before you blame the “deep state” for war-mongering bad intelligence, remember that 9/11, the Iraq War run-up, and now Israel’s catastrophe have been characterized by the elected executive ignoring the professional intelligence bureaucracy or tendentiously freelancing their own intelligence. cf #ElenaGrossfeld https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/11/israel-intelligence-gaza-hamas-war-1973/
Text: Grave warnings by Netanyahu's defense chief and the heads of Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel's domestic security service) on the impact of widespread conflict within Israeli society on military preparedness not only went unheeded but were used by the representatives of right-wing parties as further proof of the IDF and the intelligence community's bias and supposed left-wing prejudices. Rumors of Mossad-instigated protests, right-wing coalition partners blaming the military's soft approach to reservists threats to stop volunteering, and the persistent resistance of the Shin Bet to the policies proposed by the settler extremist turned national security minister showed the deep rift between politicians and some of the most respected Israeli institutions.
@sugar @jonny that has tax implications as well.
If somebody believes a lie, and then tells it, are they lying?
@paninid @billseitz I guess it's right out of that same passage of Keynes. ("Thus the remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest but a lower rate of interest! For that may enable the so-called boom to last.")
But in my own view, interest rate policy is a bad lever to modulate demand, we'd be better off keeping short rates between 5% ± 2% and use other tools when that degree of "fine-tuning" isn't enough.
@paninid @billseitz "The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom." —J.M. Keynes
Here's to more resilient bubbles!
@LouisIngenthron Ha! Maybe less notable than I think!
Sometime in the 1990s I actually read the Turner Diaries, as an old-school physical book. I remember getting challenged in a cafe in Cambridge MA, angrily asked "What are you reading?" I'm like, hey, I'm a rootless cosmopolitan Jew but some motherfucker just blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City and I want to understand WTF they are on about.
@LouisIngenthron @karchie Yes. There were a lot of those that were unpleasant. But notability is usually enough to keep them (dangerously for our sanity!) in the library, where we migt accidentally begin them even if we are not assigned them...
@karchie To be clear, I'm not arguing that "Turner Diaries" need to be in every high-school library! I'm mostly suggesting we acknowledge that we nearly all are okay with content-based decisions about accessibility in libraries, and that accusing those we disagree with of "banning" while pretending we would never do any such thing is mistaken and ultimately unhelpful. (I also agree almost nothing shld be state-banned. Amazon does carry Mein Kampf, I guess bc historical or scholarly importance.)
@LouisIngenthron Again, we're not disagreeing in principle. We both agree that it's legit for libraries to make choices on the basis of some nonideological mix of popularity, notability, value-as-a-reference, etc.
I'd put to you, though, that the fact that I could bring up the Turner Diaries and pretty much all of my interlocutors know what I am talking about suggests that it meets a notability threshold that, absent other concerns, would be sufficient for many libraries to carry it.
@LouisIngenthron @karchie I guess the question I posed was trying specifically to acknowledge that. I agree there's no issue if we just think no one is interested in Turner Diaries. A library can't carry everything. But I don't think that's actually why Turner Diaries aren't in government libraries. I think there'd be more interest in it than in lots of books libraries routinely carry, and that it's obviously a notable work (even if it is a bad novel in more than an ethical sense).
@LouisIngenthron I think that's principled enough, as long as you acknowledge — which you do — that the *status quo* then is government suppression of Turner Diaries that should be remedied by its inclusion in age-appropriate, well-contextualized government provided sources of books. (Obviously that is not the case right now, so you are arguing for more affirmative government action to undo its current suppression of bad speech.)
@karchie i’m not a great fan of Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, because I think in practice once we accept it we have no principled grounds for line drawing. the same case for free speech broadly (we might be wrong!) should chasten us in imagining we can identify meritless intolerance.
but putting that aside, at least invoking the PoT is an open and principled way of acknowledging that sometimes we do mean to suppress things, and that what we are objecting to is bad criteria for doing so.
@admitsWrongIfProven@qoto.org who is discussing forced work for asylum seekers? i’m asking not rhetorically — fascist or not, i think liberalizing immigration on condition of participating in some kind of work program (“you can come, but you have to pay your dues”) might be a worthwhile way of overcoming public resistance to allowing entry by people otherwise in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. (is it fascist to consider this?)
@karchie the same government libraries that Gender Queer is being pulled from I very strongly suspect don’t carry Turner Diaries.
do you disagree? do you think that choice is content neutral, just that libraries can’t carry everything and Turner Diaries isn’t notable enough?
listening to an NPR segment discussing “Gender Queer” as a “banned book”, i looked up “Gender Queer” on Amazon, and it was there, available to purchase. i looked up “Turner Diaries”, and it was not.
“Gender Queer” is, I am sure, “banned” from many schools and public libraries (which also, I suspect, don’t carry “Turner Diaries”).
should we be outraged by the suppression (“banning”) of “Turner Diaries” too, or are we arguing more about the criteria of suppression than the fact thereof?
