some people celebrate today like it’s special, but i am a fool every day of the year.
a useful antidote to the broadbrush narrative that Israel is simply insisting Gaza starve.
i hope #KevinDrum's empirics and moderation are broadly right, but i have very little confidence, the information environment surrounding Israel/Palestine is too thick to cut through.
This post has been taken out of context.
money buys petulance. ht @socialsciences https://mastodon.world/@dsrabbithole/112191164974828442
a very, very good critique of Effective Altruism by #LeifWenar, perhaps the best of the genre. https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/ ht @deanwampler
soon our authorized deep-fake spatial videoconferencing avatars will be so much better acted than we are IRL, in-person interaction will come to seem flat, off.
spending some time over at the other site always restores my faith in misanthropy.
“the internet interprets privacy as damage, and routes around it.”
“Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s anti-immigrant National Rally party, argues that true exile ‘is not to be banished from your country, but to live in it and no longer recognize it.’”
my dear Marine, that is not exile. that is called getting old, and disagreeable as it can be, it’s what awaits all of us, if we are lucky.
quote from https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/world/europe/angry-farmers-are-reshaping-europe.html
@admitsWrongIfProven the US has no interest in, a contrary interest to, participating in a military operation most of the world considers sheer atrocity. Israel misperceives its own interest in considering its conduct of this war advisable. this catastrophe has been in no party’s interest, other than the most amoral sort of Palestinian nationalist who sees mass “martydom” as “worth it” if it advances their cause, which this war certainly has.
@admitsWrongIfProven there are questions of deeper interests than a party recognizes of itself. in that sense the US may have been less devoted as an ally. we’ve abetted Israel as it destroys its own project, as well as thousands of innocent lives, simply by giving them what they’ve asked for. absent some sharp change in how they conduct themselves, a decade from now there will be few people left who wish Israel well.
@admitsWrongIfProven being concerned about and supporting the interests of the other.
what if Biden trolled everybody and declared March 31 as the furry day of visibility too and dressed up as the Easter Bunny and bounced around the South Lawn while photo-op kids hunt for colored eggs?
q: why do your focus your criticism on the anti-cthulhu movement, rather than on people working to bring cthulhu upon us?
a: well, look. just about everyone in establishment authority is anti-cthulhu. that kind of monoculture of power is dangerous, while the cthuhists are mostly oddballs and weirdos without access to the levers of the state. therefore it follows that it’s the anti-cthulhists who must be taken down. fight the power.
prediction: a dramatization of the xz backdoor story will be streaming to netflix shortly.
A fascinating essay by #TannerGreer on Wang Huning as a kind of Chinese Tocqueville of the late 20th Century. Long but worth it. https://scholarstage.substack.com/p/american-nightmares ht #TylerCowen
(fixed broken link, thanks @marick)
Compare with #NSLyons, who frequently offers a much darker take on the views and role of Wang Huning, e.g. https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/
to whom have you cozied up?
captchas are ripe for automation. https://gleasonator.com/objects/f2763f22-676e-49e1-b35b-4e30adad65fc
there's no question that the United States has been a very devoted ally to Israel.
has Israel been a devoted ally to the United States?