this one reminds me a lot of Nancy Pelosi communications i used to get.
e-mail screenshot: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN Lara Trump reached out to you. Trump Advisor Kellyanne Conway reached out to you. Donald Trump Jr. reached out to you. But your response to the Trump Presidential Canvass is STILL MISSING.
even a bad seed can with care and time grow into a wonderful tree.
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit i wonder whether the discriminator here might not be more when rather than how many. Jordan naturalized many Palestinians before the conflict curdled into something quite so bitter and nihilistic and apocalyptic as it has now become. it did the most important work a state does, made that population not stateless, gave people a state which defines enforces certain rights. 1/
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit Jordan’s Palestinian population is obviously pro-Palestinian and in deep, painful sympathy with their stateless brethren. But they have much more to lose, and are less bitter and radical than those who’ve spent 40 years in the desert hoping for Canaan. 2/
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit Over time, naturalization could offer some degree of contemporary normalcy to migrants to, say, Egypt from Gaza or the West Bank. But if you were governing Egypt, and well aware of your precarity doing so, you might wonder how long it might take for bitter, defiant grievances to fade, whether that population would consent to mix and assimilate as much as Jordan’s much earlier wave did. 3/
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit Putting aside questions of justice or the human rights surrounding “ethnic cleansing”, I think naturalization in neighboring states will be a hard-sell due to these very realist concerns. Of course leaders will say, as Sisi does, that they won’t accept them because they must remain steadfast in their noble cause. But that serves both as pretext + to mollify the passions of their publics. On practical grounds, it’s just dangerous./fin
@Alon @BenRossTransit (i don’t think theocratic strictness is the aspect of polical Islam Egypt fears. rather there’s a strand of political Islam that might be less strict in those ways but that sees life ordered under disjoint contemporary states as illegitimate. it hearkens to a more encompassing Dar al-Islam, which constructs like Egypt and elites who benefit from it undermine. the Saudis, for example, use strictness precisely to substitute for and mollify this more dangerous strand.)
@_dm (unintentional in the sense i don't think she foresaw the full consequences, like a pool shot that impressively sinks several of your balls when you’d planned on just one.)
i’ve got to admit, Elise Stefanik performed an unintentionally brilliant act of partisan politics when she got the Presidents of Penn and Harvard fired, encouraging their colleagues to jump straight to the kind of repressive overreaction that is a match to the kerosene mix of student idealism and narcissism.
now the Democratic coalition is bitterly divided, and the most salient issues are public disorder and student entitlement, both of which strongly favor Republicans.
does anyone have any idea what’s been going on in Gaza over the last week? i feel pretty up to date on American university campuses, thx.
@Alon @BenRossTransit (i won't comment on whether it's racist or not for them to think so, but my understanding is Egypt's elites in particular genuinely fear Gaza's populations would add to sometimes violent strands of political Islam they already find difficult to manage, even with a willingness to indulge in, um, lapses of liberalism. Sinai itself is perhaps not a fully integrated province of a modern developed state, and though most Gazans aren't habitually Bedouin, they are a complication.)
"How Movements Win" by Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli https://www.liberalcurrents.com/how-movements-win/
@Alon @BenRossTransit If we can get past this shitty war to a world in which Israel's integration with the Arab Middle East can continue, lifting old taboos on naturalization of Palestinians by Arab states is an obvious thing to pursue. Gulf allies no longer want to foment the instability those taboos were imposed to foment. Unfortunately, though there may be linguistic + cultural fit, the past half century has left all parties nervous about populations like Gaza's on security grounds, I think.
@BenRossTransit @Alon (I don't think the US is playing a meaningful military logistics role in the Sudan conflict. UAE is a US ally and allegedly supporting to some uncertain degree one party to the conflict, but even if it is, that remains very far from the direct US support than both Israel and KSA have received in their conflicts.)
if you want to make a case that antisemitism plays an unusual role in the US discourse surrounding Israel, your best point of reference is Yemen and US support of Saudi Arabia’s conflict there, which conflict (whomever you blame for it) did lead to mass famine and death, but not to mass protest on US campuses.
Fascinating “War in Gaza Public Opinion Survey” of Israelis, with across Jewish and Arab populations. https://en.idi.org.il/media/23635/war-in-gaza-15-_data_eng.pdf ht #NathanTankus
@susannah@octodon.social it’s very strange. great lover of humanity is also not my impression of Donald Trump but somehow he comes off that way to some?
@BenRossTransit @Alon @grvsmth @djc It’s an excellent piece.
@realcaseyrollins I've gotten a lot of political e-mails. None have so personally professed their love for me. I guess we'll agree to disagree, but I'll maintain, this is really, really different from the pitches I usually see.
@scott i have a gmail address (not the address i actually use) that weirdly gets a lot of e-mails not intended for me, but for people with names similar but not identical to mine (sometimes even quite different). this one was personalized for another S-beginning first name, and sent to that address.
@realcaseyrollins Many politicians try to prove they "care", they "get you".
But this is really quite different in character.
This is just a weird movement.
It's just trying to appeal along entirely different dimensions than a conventional campaign. It's parasocial rather than political.
Screenshot of a Donald Trump campaign email, subject "Is there anything you'd like to share with me?" "I've got something I've been dying to tell you: I WILL NEVER STOP LOVING YOU! PLEASE PLASE PLASE tell me you love me too!" [I LOVE TRUMP BUTTON] I don't care what the DERANGED RADICAL LEFTISTS think. I don't care what the MARXISTS AND FASCISTS think. I don't care what the AMERICA-HATING DEMOCRATS think. I only care about YOU!
@mike_kraft we're just going to disagree. i think abandoning Afghanistan in the way we did was a catastrophe. it is our role, as a matter of happenstance and history, to hold contemporary arrangements together until we can negotiate some other credible architecture. leaving and letting the chips fall where they may would be both catastrophic, on both moral and self-interested terms. it's like a bad marriage with kids. you may want to go, but you can't just walk away. arrangements must be made.
