Commenter Archive

I think Ward Churchill is a good case to think about in this context. I assume everyone here is old enough to remember how in 2005, someone discovered his 2001 essay calling the victims of 9/11 "Little Eichmanns," creating an outrage that ultimately resulted in Churchill losing his job as a tenured member of the faculty at UC Boulder 2 years later. But remember, he didn't lose his job for the 2001 essay; he lost it because of research misconduct. Would he have been fired if he hadn't written the 2001 essay, or if the article had never been brought to the general public's attention? Who knows; his scholarship, such as it was, seems to have been largely ignored even within his field until then. But the main point is, Churchill was fired because of his academic work.

I did not know there was a beef with Gadot. Where did it come from?

I have seen people being passive aggressive, of course.

Me either. To be fair to him, Saul mentioned Snow White, but man, talk about an obsession.

I suspect just about everyone is, when doing political speech in a public forum, is "signaling" to some extent, but I see no reason to think she's "signaling" any more than, say, people who post here.

For example, why is she saying "screw you" to Gal Gadot? Is it because she's Israeli? If so, why doesn't Zegler like that she's Israeli? Or is saying "screw you" to Gadot part of the signaling?

This reminds me of something I've been wondering: What comes after Trump?

After Trump's first term, in which he was largely a bungling and ineffective president, my big worry was that what would come next would be a more competent far right candidate, like say DeSantis or Vance, and they would much more effectively implement a far right agenda. I've since come to realize that, at least to this point, all of the other far right candidates the Republican Party has put forward, particularly Vance and DeSantis, have the charisma of a rotting tree stump. This is important, because it's really difficult to implement a far right agenda with the charisma of a tree stump. You really need a charismatic strongman to be that authoritarian.

And of course, now I know the real threat was a Trump administration populated entirely by far right true believers and Trump sycophants, all of whom had 4 years to coach up Trump and plan their strategy, with Musk thrown in as an extra wild card. But what comes after Trump after this term? I mean, a lot of damage will have been done, but how does the MAGA movement, and the Republican Party it's completely taken over, maintain this without a cult of personality to lead it?

Obviously there are other relevant questions, like what happens to a Democratic Party that's shown itself to be utterly worthless in the face of everything that's happening, and that currently has favorability ratings in the low 30s? Is there still a Constitutional order in 4 years? To what extent will state Republicans have so thoroughly undermined the integrity of elections that Dems can't win elections in Red States anyway? Etc. But mostly I just wonder, who takes over from Trump, and how unpopular will that person have to be, as they inevitably will be unpopular, for this shi*t to fall apart?

The closest I can find is here:

Well, lemme tell ya, the whole “cutting remark hiding behind superficial affirmation of membership in good standing” thing is something that the Babtists are pretty good at.

Is she saying she's a young progressive liberal by saying this, and not actually saying, "Free Palestine?"

I gather you're saying she's signaling, as the libertarians used to say. What I'd like to know is a) what you think she's signaling, and b.) why you think that.

My opportunities to see movies in theaters are limited. I probably won't see 5 movies in the theater this year.

And no, I have no idea what you're talking about. Like I said, I know very little about her, as a person or as a performer. Maybe you do have information I don't have. It would probably be easier if you just said what you're talking about.

I mean, I'm sure she's not sitting around worrying about Gaza 24/7, but other than you just know it when you see it, why do you think she doesn't sincerely believe that Gaza should be free? Because she's a celebrity? Because she's young? I'm confused. Personally, I know nothing about her, and I don't think I've seen her in a movie (I'll catch Snow White when it hits Disney Plus), but what I see here is a person saying something that could affect her career prospects, and obviously this particular movie's success, and I respect that.

You don't think she believes Palestine should be free?

And I'm pretty sure show biz is a high-status industry.

People are complicated, and have complex motivations and feelings. That doesn't seem unusual; I'm sure you've experienced this as well.

Personally, when I see something about Teslas getting torched, my first thought is also, "Cool!" but then I think, "Actually, this is probably not helping, and risks escalation. People should come up with more productive ways of making sure Musk experiences consequences for buying the presidency and using it to destroy the federal government. But still, the pictures are great."

What she said, in 5-word tweet, has long been a cancellable offense in this country, and can now get you deported if you're not a citizen (how long before it can get you detained even if you are?). I am sure she knew their could be a cost. To argue that she didn't mean it, then, requires a bit more than, "I can recognize it when I see it, based on how I was raised."

Her.

This has got to be a mis-threaded reply, but it's absolutely hilarious as currently threaded.

I assume this happened often enough on the early internet (like BBS's with a private message function, AOL Instant Messages, or whatever the direct messages were called on CompuServe), but the difference was that back then, the ratio of men to women on the internet was like 3 or 4 to 1, so every woman would have been getting these messages from like 10 guys at once.

Almost enough to make me vote for a Democrat, if I lived in her district.

This.

Because her opinions on Israel are very different from the opinions of many of the residents of the district on Israel.

It's a very Democratic district, with a relatively large Jewish population, who still make up a minority of the district (~10%). Assuming that the non-Jewish population of the district looks like the Democratic Party nationally, and that every Jewish person in the district voted Democrat (a ridiculous assumption, but this is just to make sure we've got a conservative estimate), then with 68% of the district voting for Harris, take away the 75-80k Jewish voters (obviously, some of them can't even vote, but again, we're being conservative), then with Dems nationally sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis at about 3:1, we'd still have a majority of Dem voters sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis. When you throw in Republicans, who sympathize with Israelis at about 8:1, this is still less than 50% of the total electorate, but it's pretty close. Considering that there are probably at least some Jewish residents who are either anti-Zionist or are pro-Israel but oppose the genocide, I bet it's probably right about 50:50. I'm not sure it's at all unreasonable for her to run, but then, that's why we have elections, right?

I'm confused about why you think she's a poor representative of a district that, while it does have a sizeable Jewish population, is still overwhelmingly non-Jewish, and more than 40% non-white.

Looks like it's ~10% Jewish, though the statistics I found are a bit outdated.

The talk about not wanting to "bail out Europe again" was a pretty big clue they were dilettantes.

In 2023, I listened to a discussion/interview with a well-known American philosopher and a couple philosophers outside of the U.S., mostly about his most recent book (which has little to do with politics, and nothing to do with American partisan politics), but they ended with talk of movies and then current American politics, and they all, the American philosopher and his non-American interlocutors, agreed that Biden was in serious cognitive decline and the Democrats should be holding a primary to find another candidate.

Point being, it was obvious even to random (admittedly leftist, so not big fans of Biden or the Dems) philosophers in other countries, so it must have been obvious to the people in the White House and the Dem national leadership. In a just world, nobody who worked in that administration or in the national party would ever work in politics again. Alas...

There are modernist Zoroastrians, though they are a minority within a very small religious group anyway, so you're unlikely to meet them. There are also restorationists, who reject "recent" (as in, over the last millennium) changes to the original, pure Zoroastrianism of the Gathas, but they're also a small(ish) minority within a very small religious group. I think most Zoroastrians are somewhere in between the two, though the only Zoroastrian I've ever known personally is a Parsi, which is a group known for their conservatism, though they're not restorationists.

It takes two steps: first, you have to send an invitation to someone, and second, when creating a group, you have to put their name in. If you have people in your contacts with very similar names, it's probably pretty easy to include the wrong person in both steps if you're not paying attention to what you're doing. Which, I mean, it's been a while since I last created a national security chat, but I'm pretty sure that if I'd be a bit more careful about adding people than they seem to have been.

A fun possibility is that the initial invite to Goldberg was intentional, because dude was using his personal Signal account and he was just adding a lot of media contacts, but then he used his personal Signal account to talk about national security sh*t.

I knew virtually nothing about the history Near, Middle, or Far East until fairly recently, when I read a couple books with a reading group, became fascinated, and read more. I really feel like Persia, the Silk Road, and China/Southeast Asia were huge holes in my formal education, and I'm trying really hard to fill them.

Also, at least after it became the center of the Muslim World before 1000 CE, the Middle East, trade with which made the Vikings and Venice great powers, while shaping Eastern Europe (including Russia), and intellectual exchange with which made the great European advancements in philosophy and science of the late Middle Ages possible.

There are many problems with using the Dark Ages as an analogy, not the least of which is that the Dark Ages, to the extent that they were really a thing, took place in a part of the world that, outside of the Italian Peninsula, Greece (and the surrounding areas), and Turkey, had effectively been a global backwater since the extinction of the Neanderthal. Sure, Rome had conquered much of it, but it's not like Roman technological, military, or political advances were coming out of Gallia, Hispania, Germania, or Britannia (or to the extent that they were, they were coming from Romans campaigning there). Things looked very different for much of that thousand years in, say, Persia or East Asia, where the world was doing just fine.

Since the end of the world, the West has seen the rise and fall of more than one great power, and the East has seen its millennia-old great power fall and rise again. There are likely better lessons about the end of a great power in a highly globalized world in the last 600 years than in anything before it. We're not Rome, as much as we'd like to think we are, because the rest of the West is not merely barbarians.

I'm sure I've recommended it here a few times before, but The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi is a great look at the cycle of the decline of a great Western power, the interegnum, the ascendance of another power, and its reign, since the late middle ages (starting with Renaissance Florence). There's much to disagree with in there, and he gets predictions about who will come after the U.S. wrong, but it's full of great historical insights.