…it was apparently einstein who suggested the only reason for time was “so everything didn’t happen all at once”…so…I don’t rightly know what the point of our times would be to the guy…because despite a lot of it happening at the sort of glacial pace that means the UK covid enquiry won’t wind up until ’26…for example…the all at once of it all is…a lot

The Israeli military on Saturday said three hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli troops had been shirtless, unarmed and bearing a makeshift white flag. The troubling details of how they died have created widespread anguish and prompted renewed calls for a pause in the fighting to allow more hostages to be released.

The military, which acknowledged that the killings violated its rules of engagement, announced the deaths on Friday, hours after saying it had recovered the bodies of three other Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevy, the Israeli military chief of staff, said on Saturday that the three hostages had done “everything so that we would understand” that they were harmless, including removing their shirts to show they bore no explosives.

“The shooting of the hostages was carried out contrary to the open-fire regulations,” he said. “It is forbidden to shoot at those who raise a white flag and seek to surrender.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/16/world/middleeast/israel-hostage-killings-gaza.html

…which…I can’t tell you what to make of when even the most forgiving estimates have the casualties in Gaza running a little over 2:1 civilian over what you might call a legitimate combatant…so…maybe…& I can’t believe how this sounds…shooting your own innocent hostages…the very ones whose rescue your whole offensive is predicated on…when they’re clearly not a threat & brandishing a white flag…might be enough to get netenyahu to go back to prisoner exchanges…though…that whole thing’s been a bit of a shell game when you consider they’ve been arresting palestinians at a pace sufficient to have a net increase in numbers incarcerated at any given moment…so…outside of inflicting enough wounds on enough people to ensure the bad blood makes it easy to keep recruiting…how anyone calls anything in that mess a win is frankly beyond me…in much the same way as the sheer gall of the IDF spokesperson I heard preface his remarks on the subject with a reminder that once they became hostages every aspect of their ensuing fate could only be seen as 100% blameable on not-the-people-who-shot-the-ones-we’re-talking-about…so…yeah

U.S. and Israeli officials have told NBC News they fear that some of Netanyahu’s positions on the war are rooted in a bid to prolong his political survival.

And with a growing sense he will not be able to maintain power once the fighting ends, they said he has a strong motive to prolong Israel’s offensive in the enclave.

“He has every incentive to keep the war going, to ensure his political survival,” one U.S. lawmaker, who asked not to be named, said Friday.

Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, also said Netanyahu is likely to have serious concerns about the “day after” the war.

“There, it seems that Netanyahu is not only worried about how to stabilize the security situation the day after, but also how such decisions might affect his political career and how to reinvent his political posturing” in “the way he manages those discussions,” he said.

Anger at Israeli government mounts after military admits to mistakenly killing hostages [NBC]

…&…it’s no surprise that where that rubs off on others…it doesn’t do them any favors

Last month, the group Black Christian Faith Leaders for Ceasefire took out a full-page ad in the New York Times pushing for president Joe Biden “to call for an immediate bilateral ceasefire in the Middle East for the sake of our shared humanity and our collective security”. More than 900 Black Christian faith leaders representing churches across the country backed the letter.

Prior to the publication of the ad, signatories of the letter met with White House officials and the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss their concerns regarding the Israel-Gaza war, namely the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The Guardian spoke with several signatories who said they were disappointed with how the meetings went.
[…]
After Biden was elected, the Black Church PAC released an open letter to the incoming administration, presenting concerns and reminding them of key issues.

The PAC’s endorsement of the Biden-Harris ticket was contingent on promises that the group says have not been kept, such as a failure to pass a federal voting rights bill and failure to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. With the administration’s support of the war in the Middle East, PAC members say their 2024 endorsement is up in the air.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/16/black-church-leaders-on-the-fence-on-biden-endorsement-amid-israel-gaza-war

…&…I haven’t got a leg to stand on when it comes to telling people not to stand on principle…at least this side of the primaries shaking out…but…what with one set of those looking like one of them foregone conclusion deals

A variety of polls have tested this question, and virtually every one of them indicates that a huge number of Trump backers would stick with him even if he is a felon. But they also show that a conviction could turn off a group of voters that is significant enough to effectively lose the race for Trump.

They also offer disparate findings about how much a conviction might matter, reinforcing how uncertain the actual impact would be.

…what with how these polls worked in terms of the difference between people willing to vote that way & people willing to say they would in advance in ’16…even the ones that say a conviction (or even a few) would hurt him…don’t say it clearly enough to make me feel like it makes me feel better

A New York Times/Siena College poll last month got the ball rolling on this hypothetical. The swing-state poll showed Trump going from a four-point lead on Biden across those states to a 10-point deficit if he’s convicted — a massive 14-point swing on the margins. If the impact were even close to that, it would be likely to foreclose any real shot Trump had.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week showed an even bigger impact. While Trump led Biden within the margin of error in a field including independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., taking 38 percent, just 25 percent said they would vote for Trump if he were convicted of a felony by a jury. Fifty-nine percent of voters overall and 31 percent of Republicans said they wouldn’t back him — numbers that would in all likelihood be prohibitive for him.

A Vanderbilt University poll of Tennessee voters this week showed Trump’s support dropping from 45 percent without a conviction to 37 percent with one. That wouldn’t be enough to put the red state in play — and it is notable that his supporters mostly went to candidates other than Biden — but such a shift would be likely to be decisive if reflected across other states.

A Quinnipiac University poll last month showed a more muted impact. Trump took 38 percent in that poll and led Biden by three points, but only 84 percent of his supporters were committed to backing him if he were convicted. That would move his support down to 32 percent.

A Wall Street Journal poll over the weekend featured the most muted impact of all. It showed Trump leading by four points without a conviction and trailing by one if convicted.
[…]
This finding comes with significant caveats.

One is that it seems plausible that people could be overestimating just how much this matters to them. Partisanship often overcomes other factors when people ultimately make their decisions. A case in point is that third-party candidates tend to poll much better than they ultimately perform. People want to vote for someone with a chance. And if the alternative is looking like a second Biden term, it seems possible that some voters who ditched Trump — but were, after all, initially inclined to back him — could be convinced to stay in his camp.

It’s also worth noting in this moment that Trump has built his apparent lead in recent months despite his four indictments and despite being found liable in civil court — both for sexual abuse and financial fraud. Those aren’t criminal convictions, and the standard of proof in civil cases is lower. But the fact that his numbers haven’t suffered and have even improved would seem instructive.

The last big caveat is whether we even see these trials in time. Three Trump trial dates are set for March (federal election-subversion and Manhattan hush money) or May (federal classified documents). But there are signs that the federal cases in particular could be delayed. The judge in the classified documents case has said the current May trial date could be difficult to keep, and Trump’s immunity claim in the election-subversion case is looking like it could delay that one as well. Trump’s lawyers have made clear they would like to delay these cases as much as possible.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/15/heres-how-much-criminal-conviction-could-hurt-trump-2024/

…I can’t say as I like the likely alternative a whole hell of a lot

The Kremlin’s spokesman on Friday weighed in on the upcoming U.S. elections, and said Vladimir Putin would prefer a president who is “more constructive” toward Russia and understands the “importance of the dialogue.”

Asked during a one-on-one interview whether Putin could work with the Republican front-runner, former President Donald Trump, Dmitry Peskov said Putin would be ready to work with “anyone who will understand that from now on, you have to be more careful with Russia and you have to take into account its concerns.”

In a one-on-one with NBC News, spokesman Dmitry Peskov accuses the U.S. and the West of unnecessarily prolonging the war in Ukraine. [NBC]

…something something

Condemned for his previous remarks at the last rally he held in New Hampshire – where he threatened to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections” – Trump appeared to double down in Durham on Saturday.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done,” Trump told the crowd.

“They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America … but all over the world.

“They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

It is the second time Trump has used the poisoned blood phrase, which has been widely condemned for echoing white supremacist rhetoric.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/16/trump-immigrants-new-hampshire-rally

Classic Trump: say something crazy outrageous, neo-Nazi-like and it gets headlines, creates outrage.

So wait a little. Then say it again, no one notices, no coverage, and it gets normalized and mainstreamed.

Let’s be clear: migrants ‘poisoning the blood’ is Hitler rhetoric. https://t.co/H3QZtIYbaK

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) December 16, 2023

…friends like these

Yet whatever their very different backgrounds, the ties between Giorgia Meloni and Rishi Sunak are likely to grow even closer on Saturday when he attends a rightwing political festival in Rome organised by her hardline Brothers of Italy party.

The visit is also a return favour on Sunak’s part – Meloni was the only other G7 leader to attend a UK summit on artificial intelligence last month. The biggest draw once again will be Elon Musk, who was publicly interviewed by Sunak at the UK event, while other guests at the Atreju summit include figures such as the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party.

Sunak and Meloni have bonded over a shared hardline approach towards immigration through policies that have sometimes pushed the limits of what is legal.

The issue will be central to a bilateral meeting between the two before the festival and then a “trilateral” involving the prime minister of Albania. A controversial deal struck between the Italian and Albanian governments is regarded as having been partly inspired by the UK government’s long-running attempts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.

But the mutually beneficial relationship between Sunak and Meloni also reflects an increasing blurring of lines between politicians from Europe’s far right and more traditional conservative backgrounds.

Post-Brexit, Sunak has found an ally inside the EU with a shared interest in taking the increasingly hardline stance on immigration demanded by his party’s power base. For Meloni, an anglophile fond of quoting the British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton in speeches, the alliance helps make her extremist roots seem more distant.

“Your priorities are also mine,” she told Sunak on camera when they met in the UK in November.

‘A love-burst’: how Sunak and Meloni’s rapport is boosting hard-right agenda [Guardian]

…but…whether it’s in the frothing-at-the-mouth daily mail sense or in the “has anyone really thought about the scale of potential movement we’re looking at if we don’t pull a fucking finger out & the environment goes the way it looks to be going” sense…it’s not the bill of goods he’s actually selling…but…there’s at least an echo of it that might bear a striking resemblance to a broken clock moment

Rishi Sunak has been accused of adopting the “toxic” rhetoric of his former home secretary Suella Braverman, after he warned that migration would “overwhelm” European countries without firm action.

In remarks that will further inflame the Tory row over migration that has been raging for weeks, the prime minister said that “enemies” were “deliberately driving people to our shores to try to destabilise our society”.

…I mean…he’s still a mendacious little bastard

“Criminal gangs find the ugliest ways to exploit our humanity and don’t have a problem with putting people’s lives at risk by putting them on boats,” he said. “If we do not tackle this problem, the numbers will only grow. It will overwhelm our countries and our capacity to help those who actually need our help the most.”

…& the parts of that which are true…well…in the blue skies of the thinking that gets you a view of what it might look like if the entire stock in trade of the people profiting from those small boats was taken out of their hands & put on safe routes…that ought to provide some perspective…given it would barely make the overall numbers required for the overwhelming aspect flicker…& I for one haven’t heard a damn thing about any attempt to up that capacity…which isn’t really how I was told that supply/demand thing worked…but…it all rings a little hollow to me…which would track for a thing that’s heartlessly cynical

It comes after a week in which Sunak avoided a rebellion by his MPs over a bill designed to ensure he can send some asylum seekers to Rwanda. However, that battle will now spill over into next year, when the liberal wing and the right both believe they can pull the legislation in their direction. It also comes with MPs concerned over the looming electoral threat of Reform UK, which is planning to launch a campaign in early January to turn the next contest into an “immigration election”.
[…]
“Rishi Sunak is so desperate he’s reaching for the Braverman playbook, using divisive rhetoric to try to cover up his own failures,” said the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson, Alistair Carmichael. “Infighting within the Conservative party is now generating a bidding war to see who can make the most toxic contribution to the debate.

“It is also a bit rich to say we need international cooperation when Conservative ministers are trashing the very treaties that we have signed up to to deal with this. Who would want to cooperate with a government that is happy to disregard our legal obligations? Instead of posturing, Rishi Sunak would do better to focus on tackling the asylum backlog that is leaving people in limbo and costing taxpayers billions.”

Sunak and Meloni, who described his presence at the festival as “a gift”, shared a hug as they stepped off the stage to rapturous applause. The Atreju festival began as a platform for debate among the youth wing of National Alliance, a neo-fascist party formed by the lingering supporters of Benito Mussolini after the second world war, before evolving to include politicians of all colours who mostly attend to nurture their own profile.

Elon Musk was among the other star guests this year, as was Edi Rama, the Albanian prime minister who is working with Italy on a migrant pact regarded as having been partly inspired by the UK government’s long-running attempts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Other notable attendees included Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s rightwing Vox party.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/16/sunak-accused-toxic-rhetoric-after-warning-overwhelming-migration-europe

…birds of a feather & all that

As hard-right movements rattle or control European governments, the words of George Steiner animate James Carville.

“Nationalism is the venom of our age,” Steiner wrote in his 1965 essay on the Holocaust, A Kind of Survivor. “It has brought Europe to the edge of ruin.”

Those words prompted Carville, the centrist Democratic political consultant who guided Bill Clinton to the presidency, to say: “The greatest distinction in the world is between patriotism, which is positive – a piece of ground as an idea – and nationalism, which is tribal, exclusionary and, yeah, poisonous.”

Carville zeroed in on the US variant: white Christian nationalism, particularly as embodied by Mike Johnson, his fellow Louisianan and the US House speaker.

“Johnson has no skill, no background, no majority to speak of,” […]

“What Johnson does represent is a level of breathtaking hypocrisy,” Carville said. “His anti-homosexuality and young earthism are hypocrisy on steroids.”

In a 2004 Shreveport Times op-ed on gay marriage, Johnson wrote: “If we change marriage for this tiny minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists and pedophiles will be next in line to claim equal protection.”

“Young earthism” signals Johnson’s belief that the planet is 6,000 years old, a literal interpretation of Genesis. In a 2021 interview celebrating the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which lies 40 miles from Ark Encounter, Johnson said: “The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”
[…]
“The debate I want begins: ‘Resolved, Christian nationalism is a greater threat to America than al-Qaida,’” Carville said. “I want students to see real debate and make up their own minds about what kind of America we want.”

Before his election to Congress, Johnson was founding dean of a campus law school to be named for Paul Pressler, 93, a retired Texas judge, legislator and Southern Baptist potentate. In 2018, the Houston Chronicle reported Pressler paid $450,000 to settle a lawsuit by a man who alleged that Pressler sexually assaulted him as a high school student in Bible study. The law school never materialized.
[…]
The hard-right network of Catholic organizations such as the Napa Institute, Church Militant and Eternal Word Television Network offend Carville for similar reasons that send him into attack mode against Trumpism and Johnson.

“The essence of Trumpism is that politics has run over you,” Carville said. “I understand why people feel that – the idea of loss, what people once had. In the church, we’re seeing a real defense of power in reaction to the hypocrisy and rottenness that’s been exposed. So the right wing doubles down.”
[…]
“I have all kinds of people tell me: ‘James, this is not the country we grew up in,’” Carville said.

And they’re right, he says – but probably not in the way they mean.

Carville said: “I actually hear [white people] say: ‘People knew their place.’ Well, I graduated from LSU law school with one Black and three females in the class. You go to any law school today and half the class are women. That’s a profound change in my lifetime. You can’t show someone a Norman Rockwell painting, say this used to be America, and expect the world to change.”

Carville’s greatest concern about the 2024 election is Joe Biden. He points to a recent Wall Street Journal poll that had the president at 31%.

‘The venom of our age’: James Carville on the danger of Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalism [Guardian]

…I dunno…for me…looking at it…that “greatest concern” tag…well…that might be a…wossname…”misnomer”

Speaker Mike Johnson calls separation of church and state ‘a misnomer’ [Guardian]

…but…I got no shortage of concerns to concern myself with

Democracy’s Super Bowl: 40 elections that will shape global politics in 2024 [Guardian]

…& that’s before I try to guess what comes beyond the verdicts

Harry wanted respect. Now, with this court victory, he’s earned it [Guardian]

…in terms of adjusting to underlying realities

Alex Jones offers $55m to Sandy Hook families to satisfy $1.5bn judgment [Guardian]

…still & all…does feel like in an ideal world we could do better than just me adjusting my expectations

Diversity policies face ‘full-out attack’ in 2024, leading HR boss warns [Guardian]

…it’s not like we’re going to get to retire the rhetoric any time soon

When Gilad Zar, who oversaw security for Jewish settlers in the area, was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen in 2001, his father, a member of the Jewish Underground, considered a terrorist organization by Israel, swore that he would establish six new illegal settlements — one for each letter of his name.
[…]
And now, as Israel reels from the Hamas attack Oct. 7, the deadliest single day since the modern state was founded, the country’s extremist settler fringe sees new opportunities to expel Palestinians and expand the Jewish footprint in the occupied territories, further threatening the viability of a two-state solution.
[…]
Radicals here were already emboldened by the farthest-right government in Israel’s history, which includes settlers such as Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister. But the assault of Oct. 7, when Hamas and allied fighters streamed out of Gaza to attack Israeli communities, killing 1,200 people and taking 240 hostage, has brought them more cash, weapons and political support.

As Israel rains bombs down on Gaza, nearly a dozen Zionist organizations have agitated to return to the Gaza settlements from which they were expelled in 2005 as Israel moved to “disengage” from the enclave. The idea has been dismissed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “unrealistic,” but such views are beginning to enter the Israeli mainstream.

Since Oct. 7, settlers in the West Bank are feeling an increasing sense of impunity for attacks on Palestinians. In the past two months, armed settlers have raided 15 herding communities, destroying houses, tearing down tents and displacing more than 1,200 people. The United States and Britain have imposed visa bans on the settlers implicated in the assaults.

…I mean…when there’s upwards of three orders of magnitude more people displaced in gaza that can sound like a rounding error in terms of displacement…but…wedges & slippery slopes have some characteristics in common & I’m not loving the common themes that appear to be characteristic of the way things are going all over the god forsaken headlines…but…we may be through the looking glass at this point

Have you heard that the writer who invented the Thought Police has fallen victim to modern-day thought-policing? Perhaps not, if you don’t follow anti-“woke,” right-wing media, but in their telling, George Orwell is headed for the memory hole.

Anna Funder, a biographer of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, recently called Orwell “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent” at a literary festival in Cheltenham, England. This comment was received by the Daily Mail, the Gateway Pundit and the Daily Caller, among others, as heralding Orwell’s imminent demise — “The Left Is Seriously Trying to Cancel George Orwell Now,” as the Daily Caller put it.

On social media, people went further, putting the cancellation in the past tense. One tweet — “They cancelled George Orwell lol” — garnered an “Uh what” response from Elon Musk.

A similar furor resulted when my novel was announced in 2021, described by the publisher as a “feminist” retelling of Orwell’s classic “1984.” The very idea of such a book was called “Orwellian” and compared to the erasure and falsification of history in “1984.”

…sometimes…& I know this sounds offensively flippant…but I do sort of mean it all the same…I can’t help feeling the world might be a lot better off if more people actually understood irony

For decades, conservatives have used Orwell’s opposition to totalitarianism to justify the Cold War he explicitly denounced and attack the socialist principles he risked his life defending. They claim his support when they condemn the removal of statues of Confederate generals — though Orwell abhorred slavery and might well have approved of such removals, much as he would have been likely to approve the perestroika-era removal of statues of Stalin. Right-wingers quote Orwell out of context to smear their enemies as fascists, and in the next breath laud Russian President Vladimir Putin. There has always been a fair bit of doublethink involved.

However bad Orwell’s attitudes toward women were, the warning he gave us in “1984” was not that society might someday become so twisted that women would criticize him. His novel was a warning against the kind of leaders who call their opponents “vermin,” leaders who want to punish people for having the “wrong” opinions or being of the “wrong” ethnicity. It was written about leaders who become cult figures, whose idealized image is plastered everywhere as a symbol of belonging, who hold rallies at which their followers join to scream in ecstatic hatred. It was written about a world in which such leaders could avail themselves of advanced technology, in which propaganda and surveillance were unavoidable and ubiquitous.

Recognizing that Orwell was flawed doesn’t cancel him. It doesn’t suggest an impulse to cancel him, and there’s nothing Orwellian about it. What’s Orwellian is using his work to defend the people who are moving us toward the political horror he most feared.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/12/orwellian-criticism-right-wing/