A take that has stood the test of time

Im Tagesspiegel wird Nicholas Potters neues Buch gefeiert. Der Autor des Artikels, Sebastian Leber, war laut Danksagung aber selbst am Buch beteiligt: Er hat „Kapitelentwürfe aufmerksam gegengelesen und […] wertvolles Feedback und Ratschläge gegeben“.

Congress dialogue tree: A. Sorry, we don't have a majority B. Sorry, we don't have a supermajority C. Sorry, we have to support the president D. [say nothing, avoid all media]

Worth noting that the Israeli settler movement has been doing the same thing for decades: saying “civilian presence” is needed to hold hostile territory, then using the very expected danger to those “civilian” settlers to justify displacing their neighbors, allowing more settlement—rinse and repeat.

You’re going to want to sit down for this one, because it’ll come as a big shock, but: they mean “drive out the people who live in southern Lebanon, demolish the existing towns and cities then replace them with a million crank psycho settlers”.

It would've been reckless and inexcusable to cause generational damage by illegally defunding USAID, NIH, HHS, Dept of Edu, and so on just to reduce the deficit... ... but spending and the deficit are both higher than '22, '23, '24. It was all just harm for harm's sake. The cruelty was the point.

Seen tacked to a community board on my walk

It is quite telling that since the horrific story of Cesar Chavez re: sexual abuse broke earlier this week and calls to change the names of schools and other public spaces named in his honor, not one conservative voice has stepped forward to object that this would be tantamount to erasing history.

It’s our overlords’ line going up. Be grateful!

Like the bible says: live by the sword, no worries

So if AI Psychosis is a thing that happens because the human mind breaks when it's trapped by a sycophant who affirms every thought, agrees with every delusion - does this give us a window into what's been happening into the ultra rich , and why they're such broken people?

It’s pathetic and concerning but also way better than the worst case of a competent, focused, MAGA FBI. Truly a small blessing.

Using Jews as a smokescreen for the administration's project of destroying higher education in the US - which the American right has wanted to do since long before 10/7/2023 - will do nothing to make American Jews safer. www.reuters.com/world/us-sue...

There is a debate going on in Germany that calls people antisemitic for pointing out that Isreal is an ethnostate. In the same breath they insists Israel must stay ethnically Jewish for Jews to be safe. They don't like the bad words, but love the concept and policy. Translation link in ALT

PinkNews:

Sadly, an angry ex has long been a common cause of deportation/family separation, which DHS encourages when promoting the ICE Tip Line on social media. Abusers, employers, and landlords also use it as a threat or a get out of jail free card for domestic violence or when workers get hurt on the job.

a billionaire must never make a decision because the billionaire can never be held accountable

this feels like such a pervasive issue with where we attribute blame. who are the people in an organization who can’t really be fired (or can’t be easily removed)? that is ultimately where agency lies

It turns out that sometimes when you post a thread criticizing someone for letting their legitimate horror and anger lead to them drifting into the sea of algorithmically-promoted conspiratorial hateful slop, they read or & absorb it & engage productively & realize where they went wrong.

I feel like I spent the years before Oct 7 trying to get across the people how genocidal Israel was becoming, got a lot of “what no that’s crazy”, and then it really happened and the same voices have mostly tried to deny or ignore it 😐

Here is Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister and likeliest next Prime Minister of Israel, saying *explicitly* that the Bedouin-Palestinian citizenry of Israel is an existential threat to the Jewish nature of the state, and he even went as far as to imply that they'd do an Oct 7th style attack.

It is maddening how glaringly obvious it was from the first moment that this war on Iran was going to be a generational catastrophe and yet there were some Reasonable People trying to make it make sense, and in fact, there still are

it's hard not to keep coming back to the fact that they could simply have Not Done This they could have not bombed Iran! the strait would be open! we wouldn't be staring down a massive global economic crisis! none of this had to happen!

Not a single moment of this was what I expected

A reporter-free newsroom isn't a newsroom, it's (at best) a content aggregator.

The actual question here is "Does supporting the existence of the Jewish State justify upholding its currently extant apartheid reality?" which nobody actually wants to address, which is why we all spend so much time dealing with hypotheticals and counterfactuals.

I largely agree with this, and I truly hate it. Twitter should have been treated like the public utility it became. That ship has sailed, and I don’t know the answer.

In honor of Mr. Rogers’ birthday, here’s your regularly scheduled reminder that the quote of his you keep sharing, that in times of crisis we should look for the helpers, was for his audience of children. We’re adults now. We’re supposed to *be* the helpers.

even in spaces that aren't overrrun with bad-faith actors and hasbara plants, you hear 10X more about antisemitism in the US than you do islamophobia. the latter has been so baked in to everything we do for a generation or two, it's just how we are

my sister is so excited about getting her cosmetology license i don't have the heart to tell her the USSR doesn't have a space program anymore

This statement is not going to do wonders for the state of Israel’s reputation among Christians, but also, it is a naked expression of a fascist worldview. No room for morals in international affairs; the will to power is all that matters.

Here's the thing: there is no going back to a different era of Twitter. This doesn't replace it, Threads doesn't replace it, Twitter doesn't replace it. That era is dead, no return, it was a very fun 5-10 year window or so that dragged on past its prime until it dropped off a cliff.

Breaking character: Every so often, I like to remind people that Trump has a serious personality disorder that makes his decision-making different from a normal person's. The media doesn't explore this, which makes their reporting on him useless, but my friend Nick Carmody does.

it's a real mindfuck to see the leadership of a publication creating some of the most important journalism of a generation trying to screw the people doing the work

In 2022 the Israeli parliament passed a renewal of an amendment to the citizenship law which ***specifically^** denies citizenship to Palestinian spouses of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and during the debate Ayelet Shaked admitted outright that it was a demographic issue, not a security issue.

everyone is now guided by a simple three word principle: "not me though." not me though

How the fuck do you have a reporter free news room?

I think some on this website and in general are confused. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. I have written I do not know how many pieces saying this. Also, if you are using anti-Zionism as an opportunity to say hateful things about Jews qua Jews, you are, I am sorry to say, being antisemitic.

pol. Zionismus kann deshalb kein Anti-Antisemitismus sein weil dessen Logik die Entwurzelung der Diaspora als einzig effektive 'Lösung' gegen Antisemitismus propagiert. Glauben Küpeli und Lühmann, man bekämpft AS indem man alle Jüdinnen und Juden nach Israel umsiedelt? 7/11

if there's one conclusion that the study of both labor history and imperialism converge on, it is that the richest people in the world are happy to burn money on control, power, impunity. and the "everything is about profit" version of anti-capitalism does not survive serious contact with either

Adding to this thread: it’s a common mistake (I’ve made it myself, many times) to think of the motivations of the capitalist elites as essentially mercantilist: that is, that they are largely still motivated *entirely* by profit and loss, selling product, etc. This has not been true for a while.

Taxes on the rich are good under our awful system. We should push them as high as we can get them and the fact that we can't should tell you everything you need to know about democracy under capitalism. But no matter how good thry are as a Band-aid taxes can never fix the injustices of capitalism

The point of all this isn't to turn a profit or come out ahead. The point is to establish that capital can never be invaded, that wealth belongs exclusively in private hands and its expenditure decided by private interests, that the state and its people have no right to it or say in its use.

It's still smart for Brin. He's worth $240 billion; this tax could theoretically cost him $12 billion. This is a fraction of that. But *even if the math didn't work for him*, he'd still do it. He'd spend $20 billion to save $1 billion of it came to that, because the numbers aren't the point.

this is completely insane: since when is it acceptable for a tech company to rewrite news outlets' headlines without their consent? especially at a time when audiences are sensitive to how stories are framed in headlines? (ie Israel/Palestine, the Trump admin, ICE) www.theverge.com/tech/896490/...

100% I used “zio” a couple times innocently to save characters on twitter, years ago. Once informed of the term’s resonance I stopped. One shouldn’t assume it’s always an intentional code, but if someone knows it sounds Nazi and continues, that’s a hell of a red flag

This might be what breaks me and makes me pay for Kagi