It wasn't all innocent glances at the soda fountain or dances at the sock hop.

On the other blog somebody described Gen Z as having an overwhelming desire to be good kids. This would certainly explain their strange prudishness. I heard that many of them don't even like sex in fiction that isn't explicitly pornographic.

There should be at least some strategy to the district choice.

I provided a link of her rallying against AIPAC on social media.

They also didn't want to hold their nose at work with people that made them wretch. Many of them also seem to really believe that Israel is going to collapse any moment despite this being objectively mad as an opinion.

I agree with the age thing but there are better primary challengers out there or maybe not. Diane Feinstein's last primary challenger got caught doing racisms against African-Americans, Jews, and even Armenians in a hot mike moment after Feinstein was elected.

The Pro-Palestinian movement basically convinced itself that the only way to achieve true justice (TM) for the Palestinians is to completely destroy Israel. Algeria convinced them that this is possible even though Edward Said warned earlier that the Algerian situation does not match the I/P conflict and is a poor comparison. The growth of the De-Colonize whatever movement has not helped. Much of the Pro-Palestinian movement in the West is thoroughly wrapped up in this and is treating the Palestinians as proxies for the Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and other groups deemed indigenous and by destroying Israel all indigenous people in the world will be avenged.

This is an incredibly stupid strategy that doesn't help the Palestinians at all because Israel exists, is affluent, and has a dedicated patriotic population who sees Israel as the Jewish homeland. Diaspora Jews agree generally with Israeli Jews on this. But the Pro-Palestinian movement would rather shoot itself in the foot so they can graffiti vulgarities against Israel on public property or protest like mad than do something effective.

Because her opinions on Israel are very different from the opinions of many of the residents of the district on Israel. Jamal Bowman got into trouble by using the term Zionist in very weird ways, embracing 10/7 conspiracy theories, and saying that Jewish majority neighborhoods are bad in a Jewish majority district. Same thing.

A 26 year old leftist influencer/TikTok presenter named Kat Abughazeh is attempting to primary Democratic politician Jan Schakowsky in the 9th District of Illinois. The Illinois 9th District is a very Jewish District, it contains Skokie, and has been represented by a Jew in Congress since 1948 with a brief two year exception in the early 1960s when their representative, Sidney R. Yates, attempted to run for the Senate. Ms. Abughazeh is Palestinian on her fathers side, was part of uncommitted, and has rallied against AIPAC on social media:

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4e35adc4d1f152e258c0f8c8d1a8ed40c86b35e9e08f7302659f5de70c5ecb2e.jpg

I have no idea why she considers herself to be a good match for this district. I am getting a lot of Jamal Bowman vibes from her.

I've mentioned this previously but by formulating the protests around "Anti-Zionism" and "settler-colonialism, the Pro-Palestinian protests did nothing to help the Palestinians and prevented a lot of useful political alliances with Israeli and Diaspora Jews. Netanyahu isn't popular in Israel. There were massive protests against him since his coalition won the last election. He is on trial for massive corruption in Israel. The Israel-Hamas War did nothing to improve Netanyahu's popularity in Israel and his coalition is only held together by him regularly appeasing the most rightest members.

There was big potential to teaming up with anti-Netanyahu forces in Israel including the hostages families and Diaspora Jews. By framing the protests around "anti-Zionism", "settler-colonialism", and the legitimacy of Israel itself, the Pro-Palestinian protest movement made this impossible. They did nothing to help the Palestinians as well.

Delicious.

Happy Nowruz everybody. I was at my second Nowruz celebration with my partner last night. Yesterday was a Zoroastrian Nowruz. It's pretty interesting comparing and contrasting how one small insular ethnoreligious group deals with things compared to your small ethnoreligious group, especially when they occupy the same socio-economic niche:

1. The Zoroastrian approach to politics and society seems to be keep out and keep your head down. This is the complete opposite of the Jewish approach. Whether we are Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, left or right, Zionist or anti-Zionist, Jews dod not keep out and keep our heads down. Our approach is more like "just because we might be 1% or less of the population, doesn't give you a right to boss us around. Fish you."

2. Zoroastrians seem to have no need to update or modernize their religion while the modernizers, traditionalists, and everything in-between was fighting over the religion since the early 19th century.

The people screaming genocide were applying the very broadly defined Convention Against Genocide to the Israel-Hamas War. The problem is that the Convention Against Genocide, most likely to prevent wiggle room in the case of a trial, defined things like "(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group." Any war that is vaguely intra-ethnic in character and has civilian casualties can be therefore called a genocide. Hamas action on 10/7 were an attempted genocide under this definition.

In conflicts where outside partisan factions rage strongly like the I/P conflict, it wa inevitable that people would scream out genocide. I think this was a really ineffective tactic for the Pro-Palestinian side because it prevented useful alliances with anti-Netanyahu Israelis or Diaspora Jews but they seemed intent on making this about "anti-Zionism."

50,000 with 20,000 to 25,000 being Hamas soldiers seems fairly reliable. Hamas would obviously love to give a much bigger number and anti-Israel forces were predicting basically over a million dead Gazan Palestinans since the start of the Israel-Hamas War.

AP estimates the current death toll in the Hamas side of the Israel-Hamas conflict to be 50,000. Since this is Hamas, they do not distinguish between Hamas soldiers and Palestinian civilians.

India sometimes gets something like this. I'd argue that most countries do get a lessser version of what Israel gets from the Left. Muslim majority countries are give a big freaking exception to liberalism or if problems are acknowledged, it's all blamed on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Monarchies.

Being governed by idiots is the style of the time but America's long tradition of anit-intellectualism isn't helping here. Our far right is a lot more suspicious of book learning than other far rights.

The global left criticizes those and Hinduism or even Budhhism for good measure while basically deciding that Islam needs to be allowed to naturally evolve rather than marched forward into modernity.

I am looking at this from the perspective of United States citizens. What good does this do to the people of the United States? Will the money be re-invested in American universities? Of course not. Nor will it be used for anything else.

There are ways to do these things with tact. I might be even prone to agree with you that maybe America shouldn't be funding universities in developed democracies. Just turning off the money spigot suddenly and without warning is not the way to do it though. Even from a pure realpolitik standpoint it is incredibly bad because it makes us look like a big villain.

America not becoming a pariah state and hated by most of the entire world isn't a strong defense? Trusk is undoing decades of hard work done by Democratic and Republican Presidents to make America the leader of the free world and the liberal order for no reason but pure spite and the fact that they see everything as a zero sum game. Tens of millions of Americans are seemingly fine with this. They are turning us into what the further left clowns accused us of being and you are fine with this?

Do you think this is a good thing. I mean maybe universities in other countries shouldn't be so dependent on American aid that turning off the spigot is a mortal threat but this is just a mafia tactic. It isn't like Trusk is going to re-channel the money towards American universities or other things for the benefit of the American people. Trusk will just pocket the money for themselves.

It does pre-exist the liberal order. There is an arrogance in Islam that nobody has any idea how to handle.

There is no easy or good solution to a movement that proves to be as stupidly obstinate as the Palestinian movement under the liberal order.

I'm fascinated on why Japanese parents have a higher freak out threshold compared to parents in basically every other developed democracy, including ones from the same Confucian world view, on the amount of sex and violence they can deal with in kid's entertainment compared to everybody else.