@admitsWrongIfProven did you think the atlantic piece was that emotional or threatening? i suppose the stories about putative heroes much better than Netanyahu were emotional in their way, but i saw the piece as just correctly pointing out that Netanyahu is a disaster.
@admitsWrongIfProven “go” doesn’t mean die or be assassinated. it means depart from his disastrous position of “leadership”. in a democracy, the power should rest with the public, not shadowy “powerful people”. it is only dictators for whom a question like mine might sound unlikely and mysterious. do you think is Israel so far gone?
@admitsWrongIfProven @bobwyman i’m not quite sure what that means.
by what process, and on what timeframe, does Netanyahu go? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/israel-after-netanyahu/675952/
ht @bobwyman
war is a process whose function is to turn human beings into cartoon villains, or just corpses. https://dair-community.social/@ZekuZelalem/111354815395188085
"When creating an IMAP account… login name and password were being transferred to Microsoft's server. Although TLS protected, the data in the tunnel runs to Microsoft in plain text. Without informing or asking, Microsoft grants itself full access to the IMAP and SMTP access data of users of the new Outlook." from a Google translation of this, in German https://www.heise.de/news/Microsoft-krallt-sich-Zugangsdaten-Achtung-vorm-neuen-Outlook-9357691.html ht Technology as Nature
so much of the telos of the global authoritarian right is the petrostate. liberal economists' "resource curse" is reappropriated as a blessing: control of and proximity to resource rents becomes an enduring basis for hierarchy.
Netanyahu's Israel admires Putin's Russia. "Drill baby drill" isn't really about the implausibility of alternative energy sources, but about their disruptiveness to existing hierarchies if they succeed.
cf #TimSahay interviewing #GuyLaron https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/october-war/
if you will make so dark the night,
it is your duty then
to make the morning bright.
politicians paying elon musk to fundraise to me are probably not politicians i’m gonna support.
the two phenomena are alike in some ways but quite different in others.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite (i kind of wanted to bookmark the links. the article points to lots of under-the-radar pro labor actions taken by the Biden administration i want to be able to recall.)
states transform and sometimes suppress ethnicity and culture even when they ostensibly exist as the flower of the very same ethnocultural aspiration. this piece describes that well, and takes for granted it’s a bad thing. i’m not so sure that it’s a bad thing overall, although surely there are losses one can lament.
“Zionism and the Nation-State” by @KevinCarson1 https://c4ss.org/content/59175
“Is Joe Biden the Most Pro-Union President You’ve Ever Seen?” by #JasonVazquez https://onlabor.org/is-joe-biden-the-most-pro-union-president-youve-ever-seen/
there’s a kind of cleverness to haley’s “well we would if we could, but we can’t so you don’t have to worry, you can still vote for us!” approach.
@michelm @evan (sorry! i had to get the kid.) i think i should have done a better job to emphasize that the mischief is in the word “right”. a right means something one can enforce, even over the objections of others. in the context of national self-determination, it is often taken to legitimize violent “resistance”. 1/
@michelm @evan that self-perceived communities have aspirations to a kind of self-determination strikes me as fine and normal, and i agree that there are many situations where it would be better if states would recognize those aspirations, which might range from recognizing as official a minority language, to intrastate devolution and autonomy, to formal secession as a separate state. 2/
@michelm @evan but i think elevating thise aspirations into a “right” is beyond counterproductive. (i think it has proven in practice quite vicious.) states thrive when they are functional, and communities that consider themselves disrespected and repressed are a drag for everyone. as long as it’s clear that any changes will be by mutual consent rather than unilateral, i think there’s tremendous scope for human communities to work stuff out. 3/
@michelm @evan but as soon as there’s a right, there’s a threat to try to enforce some rearrangement without mutual consent. and i think that poisons the whole exercise. ironically i think it ends up harming the minority communities it is meant to empower most, because while it legitimates “resistance”, they then bear the brunt of much more serious kinds of oppression than might otherwise obtain if the more powerful majority did not fear unilateral secession and potential violence. 4/
@michelm @evan i don’t mean to diminish the real trade-off here. taking the “right” off the table does mean the more powerful group can more easily choose to simply ignore and repress the claims of a less powerful group. but my (perhaps mistaken!) judgment is that overall, the cost of polarization and violence that claiming a “right” engenders outweighs the good that might come from the stronger negotiating position a perceived right might enable. /fin
@michelm @evan my view on this is very empirically guided. perhaps my very casual emprirics are wrong! but in my read, *nonconsensual* attempts to alter borders to map to nations has brought much more conflict than peace, although yes you can find examples of both. i agree very much that sometimes agreed alterations of borders to better conform to perceived nations can be pro-peace! compare Czechoslovakia vs Yugoslavia.
@michelm @evan I also say "They cannot be sundered unilaterally, and should not be redrawn lightly, but only with mutual accord of the parties most affected."
We can discuss anything, and redraw anything by mutual accord. But letting claims of nationhood justify a resort to violence to alter them more often yields death than justice.
@kentwillard (thanks!)
@evan fwiw here’s my more extended take. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/10/13/national-self-determination-is-a-vicious-idea/index.html