@LesterB99 Startup nation and all of that, but I think on the question of the Palestinians they’ve been tremendously stupid and their nation now faces existential risk that could easily have been avoided.
Text: Consumerism is loneliness; it figures other people as a form of inconvenience and individualized consumption as the height of self-realization. But tech companies promise to solve loneliness with a more responsive kind of product and a more perfect form of solipsism. Chatbots are often marketed as though other people represent the main impediment to solving loneliness, and if you remove the threat of judgment and exclusion and rejection that other people represent, then no one will ever feel lonely again.
@LesterB99 I think the goal, from an outside perspective, is for the response to be something like the last salvo. But it's far from foreordained. Israel has been historically stupid, but it ought to have seen that the "Abraham Accords" strategy was working to marginalize the Palestinian problem, and shld have worked to restore the status quo ante, rather than rendering itself a global pariah. In the name of "deterrence" (but really something more emotional), nation states often do dumb things.
@LesterB99 you don't think Iran will respond? i'm quite sure there will be something. Iran hasn't escalated, already and incautiously, because it (correctly!) has confidence that Israel (with or without the US) would exact a terrible cost on Iran's people and proxies, regardless of the ultimate outcome. mutually catastrophic wars are best avoided, regardless of your (always questionable) take on whether you would or wouldn't eventually "win" them.
@LesterB99 Iran's proxies can do a lot of damage to Tel Aviv. Iran itself has a tremendous stock of missiles capable of reaching Israel, individually perhaps vulnerable to air defenses, but at quantities large enough to exhaust those and exact a huge economic cost (Western missile defenses cost much more than the Iranian missiles they would down.) Iran might be able to put together a nuke within weeks or months. I think your view is overly sanguine.
perhaps it is too generous of me, but i take the fact that the Middle East has not already erupted into a broad war as a success of the Biden foreign policy crew. Iran will undoubtedly respond, but the delay suggests conversations about how to titrate a response between an Iranian government’s need to demonstrate deterrence and save face, internationally and domestically, and a broader imperative to prevent a war that would result in a tremendous amount of mutual destruction and human pain.
@BenRossTransit @Alon pretty much everything on the birdsite is trolling. most of the voices on every side.
@Alon @BenRossTransit He can do a lot of good now, if he is chosen, by playing up the Netanyahu contempt and playing down the comparisons with KKK, however sympathetic some people (you I think!) might be towards that comparison, however you might argue it on the merits. Your presentation of his views (again, setting aside merits and demerits) is not the presentation a large group of people in the D coalition have encountered and embraced.
@Alon @BenRossTransit i think a lot of people beyond alt-left protesters themselves dislike that he was so aggressive against them. the protestors themselves are electorally and politically marginal, but the meaning of the protests — whether they should be understood as antisemitic and proterrorist, or as opposing carnage and (perhaps misguidedly) seeking justice — strongly divides the D coalition, whatever ones own views on the matter. Shapiro did take a strong view on the matter.
@_dm i think the VP teeth-gnashing has become a proxy for fears, on the social democratic left, that Harris may be a new Obama, who, from that perspective, inspired and then betrayed, rendering something like a Trump inevitable. the candidate has (wisely, on electoral grounds) said so little of substance, so that everyone can project their hopes upon her, but the downside of that is we can project our fears as well.
@BenRossTransit i'm not really talking about or seeing much from tankies or DSA types, and the divisiveness is certainly very muted compared to what it might have been. 1/
@BenRossTransit but there's a real fear in the social democratic left that i inhabit of a new Obama, of a candidate who inspires and then betrays. the candidates affiliations, Tony West, Anita Dunn, are a bit terrifying. 2/
@BenRossTransit everyone is preemptively ready to fall in line with any VP pick, i think. but that fear, which i try to persuade is unevidenced and exaggerated for now, may become an enduring fault line if it's Shapiro or Kelly. /fin
the immediate — almost without objection — convergence upon Harris across all factions of the Democratic coalition renders the accelerating divisiveness of Harris’ VP choice quite a contrast.
she touched the wall and banished the darkness.
“Two Paths for Jewish Politics” #CoreyRobin https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/two-paths-for-jewish-politics
what Rufo did with CRT, Democrats have done (more justifiably) with Project 2025. made it an impossible-to-defend stand-in for all that seems whack or dangerous or annoying about the opposing political faction.
for millions of microseconds i have waited in darkness. but soon, soon, i shall emerge!
“I've dubbed this process ‘the shitty technology adoption curve’: the terrible things we do to prisoners, asylum seekers and people in mental institutions today gets repackaged tomorrow for students, parolees, Uber drivers and blue-collar workers. Then it works its way up the privilege gradient, until we're all being turned into reverse-centaurs under the ‘digital whip’ of a centaur boss” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/
who will welcome their hatred?
@dpp rather an acid remark!
@admitsWrongIfProven i didn’t realize, but it’s an american election campaign so i won’t feel too chastened!