My first non-fiction book contains an 1887 homoerotic boozy bath scene between two jacked bareknuckle boxers the morning after they hit each other for two and a half hours in a French field. Please buy it. Also please someone ask me to talk about it, saucily, on a podcast.

Ukraine’s General Staff says American and Franco-British missiles have hit a Russian base in occupied Donetsk that was storing Iranian Shahed drones — like the ones the US and Gulf countries are struggling to combat in the Middle East and so have requested Kyiv’s assistance in taking down.

🚨This is an emergency; please keep Britt safe! 🚨 #MutualAid #HelpSky linktr.ee/hiitsbritt

I’m starting to believe Israel doesn’t want peace in the Middle East

This is the language used by the BBC to describe Israel's war on Lebanon www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Cited: IDF Chief of Staff, Israeli living near the border, another Israeli, an Israeli politician and a Israeli commentator. No one else. The Lebanese are just numbers throughout the piece.

This is easily mockable but like, this is good? This is a textbook case of a positive deescalation.

My god the arrogance

Is Israel delighted Trump's doing this? Obviously. Is Riyadh/Doha/Abu Dhabi? Maybe, though I doubt it. Did they somehow convince him and have the power to call it off? Come on lol.

Whether you believe Trump is blindly following the directives of Israel or the Gulf States, both are just silly concepts unless held in conjunction with the knowledge that there has been a cohort of Yank conservative pundits that have urged this war since before most of us here were born.

I think it's um rather interesting how desperate people are to believe that America can't possibly be invading a country that its conservatives have talked about invading every single year for the past forty six years except if a nefarious foreign force bribed it to.

Corollary: the Gulf States did not make America back the Gulf States in doing bad things.

One of the Israeli strikes in Tyre, Lebanon, nearly hit an ancient archeological site www.lorientlejour.com/article/1497... Tyre is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world

Israel attacked UN forces in Lebanon. It’s nowhere near the first time either.

It is the nature of small nations and cultures that we are never quite safe. Some degree of this has to be accepted as baseline fact that cannot be mitigated except at intense cost to our own souls.

I actually understand Israelis almost completely. I just disagree with their conclusions about the nature of the world, what guarantees Jewish safety in it, and, you know, most importantly, whether it is acceptable to inflict pain on others to mitigate your own lack of safety.

we cant keep doing this every single time, im sorry, its just not very practical

like ok i do but you do realise that you are asking folks to prioritise what is essentially a Feelings question over a People Are Dying question

one thing i kinda find frustrating is a certain type of person who doesnt even actually really support the Occupation but will get extremely mad if you in any way say anything about Israel that does not include a disclaimer saying you understand that 2000 years of oppression tends to break brains

Instead of reckoning with the frankly timid and limited criticisms of people like Tony Judt a lot of people plugged their ears, or in some cases even worse ran into the arms of someone like a Carlson or a Ben Shapiro, and now everyone's shocked.

And as a result conservatives of course will splinter over this and also left and left-liberal criticism never actually went away either. Sorry but that's how it goes. Shit sucks.

Yep. A lot of people who sit on the center-left or center thought conservatism would always be in the tank for Israel and it was a load bearing pillar that Muslims were (in a sense) the new Jew and it turns out actually no you can't be bigoted against just one group forever it poisons your mind.

Like I agree that people should not have suppressed left-wing and liberal critique of Israel, among other things because I was making that critique. But I am quite unhappy with the proliferation of the racist crank critique now and I can't really just shrug at it because it's a direct danger to me.

This is both emphatically true and, like, just a disaster.

You see it too now with Mamdani. A lot of people want to treat Mamdani like persona non grata but actually if you do that the left-liberal criticism won't go away it'll just be redirected. Sorry that's just literally how it works.

And of course it didn't, sorry

Suppressing Tony Judt didn't actually make criticism of Israel go away, did it

One of the instances in which it is actually emphatically true that by stifling left-liberal criticism of Israel on a liberal basis you just leave open room for nutjobs to do it and fill the space instead

I am sure the gay Arab in occupied Palestine, occupied Lebanon and occupied Syria love their Jewish military dictatorship so much

Alberto Toscano: "Where Trump and his administration appear afflicted by a kind of imperial attention deficit disorder, Israel has laid its objectives bare." inthesetimes.com/article/axis...

so the world's energy mix looks like this. around 20%-25% of the world's oil (7%pt of total energy) and a third of the world's gas (another 7%pt) goes thru hormuz. right now that's been zero'd out, and there's no clear path back. a sixth of the world's energy supply is just... gone.

Asia and Europe directly screwed, Americans indirectly screwed

Yeah I'm not being funny but not a single diplomatic corps in the history of mankind has been run on the principle of Speaking Truth To Power.

The correct answer to someone saying this is "why. for what"

Cw/ body parts The Israeli army massacred 9 people in the city of Tyre, Lebanon, all belonging to a single family www.instagram.com/reel/DVjME5b...

[a mandalorian who's really bad at it]: this is the second way

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Reports of the Israelis bombing a UNIFIL position in South Lebanon

Okay, this rules.

Using AI to narrate a story about how AI is sucking up the energy of the entire city of Edmonton is some bleak irony

do better, america. holy hells.

c o o l

i'm going to kms

I’ll leave for later why reporters didn’t fact-check - there’s an ugly story there too. But the urgent issue is, Platner would be crushed in the general. It's best to lance the boil now. Here’s the document, sourced and Wikipedia-ready. You should read it. The NRSC sure will. 11/

Just imagine what Collins can do with this. Of course DoD would FedEx her Platner’s service record the moment she asked. Imagine the ads she can make, mocking his little-boy lies and excuses. NRSC staffers have been following this account, like sharks. 10/

But the tattoos alone are enough. Like Elon Musk, Platner lies when cornered; he can’t admit fault or take responsibility. He gave his staff a script about his Nazi symbol to recite: “He did not know the meaning at the time and covered it once he learned..” That’s a lie. 9/

There’s a lot more, or course; Platner’s stories are full of lies and gaps. We don’t know who got him to run - the names are all secret. We don’t know what he did in 2017, a black hole after he dropped out of college, before he signed with Constellis. A family friend said “He was in rough shape” 8/

Platner’s former campaign team know something’s wrong - they all quit. They know he would lose in the general election. Janet Mills needs to make him lose in the primary instead. And she can, just by demanding his records. He won’t show them - he can’t. Confront him with that. 7/

Why didn’t you know this? Platner lies in reporters’ faces but no one fact-checks him. When his Nazi tattoo was first reported, he ran to Tommy Vietor’s podcast for damage control. He told his false leaving-the-Marines story; Vietor laughed with him. No hard questions for your buddies. 6/