Carbon tariffs is an interesting idea. It would be a fascinating but positive silver lining.

YIIIIIIKES

Big oof

Am I crazy for assuming that they’re in “go for broke” mode, and everyone else assumes this too?

Yeah, that was my thought.

I think it’s clear that Biden and the west is banking on collapsing the country economically, which I totally understand as a reasonable idea. But I think that it fails to account for the incredibly unpredictable and negative consequences of collapsing a state. And that’s before considering that it’s a nuclear state.

I’ve heard of at least one: believe it or not, Hapoel Tel Aviv F.C..

They’re a socialist Israeli football club popular among leftist Israeli Jews and Arab Israelis. Famously, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the American-Israeli hostage who was killed in Gaza in August was among their fans.

As you can imagine, they face a pretty hostile environment throughout Israel these days.

I think people should also be aware that Israeli football culture is notoriously violent and nationalist. Even by Israeli standards.

It should come as no surprise at this point that Israelis have come to believe in an entitlement to act aggressively anywhere in the world and treat any response as illegitimate and unjustifiable. This has become an inherent part of Israeli nationalist culture from top to bottom at this point.

That is factually untrue.

Brig Gen Itzik Cohen declared last week that the hundreds of thousands of people remaining in northern Gaza have been reclassified as combatants and no further food will reach them.

They are going to be eliminated, and the land annexed and resettled.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/07/idf-israel-military-no-return-remarks-north-gaza

I’ve heard this called “soft climate denial”, and unforntuately it’s widespread.

People like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi say that they believe in climate change. But let’s imagine that we’re roommates and you told me that there’s an out of control wildfire a few miles away and the governor has told us all to evacuate. One roommate says that they don’t belive it and they’re staying. And I say ‘Shame on you for denying this! I firmly believe in the wildfire. It’s urgent that we act now, which is why I’ve ordered travel maps on Amazon so we can begin plotting our evacuation route as soon as they arrive.’

Would you characterize this is accepting the crisis, or being in a state of soft denial?

What broad coalition?

There was no coalition. It was a campaign by and for white college educated professional women in the suburbs.

That’s not a coalition, that’s a book club.

Do you know what I’d like to see?

Instead of banning them, ban the extraction of profit on producing and selling them. Turn them into an entirely recreational market. I’d love to see the outcome of trying that.

DAMN! That’s fucking hilarious.

And also… you know. Sad. But boy: it’s wild how well that aged.

That doesn’t sound at all like the point he was making, but I haven’t read the book so I’ll withhold further opinions.

There’s a lot in there I agree with and a lot I find unconvincing, but the thing that really jumped out to me was this line:

Elites seek to concentrate profits. In our book Why Nations Fail, we compare Bill Gates and Carlos Slim. In the book, we point out that while Gates made his fortune through innovation, Slim did so by forming a telecommunications monopoly thanks to his close relationship with the government. It is an example of the link between monopolies and clientelism that has been seen throughout history in Latin America since colonial times.

I’m sorry, what? Does he not remember Microsoft losing perhaps the most famous successful American antitrust case of the last fifty years?

I don’t think this guy is dumb, but I don’t know how to fully take him seriously when he says something like this in passing.

Yeah, which I think is a real weakness in the reporting.

40k dead is bad, but it’s a rounding error of the total population.

A tenth of the total population dead, a fifth or a quarter of the population subjected to severe permanent disabilities, and nearly the entire population displaced, homeless, and presently starving to death is a clear genocide. They really are trying to exterminate them. It strains my ability to comprehend. In any case, “40,000” does not begin to capture the current scale of what has become a pretty standard, unambiguous genocide.

I mean… Isn’t the elephant in the room that this is not going to happen if Trump wins?

It’s like speculating over whether either candidate might push for am arms embargo against Israel after the election.

I don’t really see any ambiguity here. If Trump wins, Zelensky should probably prepare for a complete end to support from the US, right?

Am I missing anything?

Damn, that’s rad as fuck

It sounds like there’s no fundamental disagreement between us. It sounds like the only difference is one of attitude.

I worry sometimes that people express frustration with the state of things as though articulating what people should do might serve as a road map to getting them to do it. But getting people to do it requires understanding why they don’t.

This is true. But it’s incomplete.

We do not have a functioning democracy. Most people feel that. Voting works when there are candidates with voting for, and votes translate into change, but when the system has been hollowed out by money and judicial capture and voting rules designed to prevent actual change, we are in a bind.

Will voting fix this? No, not singularly. So voting doesn’t make a difference? Absolutely not! It’s still one of our most powerful tools, even as weakend as it is!

Vote … and March. Vote… and boycott. Vote… and disrupt. Vote… and organize your neighbors.

We can’t stop voting, but that can’t be our biggest or only tool. And everyone needs to understand this.