@lienrag the servicemembers acting as ordered, on a mission that is not a war crime, are not the people responsible. their deaths are not to be sought or excused. in consequential terms, had incompetence led to their deaths, the probability of an escalation for all involved, leading to more civilian and noncivilian catastrophe, would be very high. it may already be high, but severe escalation (eg restarting full civil war) may also yet be avoided.
kakistocracy is downstream from plutocracy because under plutocracy those who survive in positions of authority become restricted to those who’ve proven susceptible to extortion and gratuity.
@efraim @serge @carolannie I don’t know any solution that seems plausible in the immediate term, but I agree entirely that intifada rhetoric is… unhelpful, and that whatever works to engender peaceful coexistence is what matters, much more than all the isms.
@efraim @serge @carolannie Critical of Zionism often means critical of the existence of Israel as a specifically Jewish state, which is distinct from critical of Israel existing at all. You might think it historically undesirable or genocidally impractical, but most Westerners who describe themselves as anti-Zionist claim to want a state neutral among the religions and ethnicities of residents, who would all become citizens. 1/
@efraim @serge @carolannie One can be critical of this Israeli government and still be a Zionist in the sense of favoring Israel as an explicit Jewish homeland. One can be critical of Israel in a way that attributes its putative misbehavior to its construction as a Jewish state, and therefore be anti-Zionist, but still want a peaceful state for its inhabitants to exist on the territory. /fin
@serge @carolannie As you have pointed out, the relationship between Judaism and Zionism is complex within the Jewish community. Like it or not, given the both the American state and the Israeli state act with power and violence in the world, people in the world will make judgments about those actions and will have to reconcile those judgments with their own understandings of Judaism and human beings they interact with who are Jewish. 1/
@serge @carolannie Many people of good will, precisely because it is important to them that they not be racists, but who nevertheless condemn the actions of the Israeli state, adopt a frame in which there’s a sharp distinction between Judaism and Zionism. Some Jews do the same, while some see the connection between Judaism and Israel as pragmatically or theologically essential. 2/
@serge @carolannie From your perspective, Jewish anti-Zionism means “Jews…support[ing] the murder of other Jews”. There are lots of Jews who don’t see it that way, rightly or wrongly. It is not racist of those Jews, or of non-Jews, to disagree with you about what Zionism or anti-Zionism mean (though outcomes might ultimately prove some views right or wrong). 3/
@serge @carolannie Regardless, a lot of people, rightly or wrongly (I think rightly), condemn the choices the Israeli state is currently making. It’s a good impulse, not a bad impulse, for those people to put daylight between those choices and Jews and Judaism generally. 4/
@serge @carolannie It might be best if people were better at making a distinction between what the Israeli state is currently doing and Zionism as a project, which once and might in future refer to a Jewish state whose government has a very different character than Israel’s current government. 5/
@serge @carolannie But I guess I’d say that’s a very fine parsing to expect of people. People, Jewish and non-, do have a right, even obligation, to form views about this Israeli government and this American government. If it’s hard to critique Israel’s behavior without risk of seeming antisemitic, it’s harder still to do so without seeming anti-Zionist, even if in theory there’s a space for that. /fin
@serge @carolannie I agree, the issue is the deportation based on speech, even if the speech is reprehensible.
I suspect we all agree on that. But that principle is being violated, by the US govt, based on a particular set of claims abt what constitutes antisemitism, whether antisemitism might by association with terrorism constitute something beyond mere speech + so be actionable. These are now questions of general public concern in the US.
@serge I’m glad to forgive you for being on edge. We all are these days I think, and “here” is rarely where we are at our best.
Israel and its relationship to questions of antisemitism are not Jews’ alone to adjudicate when the United States is using a particular view of those things to justify unprecedented actions against e.g. green card holders. @carolannie has every right, and perhaps even an obligation, to form her own view.
I’m a Jew, I don’t think @carolannie has said or done anything remotely racist or wrong, and I think @serge is being a real dick.
@lienrag It would have been, yes.
if you want a fair hearing on human rights, i guess you're better off suing in El Salvador. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/venezuela-hires-lawyers-detainees-el-salvador-rcna197955
The war-plans thing is bad, but I think it's far less of a scandal than lawlessly decimating USAID, CFPB, NSF/NIH, etc.
It would have been a terrible tragedy if US servicemembers had been harmed due to their leaders' miserable opsec. But what those mfs have done to USAID alone will kill many more.
@GreenSkyOverMe there were more than two candidates on people’s ballots.
Donald Trump won more votes than any other candidate. But the other candidates together won more than 50% of the vote.
a majority of voters voted for someone other than Donald Trump.
@GreenSkyOverMe (Suppose there are three candidates. Candidate A receives 40% of the vote, Candidate B receives 35% of the vote, Candidate C receives 25%. No candidate has achieved a majority, but Candidate A is said to have achieved a plurality, the largest nonmajority block.)
Donald Trump has no mandate at all. The majority of people who voted in the 2024 election voted against him.
He won a plurality of the popular vote. He achieved not even the barest majority, which itself would not constitute any kind of a mandate.
Excellent, from #MattBruenig, on “Abundance”. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/03/24/the-abundance-agenda/ ht @ryanlcooper
Can we rescue the people we misimprisoned in El Salvador?
if you don’t feed me grapes when i ask for grapes, you are a bad ally. 🍇
i remember when every day had a main character rather than a main catastrophe.
@light @oliversampson there are lots of claims that it’s worth trying to understand where they come from even as the vast majority of us will (and should) easily reject them.
@light @oliversampson I give it a fair hearing and reject it. Some of “fair” when discussing things to which I have no first hand access is necessarily deciding whom to trust. So, though I can’t personally refute every proposition offered by obsessive holocaust denialists doesn’t mean I have to accept his claims over those of others I find trustworthy. The “should have” claim I’d find very easy to reject.
@light @oliversampson Should we care about the values and interests of sinners? When you curdle a human being into a noun, you obscure the human, but even humans who have done hateful things — to some degree all of us — still count. That doesn’t mean we have to collectively agree. A murderer might argue we should not punish him because reasons. We might hear him out and punish him anyway. But we owe him, like everyone else, a genuine hearing. 1/
@light @oliversampson And, like all of us, he has values beyond his sin. His perspective on land use or taxation or food safety is not rendered worthless because of his sin. He owes what our justice system deems him to owe, but he remains a human being, not an object or a nullity. /fin