Notices by Alon (alon@mastodon.social), page 2

@joeinwynnewood @mekkaokereke Check link elsewhere in thread: married women voted like married men in 2022, same as 2020.

I'm glad I'm seeing pushback by @mekkaokereke against the "women hiding their votes from their husbands" meme. I'm sure it exists, but it's not a big factor, and in exit polls in the US, married women vote almost the same as married men - the gender gap is about younger and unmarried voters, whereas a large majority of women married to Republican men are Republican themselves. Go to https://edition.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results and scroll down to gender by marital status.

I'm familiar with two parts of the world where otherwise-reasonable people keep insisting to me that immigrants really are bad, it's not like in other countries like the US and Germany: Canada, and Scandinavia. In Canada, it's bullshit about how immigrants all go to scam unis and are driving up housing costs (and not, say, enticing developers to build more housing). In Scandinavia, it's about crime and economic integration, which is never blamed on white racism, only on immigrant behavior.

Yesterday Israel remote-triggered thousands of booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah; today it's following up with an attack on radio devices. 12 dead, thousands wounded. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-18/ty-article-live/lebanese-security-source-mossad-planted-explosives-in-5-000-pagers-ordered-by-hezbollah/00000192-02f1-df36-ad96-0afbea560000

Among yesterday's 9 dead, Hezbollah says 8 were members. The 9th was the young daughter of a member. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7xnelvpepo

But none of them was important for Israel to kill. Barak Ravid reports the timing was pure tactics, no strategy: Hezbollah was about to switch pagers, so it was now or never.

@jeffowski It's a bad poem by a bad person and people need to stop quoting it. https://mastodon.social/deck/@Alon/112770160114866875

@rood @jeffowski His original version omitted the Jews, because he was so anti-Semitic that he didn't seem to mind what the Nazis were doing the Jews even while in the camps; Yad Vashem did not give him Righteous Among the Nations status, since he only did anything for converts to Christianity. It's self-pitying bullshit, so of course Europe (and CANZUS) eats that shit up, to avoid centering the biggest group of victims of the Nazis.

@skaphle @rood @jeffowski I'm not talking about modern democratic Germany, after the left won the Historikerstreit (the self-proclaimed anti-communists were defending Hitler; Jäckel's view of the uniqueness of the Holocaust comes from the opposite end). I'm talking about Niemöller, a man who evidently preferred Nazi Germany to modern democratic multicultural Germany. Stop commemorating that anti-Semitic shit.

@skaphle @rood @jeffowski It's a fake quote. Remember, he *did not include the Jews*. He included smaller groups of victims, because he himself was anti-Semitic. Stop doing this right-wing worship of every anti-Semite who washed himself of the Nazis after the war; it's the same mentality that led Nazi journalists to get rehabilitated after the war, often by Axel Springer himself.

@kate @AstroKatie @Mabande It doesn't matter how one points it out; *any* demand for CWs on a fucking selfie because some people don't like seeing face pics is unreasonable. If you want to err on the side of caution, don't write that @-reply policing how other people use the Internet.

On Bluesky, people are mocking Fedi for its 4,200 Brazilian signups (Bluesky: 2 million), and @AstroKatie complained that last time she tried posting on Fedi, she posted a selfie and some asshole in comments demanded a CW for eye contact. It's a fascinating example of how a feature interacts with culture to subtract value. By itself, the CW feature is useful, as a spoiler warning. But combined with a culture of CWs, it empowers petty assholes to *demand* CWs, making the network less usable.

A genereal strike is planned tomorrow in Israel. The IDF just botched a rescue, and instead of getting six live hostages, it got their bodies, just executed by Hamas; the families of several of the dead are refusing to even take condolence calls from Netanyahu and calling on people to join the protests tomorrow. The Business Forum is in support of the strike and will join the protests.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-01/ty-article/.premium/businesses-across-israel-to-close-early-ahead-of-mass-rally-for-hostage-deal/00000191-ad7a-d95c-a5b5-ff7bc4960000

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-01/ty-article-live/idf-finds-hostages-bodies-in-gaza-family-of-hostage-hersh-goldberg-polin-announces-death/00000191-ab89-d453-ab9f-fb8ddb250000?liveBlogItemId=864954162#864954162

https://www.ynet.co.il/economy/article/rjkntjf3r#autoplay

EU Foreign Minister Borell to Ask for Sanctions Against Ben-Gvir, Smotrich

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-27/ty-article/.premium/eu-foreign-minister-borell-to-ask-for-sanctions-against-ben-gvir-smotrich/00000191-94a9-df0a-ab9f-f5a9b24f0000

To give more context to this toot: the six recovered bodies were of hostages who were alive in captivity for months; they died in a botched IDF operation, in which an attack on a tunnel led to the destruction of its oxygen supply, so both the hostages and their captors slowly suffocated to death. Families are naturally livid at this failure and demand that Netanyahu accept the deal that was on the table until he made up a new requirement for control over Philadelphi Axis. https://mastodon.social/@theindex/112996732492479126

@feld @pony @RedOct The poor insulation then makes city living less desirable because street noise filters into the buildings; every time I visit New York I have to deal with way worse noise than I have at home with the windows closed, and I live next to an elevated train in an extremely touristy area. But *none* of this gets resolved through taxing landlords (who then pass the tax on to the renters) - the US and Canada need to Europeanize their building codes.

@feld @pony @RedOct American building codes are generally terrible; note that this problem doesn't exist in German or Nordic Passivhaus construction. Then there's the fenestration - American buildings love to use slide windows, which are harder to insulate than tilt-and-turn, but then one of the people in our program lives in a modern New York condo with tilt-and-turn windows and tells me they're not as well-insulated as German ones, for reasons neither of us knows.

@RedOct Not "can" but "required to," because not everyone can get the required credit or even wants to tether themselves to one risky asset. In practice, taxes on landlords that are not levied on homeowners exist (for example, the American mortgage tax credit, or differential property tax rates, or capital gains taxes exemptions), and what they do in practice is redistribute wealth to homeowners from renters and not so much from commercial landlords.

@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.

@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).

@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).

@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.