JChoe Profile picture
Nov 26 9 tweets 6 min read
This is going to use politicized terms - especially with antisemitism lately - so, again, you've got to exercise a basic, basic skill of disinformation: holding an idea in your head without believing it

What you're seeing here is a sus #nafofella profile tying us to al-Qassam🧵
Again, this is heavily politicized, so let's go with what the U.S. government says.

The Director of Nat'l Intelligence website says al-Qassam is the militant wing of HAMAS.
dni.gov/nctc/groups/ha…

Per State, they're still a terrorist org (since '97)
state.gov/foreign-terror…
This is also timely given Israeli elections.

This is not the time nor place (and I'm not the author) for primer to Israeli politics, so:

Congressional Research Service says, it's chaotic, there's a LOT of different parties and it's very fractious.
crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL…
What just happened was a parliamentary shake-up - I'm not going to pretend to understand the details - that resulted in a very, very far-right government in Israel.

AP:
apnews.com/article/middle…

Guardian: theguardian.com/world/2022/nov…
So it shouldn't be a surprise how Ben-Gvir feels about HAMAS or for that matter al-Qassam.
m.facebook.com/ibengvir/photo…

Understanding the strategy he's using requires, again, suspending some level of whether or not you agree with Ben-Gvir or the US & Israel's treatment of HAMAS.
A direct juxtaposition makes it somewhat clearer.

The upshot here is that for some reason NAFO is becoming somewhat of a football - for at least one rather sus account - in Israeli right-wing politics' strategies of enemy-creation and "other"-ing.
By way of context here, Ben-Gvir saying Ha'aretz is a HAMAS rag is roughly equivalent to....

I don't know, Farage maybe?

...saying The Guardian is, like, a pinko commie rag

It's not very accurate. They're lefty, sure, but also very good factually.
mediabiasfactcheck.com/haaretz/
It's interesting in three ways here:

One, what this says about right-wing politics in general and Israeli right-wing politics,

Two, what this suggests about how the Israeli right feels about NAFO and, by extension, NATO and supporting Ukraine in Russia's war against it
Three, the way that NAFO is becoming - as other #nafoFellas have noted - like antifa or BlackLivesMatter, kind of a catch-all term for any digital grassroots anti-propaganda you don't like.

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More from @JoohnChoe

Nov 26
I don't know a ton about CQB, or room clearing; for me, it's basically skills in armed home invasion, which is singularly un-useful to a civilian.

Still.

My best friend, an 11B during the surge (one of Hertling's folks actually) said something to me once relevant to NAFO:

1/10
It was back in '13 or '14, when I ran a startup and my first investors were my veteran friend who served in Iraq, and my other veteran friend who served in Afghanistan (an 86W medic with the 173rd, coincidentally, also Mark Hertling's folks).

2/10
They're talking about stack order and who goes where in a center-fed room or something, which just means a room where the door is in the middle of a wall.

Infantrymen are (for good reason) like macho, overly-fit nerds about kinds of rooms they clear, I've noticed.

3/10
Read 11 tweets
Nov 25
easy lay-up, but points are points
Read 6 tweets
Nov 23
Got two friends who basically had their lives made by billionaires - they're so smart, tech billionaires made them their advisor on how to spend money.

It does something be around people who can make or destroy your life at a whim. I've seen it.

(🧵)
nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/…
A similar, smaller-scale thing happens to Elon Musk stans and, for that matter, any other fans or support staff of any billionaire you'd care to mention - Gates, Cuban, even Bezos has his stans.

It's not worship for the smart people; it's not precisely careerism either.
There are, for sure, pure 100% sycophants in this mix, people are plainly and publicly kissing ass in the hopes of earning the whimsy of a billionaire that can raise them up to national, even world visibility.

Read 15 tweets
Nov 23
It's really surprising what you can learn by simply being willing to be wrong and accept correction.

If you misspeak, someone calls you out & you accept that, it doesn't diminish you. Denial does that.

If you want to get philosophical about it, that's what a movement does.
1/4
Look at it this way: we've all misspoken, badly, offensively, at some point in our lives, and it's been right.

There are one of two outcomes to that.

The more common one that happens to people is that they deny being offensive, and retreat to within the walls they build.

2/4
This is probably even a valid response to being called out wrongly or trivially, which is something everyone has experienced as well.

There are people who do that as a form of aggression; I'm thinking of a very specific form of academic politics in the humanities.

3/4
Read 5 tweets
Nov 22
This utterly forgettable-looking cat here, Jesse Benton, getting convicted of funneling Russian money last week is a bigger deal to studies of Russia's hybrid war on America than might be apparent.

What you're looking at is DoJ fighting a war on Russian influence campaigns.

🧵
So, first, here's three sources on conviction:

washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/…

cnbc.com/2022/11/18/gop…

cnn.com/2022/11/18/pol…

Yup, this happened.
Benton is straight-up shady going back for years; also, hilariously, some of my friends at Berkeley actually know him.

He's been reportedly trying to sell out to foreign influence campaigns since '16.

courier-journal.com/story/news/pol…
Read 20 tweets
Nov 22
There’s a lot of focus on the hard-right in America fracturing the GOP, which is a pretty old story if you think about it; remember the “Republican Civil War” in ‘17?

Two things about that relevant to today.
One, Jesse Benton.

In ‘17 he was a key figure in funneling funds to Moore to protect the GOP senate majority. I speculate he also controls Rand Paul’s crypto war chest.

We know now what he is.

cnbc.com/amp/2022/11/18…
With the GOP, “all roads lead back to Russia”; it’s still true.

Second, I think it’s missing a quieter but more significant story, to focus on (white) protagonists and antagonists in the (white) Republican Party; not to mention the self-flagellating JD Vance-ness of it all.
Read 4 tweets

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