#David Klion

[plitnick]

Bernie Sanders' refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza is alienating his base

Only one US senator has called for a ceasefire. You’d probably guess it would be Bernie Sanders, who has established himself as the leader in the Senate in supporting Palestinian rights, even if that is damning with faint praise. But it is not Bernie, but Dick Durbin of Illinois who remains the only senator to call for a ceasefire. Why has Bernie explicitly refused to call for a ceasefire? I…

[probablyasocialecologist]

Reporting from multiple outlets suggests that Trump and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, played a decisive role in forcing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hand. In a January 7 press conference from Mar-a-Lago, Trump warned that “all hell will break out” if a hostage deal wasn’t reached before his inauguration. “It wasn’t a warning to Hamas. It was a warning to Netanyahu,” Steve Bannon told Politico, which also quoted former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert as saying Netanyahu agreed to the deal “because he’s afraid of Trump.” “The prime minister was dragged into this deal against his will and was unable to resist. He understood the consequences of disappointing Trump even before he reached the White House,” a Netanyahu associate told Al-Monitor, which also cited a former top Israeli official who said, “Netanyahu knows that with Trump he will not be able to wipe the floor as he did with Democratic presidents—like Clinton, Obama and Biden.” Witkoff reportedly told the Israeli prime minister to his face: “Don’t fuck this up.” And Netanyahu has already paid a political price: this past weekend, Israel’s settler-extremist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir resigned from Netanyahu’s shaky far-right governing coalition over the ceasefire deal, after standing with Netanyahu for fifteen months of genocidal warfare backed by the Biden administration.

[...]

In the same week that the ceasefire deal was tentatively announced, two other stories broke that spotlighted the extent of Biden’s moral and political failure in Palestine. One was The Lancet’s publication, subsequently covered in the New York Times, of a peer-reviewed study of traumatic injury deaths in the Gaza Strip from October 7, 2023 through June 30, 2024. The study estimated that the Palestinian Ministry of Health underreported such deaths by 41 percent during that period, and that over 64,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, had died from traumatic injury, a figure that does not include the untold thousands more who died of starvation or disease resulting from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza’s infrastructure (a previous analysis published by The Lancet estimated total Palestinian deaths to that point at over 186,000). Another six months of nonstop devastation in Gaza have passed since the data for The Lancet study was collected. The exact casualty numbers may never be known and in a sense are irrelevant, as no one seriously doubts that Israel has inflicted indiscriminate collective punishment against a captive civilian population, in what has been declared a genocide by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and multiple world-renowned genocide experts (including some initial skeptics), and ruled at least “plausibly” genocidal by the International Court of Justice. The other story that broke last week was an Institute for Middle East Understanding poll that made the most plausible case to date that Biden’s handling of Gaza might have cost Harris the election. Unlike most polls, which focus on what voters overall in 2024 prioritized in the presidential race—typically, economic issues like inflation—the IMEU poll focuses on the millions of Biden 2020 voters who opted for a candidate other than Harris in 2024, whether that meant Trump or a third-party candidate. Among this subset of the electorate, a 29 percent plurality named “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” as the most important issue in deciding their vote, with even higher percentages in the key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While no single factor can account for Harris’s shutout in all seven battleground states or Trump’s popular vote win, the IMEU poll provides strong evidence for what seemed anecdotally obvious throughout last year: the Biden-Harris team’s unapologetic support for Israel’s genocide alienated meaningful numbers of potential supporters.

21 January 2025

[mariacallous]

It was supposed to be a major moment for New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and the Jewish community.

The Senate minority leader, who’s also the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history, was set to appear at the Upper East Side’s Temple Emanu-El Tuesday evening to launch his new book, “Antisemitism in America: A Warning.”

But the event has been canceled as, instead of fanfare, Schumer and his book have ignited the ire of many of New York’s Jews — from both the right and the left.

On the liberal end of the political spectrum, Jews are among the voices criticizing the senator for voting with Republicans last week on a stopgap spending bill — which House Democrats have characterized as a “blank check” for Trump — that includes some $7 million in federal agency cuts to avert a government shutdown. They see him as inadequately standing up against the Trump administration.

On the right, some Jewish critics say it’s hypocritical that the senator is promoting his book on antisemitism while the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, and would enshrine antisemitism as a type of discrimination that could trigger corrective action under Title VI, is stalled in the Senate.

Ahead of a week of planned promotional events for “Antisemitism in America,” disgruntled Jews from both camps made plans for their voices to be heard. A protest organized by a local chapter of anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace was planned outside Schumer’s Monday evening event at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. Meanwhile, a protest organized by a group of pro-Israel Jews, colorfully promoted as “F—ck Chuck and His Book!,” was planned for Tuesday evening in Manhattan.

But on Monday —  following protests from frustrated Democrats outside his Park Slope, Brooklyn home and outside his Midtown office, where one protester held a sign that said “This Jewish mom is very disappointed, Chuck” — Schumer postponed all promotional events for his book due to “security concerns,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Schumer had been scheduled to hold book events in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., later this week.

Schumer’s Emanu-El talk was going to bring him in conversation with Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat who is a staunch supporter of Israel. Outside, “a broad coalition of Jewish New Yorkers,” planned to gather to demand that Schumer facilitate the passing of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, according to co-organizer Aliza Licht, a branding expert and pro-Israel activist.

Temple Emanu-El did not respond to a request for comment about the event’s cancelation — though registrants were issued refunds for their tickets and were told that it might be rescheduled.

David Klion, a Jewish, Brooklyn-based writer for, as he says, “many lefty mags,” was planning to attend the Emanu-El event on Tuesday ahead of writing a review of the book for a culture magazine. He declined to comment on the content of the book itself but did have thoughts about Schumer’s decision to back the Republican spending bill.

“It might actually be the least bad scenario in that we didn’t get a shutdown, and the focus stays on Trump,” Klion said. “But, also, everyone hates Chuck Schumer now.”

Schumer was one of 10 Democrats who voted in favor of the continuing resolution, which staves off a government shutdown for at least six months. In the aftermath, Schumer has received a “torrent of criticism” from his party.

Phylisa Wisdom, executive director of the New York Jewish Agenda, a progressive Jewish advocacy organization, declined to speak about the continuing resolution. But she said that, for the most part, she agreed with another controversial stance Schumer has taken recently, about the Trump administration’s effort to deport the Palestinian Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil.

Referring to Schumer’s statement on March 11, in which he condemned the content of Khalil’s activism but also asked for the Department of Homeland Security to provide evidence as to any criminal violation, Wisdom would have liked Schumer to use “stronger language,” she said.

“This administration are not people that we can trust to keep us safe and to be taking actions in our best interests,” Wisdom said. “So I’m grateful that SEn. Schumer drew a line between his concern around antisemitism that shows up at Columbia and protest spaces, and this extremely dangerous precedent that the Trump administration is aiming to set.”

The New York Post, meanwhile, reported that Licht and the organizers of Tuesday’s demonstration “say they also are angry with his response to the Trump administration’s efforts to deport anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil.” They support the deportation effort: As co-organizer Lizzy Savetsky, a pro-Israel influencer who recently drew condemnation for praising Meir Kahane, recently posted on Instagram: “If you’re more outraged about deporting a terror supporter than the terror they support, you’re not an ally to the Jewish community. You just hate Trump more than you care about Jewish students.”

Licht indicated that while Tuesday’s protest was canceled because Schumer’s event at Emanu-El was canceled, her group’s aims remain the same. “Our focus has always been working to get the Antisemitism Awareness Act passed and that is what we will continue to do,” she said.

“I personally was looking forward to it..,” Licht posted on X about the protest, adding, “We will find a new date.”

Schumer’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Schumer described his book as a “warning” in a statement in August.

“If America fails to understand the context and history of antisemitism, if America’s darker impulses ultimately overwhelm its better angels, an age-old truth will prove true once again: that antisemitism inevitably leads to violence against Jews and a rise in bigotry in our society at large,” he said.

Ben Akselrod, an organizational consultant who also serves as a district leader for Part A of New York’s 76th Assembly District on the Upper East Side, says his constituents are frustrated that the Democrats in the House and Senate are not on the same page.

“And the reelection of Donald Trump does not help that,” Akselrod said. “And he’s referring to Chuck Schumer using ‘Palestinian’ as a slur.”

“Antisemitism flourishes in a low-trust society,” he added. “We need our elected officials to be engaging with people on the ground, having that sort of back and forth, because democracy is a two-way street.”

[argyrocratie]

"We have good reason to worry about this: As Israelis count their dead, politicians in Israel and the US call for Palestinian blood in direct, genocidal language. “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant yesterday. “Finish them, Netanyahu,” said former Ambassador to the United Nations and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. “Neutraliz[e] the terrorists,” said Democratic senator John Fetterman. Jews share memes about the highest number of Jewish casualties since the Holocaust, not bothering to ask who, right now, is being ethnically cleansed, or how many massacres of this size Gaza has seen in the last dozen years. This language deploys the bombs that fall on Gazans from the sky, leveling whole neighborhoods, wiping out families without warning, huddled in their homes because they have nowhere to flee. “There are body parts scattered everywhere. There are still people missing,” one man north of Gaza City told CNN. “We’re still looking for our brothers, our children. It’s like we’re stuck living in a nightmare.”

We will likely soon see this genocidal impulse spread, as the Israeli government hands out automatic weapons to West Bank settlers, many of whom were already armed eliminationists. In this way, Jewish grief is routed back into the violence of a merciless system of Palestinian subjugation that reigns from the river to the sea. It is mobilized by US politicians who support Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government, which has intensified Palestinian death and displacement and disappeared any hope of a diplomatic solution. It is marshaled to drum up support for sending weapons to Israel, even as we know that, as Haggai Mattar wrote in +972 Magazine, “there is no military solution to Israel’s problem with Gaza, nor to the resistance that naturally emerges as a response to violent apartheid.”

(...)

On October 7th, my own feelings fluctuated wildly. My first feeling was fear. To listen closely to the genocidal language of this Israeli government over the past year has been to live in terror of the day they would find the excuse to pursue it. Writing in n+1, Jewish Currents contributing editor David Klion recounts the words of a campus activist in the wake of 9/11: “They’re already dead,” he’d said on the day Bush declared war on Iraqis, their fates sealed. I felt these words in my body, sobbing loudly in front of the screen. There were also bursts, very early on, of awe. I watched the image of the bulldozer destroying the Gaza fence again and again and cried tears of hope. I watched Palestinian teenagers seemingly out joyriding in a place half a mile away that they’d never been; a Gazan blogger suddenly reporting from Israel. But these images were quickly joined by others—the image of a woman’s body, mostly naked and bent unnaturally in the back of a truck; rooms full of families lying in piles, the walls spattered in blood. I wanted desperately to keep these images separate—to hold close the liberatory metaphor and banish the violent reality. By the time I began to accept that these were pictures of the same event, I was distraught, and contending with a rising alienation from those who did not seem to share my grief, especially as the scope of the massacre came into view.

(...)

Part of what has made the experience of this event feel so different from the status quo—and so different to Palestinians and Jews—comes from the fact that Palestinians were undeniably the actors, for once, not the acted upon. The protagonists of the story. I consider it an enormous failure of our movements that we have not been able to build a vehicle for that kind of reversal in any other way thus far. Our Jewish movements for Palestine were not powerful enough to stop other Jews from gunning down Palestinians in peaceful marches at the Gazan border fence, or to keep Palestinians from being fired, harassed, and sued for speaking the truth about their experience or—God forbid—advocating the nonviolent tactic of boycott.

And now, we do not have a shared struggle able to credibly respond to these massacres of Israelis and Palestinians. With all of the work that many Jews and Palestinians have done to reach toward each other over the years, I believe at heart it is this failure that is now driving us apart. There is no formidable political formation that I know of that can hold the political subjectivity of both Jews and Palestinians in this moment without simply attempting to assimilate one into the other. No place where Jews and Palestinians who agree on the basics of Palestinian liberation—right of return, equality, and reparations—are poised to turn the synthesis of these two subjectivities into a coherent strategy.

(...)

One of the most terrible things about this event is the sense of its inevitability. The violence of apartheid and colonialism begets more violence. Many people have struggled with the straightjacket of this inevitability, straining to articulate that its recognition does not mean its embrace. I am reminding myself that it was from Palestinians, many of them writing and speaking in these pages, that I learned to think of Palestine as a site of possibility—a place where the very idea of the nation-state, which has so harmed both peoples, could be remade or destroyed entirely."

...

-Arielle Angel, “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other” (October 12, 2023)

[readingsquotes]

...Biden’s failures in the Middle East predated and in many ways made possible the October 7 Hamas attacks that set off Israel’s brutal campaign. The bar was already in hell, but compared to almost any of his predecessors other than Trump in his first term, Biden did not even make a token effort to bring about a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (yes, even George W. Bush tried harder—look it up). After Trump shifted U.S. policy in the region well to the right—moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s authority over the Golan Heights, and negotiating the “Abraham Accords” that normalized Israel’s relationships with several Arab countries without any nod toward Palestinians—there was near-total continuity in policy going into the Biden administration, with Trump’s moves treated as fait accompli.

...The Harris campaign’s contempt for Palestinians was so palpable that a pro-Trump PAC funded by Elon Musk capitalized on it, targeting ads at Arab Americans in swing states that claimed Harris would “ALWAYS stand with Israel.” It was a cynical play—the same PAC also targeted Jews in swing states with the exact opposite message—but Harris left a wide opening for it, and the thing is, it worked: many Arab Americans in Michigan and other swing states actually did switch from Biden to Trump.

...In the same week that the ceasefire deal was tentatively announced, two other stories broke that spotlighted the extent of Biden’s moral and political failure in Palestine. One was The Lancet’s publication, subsequently covered in the New York Times, of a peer-reviewed study of traumatic injury deaths in the Gaza Strip from October 7, 2023 through June 30, 2024. The study estimated that the Palestinian Ministry of Health underreported such deaths by 41 percent during that period, and that over 64,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, had died from traumatic injury, a figure that does not include the untold thousands more who died of starvation or disease resulting from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza’s infrastructure (a previous analysis published by The Lancet estimated total Palestinian deaths to that point at over 186,000). Another six months of nonstop devastation in Gaza have passed since the data for The Lancet study was collected.

...Taken together, the Lancet study and the IMEU survey capture Biden’s decision to prioritize the slaughter of countless Palestinians over what he himself described as the core mission of his presidency: saving American democracy and preventing Trump from returning to power. As Trump sets about dismantling his predecessor’s fragile domestic accomplishments, the mass killing in Gaza is the one aspect of Biden’s legacy that can never be erased. When Trump rounds up migrants and refugees and forces them into camps, or guts the federal regulatory state, or ushers in the next mass-casualty pandemic—it will all be downstream of an addled Biden’s stubborn refusal to apply meaningful pressure on Netanyahu for fifteen months. After a decades-long and profoundly mediocre political career, it’s what Biden deserves to be remembered for.

[protoslacker]

There’s a pervasive censoriousness right now—conservatives denouncing liberals, liberals denouncing leftists, leftists denouncing other leftists—that’s immediately familiar from the days and weeks after 9/11. Somehow, the upshot of all the denunciations and condemnations is the right’s unchallenged hold over the discourse, and, more importantly, the ultimate facts on the ground.

David Klion at n+1 Magzine. Have We Learned Nothing?

The comparison is apt

[wanlittlehusk]

“They’re already dead,” I recall a campus antiwar activist saying to me on the night Bush announced that the US had begun bombing Iraq. He was right; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were about to die in Bush’s folly, their fates already decided. At the time I understood and somewhat appreciated what the activist was saying, but I also was parochial enough to wonder whether he even cared about the Americans at Ground Zero who were literally already dead (never mind that Iraq had nothing to do with what happened to them). Today, though, his words echo in my head as I think about the Palestinians in Gaza, and the agony of knowing that they’re already dead no matter what any of us feel or think or say.

[fiercynn]

On October 7th, my own feelings fluctuated wildly. My first feeling was fear. To listen closely to the genocidal language of this Israeli government over the past year has been to live in terror of the day they would find the excuse to pursue it. Writing in n+1, Jewish Currents contributing editor David Klion recounts the words of a campus activist in the wake of 9/11: “They’re already dead,” he’d said on the day Bush declared war on Iraqis, their fates sealed. I felt these words in my body, sobbing loudly in front of the screen. There were also bursts, very early on, of awe. I watched the image of the bulldozer destroying the Gaza fence again and again and cried tears of hope. I watched Palestinian teenagers seemingly out joyriding in a place half a mile away that they’d never been; a Gazan blogger suddenly reporting from Israel. But these images were quickly joined by others—the image of a woman’s body, mostly naked and bent unnaturally in the back of a truck; rooms full of families lying in piles, the walls spattered in blood. I wanted desperately to keep these images separate—to hold close the liberatory metaphor and banish the violent reality. By the time I began to accept that these were pictures of the same event, I was distraught, and contending with a rising alienation from those who did not seem to share my grief, especially as the scope of the massacre came into view. “I have anti-Zionist Jewish friends who are rightfully scared,” writer and reporter Hebh Jamal wrote in a recent Mondoweiss article. She observes how, despite all their sympathy for Palestinian suffering, this may be the first moment such allies are tasting the fear—and the state of mourning—that has been real for Palestinians for decades. She has also lost someone this week—a cousin, 20 years old. “I do not rejoice over death. I rejoice over the possibility to live,” she writes, and as such “I cannot condemn the militants if I believe even for a second that there might be a possibility of all of this finally coming to an end.” Hebh describes the sense of possibility that many Palestinians have felt in these events, as they have disturbed—perhaps only momentarily, it remains to be seen—the dominant paradigm in which they are condemned to die waiting for their freedom, as so many other nonviolent avenues to liberation have been punished or ignored. Her reaction appears common to so many of the Palestinians I know and trust that I must try to feel my way into it.

- Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief at Jewish Currents [x]

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Years ago, Russiagate enthusiast David Klion really uncorked one.

It’s incredible how many years I wasted associating complexity and ambiguity with intelligence. Turns out the right answer is usually pretty simple, and complexity and ambiguity are how terrible people live with themselves.

This was handy to me, in the sense that it perfectly encapsulated the exact opposite of everything I believe. I remember reading this and turning it around in my head, over and over; I imagine a sociopath viewing it the way Patrick Bateman viewed that business card. It’s perfect. I mean, the sentiment behind it is utterly demented, but it’s still perfect, beautiful in the same way a virus is beautiful under a microscope.

I don’t even really know how I’d go about defending the essential concepts of complexity and ambiguity in the abstract. I guess I would point to the indisputable existence of chronic and intense complexity in our world. Like the complexity inherent to the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem, primogeniture in the British aristocracy, the relationship between extradimensional geometries and the potential for reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics, the linguistic dynamics of the Voynich manuscript, microtonal music, the geopolitical conditions that led to the Yemen-Saudi Arabia conflict and the tangle of alliances involved, Brownian motion, the anthropology of the Kula ring, programming a physics engine for a 3D video game, technical architecture involving uneven distribution of load-bearing elements in a limited space, escaping saṃsāra, parsing the various levels of linguistic etiquette in the Korean language, solving the Riemann hypothesis, rendering realistic computer-animated human faces in variable lighting, the history of anarchism and its various schools, the line of succession for the office of Holy Roman Emperor, Hungarian language case structure, Bernoulli’s principle, Microsoft Excel, black holes, the internal politics of the Chinese Communist Party, the legacy of brutalism in contemporary architecture, Finnegans Wake, cricket, Heiddegger’s dasein, making the perfect pizza dough, and literally every other thing that has ever crossed the human mind. You can wash your hands of nuance all you like; you live in a world that will always defy your clumsy, reductive efforts. Life’s complexity is irreducible.

But it’s not just that complexity is ubiquitous and inevitable. It’s that complexity is good. Complexity is what makes life interesting, and complexity is what makes art enjoyable. We have brains that have developed an exquisite ability to parse complicated, multivariate information - the fact that you are reading these words right now and understanding them is a miracle of raw processing - and we crave the opportunity to exercise them. We create all manner of strange hobbies specifically because they’re intellectually taxing, like those guys who do Rubic’s cube-style puzzles that have dozens of blocks. Overly simplistic games like Tic Tac Toe quickly bore us, and we go looking for deeper challenges. We inject our art with symbolism and reference in order to connect with it on a deeper and more satisfying level. Recently, the dominance of simplistic stories of good heroes and bad villains has robbed movies of some of their essential power. The injection of absurd rules into what stories can be told in Young Adult literature has rendered the genre a wasteland. Morally, the ability to traffic in complexity is absolutely essential, as the basic task of ethical development lies in expanding the moral imagination, and you can’t achieve that unless you’re willing to imagine that there are things about another person that go beyond your simplistic impressions, that they suffer under problems that are too (yes) complex for you to fully understand. Life would be powerfully boring without complexity.

Ambiguity, meanwhile, is just the state of most of life. We’re ambivalent, about most things, most of the time. I think that’s good, but either way - it just is.

I was inspired to remember Klion’s little koan by this bizarre piece of therapy-speak nonsense from Adam Grant in the New York Times. Grant is one of those 21st-century hucksters who peddle pseudo-psychology to unhappy people, dressing up everything they already want and think and feel in a patina of legitimacy derived from self-help ideology. The modern American cult of therapy takes a useful and necessary medical practice, meant for specific contexts and purposes, and generalizes its habits to the entirety of human life. Its folklore exists to justify what insecure people can’t justify for themselves. Narcissistic personality disorder is thought to occur in less than 1% of adults, and yet every ex-boyfriend in this country suffers from it. Curious! But not actually curious, given that an army of opportunists have built careers out of telling people just that kind of story - everyone you don’t like is a sociopath; every time you don’t get everything you want, you’re experiencing trauma; every conflict you get into, about anything, ever, is evidence of a toxic personality in the other person. Are you sure your boss is just another human being with legitimate pressures and needs, and your disagreements the product of the inevitable friction that results from a universe where friction is inevitable? Or could they be operating under the influence of the Dark Triad??? Sure. Why the fuck not. This is what therapeutic rhetoric has become, in this culture, an excuse architecture for every spare selfish impulse you ever have. And people like Grant get rich peddling it.

(That word, toxic - I think it’s a fallen soldier, at this point, a write-off. It has been applied so liberally, and so witlessly, that it no longer has any value. I’m sure I’ll still use it, out of habit, but today it suffers from a uniquely intense combination of lack of meaning and relentless overuse.)

Grant’s concern today is, I’m not kidding, the evil of ambivalent relationships. He presents several studies that show that, when we traffic in ambiguous interactions with other people, the stress takes a physical toll. He writes, “The most toxic relationships aren’t the purely negative ones. They’re the ones that are a mix of positive and negative.” Puzzlingly, Grant does not define what the actual boundaries of an ambiguous relationship might be; how would such a thing be quantified? InterPersonal Ambivalence Units (IPAUs)? I’m torn here, because taken literally that line means that the most toxic relationships are those that do not fall clearly into a binary of perfect affection or perfect enmity. Which, of course, is a category that includes every human relationship, ever, in the history of human relationships. To read more generously, we might take it that Grant means that relationships that don’t pass a particular threshold of certainty when it comes to friend or enemy status are the most toxic. But where is that threshold? If we’re going to be justifying all of this with reference to scientific research, shouldn’t there be some level of scientific precision in the essential question of what relationships are actually toxic? The studies here don’t inspire me with confidence; they’re exactly the kind that keep failing to replicate, and when you check how they’re operationalized, it’s always some sort of dubious self-reported scale. I don’t know. I’m confused as to who and how this helps.

The notion that human relationships fall simplistically and reliably onto a linear spectrum of “positive” and “negative” is so fundamentally contrary to my lived experience that I don’t really know how to begin here. We have multivariate, inscrutable, often unknowable personalities; these personalities are shaped by innumerable Byzantine internal forces and by a relentless stream of formative experiences. The notion that any two personalities are going to interact with each other in some kindergarten polarity of positivity and negativity seems farcical, just mathematically. And, personally, I find that ambiguous relationships can be among the most stimulating. In particular, they can be very sexy - when you’re first getting to know someone who might be (but might not be) a potential romantic interest, that ambiguity, that not knowing, is one of the best parts. Of course, sometimes the way that not knowing plays out is that you’re interested in them and they’re not interested in you, and it hurts. But that’s how it goes; it’s precisely the chance for failure that makes success sweeter. [...]

I would like to summon a charitable reading here, but there’s a kind of too-cute maximalism that makes it hard. Grant writes that “Even a single ambivalent interaction can take a toll.” Even a single ambivalent reaction! My God! What are we to take from this information? I’m not sure if this is common knowledge, but we are a mortal species with finite lives that evolved by chance on an indifferent rock in a universe devoid of transcendent meaning, cursed to watch those we love die around us until we die in turn. We exist on a planet where our genetic endowment compels us to be selfish in pursuit of food, sex, and status, and there are 7 billion of us, all competing for limited resources and jockeying for status in competitions that are often inherently zero-sum. I’m going to go ahead and suggest that never having a single ambivalent interaction is perhaps an unrealistic expectation for anyone. And this gets to this paradox of self-help woowoo that I’ve talked about before: the vision of healthy human life becomes so unattainable that people end up developing guilt and shame over their inability to live without guilt and shame. Being “self-actualized” is just another unfair expectation nobody can reach. Which is perverse! I genuinely cannot comprehend what supposedly-therapeutic purpose is served by telling people that even a single ambivalent interaction is going to “take a toll.” Who is this helping?

Ambivalence is an invitation for rumination.

Well, yes, Adam. Yes it is. You’ve got me there. So, how could rumination be bad?

We agonize about ambiguous comments, unsure what to make of them and whether to trust the people who make them. We dwell on our mixed feelings, torn between avoiding our frenemies and holding out hope that they’ll change.

Again, this is presented as though what’s discussed is obviously something that we must try to avoid at all costs. But why? Is agonizing over things really that bad? I think I’ve done a lot of growing by agonizing over things in my life. That’s just part of the endowment of being a person, agonizing over things. Why are mixed feelings unhealthy? In a world this complicated, with relationships that are so full of interlocking and unconscious dynamics, aren’t mixed feelings unavoidable and ultimately benign? And why are we assuming that our “frenemies” are the ones who have to change? Is there really no chance at all that we’re the ones who should change? This gets to another point of mine about all this weird “everything is therapy all the time” self-help horseshit: life is full of zero-sum interactions between people with competing and legitimate interests. [...] This whole world of pop psychology insists that the individual is sacrosanct, that anyone who deals with insecurity or anxiety or self-doubt is the victim of injustice, and they are entitled to do whatever they want to self-actualize. But what do we do when two people are trying to self-actualize in ways that conflict with each other? I have no idea, and I don’t think these gurus know either. [...]

And, as I so often do, I have to say to this general ideology: the purpose of human life is not to feel comfortable all the time, bad and dark feelings are an essential part of being a person, and while you are entitled to having your physical self protected, your material needs met, and your basic autonomy respected, you aren’t entitled to never feel pain, sadness, insecurity, anxiety, self-doubt, or that you’re “invalid.” Society could never accommodate such an entitlement, and it’s a bad goal anyway.

[thoughtportal]

He spotlights the story of Adama Bah, a Muslim immigrant from Guinea whose life became a Kafkaesque nightmare from ages sixteen to twenty-five after she was caught up in an FBI dragnet that resulted in her father’s arrest and deportation and in her being interrogated, imprisoned, forced to drop out of school, and placed on a no-fly list. While she eventually won an ACLU lawsuit restoring her rights, irreparable damage had been done. “The story’s ‘happy ending’ notwithstanding, the United States successfully delivered a message to Adama and people like her: You are not a full and equal member of our society,” Beck writes. “Whatever dreams and aspirations you might have cultivated as a child must now take a backseat to the smaller dream of staying out of trouble.” While Arab and Muslim communities felt this domestic terror most acutely, Beck demonstrates that precedents were being established for targeting other groups, including Black and Indigenous activists and their allies.

[mattpayton]

The One Vice Presidential Pick Who Could Ruin Democratic Unity by David Klion

[mirrorbreaks]

I think this is a worthwhile article

[fuchsiaswingsong]

"There’s a pervasive censoriousness right now—conservatives denouncing liberals, liberals denouncing leftists, leftists denouncing other leftists—that’s immediately familiar from the days and weeks after 9/11. Somehow, the upshot of all the denunciations and condemnations is the right’s unchallenged hold over the discourse, and, more importantly, the ultimate facts on the ground."

[dappercyborg]

[septictankie]