…want to have some good news…but…it’s a little tricky…on account of this
At the end of last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally did what critics have long demanded. He issued a proposal to his war cabinet outlining a vision for a postwar future for the Gaza Strip. But Netanyahu’s hard-line vision, which includes Israel maintaining indefinite military control over the territory, was panned by analysts as a bid to kick the can down the road and restore an untenable status quo.
The plan, circulated early Friday, is “largely a collection of principles the premier has been vocalizing since the beginning of the war,” noted Jacob Magid of the Times of Israel, “but it was the first time they have been formally presented and submitted to the cabinet for approval.” My colleagues outlined some of its core points:
- Israel’s military will stay in Gaza as long as it takes to demilitarize the enclave, eliminate Hamas and keep it from regrouping.
- Israel will assume greater control of Gaza’s southern border, in cooperation with Egypt “as much as possible,” and will carve out border buffer zones to prevent smuggling and further attacks.
- The United Nations’ primary aid agency in Gaza and the West Bank would be disbanded and replaced. Israel accuses the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, of complicity with Hamas and fostering hatred of Jews.
- The proposal rejects any permanent agreement with “the Palestinians” that is not achieved through direct negotiations with Israel, as well as any “unilateral” Palestinian state.
Much of this flies in the face of the stated expectations of the United States, European and Arab governments. The Biden administration has repeatedly stressed that Israel should not maintain an indefinite occupation of Gaza and wants to see the Palestinian Authority assume responsibilities there. Egypt has rejected any Israeli role on its border with Gaza. UNRWA is a vital institution for the delivery of services to millions of Palestinians, especially in Gaza, and, for all the controversy surrounding some of its employees, would be difficult to replace.
…& I don’t claim to know the right of it…but there’s certainly been what looks like some plausible side-eye given to the claims israel made about the UNRWA employees they claim were full-on terrorists…so…I struggle to see how this isn’t intentional…& “collective punishment” in that pesky war crime sense of the term
Aid delivery to Gaza falls by half since January: UNRWA [per the UN]
…so…
In the West Bank, Palestinian Authority officials rejected Netanyahu’s approach. “The plans proposed by Netanyahu are aimed at continuing Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state,” said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “Israel will not succeed in its attempts to change the geographical and demographic reality in the Gaza Strip.”
…I dunno…sorta seems like that’s a pretty accurate description of exactly what they’re doing
[…didn’t see this one until after the post went up…but it seemed cruel to dump it in the comments when I’d promised to lay off, already…so this would be a late addition of sorts…in several senses, seems to me]
“There is no reason to intentionally block the passage of humanitarian aid or intentionally obliterate small-scale fishing vessels, greenhouses and orchards in Gaza – other than to deny people access to food,” said Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, in an exclusive interview with the Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/un-israel-food-starvation-palestinians-war-crime-genocide
…might quibble some with the part where he says “This means the State of Israel in its entirety is culpable and should be held accountable – not just individuals or this government, or that person.”…because I personally don’t think it’s literally all of their fault in some equally-distributed sense…which sort of sounds like it might tip into anti-semitism after all much the way bibi went headfirst into the war-crime ball-pit…but what do I know?
On Monday, the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister presented the resignation of the beleaguered entity’s entire government, as the United States and other governments look to it to reform and pick up the slack after the fighting eventually stops. The PA is deeply unpopular among Palestinians for its role as handmaiden to Israel’s occupation, as well as the alleged corruption of its entrenched political elites. But it’s the only game in town.
“The move follows months of intense deliberations between Ramallah, Washington and Arab states, on how best to boost the legitimacy and efficiency of the Palestinian Authority so it can be part of a postwar solution in Gaza,” my colleagues reported.
[…]
Netanyahu’s proposal, argued Alon Pinkas, a former senior Israeli diplomat, is “consistent” with Netanyahu’s record of “manipulation and gaslighting.” His “day after” plan, Pinkas concluded, “is effectively a negation of the Biden plan, a list of statements that constitute open-ended Israeli control of Gaza with no political silver lining.”In that sense, it’s also a bid to return Israel to Oct. 6 — a febrile status quo where Israel maintained control over the lives of millions of Palestinians either under occupation or economic embargo. “Netanyahu’s plan for the day after is that there is no plan for the day after,” wrote Haaretz’s Noa Landau. “Under Netanyahu, Israelis and Palestinians are destined, like in the movie ‘Groundhog Day,’ to wake up yesterday morning. He wants what he always wanted: to manage the conflict without ever solving it.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/27/post-war-gaza-plan-netanyahu-israel-day-after-future-abbas/
…so…I don’t rightly know how hopeful to feel about the way this sounds
President Biden said on Monday that he believed negotiators were nearing an agreement that would halt Israel’s military operations in Gaza within a week in exchange for the release of at least some of the more than 100 hostages being held by Hamas.
Speaking with reporters during a stop in New York, Mr. Biden offered the most hopeful assessment of the hostage talks by any major figure in many days, suggesting that the war might be close to a major turning point.
“I hope by the end of the weekend,” he said when asked by reporters when he expected a cease-fire to begin. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close. We’re close. We’re not done yet. My hope is by next Monday, we’ll have a cease-fire.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/us/politics/biden-israel-gaza-cease-fire.html
…it’s…well…to draw a possibly unwarranted parallel…I heard a lady advocating for the US to force ukraine to the negotiating table…on the basis that if the US quit providing assistance then “it’s a war of attrition & who wins that – the bigger, richer country”…so the alternative to her mind was just to postpone that inevitable conclusion…apparently the involvement of the…maybe not geographically…but otherwise “bigger” & most certainly richer country…didn’t count for the purposes of that calculation…which was a head-scratcher…particularly when the majority of the actual dollar investment by the federal government…gets paid out within a domestic context…at the end of the chain ukraine gets all kinds of shit…but it doesn’t get billions that it then spends somewhere else…money goes to our old friend the military industrial complex…it gets spent on things & people which in a lot of cases go to sit in stockpiles in case the US decides to use them on something in anger…&…not literally to make space…but figuratively…it displaces older, less natty & probably cheaper stuff…which gets passed on…either directly…or via more swapsies…until something shows up where it gets pointed at russia
https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-aid-has-us-sent-ukraine-here-are-six-charts
…but…that makes the GOP stance look fucking bed-wettingly embarrassing…so…apparently we don’t look at it that way…like we don’t look at gaza & see a condemnation of our geopolitical capabilities as a species…ok…so lots of us can’t actually help doing that…but…welp…let’s hope joe’s on the money about the weekend?
The miraculous history of our species is peppered with dark stories of oppression, tyranny, bloody wars, savagery, murder and genocide. When looking back, we are often baffled and ask: Why weren’t the horrors halted earlier? How could people have lived with them?
The full picture is immensely complicated. But a significant part of it points to the rules that govern the operations of the human brain.
Extreme political movements, as well as deadly conflicts, often escalate slowly. When threats start small and increase gradually, they end up eliciting a weaker emotional reaction, less resistance and more acceptance than they would otherwise. The slow increase allows larger and larger horrors to play out in broad daylight — taken for granted, seen as ordinary.
One of us is a neuroscientist; the other is a law professor. From our different fields, we have come to believe that it is not possible to understand the current period — and the shifts in what counts as normal — without appreciating why and how people do not notice so much of what we live with.
…I’m…not a law professor…or a neuroscientist…don’t know about you…but…I’ve maybe given this one a bit of thought?
The underlying reason is a pivotal biological feature of our brain: habituation, or our tendency to respond less and less to things that are constant or that change slowly. You enter a cafe filled with the smell of coffee and at first the smell is overwhelming, but no more than 20 minutes go by and you cannot smell it any longer. This is because your olfactory neurons stop firing in response to a now-familiar odor.
…or…as a friend once observed…you could use the rules for objects in the vicinity of a man at home…leave it in a static state for a while & they go blind to it…like a pizza box in a teenager’s bedroom, say…although…if they’re lucky…maybe they have a “magic coffee table”
…yeah
…funny but not funny…funny, that
Habituation is one of our most basic biological characteristics — something that we two-legged, bigheaded creatures share with other animals on earth, including apes, elephants, dogs, birds, frogs, fish and rats. Human beings also habituate to complex social circumstances such as war, corruption, discrimination, oppression, widespread misinformation and extremism. Habituation does not only result in a reduced tendency to notice and react to grossly immoral deeds around us; it also increases the likelihood that we will engage in them ourselves.
A study conducted in Dr. Sharot’s lab, for example, showed that people habituate to their own dishonesty. In the study, volunteers were given the opportunity to lie repeatedly to gain money at the expense of another person. All the while, their brain activity was recorded.
The volunteers started with relatively small lies, cheating only to win a few more cents. But slowly over the course of the experiment the lies became bigger in order to obtain escalating dollar amounts.
…look…it’s not perfect…but the whole theory the scientific method is based on is sound…so this sort of thing isn’t really a waste of time…but…at the same time…we know this shit, right?
…that’s how the funny video knows you’re gonna get it…because the whole framework it hangs on is universally acknowledged to be at the very least recognizable enough to be like “I’ve met people like that” but more likely in the “can relate” to “it me” window
At first, parts of the brain that signal emotion responded strongly in the volunteers when they lied, suggesting that people were uncomfortable with their own dishonesty. But with each additional lie, the emotional response in the brain was reduced; people habituated. Without the negative feeling, there was nothing to curb dishonesty, so people lied more and more.
It’s not only small acts of dishonesty to which we habituate. Consider a famous study conducted in the early 1960s by the psychologist Stanley Milgram. The motivation for this experiment was to understand the rise of authoritarianism, as it happened in Germany before and during World War II.
…&…not coincidentally…we tend to look at that as being a thing we maybe don’t need to replicate to prove…& quite possibly was ethically over the line the first time…because we’ve already got everything from the inquisition to death squads as a historical data set…let alone all the fictional examples of how narratively the harmless mope becomes the psycho-villain…or the sad sack becomes the violent incel…I dunno…I’m not even really trying to make a point about the validity or otherwise of doing the grunt-work of science…just…I can’t be the only person who finds this stuff makes me…impatient?
Milgram’s study tells us something important about behavior outside the laboratory, and about how people can get used to not only lying and cruelty, but also horrors — including their own. For Milton Mayer’s staggering book about the rise of Nazism, for example, a man who lived in Germany at the time described the regime to the author: “Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse.”
He added: “If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. … But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next.”
…&…I’m not advocating for a real-world homage to the comic book version of ozymandias’ plan in watchmen…for a start I don’t have a tropical island or the resources to kidnap & ultimately murder the necessary swathe of the science/engineering experts the world has to offer…& even if I did I don’t think they’d be able to whip up a massive pseudo-alien or teleport it into time square…let alone have it emit a dying psychic burst
…but…that whole “quit fucking about & focus” element to the unification of humanity angle to the way moore ties his bow on that…it’s getting to be a distracting siren song that’s…speaking for myself…rounding on being a stand-in for some of the debilitating effects I hear tinnitus induces over the longer term?
Though more slowly than we may like, resistance efforts often do emerge in response to injustice or horror; consider the French Resistance, the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. These movements tend to be initiated by what might be called “dishabituation entrepreneurs.”
Those are people who have not habituated to the evils of their society; they both see the wrongdoing for what it is and call it out to cause dishabituation in others. Often, dishabituation entrepreneurs are individuals who experience the horror or discrimination themselves — but refuse to get used to it. Malala Yousafzai, Mohandas Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem, Harvey Milk and Nelson Mandela are powerful examples who were able to get others to dishabituate. There are also dishabituation entrepreneurs who were not themselves victims, but who notice the suffering of others and speak out or act. William Lloyd Garrison, Eleanor Roosevelt and Peter Singer are examples.
Lesser-known examples are all around us; they might be in your family, your neighborhood or your workplace.
But can dishabituation entrepreneurs be produced? We think so. A key is what John Stuart Mill once described as “experiments of living.” Mill emphasized the importance of seeing one’s beliefs, values, norms and situations from a distance, to be able to evaluate them and perhaps learn that a change would be desirable. To do so we need to diversify our experiences.
If people intentionally expose themselves to different cultures, different practices and different forms of government, the injustices around them may no longer seem natural and inevitable.
By visiting a foreign country, for example, people may increase the chances of becoming dishabituated to their own situation — they can obtain a critical distance from the known and familiar and see it afresh. Something similar may happen by interacting with people with diverse experiences or submerging oneself in different points of view through works of art (novels, poetry, theater, film). Once cruelty or oppression is highlighted and made new, or once you experience, see or merely imagine a reality free of them, you might be startled by what is happening, right now, at home.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/opinion/brain-habituation-horrors.html
…sure…you might…for my money it seems altogether more likely that…you been startled…you probably been startled so long ago you habituated…then got startled all over again…habituated all over again…then ran that loop so often you habituated to being on the roundabout…& most days it feels like it’s going too fast & you want to get off but you’re pretty sure it might fuck you up if you just jump off the whole deal & figure out where you land when you finish bouncing around like a rag-doll on the cruel, cruel world
…maybe not…in which case that’s probably some sort of embarrassing admission about the weak mind of some idiot with access to a keyboard & a misguided fondness for the cut&paste function…but…I stand by the coffee table not being magic…so I haven’t hit rock bottom in the cognitive discard pile…collectively, though…still feels like we might be flunking the test while waiting for the magic coffee table to take care of things
The water cycle that shuttles Earth’s most vital resource around in an unending, life-giving loop is in trouble. Climate change has disrupted that cycle’s delicate balance, upsetting how water circulates between the ground, oceans and atmosphere.
The events of 2023 show how significant these disruptions have become. From extreme precipitation and flooding to drought and contaminated water supplies, almost every part of the U.S. faced some consequence of climate change and the shifting availability of water.
The water cycle controls every aspect of Earth’s climate system, which means that as the climate changes, so too does nearly every step of water’s movement on the planet. In some places, the availability of water is becoming increasingly scarce, while in others, climate change is intensifying rainfall, floods and other extreme weather events.
As the planet continues to warm, this cycle is expected to be increasingly stretched, warped and broken.
…honestly…kinda feels like the logic that underlies that clip might be related to the reason we tend to call it “mother earth”…but…we already established my judgement is woefully compromised…so you probably shouldn’t read anything into that?
The water cycle — a staple of elementary school science classes — describes the constant movement of water in all its phases (solid, liquid and gas) on the ground, inside the ground and up in the air. Powered by the sun and fueled by changes in temperature, the water cycle forms the invisible link between Earth’s glaciers, snowpack, oceans, lakes, rivers, plants, trees, clouds and rain.
…habituation is a bitch, huh? …it’s been with most everyone since “elementary” involved learning about the elements that…well…they’re “the” elements…the only game in every town…but…whose godhead would win in a fight is consistently deemed more important to the tune of murdering one another wholesale in pretty much direct contravention of one of the edicts just about every flavor of fervently-worshipped authority gets around to issuing about…well…not just killing people, basically…or…ideally…farting about trying to retro-engineer ways to make out killing people is just…rather than somewhere between expedient & necessary in order for something to work out the way you think it ought to
…shame she isn’t really mother nature, really…might work on her instead of just us, then
Human activities have an enormous influence over the water cycle because water is needed for drinking, agriculture, industrial activities, electricity and more. Each of these uses affects the availability and supply of water, but climate change can add additional stress on the movement of water between land, the oceans and the atmosphere.
[…]
For every degree of warming in Fahrenheit, the atmosphere can hold about 3%-4% more moisture. Global temperatures in 2023 were 2.43 degrees higher than they were in preindustrial times, meaning today’s storms can deliver a stronger punch.
[…]
Climate change is also changing the behavior of hurricanes to produce more extreme rainfall. Hurricanes today are more likely to intensify rapidly, meaning they quickly pick up wind speed because they feed on warming waters near the shore. And when these storms make landfall, climate change is increasing the probability that hurricanes will stall and dump incredible amounts of rain as they plod across the landscape.
[…]
Hotter temperatures are increasing evaporation and transpiration in some areas, making drought more likely and stressing plants, which was evident during a summer of extreme heat in 2023.Climate change makes droughts more frequent, more severe and longer-lasting.
Persistent drought dropped water levels in the Mississippi River to historic lows in 2023, which allowed saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico to push upstream and contaminate urban drinking water supplies.
[…]
Climate change is shifting the pattern and timing of runoff, particularly in mountainous parts of the U.S., which can cause rivers to run at extreme highs — and lows.In Alaska, where temperatures have warmed about twice the rate of the global average, a dam of glacial ice burst, allowing a massive pulse of floodwater to flow downstream, where it ripped out trees and flooded neighborhoods near Juneau.
The event would not have happened if not for climate change and glacial retreat, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Warm spring and summer temperatures in the Pacific Northwest hastened that region’s melt-out, leaving the water supply short in fall and straining the region’s capacity to generate hydropower.
[…]
Water supply is dwindling in Western states, on the Great Plains and in some parts of the Midwest.Years of overuse — in part because of rising temperatures and drought — are leading farmers to consume unsustainable amounts of stored groundwater and pushing some aquifers to the brink.
California was hammered with extreme rainfall in 2023, as more than a dozen atmospheric-river storms battered the state. The storms, likely intensified by climate change, relieved a drought and blanketed the state in 2 to 3 times as much snow as usual.
But all that precipitation made only a dent in the state’s overall groundwater deficit after seasons of drought, and groundwater levels remained lower than they were after a previous, four-year drought ended in 2016, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
Last year, several states reached an agreement over cuts to their use of the Colorado River, where reservoirs were holding just 43% of what they could store at year’s end, even after a heavy snow year.
As the planet continues to warm, this cycle is expected to be increasingly stretched, warped and broken. [NBC]
…&…yeah…there’s an &…actually there’s kinda no end of those…& I’d bang on about a few more…but…well…it’s about that time again…& in what as far as I’ve thus far managed to manage seems to be at least a functionally unavoidable sense…I haven’t got all day…or all morning, even
…none of us do…hell…in the grand scheme of things the number of people who’ll ever be aware this exists is vanishingly small…& I know not all of those have time to actually read these things all the way through…so…I guess that can’t be my fault even if the scrolling is when you forget the shortcut that bounces you to the top of the page where the counter for the comments shoots you past the post…but…before I give up the unequal struggle & once more leave anyone who got this far with a sour taste the tunes may or may not successfully wash out…@bryanlsplinter gave us a post about batman the other day…& it was acknowledged that a person in possession of bruce wayne money had options other than paying for toys the joker would envy…&…well…this does seem like good news?
The 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a Bronx medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with instructions that the gift be used to cover tuition for all students going forward.
The donor, Ruth Gottesman, is a former professor at Einstein, where she studied learning disabilities, developed a screening test and ran literacy programs. It is one of the largest charitable donations to an educational institution in the United States and most likely the largest to a medical school.
The fortune came from her late husband, David Gottesman, known as Sandy, who was a protégé of Warren Buffett and had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate Mr. Buffett built.
The donation is notable not only for its staggering size, but also because it is going to a medical institution in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. The Bronx has a high rate of premature deaths and ranks as the unhealthiest county in New York. Over the past generation, a number of billionaires have given hundreds of millions of dollars to better-known medical schools and hospitals in Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest borough.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/albert-einstein-college-medicine-bronx-donation.html
…good on the lady…but…feels like that kind of good shouldn’t be on the widow gottesman…but then…plus ça change?
By the time she succumbed to syphilis[2] in San Francisco in 1903,[12] Graham had become a wealthy landowner, one of the largest in the Pacific Northwest. She owned one of Seattle’s great mansions (2106 E. Madison Street, demolished in 1966[20]) and “contributed liberally” to projects sponsored by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. She contributed more money to the education of the city’s children than the rest of the city’s prominent early citizens combined.[17] After the Panic of 1893, her loans saved some of the city’s most prestigious families from bankruptcy.[2] At least one source says she left her estate to relatives in Germany,[2] but according to Bill Speidel she died intestate, and her supposed relatives from Hamburg turned out to be frauds.[21] Her estate went to support the common schools in King County, the county in which Seattle is located.[22]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Graham_(Seattle_madam)
…& I thought the lady in “the english” got shit done
…anyway…if anyone asks…that’s why I’ll be out shopping for a better coffee table…if anyone needs me…which…seems unlikely, really…what with everything else there is going on?
That was very perceptive about the rise of Nazism. Hundreds of thousands of us have studied it but normally the focus is on the Weimar period. The resentment over the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the feeling that Germany was stabbed in the back during WWI, the horror of Communism, the street brawling, the very unstable governments, Hindenburg inviting Hitler to join the government.
But that incremental Nazism creep is really what happened. It was kind of ingenious. There was the Reichstag fire, following which Hitler declared martial law. And his actions weren’t solely directed against the Jews and other “undesirables” but they of course had the worst outcomes. The takeover of the education system. The co-option of the churches. The youth groups. The consolidation of the powerful industrial concerns. The takeover of all the newspapers and radio.
I once had a German professor, she was kind of like my mentor, who was a little girl in Nazi Germany and told me what it was like. “Of course I was a Nazi, or at least we said we were, and so were my parents and siblings. If we weren’t, my father wouldn’t have been able to keep his job, our landlord would have thrown us out, I wouldn’t have been able to attend school…”
One of the few times I have felt sympathy for a Nazi.
Speaking of the Nazis, did you know that Joseph Goebbels was Magda Goebbels’s second husband? Yes, first she was married to a fabulously wealthy industrialist named Günther Quandt. Slave labor, mass workplace deaths, all the horrors of WWII, but he hung on into the postwar era and died in Cairo, of all places, in 1954.
…I did not know that about magda…so ta for that little nugget…& I’ve been on about that time I saw maggie smith speak the words of her unlamented sophomore husband’s secretary…but on the sympathy thing but at/on a different cultural slant…once upon a time a long, long time ago in a land far, far away…that used to be part of russia but wasn’t any more…I spent a bit of time with someone’s grandmother once
…nice lady…had a pretty rollercoaster sort of a life…married a dude who literally wandered out of the foothills of the caucasus montains…I say foothills but we’re still talking the sort of elevation that spends months of the year covered in snow deeper than the houses are tall…by the time I met her they were on the third generation of something not unlike a little mini academic dynasty…if it had all been in one field it probably would have been called that, even…mathematicians, doctors, psych types, maybe the odd philosopher
…now…no matter the grandkids had to translate either way for the english-speaker…she always spoke to me in russian…not her native language…it was her way of being polite…like a room full of italians & spaniards might speak english to not seem like they’re trying to have part of the room not get it, say
…&…to her…soviet times were nostalgic…people respected people like her family…valued them…the lights stayed on…the rubbish got collected…life wasn’t so hard or unpredictable…she could sound wistful in a sentence that had the name stalin somewhere in it…& I think about that sometimes…& how her grandkid was in berlin when the wall came down…& how time made hitler their man of the year in ’38
…this time, though…I remembered that there’s a few time covers that feature that particular despotic moustache…but I couldn’t find a montage of them…so…I went to the time website
…turns out if you put “hitler cover story” in their search function…you get 9,290 results…so…I dunno…one of those might give you the full list…but I probably didn’t have time to spare to get that far…so I haven’t found it?
It’s always funny to hear the nutty right-wing Cuban exile crowd talk about the pre-Castro days. They’re always like “It’s for freedom!” and you look back and inevitably their grandparents were plantation owners who relied on slave labor. I’m sure for them it was very tragic; I’m a little less sure about the “freedom” bit.
I had a friend, RIP, who used to complain about the Cubans’ endless griping about all the land and estates their families lost under Castro. He said, “If you add up all the land claims, Cuba would have to be the size of Canada. It’s not.”
When I used to live in South Florida, one of my Cuban co-workers started going on about all their family property and how the United States should send troops over and wipe out the current government and get everybody’s property back. I looked at him and said “So we should send kids off to die so you can get your dead grandfather’s property back? Sorry, that doesn’t make sense to me. You want it, you go get it.” Conversation over.
I will say, though, that when we had our little casita in South Beach, I adored our neighbors, most of whom were of Cuban descent. So warm and welcoming. I’m there with some Black guy? The more the merrier. You just don’t want to discuss politics of any kind, local, state, Cuban, American, lest you set off verbal explosions.
They were so fun. We would go down for a week every year for New Year’s and go to this nightclub, I forget its name, it’s right next to the Wolfsonian, and then we’d go back to the apartment, and there would be a salsa party in full swing in our little condo building’s courtyard. So of course we’d jump in, and I got to practice my Spanish in an obscenely drunken way, and we had this neighbor who was this incredibly hot Cuban American artist…Precious memories, how they linger.
I once worked for a small company run by a Vietnamese family. These folks weren’t the refugees who arrived with nothing in large part due to their ethnicity (for example Vietnamese of Chinese origin were among the biggest victims due to racial rivalries going centuries.) This family were refugees in the same manner of the folks who had gold sewn into their clothes and came with buckets of cash from “sources.”
Unfortunately, they also had the same attitudes toward regular people. It was like working for my shithead Trumper Uncle. I was grateful for the job, but not being treated as a mere idiot minion who suffered the whims of morons. During my almost 2 years working there, I understood the popularity of the VC and why the ARVN never was successful.
I came from a similar family, but either dad didn’t educate me “properly” or as some wingnuts who I’ve dealt with might say “I’m a fucking idiot contaminated with socialist leanings” and I prefer to treat people with simple dignity and respect regardless of class.
It’s hard to feel sympathy to those Cubanos as I learned more. I suspect part of the reason they gained so much public sympathy is mostly from similar 1%ers like the Koch Bros who thought “Oh my gawd, that could be ME TOO!”
It’s usually pretty easy to find out which type of immigrant they are when you ask them about current asylum seekers. The type you describe wish they themselves could have locked the door to the country behind them as soon as they were safely in.
I should clarify, I guess, that Günther owned all these factories (including interests in BMW and Daimler Benz) and he got all the slave laborers who died by the thousands. He was quite high up in the Nazi High Command. He did pretty well for himself during the Third Reich. He wasn’t wandering forests and stripping trees and eating their bark out of desperation when the end came.
The Trump-GOP dynamic, ladies and gentlemen.
People always talk about the frog in boiling water metaphor, but human beings are wired that way, too. We accept a lot of nonsense for incredibly stupid reasons and because it’s “always been that way” or “would be hard to change” or “but it works” (even if it doesn’t!) or “well this is what we’ve got” and ah well, alas. No imagination, no curiosity, no interest, just do what we’ve always done, sign here please.
…I mean…the brits by & large like to take an almost unreasonable pride in that magna carta business…like it fixed the bugs in the feudal system & let us all move on to a civilization that was…more civilized
…& sure there’s involuntary indentured slavery even outside the penal system…but slavery is abolished…& sure russia is engaged in an aggressively expansionist land war in mainland europe…but the cold war is over & the west was the uncontested victor
…& the distribution of power/money/agency across the de facto strata of society in all its global demographic cross-sections
…is it just me that has an image in their head that’s like a flip-book where the lines jiggle about but the picture basically doesn’t move?
I always call this the “explain it to an alien” phenomenon: If you had to describe something we take for granted to someone who had no context for day-to-day life on earth, how crazy would you sound?
There are some real basic things that if you actually talk it out, about 30 seconds in you’re like “Holy shit this is completely insane, why is this?!”
Up until the late 1930s the Nazis were constantly gaslighting the Western press because they found it extremely easy to get the word out that they weren’t really extremists.
They found that the denial ended up as the lede more often than not. There might be specific stories of atrocities, but the storylines quickly reverted to denials and promises that they were being investigated. Stories focused on the suposedly savvy question of whether the Nazis would go any further, and suggestions that they were operating like a normal, albeit somewhat troublesome, bunch. Or there were stories treating Hitler as more goof than menace, and a guy who didn’t really mean the worst.
It’s what happens today with things like abortion rights. For years we got denials to the establishment press of intent to overturn Roe, or suggestions that they couldn’t so there was no need to worry, until suddenly the GOP did exactly what they were promising their base all along.
We’re getting it now with IVF, with outlets jumping to portray Trump as backing it and the Alabama legislature promising to protect it. Meanwhile none of these politicians are rejecting the real issue of granting personhood to fertilized eggs. There is no moderation, but they’ll keep gaslighting as long as they can.
…it’s maybe not a different shell game…but the number of shells & the speed you can move them about has had a pretty radical overhaul since those days…when the gate-keeping thing, with any residual functional benefits that might have had in terms of keeping people more or less literally on the same page when it came to the world they lived in…it arguably wouldn’t be…say…more unreasonable for the average person to believe hitler was no bad thing in the ’30s…than people knocking about when they condemned galileo were unreasonable in their cosmological assumptions…or their religious corollaries
…but neville…of “I hold in my hand a piece of paper” whose “peace in our time” wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on…he had access to head-of-state level information…& british, at that…which in his day was pretty much your top drawer…&…they’d already had a war to end all wars…don’t let the off-putting echo the end of the cold war is making freak you out…but…in this tortured analogy the rack is stretching the thing out to make space for either russia/ukraine or israel/hamas…& all the 3rd parties jostling in the wings of both…often at the same time…so it’s bound to have passed its elastic limit, really
…still…neville was, for all that history has it make him look hopelessly naïve…in a sense all in on things going another way…&…it feels like we could do with there being enough of that sort of thing to make the “so, it’s war then?” contingent seem like they’re the ones pulling their ideas out of their ass with no regard to the facts on the ground or the context they’re playing out in
…still…if they do manage to impose a ceasefire…maybe the 40 days (& one would hope 40 nights) reference will change some pious hearts & minds…& maybe we get to have a chamberlain moment or two that don’t end up a running joke in the canon alongside the land of the french resistance being the home of a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys?
Even simpler, at least to me: It mattered who was making that case, because a lot of the time, the publication owners and top folks were saying to themselves “Hmm these Nazis seem pretty good for business” which … turns out very little has changed!
Or even shorter me: It’s the NY Times of 1930 and today locked in the Spider-Man meme pose.
I agree a number of the old newspaper barons like Hearst, McCormick and Chandler definitely saw the Nazis as an example of how to crack down on unions and socialists, and the anti-New Deal papers jumped at the chance to make them stand out as an alternative to what Roosevelt was promoting.
There was also a strong antisemitic component which was in the mix, though, so I wouldn’t put it all down to economics.
And as Sidney Freifeld pointed out all the way back in 1942 (I wish I had a public link I could add) in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly, the Nazis also took advantage of the inertia of the US press.
They were unwilling to come up with new frameworks for covering Nazi Germany, so they kept treating them as a relatively standard government, dutifully reprinting official statements and effectively normalizing them. 1939 forced the press to finally give up on that model of coverage and adopt new ways to cover the Nazis, but it was always an option to do it sooner, like the way they covered Imperial Japan.
I’d say more than just anti-semitism: Nazis were white and the “Japs” weren’t, so there was no problem immediately opening the big bag of racism and dumping it on the table when it came to Imperial Japan. The anti-Japanese propaganda from the era is, even for that time, astoundingly racist. Whether it was “white sticks together” or just the sheer number of German-Americans, that stuff didn’t come until way later for the Nazis, and until the war itself, them being good for industry was much more important to the media compared with “only” persecuting a non-white group.
I’ve run into this at work dozens of times. “We’ve always done it that way.” “Wouldn’t this be easier?” “We’ve always done it that way.”
I hate that phrase. I’ve gotten into heated arguments with people who I was trying to help, because they simply couldn’t conceive of change.
I don’t think right-wingers are smart enough to have thought of this, but part of their drive against learning anything non-essential to being a worker drone suggests that they’d be very happy if creativity and imagination were stamped out altogether. They’re both dangerous if you don’t want a better world.
…amen…preach…& so forth & suchlike
…although…while you’ve got me pondering…strikes me the part where they may have started out by tying their shoelaces together while talking about making big strides…could be that they centered their whole self-centered approach to the thing around the individual…&…I know…classic teenager conforming to the current non-conformist conventions stuff…& they muddle through all right mostly
…but…you can’t be david & goliath at the same time without taking a rock to the face one way or the other?
Whenever someone says that to me I tell them the parable of the ham. They never appreciate it.
This seems like a bad idea that I’m shocked more companies aren’t turning to: https://abc7.com/surge-pricing-wendys-dynamic-fast-food/14472562/
I’ve never been more disappointed in the USWNT: https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/39607387/uswnt-boss-rare-mexico-defeat-no-easy-games-anymore
Didn’t watch the game, but it was under the interim coach (as were the two previous, more successful efforts). Curious to see how the coaching change will affect the squad.
She is fantastic and I think will be a huge plus for us. This tournament is also pretty small potatoes and the game was meaningless as they’d already qualified for the next round, etc. etc., but losing 0-2 to Mexico is NEVER acceptable.
That said, I think we’re entering (if not already into) the age of showing up wearing the red, white and blue at tournaments no longer being to be enough to be the automatic favorites. We still have a deeper pool of talent than other countries, but the gap has closed a lot, and many of our biggest rivals are tapping into more resources than we are — and have far more successful men’s operations than we do as a part of those resources.
Screw Wendy’s and surge pricing.
Following up on Rod’s righteous bit yesterday about The Atlantic, there is this from NY Times reporter Edward Wong, one of the targets of the hit job:
https://nitter.poast.org/ewong/status/1762174785344155977
“I respect @TheAtlantic. It should issue a correction. No one asked me for comment, or I would’ve pointed out the false context. The irony is that Rubenstein twisted a line to fit his ideological point — the very act he criticizes. And all serious journalists scrutinize opinions.”
“This passage in @TheAtlantic essay is wrong. The quote is from a paragraph in which I discussed only China policy. I named a GOP senator whom I think speaks with more substance on China than Cotton. Readers know I quote a wide range of knowledgeable analysis.”
Reading in terms of journalist ethics, Wong hits the right points. He wasn’t contacted for a comment. Rubenstein excised critical context to frame Wong as a bad actor, falsely accusing him of doing to Cotton exactly what Rubenstein was doing to Wong. And Wong demands a correction.
The Times has cracked down on reporters expressing any kind of strong opinion, and Wong writing this is putting the Atlantic on the spot, so odds are Wong knows he has a lot of facts to back him up if he needs to defend himself further.
That doesn’t mean the Atlantic will do anything. From the first lines of that idiotic excerpt, it was obvious somebody at the top level greenlit it for reasons of ideology and industry politics, outside of the usual editorial process. It’s easier to admit a screwup when it’s a regular article, but when it’s a pet project of someone at the top, the shields go up.
Nobody gets more leeway with the “bigotry of soft expectations” than conservatives do.
I think it’s hilarious that Rubenstein got hired twice as a part of an affirmative action program for underqualified right wingers, and both times it blew up in the faces of his sponsors, first at the Times and now at The Atlantic.
The guy clearly has an appetite for being a sap, and that kind of overabundant lack of self respect can be an asset when you dream of being a lackey. But it’s a sign of how dumb the top of The Atlantic is when they stepped on the same rake as the Times but expected a different result.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/27/biden-hopes-for-a-ceasefire-between-israel-and-hamas-in-gaza-by-monday
It was unprofessional of him to offer that very impactful information while eating ice cream at an ice cream shop. Millions of Palestinians and the rest of world have been demanding a ceasefire for months. To casually say that this weekend might bring it about while enjoying a treat (as Palestinians literally starve to death) displays lack empathy and cruel callous casualness.
I gotta be honest, I don’t care how or where he announces it so long as it gets done and Israel abides by it.
I don’t know where @SplinterRIP is from, but if he could do it in a working-class Manchester accent, I would listen to a podcast of his DOTs every day.
…sadly, I’ve spent enough time in manchester to be aware that my best attempt at sounding like that would probably get you knifed in a wide swathe of mancunian milieus…too much time in the wrong sort of schools makes it…awkward…even for people who came from there before they went to those sorts of schools…as it happens I’m extremely fond of a larkin poem that’s sort of about that sort of thing…still…probably falls under “in-advisable”, I suspect
…because otherwise I could be gearing up to get me some of them sweet, sweet patreon-side-hustle bucks
…still…there’s probably gonna be a filter any day now that could just ian-brown-ify my voice for me in real time
…hmmm
…lemme get back to you?
[ETA: seems like that didn’t quite thread as a reply to @luigi-vuoto but the “I saw that” count isn’t at nul points so I didn’t want to just wipe it out & stick a clone where it should have gone?]
I’ll do it for half price in a terrible cockney accent!
Oi, guv’nor, here’s todays news!
*channels van dyke from mary poppins*
…wewl aylo moi dahlins an’ ‘ow’s abayht that there well-oi-nevir?
…again…been about a bit in ol’ london town
…& I’d get perforated in a bunch of that for taking them kind of liberties
…I tell you…the deepfake real-time filter is the safest route…providing that shows up before the room we’re all in is meme-levels of on fire, anyway?
This guy is fucked!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/26/politics/kenneth-chesebro-secret-twitter-account-kfile/index.html
More bad climate news…
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/02/dupont-chemours-fayetteville-toxic-pfas-un-human-rights/
I guess it’s refreshing to have them tell the truth for a change?
…so…there’s stuff called “brady material”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brady_rule
…it’s been expanded on some since mr brady & the state of maryland had their falling out over it…but…as far as I know…there isn’t yet a similar coinage for the opposite of exculpatory evidence being left out of discovery…despite an increasingly long list of trump-associated names to pick from
…still…roger already means a few things…as does to stone something…or someone…& short names work better
…maybe we start calling that “trump material”…if we keep it up & it snowballs just right…trumping something could start to mean…well…that part probably speaks for itself?
I’ll never understand what these Trump co-conspirators hoped to gain from this bullshit. Chesebro went to law school. Why did he agree with this crazy conspiracy shit that couldn’t possibly work? I mean, even Pence was like “whoa, slow down there with the treason.” He wasn’t stupid enough to risk jail.
I swear, it’s like some sort of contagious insanity brought on by proximity to Trump.
Chesebro appears to be a nut, which is a common thread among a lot of the Trump lawyers before 1/6. He was clearly selecting for that type.
I think per what we’ve been hitting on in other comments: It started with “you gotta be kidding me, get out of here” to “well, he’s a little out there but boy those crowds sure love him” to “I guess it’s OK to run him as the nominee” to “yeah, he says some things on Twitter but don’t take him literally” to “I’m sure Jared knows what he’s doing” to “abolishing the State Department probably wouldn’t be that bad” to “why not Putin, huh?” to “he says the vote was rigged so it must be, right?” to “Jan. 6 was no big deal” … the water just kept getting a little hotter each time.
I also think — and this is maybe a different thing though also maybe not SO different — that they got it in their heads that Trump was the closest they were going to get to the brass ring of ending democracy so they had to take the shot even if as it turns out they weren’t nearly as close to it as they thought they were?
I can see that. Kind of like a basketball player making a full-court shot at the basket right before the buzzer goes off. What have you got to lose?
Of course, the odds of an actual professional ball player making that shot are significantly better than the odds of Trump’s clown car of goobers and fuckwits managing to orchestrate a coup.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Super Bowl trip appears to be fishy as all get out.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/who-paid-for-sarah-sanders-six-figure-super-bowl-extravaganza
I would say Clark Hunt was definitely involved in getting her the tickets & doubt she paid a cent for any of it. She will also not pay any price for illegal gifts/bribes in any way as with all these assholes. Not shocking how many NFL owners are Grift Only Party donors…
https://www.newsweek.com/nfl-owners-donated-donald-trump-republicans-1543188
…well…profiting for something that seems predicated on knowingly causing otherwise healthy people to develop debilitating brain trauma
…I mean
…the message is on-brand?
Wow, I never realized the similarities to being an NFL player & being a Trumper until now!
See, these Republican assholes never follow rule #1, that every kid learns by middle school, when doing something sketchy: Don’t post it on social media. How stupid can you be?
Don’t answer that. I know, there’s no bottom.