@davemark happy new year!
"the Americans are arriving at the conclusion that supporting Netanyahu means being harmful to Israel. There is a distinction between Israel’s interests and Netanyahu’s interests." #NogaTarnopolsky https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-biden-plan-to-ditch-israels-netanyahu.html
changing the subject to wokeness lets plutocrats find solidarity with broad classes of people who might otherwise realize that, despite sharing a penis and pale skin color, their interests are rather at odds with those of our billionaire caesars.
a politics of “protecting what’s ours” is naturally promoted by those who have a lot.
we need to reform our institutions so they take us toward a politics of what rather than who.
@elbowspeak @kencrandall turning it off and on fixes that too.
@kencrandall huh. AT&T says there’s no outage, and recommended i “refresh” the connection in the app, then turn the phone off and on. that did it — the network is back.
i'm in a motel in Grants Pass, Oregon, was talking on the phone, and the AT&T network just... disappeared. SOS only at the top of my iphone. Is this a very local outage?
484480 is your secure sign in code.
"there’s a whole big world out there, and we need novelists to help us make sense of why it’s collapsing." @michelle on my sister #AdelleWaldman's new novel "Help Wanted". https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/opinion/adelle-waldman-help-wanted.html
@ekrich it’s pretty much from the past, first released 2002! i got very bad at maintaining it, in part because the old ant build involved setting up a lot of dependencies manually. but i finally redid it under a modern mill build, which works beautifully, and gave it a pretty major overhaul. it’s still fundamentally written in Java 1.3 style, but i think it holds up well.
@scott I think most Americans probably do have that view. And I think most Americans think Dresden was justified. And one thing Israel is showing us, when people are in a war they perceive as sufficiently desperate or virtuous, they will do those things again. The success of the post-war order wasn’t a matter of changing some moral consensus. It was a matter of taking seriously the importance of not letting crises rise to the level where those kinds of actions become inevitable.
@Alon @BenRossTransit What’s infuriating is that we are still morally culpable for the deaths of innocents even when some other party is cynically making it difficult for us to avoid them. It’s a specific case of the more general observation that just because a game is rigged against you doesn’t mean you get to opt out. Usually the rigging is by the weak against the strong, but trolley problems are weaponized by the cynical weak.
@scott We’ve not apologized for Dresden either. I don’t think that kind of politics of apology or recognition is useful. “Name acknowledgements” don’t do anything to redress past wrongs, but they contribute to contemporary rivalries, weaponizing expressive virtue that often itself becomes a kind of competitive vice. We moved past Hiroshima/Nagasaki by adhering and contributing to a nuclear taboo that has held since, and by a relationship of continuing friendship and support with Japan.
@Alon @BenRossTransit That’s the most hopeful thing I’ve heard in a while!
@Alon @BenRossTransit I’ll agree I think with both of you that “post-colonial discourse” on the left is mostly stupid, largely an intentional project by geopolitical partisans and useful idiots to shape a future they imagine will be in thr interest rather than provide any sort of justice or improve the current geopolitical order. “Settler colonial” discourse is dumb. But the bodies are piling, the humans are starving. That is real, and makes real claims against us all, regardless of everything.
@BenRossTransit @Alon It was easier to track that balance in November, when yes there were egregious excuses made and morally destitute revolutionary cosplay among the (generally discreditable) “anticolonial” left. But now, 30,000+ dead, no plausible endgame, a domestic population that, by the polling, dislikes its leader, yes, but supports the war and does not think its brutality over much. 1/
Perhaps this is me projecting my own experience, but perhaps I am far from alone. It becomes harder and harder to take a balanced view against the backdrop of so many bodies. Dresden and Hiroshima are cautionary takes we worked to put behind us, not precedents to cite in justification. I can’t know, nor can you, but I think every day of this is killing American Jewish sympathy for Israel as a project. /fin
@Alon @BenRossTransit Of course, and I was careful to note in my evaluation that MENA Jews were dispossessed as well by the same events that occasioned Arab dispossession. It is simultaneously true that MENA had a broadly better history with tolerating Jewish communities than Europe did, but that doesn’t mean things were great, they (along with Christians) were an explicitly recognized second class.
@Alon @BenRossTransit antisemitism is not discriminating in its targets, jews of any politics can find swastikas on their doors on college campuses these days, just like peace advocates can be murdered by Hamas. nevertheless, the politics of younger American Jews is much more antizionist i think than you choose to believe. if you want a nonfreak patron saint, try someone like Peter Beinart (my age, not millennial, but a leader). 1/
@Alon @BenRossTransit i think you are badly underestimating younger US jewish exhaustion with Israel. we can look for polling or something to argue over later. i think very current events have polarized US jews, but the mass of the pole giving up on Israel as a potentially virtuous project is much larger than you want ti acknowledge.