@Alon @MisuseCase I have no idea who Leifer is. I quoted that line because it maps to my (again very limited) experience with people who before all this I'd have called liberal Israelis, that they simply have a very different (and I think objectively not defensible) understanding of what is going on.
@BenRossTransit @Alon Do you think that is because there is a near-complete expert consensus that diplomatic status did not protect, or that the Times very generously to Israel chose to quote the subset of experts who would make that case?
My interpretation is the latter. It's a very generous piece. If you think Israel is being unfairly treated by the hedging in the title, I'd ask you to consider honestly whether you'd apply such stringent standards in other contexts.
@MisuseCase @Alon I think you may be making my point. It is easier to be sympathetic to Israelis if we imagine that they just aren't seeing, in the local, Hebrew, press, what we are seeing and seeing and seeing. 1/
@MisuseCase @Alon Individually, we all of the experience of our government doing what we oppose, all the time. But in fact our government has a very difficult time doing what *collectively* we actively oppose. You might have opposed Iraq, but the broad public either favored it or was deferential to experts and politicians who did. Here and in Israel, strong public opinion does matter. /fin
@BenRossTransit @Alon let me ask you, in a war is there ever not a great deal of unfair portrayal? is that so special?
in the Western press, you can make at least as strong a case that there is a tendency to overcaution + overly generous interpretations of Israel’s actions.
one of the first things i wrote about all this was about the stupidity and counterproductiveness of accusations like “genocide”. but, to be fair, my reticence seems less and less defensible.
@Alon i hope you are right about turning against, soon. my impression from my own limited contacts is much more defensiveness and a sense of unfair portrayal than acknowledgement that Israel has turned itself into a pariah in the eyes and hearts of many people once sympathetic by its own, actual, not-al-jazeera-fabricated choices. i just presume, qua the quote, that they are shielded by a bubble of patriotic media. if that’s not the case, i don’t know what to think frankly.
the docs treat us as second class, but i feel like this is a win for team Type=forking
@Alon i guess they know it about as well as they know no civilians were killed at Shifa. there’s always someone saying anything. nevertheless Israeli’s perception of the war and the perception of followers of media in any other country, even their closest allies, seem very starkly at odds. (this is a sympathetic take. if this were not true, it would be hard to understand or forgive how Israel as a political community tolerates its country’s actions.)
Can anyone point to a comprehensible explanation of why this is? Is it some kind of relativity effect, like time is very different if you are traveling near light speed?
“Because there’s less gravity on the moon, time there moves a tad more quickly – 58.7 microseconds every day – compared to on Earth.” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/02/moon-nasa-coordinated-lunar-time
ht @danjac@masto.ai
@Alon mentions The death toll and quoting Biden are quite different than seeing the kind of imagery and interviews the rest of the world is seeing.
Naftali Bennett can say “*No civilian was killed*. Not one.” at Al Shifa. Israelis, but no one else, can consider that remotely plausible.
Israelis vaguely know the world is getting a bad impression, which they consider unfair. They have no idea, viscerally, how horrible even the depictions in cautious, sympathetic US media have become.
“the horrific violence and incipient famine in Gaza receive little coverage in mainstream Israeli media” #JoshuaLeifer https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/opinion/netanyahu-protests-legacy-war.html
"Though it seemed completely automated, [Amazon's] Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped." #MaxwellZeff https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116 ht @vonkarama
The inimitable @DeanBaker13 on my sister #AdelleWaldman's new book, "Help Wanted". https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6371119899
I think I’ve found the compromise that will end America’s culture wars. You can thank me later.
We should all just agree that 2nd Amendment rights under the Constitution begin at the moment of conception.
@dpp and once you’re gone you can never come back, when you’re out of the blue and into the black.
@rst i hope so. if the US is simultaneously involved in a major middle east war while also deterring russia in europe, a third front would be rather difficult to sustain.
i would take announcements about readiness with boulders of salt. i certainly don’t claim to know anything about China’s current capacity, but if you were ready today and your intention is to act, not to deter, dissembling your unpreparedness helps you achieve an element of surprise.
rust never leaks.
@djc (i think in wealth rather than income stats, it’s mostly due to the roughly third of the bottom 50% of households that owns a home enjoying a bit of the asset price boom. but note a real estate price boom is largely at the expense of the roughly 2/3 of bottom 50% households that do not own a home, and so are short a perpetual stream of future shelter.)
@djc again, there’s a lot of mischief in the denominators here. what is the wealth of the bottom 50%? roughly 3% of total wealth. you can argue that if trends in that chart continue indefinitely — continue indefinitely as a multiplicative process, in percentage rather than dollar terms — eventually we’d meaningfully equalize. that’s quite a conjecture. 1/
@djc but in fact what this chart shows is a 52% increase on roughly 3% against (top 1%) 8% on 31%. Work that out and you get like 60% more dollars flowing to the top 1% than to the bottom 50%.
( i’m taking my rough figures from here. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wealth-distribution-in-america/ ) /fin
@djc no, i don’t think wealth levels have evened out at all. on the contrary. the effect of booming asset values to make the rich richer dramatically outstrips relatively high percentage gains in wages against tiny bases of low wage earners. wealth is a cumulation of income (including unrealized gains/losses) net of consumption. when asset values boom, given the initial distribution of marketable assets, so too does wealth inequality.
you can’t meaningfully address inequality without addressing inequality of nonlabor income.