#but several orders of magnitude worse

[botaniqueer]

It’s a good development that more and more people are getting disillusioned with Biden because it means people aren’t supporting politicians uncritically despite having voted for them.

The next step to make the most of this is to also realize that Biden isn’t even an outstandingly bad or good president and is average in terms of human rights abuses. What is different about Biden is that COVID, an overly gung-ho US imperialist ally (Netanyahu), and following Trump have made it much harder to control the optics and veneer that the US normally maintains.

He isn’t any more or less genocidal than any of his predecessors or anyone else we’ve personally voted for in the past, but he’s having trouble maintaining the illusion that there is such a thing as a just United States. The curtain that is usually there has been torn by a confluence of events and the machinery that has always been here is easier to see.

[benevolenterrancy]

Hey! I love your artwork esp of Hogan’s Heroes. I like how you portray the group shenanigans and Hogan’s tired dad energy lmao

If you’re still doing requests for art could you do one of this meme please? If you’re not that’s fine!

yup, @colpapabear's post just about sums these two up -- Klink's anxiety is on a hair trigger and boy does Hogan love pulling that trigger

[tarrarre]

She told me she sent him €5000 a few days ago. No comment honestly

[embervoices]

You're underestimating how much it takes to live indefinitely in peace, but yes, beyond the level of "set for life" (which takes multiple millions at least these days) and maaaaybe "leave a legacy" if you want your children to live as well as you have, there's no reason, much less justification, for the hoarding of resources that Billionaires are doing.

Low millions in USD? Very useful. Not unreasonable in current currency rates, but not easy either.

Many millions? I hope you're a philanthropist.

Many thousands of millions? Just exactly how long have you been robbing your employees, short-changing your customers, and dodging taxes?

TAX THE RICH

[mesetacadre]

Throughout contemporary history, especially in the third world where oppression is more explicit and more brutal, the general attitude taken by oppressed peoples at governments that don't represent their interests and that violently supresses them has not been to hope a slightly less worse person is put in place, but rather to overthrow the entire system that supports them and creating another that does represent the interests of the social majority.

To the specific subset of people who prefer to remain ignorant or self-deluded about this fact, the mere suggestion of this might seem unrealistic, unproductive and idealistic. While it is true that the strategy stated above has failed some times, it has also succeeded the rest of the time, and the results have been better than any amount of reform could achieve.

The only actual harm reduction is the organized effort of workers to remove the source of harm altogether, and the only unrealistic strategy is to keep trying to reform your way out of a system that has been reinforcing itself for more than 200 years to guarantee its own existence.

Non-violence is a fairy tale. Almost 10% of the world population went hungry in 2021, and around 2.3 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure. 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing conditions and 15 million are forcefully evicted each year. We could keep going over statistics but the fact is that the global capitalist economy is built atop systematic misery and death. No amount of people with guns could ever even hope to come close to the magnitude of suffering imposed on the exploited. Violence or non-violence is not a choice you can make, it was made for you millenia ago. The only decision you can take is whether to dedicate your efforts towards ending class society, or not. Civility and "rational" centrism is a luxury only those who live by the accumulated wealth looted from everywhere else in the world can afford, and only for as long as their imperialist order can stand.

[heathersdesk]

The Crimes of Brigham Young: the Briefest Introduction

If you're going to be LDS long term, one of the facts you have to accept and make peace with never trying to dispute, is that Brigham Young was a horrible person.

We don't openly talk about this as a community, so you can reach adulthood without ever having to wrestle with this too much. But that makes it all the more shocking when you discover how bad he was.

To say he was deeply flawed doesn't do it justice. Your uncle who says hateful stuff at the dinner table and disrespects his wife and children is deeply flawed. Brigham Young is so much worse than that, by several degrees of magnitude. He introduced and was complicit in extreme violence that was unnecessary and unjustifiable. By the standards of his day and ours, from the perspective of those inside the community and outside, he wasn't a good person. If what you imagine a good leader to be is the King Benjamin definition of someone who does good for his people and doesn't enrich himself from their labors, that's not a test Brigham Young can pass. At all. Not even a little bit.

There's too much history to get into, but here are the basics:

Brigham Young enriched himself constantly from other people. He gave himself the largest allowance of any Church leader in our history. He was living in finery when the rest of the Utah Territory was living in deprivation and squalor. He abused his position within the Church/consecration to make sure he never went without. D. Michael Quinn is the best authority we have on church finances and, to summarize his work, Church leadership has only improved over time in terms of leaders not abusing Church resources. But that was very easy to do because of how much Brigham Young abused them for his personal benefit.

The fact that he was openly racist and introduced slavery to the Utah Territory, undoing the work of Joseph Smith to put black and white Saints on more equal footing with each other is no secret. The Church openly admits to that one now, which is good. We need to be honest about the harm the institution has done in the past towards black people, and we're doing better on that front.

Where we still fail is the overwhelming amounts of violence and genocide our people engaged in against various indigenous tribes across the Midwest and in the areas of pioneer settlement in the Intermountain West. You may have heard of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which is the event where John D. Lee murdered a group of innocent white travelers that were passing through Utah. What you may not know is that skirmish was part of the larger Black Hawk War against indigenous tribes that included over twenty years of violence, in which our people were consistently the aggressors. Mountain Meadows is the one you've heard of because, true to American form, we only acknowledge white wrongdoing when it hurts other white people. The number of indigenous people who were murdered in genocidal violence by the hands of our people, at the express orders of Brigham Young, is undeniable. It's well-documented history.

This is just one extermination order that exists in which senior Church leadership calls for the total extermination of entire indigenous tribes and nations. They used the Nauvoo Legion to do this.

You would think a group of people who were exterminated with orders like these would know better. But that's the trouble with unhealed trauma: it keeps you from learning from the worst things that happen to you and makes you repeat them instead.

Brigham Young didn't want to live adjacent to indigenous people in the Utah Territory and surrounding areas. He wanted their anhialation. He wanted to take their lands and their possessions. That's what he did to indigenous people who helped our people survive in terrain and elements they weren't prepared to live in. He rewarded them with violence, dishonesty, and betrayal.

There are many reasons you will hear me say that I want a one-on-one socker bopper fight with Brigham Young in a Wendy's parking lot. He has a lot to apologize for, to me and many other people. You cannot begin to understand what that means if you've never seen the scope of how much harm he did.

I love y'all. I'm sorry if I'm the one to tell you this, especially if your people were involved and you were lied to about it. You deserve the truth. That's why I'm telling you. We cannot heal from what we don't acknowledge, and so much of the way we are today as a community is a direct result of all this violence. It's why our people mistrust outsiders, attempt to solve problems with unnecessary violence, and discredit any criticism for their loyalties to the prophet and senior Church leadership. It's who our people have been for so long, there is real intergenerational fear in trying to be anything else.

But that healing is necessary so we can stop repeating the mistakes of the past.

The Book of Mormon teaches in 2 Nephi 9:40:

I know that the words of truth are hard against all uncleanness; but the righteous fear them not, for they love the truth and are not shaken.

We are comfortable acknowledging this to be true about outsiders. Do we believe it when it concerns our own? Do we actually care more about what is right, rather than who we want to believe is right?

Such examination requires faith, honesty, and courage. Truth doesn't have the power to destroy faith, only flimsy and undeserved certainty. And if your certainty was based in falsehood, then best to dispense with it so you can live more fully in the truth.

[ladyaldhelm]

This post is a very long rant about Generative AI. If you are not in the headspace to read such content right now, please continue scrolling.

....

....

It has come to my attention that a person who I deeply admire is Pro-AI. Not just Pro-AI, but has become a shill for a multi-billion dollar corporation to promote their destructive generative AI tools, and is doing it voluntarily and willingly. This person is a creative professional and should know better, and this decision by them shows a lack of integrity and empathy for their fellow creatives. They have sold out to not just their own destruction, but to everyone around them, without any concern. It thoroughly disgusts and disappoints me.

Listen, I am not against technological advancements. While I am never the first to adopt a new technology, I have marveled at the leaps and bounds that have been made within my own lifetime, and welcome progress. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models certainly have their place in this world. Right now, scientific researchers are using advanced AI modeling to discover new protein configurations using a program called Alpha-Fold, and the millions of new proteins that were discovered have gone on to the development of life saving cancer treatments, vaccine development, and looking for new ways to battle drug-resistant bacterial infections. Machine learning models are being developed to track and predict climate change with terrifying accuracy, discover new species, researching new ways of dealing with plastic waste and CO2/methane, and developing highly accurate tools for early detection of cancers. These are all amazing advancements that have only been made possible by AI and will save countless millions of lives. THIS is what AI should be used for.

Generative AI, however, is a different beast entirely. It is problematic in many ways, and is destructive by its very nature. All the current models were trained on BILLIONS of copyrighted materials (images, music, text), without the creator's consent or knowledge. That in and of itself is highly unethical. In addition, these computers that run these GenAI programs use an insane amount of resources to run, and are a major contributor to climate change right now, even worse than the NFT and blockchain stuff a few years ago.

GenAI literally takes someone's hard work, puts it into an algorithm that chews it up and spits out some kind of abomination, all with no effort on the part of the user. And then these "creations" are being sold by the boatload, crowding out legitimate artists and professional creatives. Artists like myself and thousands of others who rely on income from art. Musicians, film makers, novelists, and writers are losing as well. It is an uphill battle. The market is flooded right now with so many AI generated art and books that actual artists and writers are being buried. To make matters worse, these generated works often have inaccuracies and spread misinformation and and lead to injury or even death. There are so many AI generated books, for example, about pet care and foraging for plants that are littered with inaccurate and downright dangerous information. Telling people that certain toxic plants are safe to eat, or giving information on pet care that will lead to the animal suffering and dying. People are already being affected by this. It is bad enough when actual authors spread misinformation, but when someone can generate an entire book in a few seconds, this gets multiplied by several orders of magnitude. It makes finding legitimate information difficult or even downright impossible.

GenAI seeks to turn the arts into a commodity, a get-rich-quick money making scheme, which is not the point of art. Automating art should never be the goal of humanity. Automating dangerous and tedious tasks is important for progress, but automating art is taking away our humanity. Art is all about the human experience and human expression, something a machine cannot ever replicate and it SHOULDN'T. Art should come from the heart and soul, not some crap that is mass produced to make a quick buck. Also developing your skills as an artist, whether that is through drawing, painting, sculpture, composing music, songwriting, poetry, creative writing, animation, photography, or making films, are not just about human expression but develop your brain and make you a more well rounded person, with a rich and deep experience and emotional connection to others. Shitting out crappy art and writing just to make a quick dollar defeats the entire purpose of all of that.

In addition, over-reliance on automated and AI tools is already leading to cognitive decline and the deterioration of critical thinking skills. When it is so easy to click a button and generate a research paper why bother putting the work in? Students are already doing this. Taking the easy way out to get a grade, but they are only hurting themselves. When machines do your thinking for you, what is there left to do? People will lose the ability to develop even basic skills.

/rant

By the way if any tech bros come at me you will be blocked without warning. This is not up for debate or discussion.

[hedge-rambles]

I mean, I don't think it's particularly nonsensical? Soul siphoning may be controversial and dodgy in a way people find distasteful, but there's this teensy tiny difference between "temporarily displacing your cav's soul for some power" and "murdering them and unmaking them as a person to burn their soul forever".

you know the anecdotal thing about how Christian kids who really love the gospel and grow up extremely devout are the ones who are most likely to leave the church, because they're the ones who will actually study and try to understand and realize the contradictions between their theology and the culture of their congregation, rather than just following tradition because it's what they're told?

this is a post about Harrowhark Nonagesimus and heresy

[throathole]

It is really absolutely inexcusable to STILL be using Twitter / “X” in the year 2025 like… girl the time to jump ship was several YEARS ago and it somehow continues to get orders of magnitude worse every year, what the fuck could possibly be keeping you there?? “I only use it for porn” nothing against sex workers who post content for a living but all of those people you’re jerking off to are really just using twitter to advertise their onlyfans, and onlyfans massively funds Israeli lobbies. So you are okay with your presence on this website funding Israel AND arguably the worst man in the world because the pictures make your dick hard. My brother in Christ there are One William terabytes of porn across the Internet in places that are not entirely co-opted by right wing pieces of shit what the fuck are you doing with your precious few minutes on this earth!

[voodoobuddha]

One of the reasons I love romancing Emmrich as a Warden Rook is because it's less 'match my freak ' and more 'my freak has recently gotten several orders of magnitude worse than it's ever been, and your freak is stable and pleasant in comparison.'.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Why Trump's corruption matters.

May 28, 2025

Robert B. Hubbell

Tuesday was a mixed day for defenders of democracy. On the one hand, the president’s corruption boiled over in a public display of graft on a scale and depth of depravity never before seen in our nation’s history—a display directly traceable to the Supreme Court’s immunity decision. On the other hand, the courts continued to grant relief to almost everyone who has risen to challenge Trump's reign of lawlessness.

As to the public display of graft, the obvious question is, “What can we do about it?” In a healthy democracy, Trump would have already been impeached, convicted, and removed from office by joint action of the House and Senate.

Because the GOP will not defend the Constitution by impeaching Trump, the next obvious remedy is to prosecute Trump under the US criminal code—a route barred (with one exception) by the US Supreme Court’s grant of presidential immunity in Trump v. US.

Once again, the remedy falls to us. We must speak the truth about Trump's public corruption. And, once again, I remind those who say, “It won’t matter; Trump doesn’t care; his base doesn’t care,” that we are not speaking to Trump or his base. We are talking to persuadable voters who supported Trump and eligible voters who stayed home in 2024. We are speaking to family members, children, and grandchildren. We are speaking to future historians. And we are reminding ourselves that honest government matters to us.

If we stop caring about corruption, surrender to cynicism, or succumb to defeatism, our democracy is lost. We cannot let that happen. We will not let it happen—not on our watch.

Yes, it is painful and galling to review the daily corruption by Trump, but we must be able to communicate that corruption to everyone who matters.

So, let’s take a look at the actions by the most corrupt administration in history.

Why Trump’s corruption matters.

Trump’s corruption is becoming more blatant and public—while the media is becoming increasingly quiet about the unfolding scandals. Josh Marshall describes the increasing complacency of the media as “The Great Quieting.” (“[L]ots of things are not being said or reported because people are afraid to say them.”)

Multiple scandals, several orders of magnitude worse than Watergate, unfolded over the last 72 hours, but the media is eerily quiet about the cascading corruption. (Except for Jake Tapper, who is on British television telling anyone who will listen that the alleged “cover up” about Joe Biden's health is “worse than Watergate”—while Tapper says nothing about Trump's current scandals because they won’t help boost his book sales. No wonder the trending meme on the internet is “F*** Jake Tapper.”)

The corruption is so bad that the person Trump has appointed to lead the DOJ Office of Pardons—the disgraced Ed Martin—tweeted “No MAGA left behind” after announcing the pardon of a corrupt Virginia sheriff convicted of “selling” fake police badges. See Alternet, 'No MAGA left behind': Outrage as Trump pardon chief issues new vow.

Ed Martin’s shameful tweet is a play on the unofficial motto of the US military: “No man left behind.” But in Martin’s perverted version, he is saying that the DOJ will not leave any MAGA convicted criminal without a pardon—no matter how egregious the crime.

On Memorial Day, Trump pardoned Sheriff Scott Jenkins for issuing police badges in exchange for bribes. See Rolling Stone, Trump Capped Memorial Day by Pardoning a Crooked Sheriff. A jury convicted Jenkins on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy, and bribery. Ed Martin’s post-pardon tweet made clear that Sheriff Jenkins was pardoned under the “No MAGA Left Behind” policy.

To a similar effect is the pardon of Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to tax violations. Per the NYTimes

[Walczak] withheld more than $10 million from the paychecks of the nurses, doctors and others who worked at his facilities under the pretext of using it for their Social Security, Medicare and federal income taxes. Instead, he used some of the money to buy a $2 million yacht and to pay for travel and purchases at high-end retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman and Cartier, prosecutors said.

Trump pardoned Walczak three weeks after his mother attended a $1 million-per-person fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

In any other administration with any other Congress, the president would be subject to an impeachment investigation, if not conviction and removal. The facts strongly suggest a quid pro quo that deserves scrutiny. But under the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, Trump's exercise of his core presidential power of issuing pardons is above the law.

So, too, with Trump's pardon of two “reality TV stars,” convicted of tax evasion and fraud. CNBC, Trump to pardon reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley.

Trump pardoned the Chrisleys after their daughter made a request to Trump. The Chrisleys’ daughter actively campaigned for Trump in 2024, leading the “Women’s Tour for Trump.” Loyalty to Trump matters above all else, including defrauding innocent victims.

But the pardons are chump change for Trump. The parent company for his social media venture announced on Tuesday that it was raising $2.5 billion for a cryptocurrency fund. See Business Insider, Trump Media Is Raising $2.5 Billion To Build A Bitcoin Reserve.

The president, of course, is presiding over decisions regarding the future regulation of the crypto industry, which he once called a “scam.” He recently hosted a dinner at the White House for the largest purchasers of a newly issued crypto meme coin called $TRUMP.

Within a matter of hours, the worthless $TRUMP meme coin became the 15th largest cryptocurrency in the world.

Why?

Because it provides access to President Trump, which is precisely what the largest purchasers received when they were invited to the White House for a dinner with Trump.

When reporters asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about the obvious conflicts of interest for a president selling cryptocurrency that granted access to the White House, she responded that the dinner and related activities were done on Trump's “personal time.” See Mediate, Karoline Leavitt Insists Trump Is Attending Shady Crypto Dinner With Foreign Investors in His ‘Personal Time’

Bingo! If Trump is “selling” access to the White House on his “personal time,” then the presidential immunity granted by the Supreme Court does not apply. See Raw Story, White House claim puts Trump 'potentially outside the immunity shield': attorney.

So, Trump's grotesque spree of corruption may have exceeded the capacious boundaries of presidential immunity granted by the Supreme Court. There is still hope that Trump will be criminally convicted after his term expires!

But, regardless of what happens, we must remember, “It’s the corruption, people!” The cavalcade of corruption is taking place at the very moment that the Senate is considering cutting off lifesaving benefits for tens of millions of Americans. It doesn’t get any more outrageous than that!

Successes in Resisting Trump's lawless agenda

Now that we have addressed Trump's corruption, let’s look at successful efforts to resist his lawless agenda.

Perhaps the most instructive story is that a CNN journalist who was about to be barred from Pete Hegseth’s trip to Singapore because the journalist had hurt Hegseth’s tender feelings with mean tweets. The other journalists in the Pentagon press pool took the only sensible action—they refused as a group to travel with Hegseth to Singapore, thereby denying Hegseth the media coverage that prevents him from melting like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Guess what the Pentagon did? It relented and allowed the CNN journalist to travel as part of the press pool on Hegseth’s trip to Singapore. See Oliver Darcy, Status News, Hegseth's Safe Space.

The moral of this story should be burned into the hearts and minds of everyone who resists Trump: Together, there is nothing we cannot do!

Next, NPR has sued the Trump administration over cuts to public broadcasting imposed in an executive order. See NPR, NPR, public radio stations sue Trump White House over funding ban.

Before commenting on the NPR suit, it bears repeating that the president has no authority to cut, withhold, or impound funds appropriated by Congress. Doing so violates Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Trump's conduct in withholding funds appropriated by Congress is an impeachable offense that should result in Trump's conviction and removal from office.

Because Trump's actions are unconstitutional and illegal, NPR will win. The resistance by NPR is precisely what every institution affected by illegal executive orders should do.

The NPR story has another positive aspect—the fact that the preeminent law firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and star attorney Ted Boutrous are representing NPR in its lawsuit against the administration. Some of Gibson Dunn’s most prominent attorneys have long been part of the Republican establishment. But those past political associations did not stop Gibson Dunn from taking on NPR as a client in a just lawsuit against an illegal order.

Kudos to Gibson Dunn and Ted Boutrous. They are leading by example during a fraught time in our nation’s history. [Disclosure: I was a partner at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher for several years before joining Morrison & Foerster.]

Speaking of the legal profession being put to the test, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon issued a permanent injunction in favor of the law firm WilmerHale in its lawsuit challenging Trump's executive order, which punished the firm for employing Robert Mueller.

The opinion is here: Wilmer Hale v. Executive Office of President | Memorandum Opinion | 5/27/25.

Judge Leon found that Trump's executive order violated the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution as well as the doctrine of separation of powers. In the introduction to his opinion, Judge Leon writes:

The cornerstone of the American system of justice is an independent judiciary and an independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting. The Founding Fathers knew this! Accordingly, they took pains to enshrine in the Constitution certain rights that would serve as the foundation for that independence. Little wonder that in the nearly 250 years since the Constitution was adopted no Executive Order has been issued challenging these fundamental rights. Now, however, several Executive Orders have been issued directly challenging these rights and that independence. One of these Orders is the subject of this case. For the reasons set forth below, I have concluded that this Order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional. Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!

The future of the legal profession hangs in the balance. Some firms—such as WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie, Gibson Dunn, King & Spalding, Quinn Emanuel, Susman Godfrey, and Covington & Burling—have stood up to Trump. Others have capitulated.1

The lesson of Wilmer Hale is that resistance works and encourages others to resist. The legal profession must remain united in its opposition to the lawlessness of the Trump administration.

In the section below on Opportunities for Reader Engagement, I invite everyone (but especially lawyers) to join an event by Speak Up For Justice, an initiative by leaders in the legal profession to defend the judiciary against attacks by the administration.

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

This is highly pedantic but I really, really, really want to take the word "diaspora" away from people who have been to grad school. Language evolves and words don't have fixed meanings but diaspora once meant the scattering of the Jews specifically. Implicitly the phrase, used thus, indicates extreme duress and even compulsion. It has also been used for Protestants fleeing Europe on pain of torture and death and of Africans who were kidnapped and sold into the transatlantic slave trade. People might also use it to describe the Irish fleeing literal starvation in the 19th century. There is no shortage of these examples but again, the thing you will find they have in common, is extreme, mortal danger coupled with intense, multi-generational grief for being compelled to leave the place of origin. Almost always some external force is compelling migration through violence. The phrase "diaspora" should be reserved for examples of this intensity.

But scholars--I strongly suspect hoping to get a little of the intersectional capital of the more intense (i.e., legitimate) examples--apply the phrase to any instance of a population being somewhere they "shouldn't be," as if that meant anything at all. If there is a population of group A that started in place A but is now in places A, B, and C, you've got yourself a diaspora no matter the cause for their migration.

I'm sure there are Korean and Indian migrants who would have preferred not to move to the United States or Western Europe in pursuit of career or education but it doesn't quite have the same sting that one finds with the transatlantic slave trade, does it?

"But Ivan, moving away from home makes people sad, and diaspora just means scattering, so any migration is a diaspora in a way" yes but the thing is, some of the examples are so intense, so severe, so catastrophic in their consequences for centuries after the fact, that they're kind of in their own category. And I can't shake the suspicion that scholars are trying to get away with some rhetorical sleight of hand to make their particular subject seem more important.

It's a bit like genocide. Is it really genocide or is it ethnic cleansing or something else that's bad but not quite as bad as genocide? If you can get--and such is the perversion of our moral imaginations--if you can get that laurel of a proper genocide, it just seems to unlock some kind of prestige that the so-called lower crimes just can't capture.

Diaspora should not be the same as migration. It should be reserved for examples that unfold over extreme--extreme--duress. Or else, we need to find a new word for the phenomenon that was once described as "diaspora" because fleeing literal starvation, violent and repressive conquest, torture at the hands of the Inquisition, or being kidnapped and sold into slavery are orders of magnitude worse than being sad that you are moving because you want to make more money.

[dostoyevsky-official]

Peace. It is time to bring back this word. Even more, it is time to expect and demand it. In the midst of what we thought was peace, we were wrong not to prepare and think of war. In the midst of a brutal war, it is time to envision peace. It used to be understood that this is how wars end. One side wins and another side loses, even surrenders. [...] A year ago, on October 7th, when Israel declared war in response to the Palestinian invasion, occupation, brutal massacre, and kidnapping, we made the cardinal of declaring war only against Hamas, when we should have declared war on the ideology of Palestinianism – of which Hamas is but the most recent and brutal executor. On October 7th we should have said, and we should still say, “This ends here: from Gaza to Columbia, this ideology, that for more than a century has vowed to prevent, and then undo, the existence of a sovereign state for the Jewish people in any part and of any size in the ancestral homeland, must die.” This kind of declaration would have also naturally led to a vision of peace. We need to declare that this war ends when that ideology of Palestinianism is replaced with a constructive one. It needs to be replaced by an ideology that seeks to live next to a Jewish state, rather than instead of it as understood from the chant refrain From The River to the Sea. The war will end when Palestinianism dies This is a vision we must reiterate daily. We need a leader who every day speaks to the world to say that “the day that Palestinians end their century-long war with Zionism, the day they develop a constructive vision rather than a destructive one, the day they want to live next to a Jewish state, rather than instead of it, the day they understand they are not multiple-generational refugees, and accept that there is no such thing as a 'right of return' into the sovereign territory of the state of Israel, is the day that they will find, as it always was, that we are willing to live in peace with them side by side in two separate states.” This is the vision we need to uphold with Lebanon. No more feeble calls to implement previous UN resolutions that no one bothered to enforce until Israel started enforcing Hezbollah’s disarmament by force. We need to demand that this war ends with full and complete peace between Lebanon and Israel, nothing less. We have no territorial dispute with Lebanon and until they choose peace, it shall be war – we will decide when and how to fight it – but no more one-sided ceasefires, empty UN resolutions, and worse than useless UN “peacekeeping forces.” Finally, we must go back to those neighboring countries with whom we officially have peace, and demand that they finally begin to look like peace, rather than glorified nonbelligerency agreements. While we have given Egypt the entirety of the Sinai Peninsula, we received much less than peace in return.

this is a former Labor MK and a representative of the israeli jewish left. this whole short article is a racist sham filled with half-truths, lies, equivocations, and distortions, beginning with the overarching framework that the self-determination of the palestinian people is an "ideology of palestinianism," whereas the poor israelis are oppressed from having their own state. it's riddled with typical israeli self-victimization, despite the fact they are the ones who have created several magnitudes of order greater numbers of corpses than their enemies.

this is what mainstream liberal-left zionism looks like. there are indeed a few organizations and individuals in israel that are committed to anti-zionism and genuine peace with palestinians, like hadash. but to say that society, which proudly proclaims itself to be the sole democratic one in the middle east, is non-belligerent and working for peace is a canard and a pack of lies, especially when one considers that labor itself has long been marginalized. if this is the marginal left view, what does mainstream israeli society think?

[qqueenofhades]

Extremely stupid and contradictory question that I still want an answer to, but what is it that makes people want a dictatorship with progressive values?

For that matter, why is it that nearly all dictatorships are so fundamentally built on conservative/authoritarian ideals and values?

Why doesn't genuinely good values ever end up being the core value that gets enforced with ruthless brutality instead of people twisting themselves into knots to justify always sinking to the worst possible impulses built on hatred?

Is decency just fundamentally anathema to it?

This is one of those questions where you're actually asking several different things at once, and it will take a lot of work for me to explain and contextualize everything that you're looking for. However, I do think this is important to understand, so I'll give it a shot.

First, if I may point out, you've answered a bit of your own question when you ask "why don't genuinely good values ever end up being enforced with ruthless brutality?" I think it's fair to say that if your values were actually good or something that would broadly benefit the lives of most people, they would not need to be enforced with ruthless brutality. This is the case regardless of which ideology your totalitarian dictatorship is built on; i.e. conservative Christian fascism or left-wing old-school communism/People's Republics. Because a dictatorship, no matter which values it claims to use to justify itself, never exists to benefit people. A dictatorship exists to vest supreme power in one person or system and totally disenfranchise everyone else, and it is not, regardless of what some people on the internet in 2023 seem to think, a tool of social justice. Marginalized groups who have a hard time in a traditionally white/culturally Christian Western democracy will nonetheless have an orders of magnitude worse time under a dictatorship, as will everyone else. It is not something you should wish for under any circumstances, and also represents a naïve Western privilege where, having grown up with the unpleasant consequences of late-stage capitalism, people go for the fallacy that old-school communism must be better! Except it isn't, and when you totally blow over and ignore the objections of people who actually grew up under those regimes and warn you that they're not so great, you're just straight-up projecting and wishful thinking. It has nothing to do with reality or history or what anyone should aspire to.

The idea has existed in human society for thousands of years that if you can just get a "benevolent dictator" or "merciful autocrat," who can be trusted to rule with supreme power, do what's right for everyone, and get rid of the messy and flawed process of representative democracy that never seems to quite fix society's biggest problems. However: this doesn't work, it has never worked, there have been countless wars fought over this question, and it would certainly never, ever work in a setting as complex as the globalized twenty-first century. The Online Leftists who want Bernie Sanders, an old white man, to be their all-powerful dictator -- that is, uh, not the Social Justice Flex (tm) you think it is. And as noted, a dictator of any stripe is fundamentally anathema to actual progressivism or social justice, and anyone who loudly wants one (or thinks that the American president should act like one) is exposing both their profoundly immature understanding of the situation and a worrisome thirst for tyrannical despotism as long as it has "the right ideas." This has, again, caused countless wars and numberless deaths, because "the right ideas" will never be universal, universally agreed upon, or anything else, and if they're enforced with violence, you have -- again -- a dictatorship! It's not great!

In chaotic and uncertain times, people tend to want a "strong leader" who they can trust to just fix all their problems and relieve them from the burden of governance or worrying how things are going to work out. This was first articulated in modern Western political philosophy by Thomas Hobbes, who wrote his Leviathan in the mid-17th century during the English Civil War. Basically, his idea was that the people should democratically elect an absolute monarch/leader, who would then rule with an iron fist and retain supreme power, because they couldn't be trusted to govern themselves. (Hobbes is also where we get the pessimistic description of life being "nasty, brutish, and short.") Because things are bad right now, people likewise tend to want an absolute monarch of either right or left political persuasion, but these are both very bad options and should be equally resisted.

Democracy is flawed, imperfect, slow, cumbersome, and contradictory. It can be badly hijacked and corrupted (as we've seen in the last few years) by money, misinformation, bad-faith actors, and more. It is also still always, 100%, all-of-the-time preferable to a dictatorship. People still fall for the idea that having an absolute monarch who just "makes things happen" right away without the cumbersome apparatus of congresses or senates or supreme courts of judges would be "better," and totally ignore the massive and systemic disenfranchisement it would impose on everyone else. Especially in our current misogynist white-supremacist homophobic etc. system; the dictator WOULD be a rich white dude and let's not even pretend otherwise. Even if he made a play at being "progressive," it would not be true and it would not last. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, etc. etc. I do not want a dictatorship. I do not want to live in a dictatorship. I don't care what Good Intentions (tm) anyone has, because I think that anyone who wants to be a dictator or to live under a dictatorship has a very different idea of Good Intentions than I, or indeed most sane people, do. The end.

Yes, America is a deeply flawed country. Yes, it is built on systemic and ongoing racial and cultural white-settler-colonial genocide. However, where modern leftists struggle the most is the idea that two things can be true, because they're so deeply sunk into black-and-white, zero-sum thinking where if one thing is true, it rejects all the others. If we have a flawed democracy, the solution is to fix that democracy, not to just throw it out the window and cavil for an absolute monarch. You can be fiercely critical of America's imperialist actions, unnecessary wars, racist violence, and everything else while also realizing that if the first and oldest presidential democratic republic in existence was dismantled or turned into a fascist autocracy, it would be absolutely terrible for many, many countries around the world, and humankind in general. You do not have to subscribe to the nonsensical, navel-gazing tankie "logic" that America is the only country with (evil) agency ever, and everyone else in the world is just its helpless pawns. You do not have to subscribe to the idea that any work within the system, or accepting basic political realities, makes you a "bootlicking neoliberal shill" or whatever they're using to insult anyone who doesn't just live in their distorted bubble of self-righteous ignorance. You don't!

As I always say, the only people who really want a dictatorship are those who know that their ideas aren't popular enough to win a free and fair election, but think they "deserve" to be in power anyway, because etc. etc. My Ideas Are Better! (Spoiler alert: they are not.) This is the same whether it's the Republicans trying to outlaw elections or the Online Leftists who sanctimoniously refuse to engage with the civic process because it's "contaminating" for their Pure Ideas to make any compromise with reality. And yet those so-called progressives are utterly dependent on us Normie Liberals who actually vote against the rabid fascists, and are (just barely) holding the line. Because yes, in a liberal democracy, they do have the right to be sanctimonious, useless, toxic, holier-than-thou ideologues who sit on their asses and contribute nothing to the actual dirty process of change. But if the Normie Liberals haughtily refused to vote in the same way the Online Leftists do, the fascists WOULD be in complete control by now, and trust me, it would be grim.

To be frank, I think most, if not all, of what calls itself "Western leftism" has categorically and completely failed as a moral, political, or practical opposing force to right-wing fascism. Much of it is dependent on savagely backbiting even those people who already agree with you, refusing to take basic steps to enact change even incrementally (i.e. voting), and attacking the establishment liberal party, i.e. the Democrats in America, while vocally supporting foreign dictatorships as long as they're "anti-American" or ancestrally "socialist." We've seen the utter failure of Western leftists at developing a moral stance on Ukraine, a consistent opposition to Trump, or pretty much anything else that requires them to come down from their high horses and accept a more complex reality than their abstract purity tests or outright nonsensical clichés. And when you're attacking the Democrats nonstop and backing foreign dictatorships, that is, uh, pretty much the exact same thing that the fascist Republicans are doing. Which means both of these groups are profoundly and dangerously anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanity. There's no way around it.

In short, so-called "progressives" want a dictatorship because they too have given up on democracy, don't believe that people at large are as "smart" as they are, and don't want actual praxis or the effort of making change within a flawed democracy. They subscribe instead to the magical thinking that an absolute monarch will instantly and benevolently fix everything, which has -- as noted -- been violently disproved over and over in human history, and they think that "leftism" consists of having the most "pure" views. They do not care about or actively deplore any idea of making compromises to put them into practice, they gain moral superiority by excluding more and more people to make a smaller and smaller in-group, they refuse to accept any information, history, or factual evidence that contradicts their beliefs, and they're just as angrily anti-intellectual as the worst Christian-fascist-nutjob-right-winger, because reality has a bad habit of being complicated and not fitting into neat boxes. And if you think, as I do, that it would be a very, very bad idea to trust these mean, vindictive, constantly-want-to-punish-everyone-who-is-not-exactly-like-them people with absolute power, then you'll have to move to the idea of accepting that for all its flaws, democracy is still the best and most just system we have yet invented for governing ourselves, and the idea is to fix ours, not get rid of it entirely. So yeah.

[velvetvexations]

I have to say I’m relieved to see you speaking on and listening to people about Russophobia and also acknowledging citizens shouldn’t be punished for the gov. As a Russian (in Russia) follower I did get kind of frightened sometimes that if you know where I was and who I was you’d hate me for being Russian with how angrily you posted about Russians in the past. I am of course severely anti-war. Thank you Velvet.

I'll be honest anon, I used to be way more aggressive about it, even in spite of those friends I mentioned still missing and hoping they're doing okay. In fact, it was just the other day it occurred to me to log on to my Bluesky account I never use to take "Russia delenda est" out of the bio.

I had vaguely negative opinions about Russia because I had also followed Crimea back in 2014 but it was mostly lowkey until the conflict fired back up. Genuinely maybe the darkest things I've ever said to insult anyone was to vatniks on Twitter in 2022 and 2023, although in my defense, they were vatniks vigorously supporting the war and not random people. Also, even at my peak "lol get fucked orcs" I knew enough to respect and admire individual Russians who went against the grain. Gary Kaspraov in particular is an endlessly fascinating and cool guy who did a lot to educate me on the history and politics involved, and even before he was killed I thought people dismissing Navalny because of problamatic issues in the past were kinna being dicks to a guy who threw himself into risking life and limb for the cause.

It took a lot to tone things down. Someone I'd been friends with for a few years (and still am) mentioned that they were half-Russian and the way people were occasionally got to them, so I resolved to be better about it, because if I could recognize individual Russians as good people I shouldn't punish them for it by making them put up with being lumped in with vatniks. Before this past week I still had only heard of Russophobia from propagandists arguing the world was being so mean to them for starting a war, but now I know more about it.

I still have complicated feelings about Russia. It's weird. If I tried to explain why someone who's barely gone a few miles outside of her home state would feel so strongly about a country a world away, it'd probably just make me look stupid. I know more about Russia and Russian history than I do any other country save Japan and England, but unlike those two, at least before I started getting serious about my interest in Imperial Japan, it was never through Russian pop culture. I'd compare it to how you might feel if your only exposure to America were books about the KKK and school shootings. So I have a pretty harshly negative opinion about Russian society that is probably not rationally proportionate to the degree to which Russia can be said to be worse than like, the US or anywhere else, even if it is still worse by an order of magnitude.

But really, "worse" is kinna a silly thing to say in conversations like this. I'm not qualified to rank nations by human rights even if my feelings about how much "worse" another country is seems airtight.

Then, also, there is that I bear a very deep-seated grudge over the Soviets fucking over Romania for the entire 20th century, and also the Winter War.*

So my hostility towards Russia has never really been rational, but the sPeCiAl MiLiTaRy OpErAtIoN really shot some adrenaline into those negative feelings and it took some work to tame it.

*I'm not going to explain why these things matter to me

[sophieinwonderland]

the people at Gitmo are, much of the time, held without trial and subjected to "enhanced integration techniques" (torture) to attempt to extract information that many of the accused may not even have in the first place. Many of those people are not "war criminals," a fair number of them are innocent civilians, and even if they had been tried and convicted, their treatment would be illegal if it were on US soil for how cruel and unusual it is. Do not pretend that anything happening there has ever been okay.

"A fair number of" who, exactly? The 780 that it held at its maximum capacity? Or the 15 who resided there at the end of Biden's administration?

Everything that you said about Guantanamo Bay is 100% correct. But I don't think it's very relevant.

I am not defending the continued use of Guantanamo Bay under Obama and Biden. But I do think that we should acknowledge that both presidents reduced the number of detainees held there over the course of their presidencies. It's likely that the number would have decreased even further under a Harris presidency.

Before this year, the Guantanamo Bay prison was dying a slow death at the hands of several poison pills meant to kill it. It absolutely sucks this didn't happen in 2009 when Obama promised it would. But on its previous course, the facility was doomed to be emptied.

Under Donald Trump, it is slated to be filled up nearly 40 times as high as it was at its maximum capacity.

Focusing on the Democrats not doing enough to completely close it down instantly, and instead just slowly closing it down... It's beside the point to what is actually happening right now.

I am sick of the blame game that points the fingers to Democrats because they were too slow at fighting injustice, in order to distract from the people who are actually perpetuating and causing the injustices.

The man who wanted Adolf Hitler's generals is creating a concentration camp at a facility infamous for torturing inmates, where media won't be allowed to see the human rights abuses that take place there, and it's going to be used to detain people captured on US soil without a trial.

This is a nightmare scenario that is magnitudes worse than Guantano Bay was even during the Bush era.