I’m still proud of the copy of “Maus” that I donated to the library of my shitty little Texas town before I moved out of that hell-hole a few years back. I still check the online catalog from time to time to make sure it’s still in circulation.
An “outspoken Israel advocate” wants to get rid of books about the Holocaust and antisemitism in general? I am very confused. Usually right wing extremist demands make some kind of sense from within their twisted world view, but how does that fit together at all, in any world view?
Hard right folks don’t like teaching the history of the consequences of hard right political movements. Those histories never end with a country full of happy economically secure people just living their lives because the only thing fascists can do is destroy everything.
The TL;DW is that evangelical Christians are outspoken supporters of war in Israel, because they believe it will bring forth the second coming of Jesus.
Sounds straight up delusional and seems like people who believe that sort of stuff and then act on it should be institutionalized for the safety of our fellow citizens.
Aren’t most people who believe in invisible people and talk to thin air considered crazy?
I think that’s a little ableist and a lot reductionist, ignoring the people creating these ideas and institutions and enforcing them (including by historically and still in different forms today actually institutionalising people that speak against them), because they didn’t come out of thin air, and the money and power those people have definitely isn’t imaginary.
Don’t blame people grasping at straws for comfort in this shitty shitty world, blame those manipulating and exploiting them for profit and power.
“Outspoken Israel advocates” who are evangelical Christians don’t love Jews. Quite the opposite. They need Israel to exist so all Jews in the world can be forcibly deported to it, and then made to rebuild the Great Temple, so Jesus can come back and throw them all into Hell.
And a red cow comes into the picture as well.
None of that is sarcasm. That is really what they think.
IIRC there is a brief depiction of a (possibly human rather than mouse? It’s been a while since I read it) woman whose body is in a tub after committing suicide, which is what I’ve read other groups trying to get it banned object to. Because titty.
For some reason this made me way more irrationally angry than just killing Palestinians. It’s killing Palestinians and running cover for the people who killed Anne Frank and Spiegelman’s brother, and doing it all at the exact same time with no sense of shame or embarrassment but, I’m sure, a smug sense of superiority like everyone else is the monster in this
This guy better really hope that there isn’t a hell
In-Israel Israel advocacy, and American Judaism, are absolutely chock full of people who are disgusted with Netanyahu’s government and his “war,” in part because of how much he is doing to destroy Israel on the world stage and get Israelis killed for more or less no purpose, as well as the unfolding horror of the apartheid state and genocide he’s enacting in their name.
Zionist advocates and Israel advocates and Jewish advocates and human rights advocates are four sometimes overlapping but distinct categories.
I sense the morass of an ever widening pointless argument opening up beneath me.
I'll say my feeling on it and be done, and you're free to disagree: No one should be hated for where they were born, or for wanting a home or a safe place to be. Not a Palestinian, or a Russian, or an Israeli citizen, or someone who was born and grew up in Nazi Germany. If you got born in Israel and managed to penetrate through a significant haze of propaganda and groupthink to realize that what your country is doing on the world stage is a monstrous crime, what should you do?
Advocate for the destruction of your home?
Move away, never to return, renounce your citizenship and want nothing to do with your evil of a country? Yeah, maybe.
But I can also see someone who sees it as their duty to resist Netanyahu's government, tries to set their country back on the right course, advocates for the ICC, and turns out for protests against the government and gets brutalized and arrested for it. That stuff happens too. "Pro Israel" isn't really the right word for those people, no. I actually don't fully disagree with what you're saying, that in the modern world if you are "pro Israel" you're probably a piece of shit (or just totally propagandized / misinformed about what's actually going on, which there's a lot of also). So maybe I shouldn't have phrased it in those terms. But definitely, I think there is a type of Israeli person who is trying to support their home, the only place they've ever known to live, by resisting the Netanyahu government, and is ashamed of Israel but not like "against" them in the sense of, I hate my home and all the people here. You can love the town you grew up in, you can have friends and allies (hopefully, ones who are also horrified by the death and destruction in Gaza) there. You can be "pro" that part of it while still hoping that Netanyahu somehow gets what's coming for him, soon, and all of the killing that's being done in your name stops.
Like I say, I don't think anyone should be hated for where they were born.
(Oh, and also the far ends of the scale have 0 overlap, yes. You cannot be a Zionist and a human rights advocate, if my way of saying it made it sound like I thought you could.)
Yes they are. It's the same groups that have been campaigning to end the occupation since before October 7th. It's not a majority or even close to - two-thirds of Israelis support the continuation of the war. But saying "no one" is an absolute falsehood. And, I think propaganda and misunderstanding of the situation on the ground is also a large part (in addition to, yes, some large amount of pure racism and violent vindictiveness that says it's okay if Palestinians are dying because they are bad.)
The wheel you're currently cranking on, is the same wheel that was turning right at the beginning of Israel, and managed to turn its way from "all the Nazis are wrong and evil" around to "the Jews are always the victims about everything" and has now arrived itself at "Israel can do anything it decides to and will still be the victim" and now, on the other side, "all the Israelis are always wrong and evil" is emerging into view coming in the other direction. I am telling you that no matter how hard you crank that wheel, on whichever side, your activity will never crank you around to arrive at a world that is peaceful or just.
(I know I said I'd stop after saying my bit; I just wanted to say a little more on it and shoot down the absolutely false idea that no one in Israel opposes the war on humanitarian grounds.)
That whole article talks more about protestors pushing for returning hostages and other dislikes of Netanyahu far more than it does generic ‘anti-war’ protestors.
So thanks for that really, just further solidifies my point.
Likewise life is not a fucking wheel, it doesn’t travel in some predetermined path you’ve created. Let me tell you something, no matter how hard you centrist “don’t do anything at all” approach it, you will never arrive at a world that is peaceful or just.
Rabin was closer than anyone to ending it, and Netanyahu’s stochastic terrorism led directly to his death. And he’s been propping up Hamas ever since, to give Israel an enemy to hate and prevent peace from ever coming to the region.
If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it’s…
A swan! It claims to be a swan, therefore it is a swan! Swans are beautiful, therefore if you’re against swans you’re a bad person! You see ducks everywhere and accuse everyone being a duck! The word “duck” lost its meaning. In fact, we defeated the ducks in 1945, therefore any “ducks” we might have today are just edgy teens cosplaying as such.
EDIT: If you ask me, I think conservatives are just “good cops” to the fascists “bad cops” (this gave me an idea for a potential video essay).
It’s only wild if you believe their fable that their nation represents all Jews.
If however you see them as just another bunch of ethno-Fascists, it actually makes sense that many of the victims of the other large ethno-Fascist group in the last century wouldn’t get along with them simply because they recognize many of the same signs.
I didn’t think that would happen in Armenia, but since it does - the way some Armenians act towards refugees from Artsakh is similar, I think.
It’s easier for Israelis (especially when being fascists) to think that they themselves are strong, and those survivors are not like them, they are weak. It’s as they wanted to identify with Nazis more.
With such Armenians too - it’s the worse part of them thinking they can be just like Turks if they suck up to Turks, and also because Artsakhtsis lost their homeland for being weak, and they are not weak.
A bit like ignorant and cowardly people abandon relatives with chronic diseases, when there’s no evidence of those diseases being transferable.
It’s just cowardice. Humans do it under pressure or when presented with dark events for their interpretation and self-identification. While good upbringing may reduce the risk of someone growing up a coward, it’s very human.
You’ve probably read that in the early days of the State there was a lot of resentment towards Holocaust survivors. They were counter to the national narrative of the “New Jew” who was strong, hard-working, and living off the land. Shoah survivors represented Jews as victims, who did not fight back against the Nazis, instead going like “lambs to the slaughter.”
This all changed after the Eichmann trial (1961), which is when most of the world first came to understand the true nature of how the Nazis operated. Many people did fight back, and many couldn’t.
Holocaust survivors are revered and honored in Israel, although the country suffers from poor social services with a lot of gaps. Shoah survivors often fall through those gaps, along with other elders.
It’s not really surprising - historically, the creation Israel state was helped massively by antisemitists, who wanted to get rid of jews in their own country and having them a place to immigrate to would be the easiest option (the phenomena is often referred to as Zionist antisemitism).
So yeah, it does make sense - they can hate the jews, but also support Israel at the same time.
On one hand, Assange is a shitty person. One woman woke up to him sticking his dick in her without her consent and without a condom. On the same trip he’d had sex with a different woman who had also insisted on his using a condom, which he reluctantly did… but then the condom mysteriously broke. While a guest of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was hiding out to duck the Swedish charges, he smeared shit on the walls and refused to bathe. He also helped the Russian GRU interfere in the 2016 Presidential Election, either as a useful idiot or a willing collaborator.
On the other hand, as shitty as he is, he was effectively a journalist. With Wikileaks he released leaked footage of a US helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq. He released reports on corruption by Kenyan leaders. He released internal scientology documents. The world needs journalists who will publish stories about things that powerful people, governments and churches don’t want people to know.
On the other, other hand, at times he hung his sources out to dry, like he did with Bradley / Chelsea Manning.
The plea deal he agreed to is bullshit. The charge of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” was basically encouraging a source to leak information to him. That’s journalism. “Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information” was again, journalism. He was encouraging whistleblowers to report on wrongdoing by the government.
Even the plea deal is bullshit. He pled to violating the espionage act for… what? He didn’t break into anything himself. He wasn’t given a security clearance which he then violated. He wasn’t even American, in America, or working for the government. He was acting as a journalist receiving information from a whistleblower.
So, IMO, there’s nothing much to celebrate here. A shitty person pled to a bullshit charge, setting a bad precedent for journalism, and is now free. Lose, lose.
Uh, no it fucking isn’t. Journalists absolutely are not permitted to entice people to commit crimes more than any other person. This is exactly why Greenwald and Poitras were not indicted, they didn’t ask Snowden to do anything, they just reported what he had already stolen.
No shit, those are called laws. Journalists do not get a free pass to break laws. Imagine that was the case for a second. How quickly would the Sun or any other shit rag convince someone to murder someone so they can report on it?
This is an absurd stance. The dude broke the law, he has now had his day in court.
How do you suggest a whistleblower actually get and release the information they need to prove themselves if not by breaking bad laws that protect corruption?
Not trying to drum up an argument but I think your black and white stance is flawed.
That’s a straw man. We’re talking about journalists enticing someone to break the law. I already provided Greenwald and Poitras as examples of journalists who had a far larger impact with their coverage and did so without breaking the law.
My bad directing towards whistleblowers when you meant journos. And only about them encouraging others to break the law. Even talking about journalists though I think the same logic can apply. If one lives in for example, an authoritarian regime, any word spoken against the state is considered unlawful. If we apply the situation to less authoritarian government, that still have laws against disseminating information about the government, we run up against the same issues. It’s against the law to show your government doing wrong. So what recourse is left but to break the law in hopes that you can effect some change?
How is a journalist or a whistleblower to call out the worst without breaking the laws or discussing the same? I get that they can sometimes, your two examples, though I’m not familiar with the instances, I’m sure are great examples of when it all goes right. But some information that should be made known, will see the government pursuing the full extent of the law and potentially beyond, against individuals involved in its dissemination. Journalist, whistleblower, exfiltrator, won’t matter.
I can understand protecting innocent people by censoring what comes out. I think that Assange is a scumbag and don’t like how he operates, but I also think governments need to be held accountable for their actions and choices.
I’m really not sure what your argument is. Sometimes journalists and whistleblowers have to break the law? Sure. However, they are still breaking the law. Certainly, an adult who is breaking the law should know that they are subject to consequences and need to suck it up and live with those consequences. Rosa Parks had her day in court and was convicted of a crime. She accepted that she broke the law, regardless of how unjust it was, and did the time. That was enough to affect change.
If Assange, or anyone else, insists on breaking the law to be able to publish information, then they need to accept that they will be held accountable. Chelsea Manning served her time. Assange finally had his day in court. Snowden, hopefully, will get his day in court as well.
Which is a fine stance in the large, but not applicable to the current story. Assisting someone in leaking classified information being illegal is not some moral injustice.
And critical thinking. It’s not a matter of approval but this is the current updoot culture we live in right now and it’s very shit and puts topics besides the point.
Makes me think of the skydiving scene in Deadpool 2 where pretty much the entire team dies and Wade asks who could have seen that coming? I think it was Domino that responds with everyone, everyone saw that coming.
Expanding lower bound to 50k does indeed appear to cover the "middle class" but income above 100k is hardly "barely middle class" from statistical point of view.
That assumes a normal distribution. Wealth/income is not. An excellent resource is: Social Stratification in the United States: The American Profile Poster of Who Owns What, Who Makes How Much, and Who Works Where a.co/d/09LVTyYi
I don’t think your definition of middle class is what most people use when they talk about it.
This is really obvious if you think about people remarking on the death of the middle class. They’re not saying that the mean or the median doesn’t exist. They are saying that families like the Simpsons are much less common than they used to be.
Yeah, but like, isn’t that where the majority of people live?
So when talking about “most places” it makes sense for it to be “places most likely for people to live”. If it was literally “most places” America is pretty fucking empty.
I googled it, the average price for an acre in Kansas is like 3.5k.
In “most places” it’s cheap as hell. But no one lives there so why talk about it?
And “flyover” states 100k a year is like a millionaire…
So if going by “most places” you’d be using like 25k or even lower.
I get what you’re saying semantically, it’s just that if we’re being that semantic it’s meaningless, so clearly the other interpretation is what was meant.
Like, when someone uses “literally” you can tell what was intended.
You didn’t notice the forrest because all the trees were in the way homie.
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