Where is the control of the radical fringe gonna come from?
De facto party leader and primary front runner Donald Trump is not a great bet, given his approach to trans people in the military (kicking them all out for no reason), and runner-up Ron DeSantis was at the center of the bizarre "groomer" panic.
People routinely overestimate the relative unsafety off NYC because NYC is huge, so you get high absolute numbers of homicides, and is also the city where a lot of the national media finds its home, ensuring those homicides are disproportionately well-publicized.
So this is what all the fuss is about? I really don’t understand how anyone gets to “antisemitism” from this.
I really don't see how anyone doesn't.
You not only have to ignore probable allusions to prevalent anti-semitic conspiracy theories, and language that goes out of its way to be very inclusive (such as "western Jewish populations"), you also have to interpolate a bunch of dubious qualifying assumptions to make it anything but anti-semitic.
Maybe we should grant the benefit of the doubt if we just had to do one of these things, but even if we have a pretty robust prior of "not anti-semitic", at a certain point the posterior distribution has got to change.
"Look, I know that you think the IDF laying siege to our hospitals looks bad, but I need to inject some vital context here and tell you they also tried to give us fuel, and we said, 'No.'"
It would be funny if it weren't for literally everything about it.
There are two places where I think you are misreading the Tweet in ways that make it vastly more benign than it is.
The first, I'll grant, is a matter of interpretation, where I (and many others) see a lot of allusions to common anti-semitic conspiracy theories where Jews as a group are attempting to weaken or destroy the white race using "cultural Marxism" (hence the reference to specifically "dialectical" hatred) and "flood" majority white countries with non-white immigrants as part of the plot.
If you think this is too tenuous, I think the conversation would ordinarily end here, as we'd have no choice but to agree to disagree about the author's intent.
Here, however, your reading goes a step further:
To the first sentence, I’m not sure if you can call the current woke stuff dialectical.
Likewise here:
I think a lot of American Jews are starting to come to terms with the idea that the left won’t just betray them personally, but betray the idea of rights.
The tweet's author does nothing to single out "woke", liberal, leftist, or even American Jews. He talks about "Jewish communities" and "western [sic] Jewish populations" without any of the qualifications that would support your reading or, you know, make the tweet anything but rancid anti-semitism.
Just the plain words there, without any allusions to common and well-publicized elements of the worst anti-semitic conspiracy theorizing, are extremely bad, and something Musk should never have endorsed.
I am really struggling to understand how the settlements in the WB are causing Hamas to attack Israel from Gaza,
They sure as hell didn't stop Hamas from attacking Israel from Gaza, so if the best argument for continuing to expand them is that stopping won't prevent Hamas attacks... well, that's no argument at all.
Re: Candace Owens, she's yet another example of Ben Shapiro's ability to surround himself with people who somehow manage to make Ben Shapiro look good by comparison.
Yeah, my opinion on Israel overall is not terribly positive. Once the topic turns to its conduct with regards to Gaza and the West Bank, it's extremely negative, and that a lot of what they do is essentially criminal.
But none of that changes my belief that no state could, or should, tolerate a terrorist gang slaughtering over a thousand of its citizens and kidnapping hundreds more. I don't think it's terribly hard, or even hard at all, to reconcile the two, but evidently it causes a lot of trouble for others.
In the moment and with the limited perspective he might not really be able to understand the idea that the central American order of city states would ultimately be replaced with a Spanish one.
He probably wouldn't, and indeed I don't know if it was understood by the Spaniards either.
But “care about the ethnic background” has a lot of 2023 baggage that I’m not sure is appropriate for 1523.
Sorta cuts both ways.
The people being oppressed by the Aztecs certainly didn't care about racial categories that were invented a few centuries hence and then started being euphemistically called "ethnicities" a century or two after that, I'll grant.
I think the modern (much more modern) usage of "ethnicity" as a euphemism for the (still modern but slightly less modern) concept of race was definitely not in place.
But a broader idea of a people sharing a common identity is not new, and my understanding is that it existed in the Americas when Europeans arrived.
The indigenous[1] populations they displaced were mainly destroyed by novel diseases, not genocide – which, in the legal definition of the term, requires intent.
So there was only a little genocide alongside a whole bunch of "displace[ment]", and all of that is basically fine.
Just amazing work here, starting with two very defensible premises, both in terms of the idea of settler colonialism being ill-defined and applied in an inconsistent way, and beyond that, arguing that Israel itself is not a good example of settler colonialism, and then start smuggling in all sorts of complete nonsense.
See also this absolute record scratch gem:
I highly doubt the peoples oppressed by the Aztecs, Ashanti, or Khmer cared about the ethnic background of their conquerors.
Like, why wouldn't they?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Democratic Weakness”
I mean, I'd say sending CPS investigate parents for abuse simply because their kids are trans goes way beyond insisting public schools treating gender identity as "outside their jurisdiction", yet that's exactly what the GOP Governor of Texas has "gotten traction" for.
Likewise, the last time we had a Republican President, he precipitously banned trans people from serving in the military with a Tweet, and funnily enough he's almost certainly going to be the GOP nominee this time around, and has a puncher's chance of winning.
At some point, we as a country have to stop pretending that the GOP is a center-right party with a fanatical fascist fringe.
It's a fanatical fascist party with a center-right fringe.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/27/2023”
This is a particularly wild contrast:
Trump attorney Christopher Kise called it “a tragic day for the rule of law.” Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, complained that the order was “nothing but attempted election interference, which is failing terribly.”
Engoron imposed the gag order Oct. 3 after Trump posted a derogatory comment about the judge’s law clerk to social media. The post, which included a baseless allegation about the clerk's personal life, came the second day of the trial in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit.
It actually still surprises me how little political price Trump pays for the way the care and feeding of his own ego is his top priority, both when campaigning and (even worse) when in office.
On “The Democratic Weakness”
"If the Democrats can reforge Anduril, Flame of the West, the issue is an opportunity to paint Republicans as supporting a pretender to the throne of Gondor."
Where is the control of the radical fringe gonna come from?
De facto party leader and primary front runner Donald Trump is not a great bet, given his approach to trans people in the military (kicking them all out for no reason), and runner-up Ron DeSantis was at the center of the bizarre "groomer" panic.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/20/2023”
People routinely overestimate the relative unsafety off NYC because NYC is huge, so you get high absolute numbers of homicides, and is also the city where a lot of the national media finds its home, ensuring those homicides are disproportionately well-publicized.
On “Support for Israel is Strong, But….”
So this is what all the fuss is about? I really don’t understand how anyone gets to “antisemitism” from this.
I really don't see how anyone doesn't.
You not only have to ignore probable allusions to prevalent anti-semitic conspiracy theories, and language that goes out of its way to be very inclusive (such as "western Jewish populations"), you also have to interpolate a bunch of dubious qualifying assumptions to make it anything but anti-semitic.
Maybe we should grant the benefit of the doubt if we just had to do one of these things, but even if we have a pretty robust prior of "not anti-semitic", at a certain point the posterior distribution has got to change.
"
"Look, I know that you think the IDF laying siege to our hospitals looks bad, but I need to inject some vital context here and tell you they also tried to give us fuel, and we said, 'No.'"
It would be funny if it weren't for literally everything about it.
"
With all the anti-semitic outbursts we've been seeing on the Left recently, I suppose it's a good time to let the Right have some too, as a treat.
"
There are two places where I think you are misreading the Tweet in ways that make it vastly more benign than it is.
The first, I'll grant, is a matter of interpretation, where I (and many others) see a lot of allusions to common anti-semitic conspiracy theories where Jews as a group are attempting to weaken or destroy the white race using "cultural Marxism" (hence the reference to specifically "dialectical" hatred) and "flood" majority white countries with non-white immigrants as part of the plot.
If you think this is too tenuous, I think the conversation would ordinarily end here, as we'd have no choice but to agree to disagree about the author's intent.
Here, however, your reading goes a step further:
To the first sentence, I’m not sure if you can call the current woke stuff dialectical.
Likewise here:
I think a lot of American Jews are starting to come to terms with the idea that the left won’t just betray them personally, but betray the idea of rights.
The tweet's author does nothing to single out "woke", liberal, leftist, or even American Jews. He talks about "Jewish communities" and "western [sic] Jewish populations" without any of the qualifications that would support your reading or, you know, make the tweet anything but rancid anti-semitism.
Just the plain words there, without any allusions to common and well-publicized elements of the worst anti-semitic conspiracy theorizing, are extremely bad, and something Musk should never have endorsed.
"
And Hamas is just talking about housing policy in Tel Aviv
"
Lee has been talking about how Jews are "pushing dialectical hatred against white people"?
Huh, doesn't really sound like him.
"
It's extremely unclear why settlements are necessary to keep Hamas from taking control of the West Bank.
The decision to expand and encourage settlements in the West Bank came after decades of Hamas not, in fact, controlling the West Bank.
"
Musk would be doing himself an even bigger favor, then.
But Twitter destroyed Musk's brain, and now he's hellbent on letting his brain return the favor.
"
I am really struggling to understand how the settlements in the WB are causing Hamas to attack Israel from Gaza,
They sure as hell didn't stop Hamas from attacking Israel from Gaza, so if the best argument for continuing to expand them is that stopping won't prevent Hamas attacks... well, that's no argument at all.
"
I was thinking back to his time at Breidtbart more than anything.
"
Also, Musk needs to get Xitter to start banning Nazis again, if only to protect himself from agreeing with them publicly.
"
Re: Candace Owens, she's yet another example of Ben Shapiro's ability to surround himself with people who somehow manage to make Ben Shapiro look good by comparison.
"
I think wanting the Palestinians to at least enter into a cold peace isn’t exactly outrageous.
But, like, if you're doing stupid, self-destructive shit, waiting for your adversaries to behave better before you stop is nuts.
"
Yeah, my opinion on Israel overall is not terribly positive. Once the topic turns to its conduct with regards to Gaza and the West Bank, it's extremely negative, and that a lot of what they do is essentially criminal.
But none of that changes my belief that no state could, or should, tolerate a terrorist gang slaughtering over a thousand of its citizens and kidnapping hundreds more. I don't think it's terribly hard, or even hard at all, to reconcile the two, but evidently it causes a lot of trouble for others.
On “Settler Colonialism is Just History”
Wait. What are we arguing?
I have no idea. You seem to be attributing a bizarre, invented worldview to me for no clear reason.
"
In the moment and with the limited perspective he might not really be able to understand the idea that the central American order of city states would ultimately be replaced with a Spanish one.
He probably wouldn't, and indeed I don't know if it was understood by the Spaniards either.
"
Perhaps we could compromise and say that their problem was the Aztec’s toxic masculinity?
You seem to think I'm arguing something that I am not arguing.
"
But “care about the ethnic background” has a lot of 2023 baggage that I’m not sure is appropriate for 1523.
Sorta cuts both ways.
The people being oppressed by the Aztecs certainly didn't care about racial categories that were invented a few centuries hence and then started being euphemistically called "ethnicities" a century or two after that, I'll grant.
"
I think the modern (much more modern) usage of "ethnicity" as a euphemism for the (still modern but slightly less modern) concept of race was definitely not in place.
But a broader idea of a people sharing a common identity is not new, and my understanding is that it existed in the Americas when Europeans arrived.
"
From what I have been told, the people who were being oppressed by the Aztecs went to the Spaniards and begged for help.
OK. I'm not sure what that does to support Mr. Coté's claim that they didn't care about the ethnic background of their oppressors, though.
"
The indigenous[1] populations they displaced were mainly destroyed by novel diseases, not genocide – which, in the legal definition of the term, requires intent.
So there was only a little genocide alongside a whole bunch of "displace[ment]", and all of that is basically fine.
Just amazing work here, starting with two very defensible premises, both in terms of the idea of settler colonialism being ill-defined and applied in an inconsistent way, and beyond that, arguing that Israel itself is not a good example of settler colonialism, and then start smuggling in all sorts of complete nonsense.
See also this absolute record scratch gem:
I highly doubt the peoples oppressed by the Aztecs, Ashanti, or Khmer cared about the ethnic background of their conquerors.
Like, why wouldn't they?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.