This is a bad idea. Apologies don't appease bad faith critics. They just embolden them to ask for more, because now they realize they can bully you into groveling. If you show weakness they attack you harder. For instance: Mamdani also capitulated to pressure to tell people not to say "intifada."

Did this make the Wall Street Journal editorial board happy? No. They said it wasn't good enough, that he needed to "condemn" the word as well.

This is the moral rot of US liberalism.

@dpakman is a "progressive" commentator but from his feed you would have absolutely no idea that the US is currently deliberately causing mass starvation in Gaza.

How can you just shut this fact out of your mind like it doesn't exist?


@dpakman I never had any interest in being a commentator on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not my issue, I thought. Leave it to specialists. But over the years I've found myself compelled to write more and more about it because it felt unconscionable not to. The facts make demands on us.

To those still skeptical that Israel is committing war crimes: Will you believe it when it comes from a literal IDF officer saying "yes we murder civilians and then pretend they were terrorists"? If not then, then what amount of evidence will suffice? the answer is that for many of Israel's defenders, the defense is pathological and unrelated to evidence. They cannot believe Israel could be committing war crimes, so they refuse to confront the giant mountain of proof.

Our CA team has gone through every one of Harris's policies and evaluated them. There's stuff that will help people's lives (if carried out), a lot of mediocre half-measures, huge gaps, and some terrible things. But Trump is a nightmare on another level.

currentaffairs.org/news/every-kam… The differences between a Trump and Harris presidency: An unprecedented deportation program with armed ICE agents breaking down doors and tearing families from their homes in unfathomable numbers, total right-wing capture of the court system, ending every environmental protection

The book JD Vance blurbed is truly deranged, praising Pinochet for throwing ppl out of helicopters, encouraging the Great Men of our time to exact eye-for-an-eye justice against the "communists," ban all teachers' unions, & quash "unhumans" with the methods of Franco / McCarthy





guys I think JD Vance might be a fascist...

This is a remarkably soft way of reporting that the president is a serial liar of Santos-level proportions, having said he:
- was selected for the Naval Academy
- was arrested as a civil rights activist
- drove an 18-wheeler
- was the first in his family to go to college he also claimed to have a scholarship he didn't have, to have a degree he didn't, to have been arrested on his way to see Nelson Mandela, to have been asked by Golda Meir to be her liaison to Egypt, to have gone to the Tree of Life synagogue, to have an uncle eaten by cannibals

it's going to take a while for Americans to fully realize the scale of the evil we're responsible for, if we ever do That ISIS attack in Moscow seems like the most depraved, despicable thing human beings are capable of... and then I remember that the carnage we've created in Gaza is hundreds of times worse.

Editorial board of Haaretz, Israel's leading newspaper, says Netanyahu himself is squarely responsible for the disaster, having ignored the potential consequences of escalating aggression toward Palestinians. In other words, this is not some "fringe leftist Hamas-sympathizing" take, but what reasonable Israeli observers see quite clearly. Right-wing policies escalate the cycle of violence and make Israel less secure.

Somehow in 2023, Foreign Policy continues to publish defenses of the totally unjustifiable US atrocities against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The argument is bullshit, though many Americans refuse to believe their country would have committed a horrible crime. The idea is that Japan would not have surrendered ON OUR TERMS without the bombings, not that they would still have been a threat, which they weren't.

Exciting @curaffairs news! We've got a new project, the Biweekly News Briefing. It's a fun but comprehensive analysis of global events, delivered to your inbox twice weekly. It costs a small monthly fee (to pay for research) but the 1st one is free here: currentaffairs.substack.com/p/thursday-jun… This is an experiment for us in doing things that are a little more topical. We need about 1,000 paid subscribers to sustain it at the quality it needs to have. You can get a two week free trial of it here: currentaffairs.substack.com/subscribe?coup…

Some people have too much goddamned money and it should be taxed away from them by the state and used to fund free medical services for the poor. I don't see how anyone can disagree with this. If you don't share this opinion, which strikes me as so basic that to deny it is to deny elementary morality, then I think you are a terrible person without a functioning conscience.

How does a “government funded media” label “call editorial independence into question” unless you hold negative views of public services? Why is NPR adopting the right wing stance that there’s something fishy about being funded by the government? Public media is good! You’re supposed to be National PUBLIC Radio for god’s sake. Why would you be arguing that being a public radio station is inherently editorially compromising???

Today in Newsweek, I make the case that leftists need to study and learn from horrible right-wing pundits like Shapiro and Carlson. Not their toxic ideologies or their propaganda, of course. But we need to get better at communicating to a mass audience.
newsweek.com/right-better-c… I think there is a widespread belief among progressives that the right succeeds just because it is shameless and appeals to people's worst instincts and self-interest. That certainly gives an advantage. But they also work hard on producing clear, simple, effective talking points.

If Seymour Hersh's reporting is correct that US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, it's a major act of international terrorism (and would be labeled as such if Russia did it to us). His account is very specific, down to exactly how it was done:
seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-… The US government has adamantly denied the report. I hope the major papers are now forced to do the kind of investigative work they've conspicuously failed to do so far, and find out the truth. Hersh's report is extremely confident and detailed and he's a legend at this.

Today I asked the AI to interpret the phrase "Soviet Afrofuturism" and this is what it spat out

"they got you fighting a culture war to stop you from fighting a class war"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596072934665240576

remember: he makes money when we fight

I realize JK Rowling's new novel might seem a little long at 1200 pages but a good portion of the space is taken up by fictitious mean tweets sample page from the novel

In 1981, there were 3.5 billion people living on less than $10 a day. In 2017 there were nearly 5 billion. The idea that global capitalism is eliminating extreme poverty is based on adopting an absurd threshold of 2 dollars a day, even though $10/day is still less than 4k a year. Do you think earning 3,600 dollars a year makes a person extremely poor? If so, then there are more extremely poor people in the world than ever before and all this stuff about the end of poverty is absolute horseshit.

Joe Rogan fans say that you need to listen to his show at length to have an informed opinion. Well, I've listened to hundreds of hours of it, & my informed opinion is that it's full of guys talking out of their asses on subjects they haven't researched.

currentaffairs.org/2022/02/on-exp… I do think trying to get Rogan booted from Spotify is a serious mistake, for several reasons: (1) his audience is actually smaller there (2) it makes the discussion about "censorship" & the right claims Silencing (3) it doesn't address the real problem, lack of good public media

An absolutely horrific humanitarian catastrophe that the Biden administration bears major responsibility for. This cruelty should be causing mass protest against the administration but most Americans are oblivious to the effects of our policies on other countries. Sanctions are a weapon. They aren’t usually thought of as a weapon, but they can destroy a country just as surely as bombs and bullets can. And while bombs and bullets can be aimed at purely military targets, sanctions attack the civilian population, starving babies to death.

The sad thing about becoming an antivaxxer, covid truther, or other conspiracy theorist is that the paranoid nonsense destroys not just your brain but also relationships.
Just got Alex Berenson’s book, he admits he trashed his relationship with his dying father over his crusade. Also: “My marriage staggered under the weight of my Twitter obsession.”
Probably Twitter taking away his account is the only thing that saved him from a divorce.