@tillshadeisgone @jdp23 And as for AIPAC, *none* of how you characterize it is correct (nor Zionism - it's not an American project, it's a Central/Eastern European Jewish one). The line that it unseated two sitting members of Congress is repeated by AIPAC (to make itself look important) and by anti-Semites (to make Zionism look conspiratorial), and meanwhile, normal election analysts point out how both Bush and Bowman were not doing the district casework expected of the job, unlike Tlaib.
Notices by Alon (alon@mastodon.social)
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Aug-2024 22:12:02 JST Alon -
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Aug-2024 22:12:02 JST Alon @tillshadeisgone @jdp23 The Jews who were criticizing her were on the non- to anti-Zionist spectrum. The Jews she was saying she is channeling as her comrades are the kind who repeat anti-Semitic conspiracy theories like the doctors' plot (this was Chanda Prescod-Weinstein; the conspiracy theory she was repeating was so dumb that Ahmed Tibi saw it and called it out for being anti-Semitic).
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Aug-2024 21:36:34 JST Alon @jdp23 @tillshadeisgone That is anti-Semitic in a bunch of ways I don't want to get into (for one, AIPAC is rooted thoroughly in Americans with pro-Israel political opinions), because she also said much more than that - she explicitly talked about dual loyalties, which a bunch of Jews in @-replies tried explaining to her before she shut everything down with her "I have Jewish friends" bullshit (those Jewish friends in question believe in a doctors' plot, one that Ahmed Tibi called anti-Semitic).
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Aug-2024 21:36:33 JST Alon @jdp23 @tillshadeisgone (Separately, authoritarian regimes and democratic backsliders love accusing NGOs of being foreign agents; Bibi does it, Orbán does it, etc.)
It was not a narrow point about FARA, because then technical arguments about whether AIPAC is truly an Israel lobby would count (it isn't - it doesn't advocate for Israel's position in trade disputes). Instead, it became purely emotive: AIPAC is bad because it's part of the Jewish dual loyalties. This is why tech.lgbt was right.
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Aug-2024 00:24:45 JST Alon @evan Yeah, that's what's debatable, but in the US it's a bit more than 1% (for PR, Guam, etc.), and that's definitely not enough to make it undemocratic.
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Aug-2024 21:39:34 JST Alon @evan Qualified yes, because it depends on relative size; Puerto Rico's existence does not make the United States not democratic.
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Aug-2024 08:27:34 JST Alon The space nerds I know thought Elon Musk great until he got into extreme right politics. The transportation nerds have thought he was a gasbag going back 11 years. But now I'm wondering if the reason SpaceX looks so good is that Standard Elon Musk Industrial Safety isn't actually any worse than NASA's record.
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 24-Jun-2024 09:38:03 JST Alon On Twitter, Isaac Choua talks about the historiography of the medieval Jewish Golden Age in Muslim Spain, which was largely an invention of 19th century Ashkenazi Jews looking for some mythical past golden age. In fact, while the extent of anti-Semitic repression in the Islamic world was less bad than in the Christian one, medieval Islamdom marginalized the Jews too. https://x.com/ChouaIsaac/status/1804881881713852833
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 03-Jun-2024 00:57:08 JST Alon Some updates on the ceasefire issue.
To start with, Biden publicized a proposal that he said came from the Israeli government, which is fairly similar to what Egypt had presented to Hamas. The Israeli war cabinet had voted for it; Ben Gvir and Smotrich are threatening to vote down the government, while Lapid is saying that if they do, he'll vote with the government. It's leading people to say that it's not the real Israeli proposal, but it is, Bibi is just not announcing it.
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-May-2024 00:40:58 JST Alon Both Germany and the US are repressing pro-Palestinian speech on anti-Semitism grounds; in Germany what is done is far more in line with what the Jews want (e.g. gagging people who say "7.10 was great"), whereas in the US it's bullshit demands for anti-Semitism hall monitors at elite universities.
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Feb-2024 10:00:35 JST Alon @protecttruth The context is that what you're saying is mostly true, but it's sometimes turned into an article of faith by people whose politics is Rabin fanfic. In truth, Rabin was down in the polls due to the suicide bombings. Bibi did incite for his murder, and zigzagged in a pretty disgusting way after the assassination happened as Peres got a sympathy polling boost, but he won less in a coup and more in some pretty aggressive last-minute negative campaigning ("Peres will divide Jerusalem").
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Feb-2024 10:00:34 JST Alon @protecttruth I think overall the cringe Rabin fanfic ("Rabin would have negotiated a two-state solution by 1999") is closer to true than the hip Rabin hatefic ("Rabin would never have agreed to a Palestinian state") that some leftists like as backlash to the cringe fanfic, but it's pretty controversial either way. And as it is, Bibi in 1996-9 was unpopular and lost in a landslide in 1999; the present-day sentiment of Bibi as eternal leader is a post-2009 phenomenon.
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Feb-2024 19:58:29 JST Alon -
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 03:19:54 JST Alon @evan The level of physical destruction is disproportionate to the death toll. The IDF warns people to evacuate before destroying a building, to limit civilian casualties (the Hamas targets who are why they were going to bomb the building in the first place can get away too, but military intelligence is a contradiction in terms). So the buildings look like total devastation and then the death toll is like 0.3% of the Palestinian population (Iraq: 2% of Iraq's 2003 population).
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 23:00:48 JST Alon @evan Yes, and those 1.9 million are about to be let back in; Israel recently announced that civilians will be permitted to return to the northern Gaza Strip gradually as combat intensity falls, which Israel wants to happen by late January and the US by the end of this year. (And Israeli ministers speaking out of turn go both ways, like when Eli Cohen, who is far more important than glorified minister without portfolio Gila Gamliel, said Israel was on a three week timer around three weeks ago.)
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 02-Nov-2023 00:19:37 JST Alon 1. The Jewish Currents ran a piece blaming German Islamophobia on oversensitivity to Jewish concerns. When the war started the editor was shocked, shocked so many of his colleagues justified the massacre.
2. Killing 0.4% of the population of Gaza would not be called genocide in any other setting. You bring up Gebru (who seems most concerned for the safety of US students who signed a letter justifying the massacre); she compares Gaza (death toll: ~9,000) to Tigray (380,000-600,000).
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Sep-2023 13:50:46 JST Alon @Gargron Please make it opt-out (or not even opt-out - the stalker has other tools to get through); the opt-in infrastructure is non-obvious and you're competing with alternatives that have way better searchability.
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Sep-2023 23:52:08 JST Alon @vidar @TruthSandwich @futurebird What do you mean, better than everything else that had been tried? There were systems of free labor in medieval Europe contemporary with serfdom. There were so many peasants fleeing to cities with free labor that there were rules for how long lords had to fetch the peasants back (a year and a day). There were peripheral regions that never quite adopted manorialism and it was fine; Russia only went manorial as the Early Modern tsardom was reestablishing serfdom.
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Sep-2023 23:52:07 JST Alon @vidar @TruthSandwich @futurebird Yeah, and he was wrong. Historiography marches on, and at this point historians don't even like talking about feudalism as a thing that existed. There were a lot of coexisting different systems in medieval Europe and while manorialism was the most common, it was deeply parasitic on revenue generated by urban market economies.
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Alon (alon@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Sep-2023 23:52:06 JST Alon @TruthSandwich @vidar @futurebird Wait - none of what I'm talking about is communism. I don't think it really makes sense to speak of communism or socialism before the industrial era. The point of socialism was to replicate egalitarian communal structures at scale; that's not really a thing in a preindustrial society.