#and while not all populations agree with their governments

[eye-worms]

full article:

President Trump’s idea that the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and relocate two million Palestinians has elicited outrage and derision. But even if the idea never comes to fruition, it has this virtue: It puts a spotlight on the world’s double standard toward Israel.

Many population transfers have taken place over the past century. In the 1920s, Greece and Turkey agreed to a forced population swap: Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey moved to Greece, while Muslims in Greece moved to Turkey. After World War II, millions of Indians and Pakistanis were forced to find new homes, as were ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, Uganda expelled Indians. Only in the Palestinian case has the refugee question festered endlessly.

Mr. Trump’s idea involves transferring Gazans to other nations and turning the Gaza Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Where would the Gazans go? “It could be Jordan, and it could be Egypt, it could be other countries,” Mr. Trump told reporters last week. In a Truth Social post, he elaborated that Palestinians would be resettled “in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes.”

It’s easy to see why many people find this off-putting. We aren’t used to viewing knotty geopolitical problems through a real-estate development lens. The Egyptians, Jordanians and Saudis all appear less than enthusiastic at the prospect of an influx of Palestinians. Longtime U.S. allies, including the U.K. and France, have also criticized the idea.

Nonetheless, the discussion highlights a double standard. Following the creation of Israel in 1948 and the first Arab-Israeli war, some 600,000 to 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes. Yet the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East today supports nearly six million Palestinian “refugees.” That’s because the U.N. counts not only displaced Palestinians but also their descendants as refugees. “A great-grandchild of Palestinian refugees born in Damascus today is considered a Palestinian refugee,” Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, said in a phone interview.

Contrast this with other countries. In the turmoil following Israel’s creation, some 800,000 Jews fled or were expelled from their homes in North Africa and the Middle East. Today the descendants of these Mizrahi Jews make up about half of Israel’s population. Israel never stuck them in permanent refugee camps or used them as a geopolitical bargaining chip.

Or take the partition of India. In 1947 the departing British carved out Pakistan from Muslim-majority areas of India. The bloodshed that followed—with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other—led to some two million deaths and uprooted 18 million people, according to estimates from a 2008 Harvard study.

Both India and Pakistan worked hard to integrate the new arrivals. Two Indian prime ministers (Inder Kumar Gujral and Manmohan Singh) were partition refugees, as were two Pakistani military rulers (Zia ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf). Had the U.N. set up a special agency to look after the Indian and Pakistani refugees’ descendants, it would be responsible for tens of millions of people today.

No one expects Pakistan to transform its religious demography by offering a “right of return” to descendants of Hindu and Sikh refugees. Why should it be any different for Israel?

Arab states deserve blame for the plight of Palestinians. “The ironic thing about Palestinians in Arab countries is that their cause is sacrosanct, but the people themselves are treated badly,” said Mr. Pipes. Jordan, unlike most Arab states, has extended citizenship to most Palestinian refugees within its borders, yet about 160,000 of them—mostly those displaced from Gaza—remain stateless. Lebanon, meantime, houses some 250,000 stateless Palestinians, nearly half in refugee camps.

Across the region, Palestinians face discrimination in access to employment, government services and property ownership. The Census Bureau estimates that the U.S. houses 172,000 Palestinians. That’s more than the Palestinian population in many Arab countries.

“In the last 100 years, populations have moved repeatedly,” David Friedman, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said in a phone interview. “Sometimes it’s not fair. Sometimes it’s justified from a humanitarian perspective. But whatever happens, when it’s over, it’s over. This is the only place where it’s weaponized.”

No one knows if Mr. Trump’s plan will succeed. Removing Gazans by force would create a humanitarian crisis, but it’s not unreasonable to believe that the majority would leave if given the chance to build a better life elsewhere. Either way, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if Arab states had welcomed Palestinian Arabs the way many other countries around the world have welcomed refugees.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article in support of ethnic cleansing yesterday

[talesinfallacies]

,

[bet-on-me-13]

The Ambassador

So! It was finally happening. After Years of Pleading with the Guardians and other Ruling Bodies of the Galactic Community, the Justice League had finally gotten then to agree to create an Alliance with Earth.

With an Alliance, Earth would gain the Protection of Multiple Empires and The Guardians, which would mean an end to the Constant Alien Invasions they faced. There was also the legal opening of Trade Routes between Planets to exchange Technology and Resources on the Galactic Scale.

Of course Earth would return the Favor, legally being able to defend it's Allies with its unusually large population if Superheroes and quickly advancing Tech, while also trading Tech and Resources between Planets.

Of course the battle was not entirely won yet.

They still needed to begin Negotiations to see if both sides would even agree to the Alliance in the First Place, as well as decide on the specifics of the Treaty. The United Nation's would decide on Ambassadors to represent the different countries, while the different Alien Governments would send an Ambassador Each.

When the Ambassadors arrived, they asked to be introduced to the Representatives of the Planet. Except, they claimed that there was a missing Member.

They claimed that there was one more Major Kingdom on the Planet, the most Powerful One, which they felt must be at the Negotiations.

When asked who this missing Ambassador was, they simply replied, "King Phantom of the Infinite Realms, he and a Shard of his Kingdom reside on this Planet, do they not?"

Now they are working around the clock to find this missing Kingdom, because the Alien Ambassadors refused to negotiate without the most powerful Kingdom at the Table, and they woud not wait forever.

Just who was this "King Phantom", and why had he not revealed himself yet?

...

Sam and Tucker sat on the Couch in their apartment, staring at the TV as the Chosen Representatives for America finished their Speech. Apparently the Peace Talks had been put on Hold for a few more days as they did some last minute preparations. Something about making their Guests more comfortable before they began discussing politics.

"Hey Danny, they're delaying the Negotiations for a few more days." Sam called over to the Kitchen.

"Aw, what?!" Shouted Danny from the Kitchen, sounding extremely disappointed, "I just finished making all the Popcorn!"

"I know Honey, its too bad." Tucker comforted his Partner, "Let's marathon Star Trek instead, how about that?"

Danny slumped out of kitchen and into the Couch between them, steaming bowl of Popcorn in his Lap, "I guess. We can make good use of all this popcorn at least."

Sam patted him on the arm, "Hey it's okay, the Talks will just take a few more days."

Danny shrugged, "Yeah, you're right. Man, what I wouldn't give to be in that Room."

[reasonsforhope]

"People across the world, and the political spectrum, underestimate levels of support for climate action.

This “perception gap” matters. Governments will change policy if they think they have strong public backing. Companies need to know that consumers want to see low-carbon products and changes in business practices. We’re all more likely to make changes if we think others will do the same.

If governments, companies, innovators, and our neighbors know that most people are worried about the climate and want to see change, they’ll be more willing to drive it.

On the flip side, if we systematically underestimate widespread support, we’ll keep quiet for fear of “rocking the boat”.

This matters not only within each country but also in how we cooperate internationally. No country can solve climate change on its own. If we think that people in other countries don’t care and won’t act, we’re more likely to sit back as we consider our efforts hopeless.

Support for climate action is high across the world

The majority of people in every country in the world worry about climate change and support policies to tackle it. We can see this in the survey data shown on the map.

Surveys can produce unreliable — even conflicting — results depending on the population sample, what questions are asked, and the framing, so I’ve looked at several reputable sources to see how they compare. While the figures vary a bit depending on the specific question asked, the results are pretty consistent.

In a recent paper published in Science Advances, Madalina Vlasceanu and colleagues surveyed 59,000 people across 63 countries.1 “Belief” in climate change was 86%. Here, “belief” was measured based on answers to questions about whether action was necessary to avoid a global catastrophe, whether humans were causing climate change, whether it was a serious threat to humanity, and whether it was a global emergency.

People think climate change is a serious threat, and humans are the cause. Concern was high across countries: even in the country with the lowest agreement, 73% agreed...

The majority also supported climate policies, with an average global score of 72%. “Policy support” was measured as the average across nine interventions, including carbon taxes on fossil fuels, expanding public transport, more renewable energy, more electric car chargers, taxes on airlines, and protecting forests. In the country with the lowest support, there was still a majority (59%) who supported these policies.

These scores are high considering the wide range of policies suggested.

Another recent paper published in Nature Climate Change found similarly high support for political change. Peter Andre et al. (2024) surveyed almost 130,000 individuals across 125 countries.2

89% wanted to see more political action. 86% think people in their country “should try to fight global warming” (explore the data). And 69% said they would be willing to contribute at least 1% of their income to tackle climate change...

Support for political action was strong across the world, as shown on the map below.

To ensure these results weren’t outliers, I looked at several other studies in the United States and the United Kingdom.

70% to 83% of Americans answered “yes” to a range of surveys focused on whether humans were causing climate change, whether it was a concern, and a threat to humanity. In the UK, the share who agreed was between 73% and 90%. I’ve left details of these surveys in the footnote.3

The fact is that the majority of people “believe” in climate change and think it’s a problem is consistent across studies."

-via Our World in Data, March 25, 2024

[sistertotheknowitall]

Some Guy on Fear Gas (can apparently turn invisible)

Masterpost

“Danny was supposed to be in class today.”

There was a round of sighs in the coms. See Danny didn’t react in the same manner as the rest of the population when exposed to fear toxin (or in general, but they were mostly used to that). See Danny didn’t scream, he didn’t cry, he didn’t get violent. He got unnervingly paranoid.

He got so unnervingly paranoid about being watched, specifically by the government if the muttered and whispered words were to be believed. His eyes tracked nothing while he slowly moved around invisible people. It wasn't like dealing with someone in an active hallucination experiencing a psychotic break. It was like dealing with someone in a paranoid delusion. He wouldn't let any of the bats near him and often took off, disappearing into the chaos.

Four months into seeing this kid everywhere and their suspicions were confirmed when he literally disappeared after the second time being poisoned.

Danny was a meta and he was afraid.

That’s not the reason for the exasperation felt by this family though. It was what always happened after. The first time he ignored every vigilantly when they tried to bring it up. After the second time he attempted to avoid everyone, extended family included.

(He had asked Kate if she was also Batman’s kid. “More like their aunt.” “Oh okay so it really is a family business. Like that show Unnatural. You don't happen to have also lost your parents at a relatively young age and now go on to fight a dark presence in their honor, do you?.” Kate had stared passively at him, the others had warned her. “….. okay�� are you more of a Zuko honor type?”)

However, it was like the universe conspired against Danny. Even Bruce agreed that there had to be some god or being doing this (nothing is ever a coincidence). They kinda felt bad for him. He was very obviously trying to avoid them and he was either really bad at being evasive or a deity was laugh at him. Once he had thrown himself behind a lamp pole smaller than himself and closed his eyes to avoid Stephanie.

(It was very awkward. He could turn invisible and knew they knew so why…..? She had politely continued past so not to embarrass the poor guy further. Cause this was embarrassing and they both knew it.)

Finally it was Duke who pulled them all out of limbo. He had come across Danny on the roof of another bank. A lesser known capital union closer to crime ally this time.

Danny hadn’t been avoiding Duke in the same manner as everyone else. He still stopped to give Duke food but he never spoke and he ran after. Duke thought it would be weird to chase him but it was also weird to turn around, have an orange shoved into his hands then watch his friend run away.

However, this time Danny didn’t run as Duke approached so Duke sat next to him. Pulling out a granola bar, he handed it to Danny, “that’s why you feed me all the time right? Cause you know how many calories we need as metas.”

Danny had laughed, “no actually, that was a bit that morphed into a habit. I just thought it was funny.”

“….what.”

“Don’t get me wrong, now that we’re friends I am more than happy to feed you but yeah. The first candy bar was a thank you and then the second time I thought ‘I have fruit.’”

“….. wow… okay.” There went his plan of empathizing. They sat in silence as Duke tried to reorganize his thoughts.

“I’m sorry for avoiding you all.” Duke turned his head to face Danny, who kept his eyes forward, “you know no one cares that you’re a meta.” “Obviously. It wasn’t the invisibility that I was upset about," Danny said.

“The muttering. The paranoia.” Danny grimaced and didn’t say anything.

“You don’t have to tell us till you’re ready, man. Just let us know if you need help. Please, are you safe?”

Danny nodded and Duke nodded back and they had both continued to sit. When they parted ways Danny handed Duke a small bag of chips.

Danny had apologized everyone one at a time even though they had heard it from Duke. Danny never explained nor did he want to talk about his it. His power of invisibility was also a subject off limits. All of them were worried but they didn’t want to force him to talk about it. They had to trust that he would one day feel comfortable doing so with any or all of them. (Still, it was hard seeing their friend so paranoid that he flinched back from them. )

Post Six

[artemismoorea03]

DP x DC Prompt: The New Teacher

(So, I've seen a lot of prompts that have Danny go to Gotham and be a teacher but I don't remember seeing any with it in this direction, so on the chance that this is an original idea here we go!)

Jason was given a choice, or multiple choices. Babysit the Replacement on a mission that could last a week, go to Bludhaven and have some 'brother bonding time' with Dick who needed backup on a big case, or take a temp solo-gig in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere called Amity Park.

Well, considering he was still a bit hurt about the fact that B replaced him all those years ago and the pit loved to grab hold of that bit of frustrations towards his younger brother, that didn't seem like a smart idea. Dick wasn't an option either because he knew that would lead to 'talking about feelings' and other shit that he didn't want to do.

So he took the solo-gig.

It was supposed to be easy, at least that's what had been implied by the others he'd spoken to about the case. It seemed like most of the Justice League thought this situation was being 'exaggerated' because most of the time when somebody checked out what was going on there was nothing happening. No big take over, or kidnapping, or 'end of the world' situation, but there had been too many calls to put Bruce's mind at ease. The frequent calls mixed with the fact that the Government apparently had the area under a 'black out' made Bruce even more nervous.

Hell, if it hadn't been for the fact that Bruce was famous and that Scarecrow, Penguin and Riddler had all escaped from Arkham he would have been doing the case himself.

Which is how Jason ended up in a restraunt named 'Nasty Burger' looking at the news papers he had managed to get from a stand down the street while taking notes of things he had already seen. It wasn't just that the Government had cut them off, all of the tech in the city was easily 20 years outdated compared to the rest of the world.

Nokia phones, chunky computers, hell he'd even seen a kid with a PDA of all things. Thankfully, it looked like his tech still worked other than running slower than it should have, but thanks to modifications made by Barbara and Tim things were running better than he expected. But, they did struggle to have access to anything, specifically the news.

Hence the paper.

Ghost Boy: Friend or Fiend. A new vote cast by the city has found that the Ghost Boy - Danny Phantom - has had an astounding rise in support after the events over the Christmas Holiday. The new polls suggest that 43% of Citizens support Danny Phantom, with the majority of his support coming from the students at Casper High who insist that Phantom is a hero who has saved them countless times over the past few months. 49% of people still agree, however, that Phantom appears to be at the center of the majority of the attacks with many still claiming that he is the sole cause of the attacks. However, 8% of the population remain undecided, including many teachers, police and hospital staff. Upon seeing the new results of the pole Mayor Montez had this to say; "While I will admit that Phantom appears to favor the younger generation and frequently seems to come to their aid, we cannot forget what it has done in the past. Taken hostages, injured innocents, and caused millions in property damage. Phantom may not be a 'villain' in the typical sense of the word, but we shouldn't blindly trust him just because of a few good deeds."

So there was a... hero? Half hero - potentially villain - in Amity Park? That might have explained some of the calls they'd gotten from Amity park over the past few months. Still, he was concerned by some parts of the report.

Students at a high school were frequently coming under attack? So much that this potential-villain kept saving them? Just what was the cause? What could cause so many issues?

Jason looked up as he saw that same PDA kid talking with a girl with short black hair in a half-ponytail who was wearing a black crop-top. The girl seemed annoyed while the boy seemed worried about something.

"But it's Vlad, Sam... what if he does something?" He heard the boy whisper, "We should go back him up..."

"He doesn't need our help, besides Jazz ran away from home, remember? She got herself into this mess it's her problem to get out of it. Something that Danny should have learned a long time ago."

Jason frowned, pretending not to hear them as he hesitated then got up and walked over to the two younger teens. "Hey, excuse me."

The girl looked annoyed and suspicious while the boy looked confused.

"Uh, yeah?" Tucker asked.

"Hey, sorry to bug you both. But could you guys tell me about this... 'Danny Phantom' person?" He asked, holding the newspaper out.

The girl looked even more suspicious, "And... who are you?"

"And how haven't you heard of Phantom?" Asked the boy.

"I just moved to town." Jason admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. "So, I'm just trying to catch up on all the town drama."

"You moved to Amity Park... willingly? Psh, what do you have, a deathwish?" The girl grumbled.

"Come on, I just moved from Gotham, which is worse?"

The girl blinked as the boy laughed.

"Furries vs Ghosts, who will win~" He said as the girl elbowed him. "Ow! What?!"

"Danny Phantom is a hero." The girl explained, "He showed up in April and has been protecting the town since."

"A hero, huh? Could always use more of those in the world, but the mayor seems to have it out for him."

Tucker sighed, "No kidding, man. Somebody framed Phantom for something really bad and no matter what he does to try to fix it the city just see's that incident as the only thing he's ever done. It was the first big 'public thing' outside of the high school so it was huge but it wasn't his fault."

The girl reached for her phone suddenly, looking at it before she answered. "Hey, Danny. What's up?" She was quiet for a moment, "Yeah, we're at Nasty Burger, wanna join us? Lunch on me?"

A quiet mumble came through the speaker before she smirked.

"I'll order for you then. Double or triple?"

More mumbles.

"Triple it is. See you soon." She said, then hung up. "Come on, Tuck, Danny is on his way for lunch."

"Hell yeah, see you later, dude." The boy said, then jogged off with the girl.

"A teacher? Yeah, it looks like there's some openings but why would you want to have your cover as a teacher?" Oracle asked as Jason sat in his hotel room, looking through the paper again.

"Most of the incidents seem to surround the High School, I want to see what's going on."

Oracle hummed, typing for a moment. "Alright, well as luck will have it, it looks like teachers are sparse at Amity High, at least from what I'm able to get using your connection... which is infuriatingly slow, by the way, are you sure you did it right?"

"I've done it a million times, of course I did it right."

Oracle grumbled, "Stupid Amity black-out. Okay, so you have options. Most of the teachers have fucked off so all of the teachers in Freshmen year switch around to cover lessons or do mixed lessons. For example the English teacher also teaches Math and the normal Math teacher also teaches Science. So it looks like you could have any position you want and the school would just shuffle around the teachers."

"You said English is taken, right?"

"Yep, the teacher is named William Lancer and he- oh... wait, he's on a leave of absence due to injuries he suffered over Christmas Break. Concussion, broken arm, and bruised ribs, he'll be out for a few weeks."

Jason smirked, "Perfect. Sign me up."

". . . Jason, the English and Math teacher... never thought I'd see the day. Alright, I'll type up your application, send it in and casually push it to the front of the line. You'll be official by the time Winter Break ends in a few days. So get studying."

"Sounds like a plan, but I'll be fine, I mean our family is crazy and i deal with criminals on a nightly basis. How hard could this assignment really be?"

He would regret asking that question by the end of his first day as an Amity High School teacher.

[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

[covid-safer-hotties]

The US Government Is Shutting Down A Key Covid Website

Tomorrow the US government agency responsible for biomedical and public health research, The National Institutes of Health, will shut down its Covid-19 ‘special populations’ website.

This site hosts a huge amount of information about how to treat covid and long covid in the immunocompromised and in people with HIV, cancer and similar immune supressing conditions - so-called ‘special populations.’

The site is going totally offline.

It’s a shameful dereliction of duty by the NIH which, behind Harvard, is the second largest publisher of biomedical research papers in the world. Doctors and clinicians all over the world use the NIH site for advice and treatment ideas.

And it’s going offline during a massive summer surge of covid infections in the US, a surge that is now topping 1.3 million infections per day. (One of whom was Anthony Fauci, who was infected for the third time last week). A surge killing 750 people a week in the US. Many of whom will be precisely the type of people this website is intended to help clinicians treat.

It’s a scandal.

The message it sends to vulnerable people could hardly be clearer - when it comes to covid, there’s nothing else we can do for you. Sorry. That’s it. We’re done.

It’s so terrifying.

It also sends a terrible signal to the medical community about where we are with covid

and will be materially damaging in efforts to treat vulnerable people, both in the acute stage of the disease and those with long covid.

The move to shut the page down is premised on an entirely false assumption: that we already know everything we’ll ever know about how to manage covid so there’s no point keeping a live web resource because they’ll never be anything to update it with ever again.

This is simply not true. While we know a lot about treating covid four years in, we absolutely do not know everything, not by a long stretch. As evidenced by the hundreds still dying every week in summer 2024. And as for long covid, we know very little about how to treat it. For a start, there is no agreed treatment plan. Absolutely none. But apparently we also know so much about this disease we can start shutting down online resources dedicated to it.

Please imagine for a second if a Trump administration rather than a Biden-Harris administration was doing this.

There would be an outcry.

But this move has so far been greeted by media silence.

It is left to a few disability activists and the covid aware to shout into the social media void.

Not that this is a surprise. This is how it has been for the last two years at least, guided by the business as usual, vax-and-forget strategy. More people have died of covid under the Biden-Harris administration than died under Trump. Despite having vaccines since 2021. You’d never know it by mainstream media coverage.

Some people have written to the director of the NIH, Monica Bertagnolli, and asked them to keep the advice live and up-to-date. If you want to do this her email address is:

monica.bertagnolli@nih.gov

Long Covid Action has archived the site here

Maybe if enough people write to her and enough noise is made the decision will be reversed. Worth a try.

Overall it’s just another grim episode in the handling of the pandemic by the current US administration, an administration who, we should never forget, won power in large part due to the outrage at Trump’s handling of the first nine months of covid.

Solidarity to everyone still trying to protect themselves and their communities from covid against all the odds.

At least we can keep fighting for each other.

[a-very-tired-jew]

Hot Take Incoming The more I read about Neo/New Bundism, the more I'm convinced that it's an ideology that is based on a weird mix of Ashkenazic white guilt, "yearning for the shtetl", and identifying with Yiddish culture over Jewish culture because the former emphasizes secularism while the latter does not (which belies that fact that Judaism has multiple ways to engage with it and you don't need to be religious).

This last part is especially important to understand as in the West, Judaism is emphasized as one of the Big Three religions even though it's one of the smallest in the world. Many of us are taught that Judaism is just proto Xtianity or Islam, and depending on where you live and your community you absorb that. Especially if your family is non-practicing and there isn't much of a Jewish community and culture for you to interact with growing up. Many of our holidays, cultural norms, and so on are associated with Xtianity and framed in regards to a Cultural Xtian society. Hence why I think so many young secular Jews feel that they can't actually connect with Judaism because the narrative they have from Xtian society plus their disconnect from Jewish society means they perceive Judaism through the Xtian religious perspective.

If Cultural, religious, and lax Xtians are this way, then sure Judaism is as well since Xtianity is based on it, right?

That's the mindset I've seen over and over.

This is further exacerbated by the immigrant communities in the North Eastern USA (NY, PA, NJ) that had massive moments of cultural exchange and assimilation. Deli culture in the North East is a mix of Italian and Jewish cultures. Historically, Italian and Jewish communities allied and mixed in the early 20th to the point where it's a stereotype. And if you don't believe me then let me point to Harley Quinn in pop media, any of the organized crime families and the start of Las Vegas, or the fact that you can get a cheesesteak in a Jewish deli in PA.

So it makes sense that Bundism is having a revival of sorts into it's Neo era. It's a socialist ideology that emphasizes progressive ideals that man of us agree with. But Bundism also emphasized secular Judaism by putting Yiddish culture at the forefront. It was a way to be Jewish without being religious, and if you have any hang ups on religious practice then it makes sense as to why this ideology might be attractive. However, there is a failure to acknowledge that the largest Bund, and successor populations/groups, had to give a pound of flesh repeatedly to "prove" that they were loyal because of the old dual loyalty antisemitic conspiracy. And that was never enough as these groups were wiped out after their governments were done with them.

(Note: some of the most ardent anti-communist Jews were ex-Soviet citizens who managed to escape and witnessed all of this firsthand)

Neo/New Bundism comes across, especially since Oct 7th, as an aggressive "yearning for the shtetl" that rehashes the compromises the Old Bund was willing to give the USSR regarding its Judaism by embracing and emphasizing Yiddish culture instead.

For example; look at all the literature and examples regarding JVP. They had the seder plate incident back in the Spring, have had literature that told Jews not to pray and/or speak in Hebrew but in English or Arabic, and have rabbis that denigrate and dismiss Jewish culture and history (as well as so many other incidents and issues). All they need to do is tell Jews that they should actually be secular socialists and speak Yiddish instead and you'd have one of the cornerstones of Bundism.

It didn't work during the early to mid 20th century, and it won't work now.

But nostalgia is a helluva thing.

And so it comes across as this highly aggressive rejection of Israel and everything it stands for, whether true or falsely attributed to it, because it's not about the Jewish connection to Israel but the Jewish connection to a more immediate loss: Yiddish culture, which was decimated and destroyed in the 20th century. This is especially true when talking to Ashkenazic Neo Bundists as their family histories, like mine, start and stop with the Shoah.

Consider that the Bund were one of the largest Jewish organizations in the Pale, the resulting Yiddish community in said region were the largest in the world, and they organized and fought the Nazis, then it makes sense as to why the loss would be so poignant for many and grabbing ahold of the ideology to create a connection makes sense. I know for me that if I were to dive into everything Yiddish I would develop a greater appreciation for my family and where I come from even with the loss of knowledge caused by the Shoah.

If you further consider that it's a secular ideology that puts socialism first, then Yiddish, and then Judaism last, then it makes sense as to why you see so many anti-Zionists emphasize the "Israel killed Yiddish" talking point (which I haven't seen in months, but I remember it being a thing up until the Spring). The ideology does not emphasize identifying with Judaism and Israel, but with Yiddish culture and institutions.

There's nothing wrong with this per se, but it isolates an aspect of the Jewish community and says "you're different from the rest of them" while at the same time emphasizing that they should assimilate into the rest of the world. And let's be honest, because it is a European based ideology it was emphasizing assimilation into Western civilizations of European descent.

It therefore makes sense as to why Neo Bundists don't identify with Israel and/or refuse to identify with it. They identify with the European aspect of their history and not with the Middle Eastern. The European connection is immediate and direct, the Middle Eastern is distant and cultural. I understand this position as its Biological Altruism theory in practice, but it does fail to take in the larger "ecological" community that is being Jewish.

Part of the ideology and its adherents also blame Israel for not reviving or reconstituting the Yiddish community and culture, which is ironic because that would be focusing on a very European subculture of Judaism (and anti-Israel activists continuously yell that the country is a White European Colony). Ironically, this "Israel killed Yiddish" point either fails to take into account or lies through omission that the Nazis and USSR killed the largest Yiddish cultural centers and populations in the 20th century and that Yiddish culture in the USA has faded away over time as more and more ethnicities and cultures have assimilated and torn down their metaphorical, and sometimes very real, isolationist walls.

Unfortunately Neo Bundism focuses on the pre-WWII aspects of Bundism. I've personally talked to a bunch of Neo Bundists, and witnessed/read on social media their writings and interactions, and in each instance they emphasize that Bundism has been around since before WWII, was a widely supported ideology, and it stood opposed to Israel and Zionism.

Except they rarely talk about Bundism post WWII. After WWII and with the establishment of Israel it dropped the opposition position. Israel became an extant country and opposition to its existence didn't make sense anymore. It dropped the anti-Zionism, but still emphasized doikayt. It emphasized that Israel should adhere to the progressive Bundist ideologies of economic, social, racial, and political equality and equity. Hell, there was even an Israeli Bundist organization.

Hence why the last extant Old Bundist organization in the world, Melbourne's Jewish Labour Bund, has an issue with New/Neo Bundism. The Melborune JLB is the last existing Old Bund group in the world with all others have closed down in prior years or decades. MJLB acknowledges the October 7th attack by Hamas and the violence imposed on Palestinians by Israel. It acknowledges suffering on both sides. New/Neo Bundist organizations rarely, if ever, do this and instead commit to a Holocaust Universalization like position regarding Gaza while omitting the terrorist attacks.

Furthermore, the Neo/New Bundist organizations do not discuss the issues that define Bundist ideology, such as economic and social issues, but instead emphasizes the anti-Zionist position. This reduces it to a one trick pony that misses the point entirely (paraphrasing Dr. Ringelbaum who is President of JLB here). The focus on pre-WWII Bundist ideology echoes the sentiments of Bundist groups that did not want to change their ideals and positions afterwards, which led to them becoming defunct. The Neo/New movement is repeating the same mistakes that led to the dissolution of the movement at large and resulted in the ideology being relegated to the wings with no real voice.

It is also important to note that the majority of the Neo/New Bundist movement is under 30, with a lot of them being undergrad age. As someone who teaches this age bracket I will say that they're passionate but overconfident. They're informed but also ignorant. They're sympathetic and empathetic, but easily misled. I was too at that age.

And like any movement, Neo/New Bundism is going to have its growing pains. I think if it is to continue past this conflict and does not fizzle out then the movement and associated organizations need to reflect on what they actually mean outside of anti-Zionism. Because as of right now and for the past few years of its inception, and the brand new groups, that is all they've been. That's not fighting for labor, social, racial, political, and economic rights. That's repeating the same mistakes as the Bund in the early 20th century did. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face.

At this point in time myself and others don't trust Neo/New Bundists because why would we? The movement has shown that it's anti-Israel positioning is more important to them than anything else. This means they ally, like the Old Bund did, with antisemites who want to harm all of us. The movement just happens to give them permission to be extremely and violent antisemitic by using "as an anti-Zionist Jew" as a permissible framework. Just like the Old Bund did pre-WWII.

You're not doing anything new or innovative or helping the diaspora. You're following in the footsteps that led to more deaths of our people.

Please re-examine where you stand and what you stand for. It's been done before and we need to learn from history. Not repeat it.

[grison-in-space]

Hi fellow neuroscientist and animal behavior observer! What's up? It's a weird ass time to be a scientist in the US right now. Like there's the doom and despair taking up most of my brain but also I have a lab presentation in 1.5 weeks and my committee meeting two weeks after that. How do you make yourself focus on lab/science stuff?

I'm so sorry it's taken me a while to get back to you; I've been rotating this ask in my mind for over a week now. I hope your lab presentation went well, and I hope your committee meeting does, too. Bear in mind that I am reeling as much as anyone else, but... well, I have had a lot of things happen during my academic career, and I have had some practice with this by now. I was displaced from my home three or four times during grad school, and all but once that was because of climate change related flooding. (I actually cannot remember offhand. That kind of thing fucks with your ability to reckon in chronological time, which is why no one has been able to work out how years work since 2020 at latest.) I did my PhD in Texas, too, which gave me some exciting experiences around campus violence and guns.

But maybe the biggest thing for me is that I started grad school in 2012, right in time for the government sequester of 2013. That was the year Patty Brennan (of corkscrew duck penis fame) published an article in Animal Behaviour laying out helpful tips in case your research is targeted as "wasteful spending" by members of Congress seeking to reduce scientific funding. Brennan's work legitimately is groundbreaking--I started out close enough to her field to be able to say that almost no one was looking at vaginal anatomy when she started and she's really driven the field of reproductive conflict forward by systematically looking at methods by which females exert "cryptic choice" to control their own reproductive futures. But it sounds silly at first blush in a sound bite, so she immediately became a target when her work went viral. And that paper came out a decade ago, and we are no better than when we started.

I've gotten pretty good at working through grief and fear, and I've tangled with burnout more than once. So how do you handle it when everything is overwhelming and frightening?

You sketch out the work you can do, and you do it as best you can. Same as anyone else.

Here's the thing. You're a budding scholar. Whatever your field is, you probably know more about it than anyone who isn't a scholar in your field already, and you care about broader justice or you wouldn't be asking me this. This makes you a precious potential resource for whatever activist cause is nearest and dearest to your heart. You are placed, as a person whose career is focused on the pursuit of knowledge, in a position of great authority. Yes, even as a PhD student, although I do agree that having the PhD makes the things you say even more impactful. But you'd be surprised how far even just "PhD student" can go when you're making a stand.

You are a valuable voice when it comes to the intersection of your expertise and your community--and by that, I don't just mean your discipline and your geographical location; I mean your lived experiences and your identities too. If you burn out, your voice and effort may be completely irreplaceable. So make sure you don't burn out, but don't waste your potential to speak out, either. You can do that by working out what your "beat" is: pick one to two things you care really deeply about working on in the world, that you want to make better, and focus on those. Use your authority to make changes.

Currently, my "beat" is focused on disability justice (especially in terms of neurodivergence) and sex/gender, because those are communities I am part of and that I think deeply about. My work there can take a lot of forms: shoving hard on the pernicious medical thought process that tends to conceptualize disorder and disease as a deviation from a uniform functional population; pointing out the complexity inherent in sex differences and sex itself; building relationships with disabled academics to make networks for one another so that we can better support trainees as well as ourselves building alliances between disability justice scholars and researchers tackling these topics with an eye towards integrating the comments and interests of disabled people into the field of study that theoretically focuses on us. These are topics that tie into my research interests (context dependence, decisionmaking, strategy, developmental plasticity, etc) but also into my sense of justice and the communities in which I spend my life as an autistic queer butch.

Think about the things you care most about making better, and think about how those things intersect with your research interests. Is there a bathroom bill you could write a deposition for explaining how complicated sex actually is? A local news reporter who could use a scientist talking about the long term climate impacts of the new fracking project up the road? A new policy on immigrant familial separation that is going to lead to kids with major attachment issues down the line and increase the odds of terrible outcomes? Creative ways to send promising undergrads from underrepresented backgrounds on for new opportunities if you live in a state where DEI initiatives have been banned? (Man, that was an exhausting conversation to have with the North Carolina folks at my last conference. And the Floridians.) Where will your voice carry the most weight for the amount of energy you allocate to it?

Here's my best stab at practical advice for junior trainees:

Figure out what your limit for practical engagement is and defend it viciously. The thing about being in academia, and about having the PhD for that matter, is that it gives you a lot of leverage for speaking authoritatively about problems in your field and in your community. This, too, can be a form of activism and shaping the world. But if that's the weapon you are making out of your career, you can't also be an effective organizer on the ground for eight different local causes. You can't do everything at once, so pick a limited subset of things to focus on and work on those. Like academia, public impact will suck you dry if you let it, so you have to set boundaries and you have to be clear with yourself about that.

As always with research, your topic should be something you're interested in. Apply your priorities as a human being to your research. Move your project in directions you really care about and which are aligned with your values. Talk with your mentors about how you pitch that to other scientists in your field, of course, but if you're really shaken and scared by the political climate... well, better to apply that to your work than to not be able or interested in focusing on the work at all.

Look for things to celebrate and militantly celebrate them, even if it feels silly. You submitted a manuscript? Make a special dinner. You survived your committee meeting? Meet up with a couple of friends for coffee and cheering. You need things to cheer about, and your job is not going to naturally provide them, so lay out things you can celebrate and celebrate them even if you don't feel like you really achieved anything. (Your PI should help with this, but a lot of them don't. If your PI is absentee, try to find labmates or colleagues to celebrate when you can.) Joy and pride fuel us to keep going; make sure you are feeding them. You do not need money to make this happen, either: there are inexpensive ways to make things feel special, even if your stipend doesn't stretch nearly far enough.

Especially if your lab isn't full of people in your corner, make some friends who feel the same way you do about your "beat". Fellow activists (or just people who care) about your biggest priority are a great choice. Back in the day, I would have exhorted you to join Twitter to build that network; these days, I think most everyone is on Bluesky or Mastodon. You need people who get you and who are in your corner, and you need people who don't have power over your career to help you weather it when the storms rise.

People in the midst of despair don't know the future, either. There will be victories to come moving forward. It will be impossible to imagine them as you are today. The future is murky and uncertain, and you never know what battles you can win until you pitch them. Don't let anyone tell you a battle has been lost until you fight it, and don't make the mistake of thinking that what you do today doesn't matter intensely.

Life is iterative: it always starts from what you do today, and small aggregate decisions have a lot more power over the whole than any individual large one. If you don't like the direction you're going, you can always change direction for a while and see where you go. The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago; the second best time is now.

Find ways to take breaks completely from the political situation. Currently, I have just gotten into Minecraft for the first time, and I am playing a lot of stupid pixelated escapism games. You have to have time to recharge yourself away from all of it. Whatever that looks like to you is good enough. I need, personally, to get back into going for long walks in the woods; that one is one of my old reliable helpful ways to think without getting overwhelmed about it.

So. I don't know if anything has gotten better or worse for you over the last couple of weeks, but I hope for better for you. As for me... well, it's probably time to go back to my grant. We're short on funding going into this mess and who knows if the grant I'm writing for an explicitly DEI-oriented program will survive the coming hammer blows long enough to get it in. Even if it doesn't, I have a couple of book pitches I'll write up and a couple of suggestions for jobs along the way I can take. I can always redirect my effort to a new direction.

Take care of yourselves, friends.

[luckybyler]

This was a reply to someone else, but I'm making this its own post because so many people are being so evil right now re: Noah Schnapp.

You can find other, longer explanations with history and all, but all the places I've seen more or less agree with this:

So you're all calling people to cancel Noah because he's in favor of a Jewish nation in what is today Israel. Which is a perfectly reasonable, decent and educated opinion to have, especially when you, to use a trendy term, "educate yourself" and find out why the state of Israel was created.

11000 dead Palestinians, half of them children

According to Hamas. Don't forget that, ever. They're the current, official government of Gaza, thus they're the ones who give numbers. This means that the real number could be 10, 1 million, anything in between. What I've read is that they probably give more of less accurate total numbers. What they fail to do, however, is distinguish between Hamas militants and civilians, and beteween civilians killed by IDF strikes, civilians killed by failed Hamas or Palestininan Islamic Jihad's rockets (which happens a lot), and Palestinians murdered by Hamas/PIJ (which also happens, a whole damn lot). They also don't specify how many civilians they have prevented or tried to prevent from evacuating or receiving aid.

11k dead people is a horrible number. Even 1 dead person is a horrible number. However, urban warfare in such a densely populated area is its own kind of hell, especially when the other side is fond of using civilians as human shields in every way possible. The fact that the number is 11k and not 50k, 100k, and so on, indicates that the IDF have indeed done a lot to minimize deaths. You don't genocide people by doing roof knocks, opening evacuation lines, dropping guided bombs, putting up an Iron Dome to deal with rockets while avoiding escalation, etc. simply because actual genocide, while a lot worse, is also cheaper, easier and faster than what they're doing. This is important because caling every act of war genocide dilutes the word, and there are actual genocides happening around the world. Also, there is a difference between striking military targets and causing civilian deaths as a side effect (what the IDF is doing) and planning and carrying out a massacre deliberately targeting civilians and inflicting as much pain and humilliation as possible on them. And there is a difference between doing so by breaking a ceasefire (which is what Hamas did), and defending your country because if you don't do that a terrorist group will anhilate you (which is what the IDF is doing).

Back to Noah. So far, these are the things that people have tried to cancel him for:

Traveling to Israel (a completely normal thing)

Having Israeli friends (another completely normal thing)

Condemning Hamas' horrible attack on October 7th (the decent thing to do)

Posting a statement saying he feels unsafe as a Jewish person in the US (which, given the rise of antisemitic acts in the world, including the US, including where he lives and where he studies, is a valid feeling to have)

Signing a letter, along with Shawn Levy, Brett Gelman, Ross Duffer and I think Cara Buono, asking Biden to press for the liberation of every hostage by Hamas. This especially shows the utter ignorance of the cancellers because, as it turns out, caring about every hostage implies a slowdown of IDF's actions (and, at the time, a delay of a ground invasion).

Supporting the existence and preservation of the state of Israel (once again, a completely normal thing). The fact that people are turning against him for these things says to me that the real reason you are all hating Noah is beacuse:

He's Jewish. Like, really really Jewish.

And the fact that this all comes from a place of antisemitism isn't hidden at all: I've seen y'all on here, on Twitter, Reddit, every other social media calling him slurs (such as "cunt"), censoring his name, pretending he's not part of the cast, asking the Duffers/Netflix to fire him, wishing him failure, doxxing him, calling on his classmates to physically assault him, etc. He doesn't need to educate himself: you guys are already teaching him a great lesson on why a Jewish state is necessary. If that's the treament he gets from his own "fans", what can he expect from the world at large?

[gemsofgreece]

What does the greek public think of the Greek Genocide and Turkey now a days? I’m Armenian and the granddaughter of an Armenian genocide survivor, and I know that Armenians and Greeks have always felt a connection through multiple things including persecution under the Turks.

So I was just wondering if like Armenians who still hold anger and sadness about our genocide, if the Greeks feel the same.

Don’t answer this if you feel uncomfortable, love! 

Hello, dear ❤️

First of all, I am so happy your grandfather made it. It’s a crazy coincidence that just yesterday I finished reading a classic autobiographical Greek book, “Number 31328” by Ilias Venezis, who was a survivor of the death marches and the slave camps in Anatolia.

The truth is that Greeks absolutely still have feelings of sadness and anger, like the Armenians.

I don’t know exactly what the situation between Armenia and Turkey on a political level currently is (although I think it’s not all rosy) but Greece and Turkey have made numerous attempts at a diplomatic improvement of their relations, which however sooner or later always fall flat.

I genuinely believe that a lot of Greek people would want to leave things behind and look at the future by building good relations with the Turks. Besides, Greeks make friends with Turks, although not discussing politics and history is usually a given for this to work out. The problem is that Turkey does that extremely difficult in the long run.

Because it’s not just the genocide! (what a statement huh)

It’s that both the state and its people completely deny it. Even their more liberal people, I ‘ve never seen anyone explicitly admit to it.

And yet at the first opportunity you will be slapped with a proud “Why are the Greeks so good swimmers? Because we threw their grandfathers in the sea”. So say the genocide deniers…

Turkey committed many anti-Greek pogroms long after the genocide and it has successfully eradicated the historical Greek population of its lands.

Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and keeps occupying the north of the island, deporting thousands of Greek Cypriots and giving their properties to Turks.

Turks mock Greeks for not getting over losing Constantinople 600 years ago. Also, Turks: having an annual anniversary of Sacking Constantinople 600 years later… Like, who even celebrates invasion in 2025…….

While there is this constant abdication by putting the blame on Erdogan being a dictator, in fact most Turkish citizens seem okay with his foreign affairs policies. I know there are some who really want peace or even express love for Greece but unfortunately it’s all overshadowed by their fellow countrymen and politicians. Besides, in their Parliament too few - if any - propose a more peaceful attitude towards Greece. Most agree with Erdogan or judge him that “he is too tolerant with Greece” lol

Turkey is the only coastal country in the freaking world that did not sign the International Laws of the Sea, because it knew it would want to eventually cause problems to Greece. Now Turkey forbids Greece from practicing the right of the six mile extension which is a right given to all countries. Turkey has threatened Greece with war over this. Greece is also bullied into not searching its territorial waters for mineral resources. Turkey also formed new marine borders with the illegal government of Libya that were casually swallowing a huge part of Greece’s territorial waters including its largest island! This is an illegal agreement and even the Libyan parliament rejected it.

I haven’t heard anything lately but over the course of all the previous years Turkish airforce invaded Greek airspace almost daily.

Turkey has expressed openly its will to annex at least half of Greece’s islands and territorial waters by building the award worthy ahistorical rhetoric of the “Blue Homeland”, according to which Turks are natives of the Greek islands??????? lol They intend or have already added this rhetoric to their schoolbooks to brainwash young Turks even more.

In their museums and archaeological sites they try to minimize or eliminate Greek presence and influence as much as possible. If an archaeological site has Greek scriptures they will just say “ancient scripture” with no more details. A Greek tourist reported that he protested over this to his Turkish tour guide, who downright ignored him. By the way, Turkey is the Number Two country with most ancient and medieval Greek sites after Greece, so imagine the extense of this erasure.

They are defacing or converting medieval Byzantine churches to mosques.

They are revising history in Turkey to present the Byzantine Empire as the worst country to have ever been and that, after all, them coming was a blessing because “they saved Byzantines from themselves”. The Greek revolution (the first in a chain of events that caused the collapse of the Ottoman Empire) is mentioned in like two sentences in their history books as a minor revolt of the ungrateful Greeks initiated by the Russians (fun fact: the Russians were against the Greek revolution until years and years after it had started).

They try to build new origin stories according to which they are descendants of the Ancient Hittites (who faded in antiquity already) mixed with the Turks in the eleventh century, meanwhile the 3000 year old Greek presence there was minimal and of no consequence and Greeks did not mix at all and apparently they hellenised the region with telepathy. At the same time they blame Greeks for the fall of the Hittite civilisation which is also untrue according to scholars. Hittites had fights with other cultures way way more.

In short their anti-Greek rhetorics are beyond belief.

In 2020, Turkey intentionally misinformed its immigrants and refugees that Europe supposedly opened its borders and was accepting them and then it unleashed within 3 days 70,000 immigrants to the Greek borders by pushing them and urging them to confront the Greek army. Were there sanctions to Turkey for this incredibly immoral deed? Nope.

Some politician or military officer in Turkey will proclaim that “we will come one night” aka invade Greece at least a few times per month.

And now I ask you; is there a reason for us to forgive or forget the genocide…….? Like I said, they are accusing us of not leaving the past in the past but it does not really seem like it is the past, does it?

I believe this sentiment will resonate with you.

[max1461]

Ok, so obviously this is not going to convince the people who already don't agree with me on this, who find it contradictory or unsatisfactory, but I'm merely stating and not defending the position in this post:

I care about about people, I care about the general population of every country equally, and I don't care about countries or nations as entities. Actually this is not quite true—I believe that caring, if coherent, has to involve some degree of adopting others' ends as your own. @tsarina-anadyomene thinks this is one characteristic of love, and I would indeed like to be able to say that in at least some minor degree I love every person (indeed every creature) in the world. Uh, Serbian nationalists care about Serbia and therefore I care about Serbia, at least a little bit.

But governments, well, first of all fewer people care about governments qua governments as much as they care about nations in the abstract, but more importantly I think that governments as individual entities do a lot of really heinous shit that makes it impossible for me to like them. This is distinct from any anarchist position that the state should not exist—it's more like, point at any individual national government. Do I like those guys? Do I think those are good guys? Well they do some good stuff, they keep the roads paved, hopefully, deliver the mail, all that's great. But they also do a lot of killing and torture, and economic sabotage and shit like that, that hurts a lot of people. And the closer you get to the top, the closer you are to discussions of "grand strategy", the more you're explicitly or implicitly talking about shit like economic sabotage and killing people and the less you're talking about delivering the mail. I guess building roads definitely comes up, and that's good, but it's always "building more roads than the other guys so we can sabotage and/or kill them better" which is :/

I've always been a little contrarian on governments. I've always been a little bit of the famed "median voter" on governments. Get me talking about my preferred system and I'll sound sound like those peasants from Monty Python. Uh. I've made a bunch of posts about it. I want some kind of decentralized, directly democratic, cooperative, federated bullshit like the ancoms talk about for real life and the techno-libertarians talk about for software. Everything other than that is, uh, bullshit, it's the man keeping you down, man. But second place, if we don't get that? I'll take a well-run oligarchy, I'll take the façade of democracy to reduce political violence and attract foreign investment while a party of crony-capitalist technocrats actually runs the show, I'll take the 1955 system before the Plaza Accords, you get the idea. Representative democracy is a sham, basically, it's a sham. So if you're not going to give me freedom, which none of the liberal democracies do, at least give me peace, stability, and prosperity—which they're pretty good at!

But this means I look at, say, China, and I think... sucks they don't have freedom of speech, that's a big issue for me. I mean not so big an issue that I couldn't live there, just a big issue. I'd strongly like it to be otherwise. But the rest of it? Single party state? Who cares. Standard of living is high (for the urban middle class—actually this is my biggest issue with Chinese policy at the moment, they need to do massive wealth redistribution towards the rural poor) but anyway, standard of living is high, there's political stability, it's fucking fine. I hung out with a tone of Chinese international students in college and none of them were like, unhappy with the state of China, although the really wealthy ones all wanted to park their wealth abroad for pretty obvious reasons—

Right, that's another thing China needs to fix: fears about overall stability lead the local elites to siphon money out of the economy and park it abroad. I think, as a non-expert, it seems like Xi's rise and centralization of power have been worse for this. Go back to Deng, go back to term limits and power sharing! God I love Deng Xiaoping.

Uh, freedom is a ruse, uh, Ted K was lowkey right that in a modern techno-world freedom is kind of a ruse. I mean people have to be uh, we have to act or be made to act like worker bees if we want a hive this big and cantankerous to function. Uh, sucks man, sucks that we had to choose between freedom and antibiotics. Maybe we don't, right, that's my whole idea. You know how they had the Juche idea, Kim and his assholes had the Juche idea, well I also have an idea. Maybe we can have decentralized, directly democratic control of economic and civil institutions and still maintain a modern industrial economy. Maybe we can escape Ted K's trap <- new name for it I am inventing. Well one can dream, one can solve a lot of math problems and maybe one day I'll read a bunch of econ books and solve the right math problems and discover the answer. Marx, I love Marx I'm a genuine Marx fan but he doesn't have it. Sorry. Just does not got it. Soviet Union was in a Ted K trap just like all the others. They drained the Aral sea bro! That's hard to forgive...

[f-15-h]

This only time I will tried to write a AU out because my friend and I wanna see horrible stuff happen to D16 in a shrine maiden story that’s kinda fatal frame inspired

Warning for some blood and gore

Also I’m not really good at this

I’m going to base cybertron’s official religion on worship Primus and the 13 Primes

Orion come from a village far from Iacon that only worship primus and in their tales primus is quite malevolent and all transformers life it’s an exchange. Because of that village have a tradition of live sacrifice of every 50 cycles they will sacrifice a cogless shrine maiden by using the impalement ritual to Primus. D16 comes online without a cog and was taken away and raised to be the next shrine maiden. The cogless shrine maiden are free of earthly attachments and when they are out in the public during celebrations they masked their faces so people wouldn’t know what they look like.

Orion was the village troublemaker before his family moved to Iacon for better opportunities prior to this decade’s ritual, accidentally broken into the temple’s back yard in fall on top of the shrine maiden. Those two became friends somehow. And occasionally Orion will try to sneak D out of the shrine at night. Orion got beaten up few times for seeing D’s face, almost every time they get caught (which is only 2time ) D would cover for him “I got loss while wondering around in backyard and didn’t realize I’m in the forest.” Is a common excuse d used.

The priests and guardians would subject D16 to painful and humiliating punishments when she step out of the line, D16 followed a strict schedule everyday and the Priests and guardians are very strict and almost psychologically abusive to the cogless Shrine maiden. Even she is out at the courtyard she wear her mask and don’t talk to anyone.

Then their final meeting up before Orion moved D gives her bell bracelet to Orion as a reminder of her, Orion went to Iacon with his family . Few months later it’s the day of the ritual which D was deemed as corrupted by the earthly attachments because her longing to see her lover(very one sided just coming from D) Orion once more and was punished by the a 2rd ritual of gutting her body while she was still conscious. Her body parts were stored in different jars in boxes around the shrine, after 7 days her ghost returned and brutally killed the inhabitants of the temple in same way she was then cursed the mountain the village was located.

D in her ritual outfit

Over the years the village population dropped, younger generations either moved away or dead from strange causes, only the few older people around. The government tried to boost the economy by opening a tunnel which for some reason a horrible accident occurred during it’s construction the workers bodies was somehow either impaled or gutted empty and amputated unlike the usual tunnel collapsing. There was a vacation villa opened once and it was a sight of a mess shooting, the shooter in their confession said “the pale lady , Megatron, made me do it”. (Due to allegedly the pale bot looks like Megatronus Prime, in urban legends she was dub as Megatron).

Megatron aka the pale lady(D16’s ghost)

In Iacon city, Orion was on his last year of his master program, his best friends Bee and Elita 1 were planning a summer trip. Bee who comes from a sheltered religious family who just found freedom from his family during his university years is crazy about everything supernatural suggested to go to that mountain because he heard there was a temple that had live sacrifices which Orion try to brush it off as “Oh it’s just a fairy tale to scare sparklings”

The mountain now is more or less a common suicide forest and the road that leads to the village is the road has the most freak accidents. Bee wants do some ghost hunting and a road trip with the gang for the summer. Orion who has some distance memories from his childhood which his family don’t like to talk about agreed to go.

Before they depart, Orion receives a letter from his childhood village and it was from D-16, his childhood friend. Which he thought Dee is still alive when he got the letter, he just thought because her job as the shine maiden she don’t really have time to reconnect with him.

Notes

The sacrifice of the last 50 cycle before D was Starscream, a daughter from a high guard family. Her family seen one of their 4 daughters was a candidate as a great honor.Even as a somewhat willing sacrifice her ghost still haunts the shrine with the strong desire to see the night sky again.

D-16 was the only daughter and family of Terminus, a miner, Who committed suicide in the forest after d was taken from him. D’s spider lily head dress was given by him.

Bonus:

Ghost Starscream the grinning maiden

[familyabolisher]

If it seems odd, by contrast, to take the time to define what a child is, there is good reason to be equally critical and careful. Rather than taking for granted the existence of children as a demographic group defined somehow by age, this book takes a fairly simple approach to defining who is a trans child. Anyone under the medical age of consent during the twentieth century—typically twenty-one, but sometimes eighteen—is a child in the pages that follows. I draw on the medical age of consent not because it refers to a meaningful distinction but precisely because its arbitrariness and obvious construction illuminate how the figure of “the child” and actual living “children” are entangled products of historical processes of Western subjectification, rather than representing a natural category of human life. While there are infants, toddlers, five-year-olds, teenagers, and even twenty-year-olds throughout this book, I refer to all of them as children because they were subject to a specifically infantilizing form of governance (this is also why the category “adolescent” did not meaningfully come into play in trans medicine during this period). The medical age of consent, which deprived children of the ability to make medical decisions for themselves, proved to be a deciding factor in shaping their experiences and limiting their ability to act. Drawing on Paul Amar’s critical reading of the field of childhood studies, I agree that the child is a dehumanized social form, the product of historical and political processes of infantilization “designed to control various populations” through sexual and racial difference, rather than to index meaningful age differences. As Amar points out, one of the most pernicious effects of the production of children through infantilization is “a failure to recognize children as agents,” to render their lives politically informal—effectively unintelligible to adults. The Western form of the child and childhood is a powerful obstacle to seeing “the mechanism and practices by which social actors branded as children challenge the regime of infantilization,” whether through collective organization or individual itineraries that stray from developmentalism. For that reason, this book names the trans child not as a distinct subgroup within the trans community but as a politically disenfranchised person subject to a regime of racially and gender normative governance by medicine and other social institutions, including the family.

Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

History Repeating Itself 💔

Joe Biden’s Role in the Yom Kippur War

Joe Biden had his first meeting with an Israeli leader, Golda Meir, on the eve of the Yom Kippur war, right after meeting with officials in Cairo. During the then junior senator’s meeting with Meir, Biden suggested that Israel make a unilateral withdrawal from settlements for peace, criticizing the settlement policies of the Labor Party, and suggesting they represent a form of “creeping annexation.” Though Biden assured Meir that Egyptian officials were convinced of Israel’s military superiority, 40 days later, Sadat initiated a surprise attack against Israel.

This is the gist of a bombshell tweet from Israel’s Channel 13 reporter Nadav Eyal containing excerpts from a classified memo from an Israeli official who attended that fateful meeting. While it may have been the first meeting between Biden and an Israeli prime minister, it was certainly not the last. In subsequent meetings with Israeli prime ministers, Biden threatened Menachem Begin with withholding U.S. aid, and publicly upbraided Benyamin Netanyahu because it had been announced in a town council meeting that 1600 homes were to be built in future in the Jewish Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo (more about this here).   

Joe Biden paints that early meeting with Golda as something precious that cemented in his mind how important Israel is to the Jewish people. It is clear, however, that Joe Biden has always been against the Jewish people settling their indigenous territory. The very thought of Jews planning to build homes in Jerusalem makes him furious. Therefore, contrary to the love fest with Golda he has often described, Biden used the first chance he had to meet with an Israeli prime minister to broach the subject of unilateral concessions.

One wonders how much clout the young senator wielded at that time. Not to mention the timing of subsequent events, with the surprise attack on Israel by Egypt occurring just 40 days after Biden’s meeting with Meir. Is it possible that Golda Meir incurred wider U.S. displeasure by refusing to entertain Biden’s suggestion of unilateral concessions? Was Egypt perhaps emboldened by this state of affairs to attack Israel without fear of American intervention?

During its years in office, Israel fought the 1956 Sinai War, the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. Labor agreed to UN Resolution 242 and the notion of trading land for peace. Nevertheless, successive Labor governments established settlements in the disputed territories and refrained from dismantling illegal settlements, such as those established in 1968 at Qiryat Arba in Hebron by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, and others set up by Gush Emunim. By 1976, more than thirty settlements had been established on the West Bank; however, their population was fewer than 10,000.

"TODAY’S BLOG:

Joe Biden’s Role in the Yom Kippur War

In January 1973, Joe Biden was sworn in as Senator from Delaware.

September of that year found him in the Middle East on a trip to Egypt. Shortly thereafter, Biden was in Israel in a meeting with Israeli PM Golda Meir.

In that meeting, Biden convinced Meir that Egypt would not attack Israel by convincing her that Egypt thought that Israel had absolute military superiority.

The meeting was documented on October 2, 1973 in a secret letter (below) written by Israel Foreign Ministry official Gideon Jordan. Four days later Egypt attacked Israel.

Foreign Ministry official Gideon Jordan summed up Biden’s words as follows: “Of all the personalities (in Egypt) he (Biden) met, he heard that there was not one of them who disbelieved in Israel’s perfect military superiority and therefore stated that it is not possible for Egypt to go to war against Israel now. According to the people he spoke to Egyptians, time will take its course and when God wills, he will find the solution.”

What this letter calls into question is Joe Biden’s extreme misreading of Arab “personalities” and their intentions. His misreading–and that of Israeli intelligence–had disastrous consequences in the Yom Kippur War. One cannot help but think of similar Biden misreadings when it comes to Iran, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

Gideon Jordan later notes in the secret document that Biden was interested in more than Egypt: “The senator repeatedly said that Israel should do a unilateral act, that is to withdraw from some territories, of course not from those territories of strategic importance such as the Golan Heights, Sharm el-Sheikh and the Gaza Strip–but to withdraw without even any negotiations or an agreement with the Arabs.”

Jordan remarks that Meir immediately disagreed with Biden about unilateral withdrawals without achieving true peace. Again, one cannot help but think about the disastrous Biden unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the unilateral concessions that the U.S. has demanded from Israel in the current Lebanon “agreement” talks.

The secret letter is below for those of you who read Hebrew:

When Biden met Meir: Joe Biden advised Jewish PM to trade land for peace - The Jerusalem Post

 Biden meeting between Joe Biden and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, described in a memo published by Israeli reporter Nadav Eyal, sheds light on the former Vice President's thought process at that time, and what he believed Israel should do shortly before the Yom Kippur war broke out. The meeting took place following his return from Egypt where he discussed with Saadat several things, roughly 40 days before the surprise attack that would turn into the Yom Kippur war.

https://www.jpost.com/us-elections/when-biden-met-meir-joe-biden-advised-jewish-pm-to-trade-land-for-peace-646732