Home » Open thread 10/7/2024

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Open thread 10/7/2024 — 71 Comments

  1. Milton is going to be bad. FL hit again soon.
    Saw two videos on what Musk is doing to help, with Starlink. Looks like FCC giving, grudgingly, temp approvals of getting them working.
    The continuing face of Evil of the Dems.

    A moment of Slience for Israel.

  2. An elder colleague told me of once meeting with a man who had been a minister in the government of East Pakistan; some of us old folks may remember that this is Bangladesh which used to be part of Pakistan and was governed, poorly, from Karachi, and achieved independence through a bloody war.

    My colleague was American, like most of us here, or he might have thought harder before he asked the question, “What does an ex-minister of East Pakistan do?” The answer he got was, “Hide under the desk listening to everyone else in the office being murdered.”

    I have no respect for anyone banging the J6 “insurrection” drum. They have no idea what a real one is like.

  3. Stay safe everyone

    Yes i compared it to the delta house scrum at the end of animal house

  4. F recently posted a link to this Karol Markowicz essay on her substack: “I Have Spent the Last Year Angry at Jews” https://substack.com/home/post/p-149876586 (Markowicz is Jewish, an immigrant from Russia)

    Read the whole thing, as the kids say.

    “Most Jewish organizations are dinosaurs, committed to Democrats just as the Democrats make clear they are not at all interested in them. That’s the problem with tying your religion to a political party.”

    Separation of Church and State is not only healthy for the State. It’s even more healthy for the Church. Or as another Jew once said, “Render unto Caesar.”

  5. I read the Markowicz essay.

    I do wonder why so many on the Right who are not themselves Jews care who Jews support. Is it that they expect if Jews changed their minds, it would change anything for everyone else? Jews are such a tiny fraction of the population concentrated in areas that are overwhelmingly blue.

    I can see that someone who is Jewish might be frustrated about how Jews vote, but I’m not really sure how it would be broadly consequential. A really broad repudiation of the Democratic party might carry a majority of Jews with it, but that would be an effect of the repudiation, not a cause of it.

    There are slices of the population of comparable or greater size that we never talk about: there are almost as many Chinese Americans as American Jews, and almost as many Indian (subcontinent) Americans, and I don’t see anyone on the Right spending much time worrying about how they vote.

  6. FL 2024 party voter registrations:
    • REP – 5,385,554.
    • DEM – 4,359,354
    • Minor Party – 390,220
    • No Party Affiliation – 3,544,576

    Am guessing the Independent party is lumped in the Minor Party (?) … OK, yes it is.

    Couple of interesting articles this morning:

    Legendary Texas Republican makes shocking Harris-Trump prediction about ‘afraid’ GOP voters

    Former Tarrant County Judge Glenn Whitley — a life-long member of the Republican Party who served from 2007 to 2022 — has been one of Texas’ most prominent Republicans.

    Anyone here have a REP friend/family voting for Harris/Walz this year? Long time REP Glenn Whitley will be voting for Harris, and “believes many Republicans will vote for Harris in secret.”

    “There are a lot, I think,” Whitley said. “They’re afraid to come out, because when they do, they get ridiculed and they get bullied and they get belittled. And so a lot of people who have been staunch Republicans and still are staunch Republicans, are afraid to stand up and be confrontational with some of the leaders that we have right now.

    Interesting. So there may be some REPs who catch grief from both their REP & DEM friends/family. Ditto on the Interesting.

    Potential Trump loss threatens destruction of modern GOP

    Never before has a party’s identity been so deeply entwined with the fate, fortunes and flaws of one man. Four consecutive poor election cycles would unleash a wave of sustained scrutiny that the GOP — as it currently exists — may not survive.

    Don’t know if AXIOS is considered Left or Right here, but Article makes some good points. Guess author is saying 2018 midterm was a “poor election” cycle for REPs – along with the disastrous 2020 & 2022.

  7. I have been entertained by the “well ACKSHULLYs” from the legacy media on the FEMA money.

    Imagine a wife discovering that the rent money has been gambled away. Imagine the husband’s defense “well ACKSHULLY I budgeted that money expressly for gambling and I never would have used it to pay the rent.”

  8. The New Yorker links a poorly-written article about new book by Ta-Neshi Coates, about which they say:

    “In his new book, Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses his version of moral clarity: Palestinians and Black Americans share a profound connection, and it is the duty of people of conscience who would oppose Jim Crow to oppose the oppression of Palestinians.”

    Good response from @WindDustStars, who says:

    “What a bloated and self-indulgent essay. The author is irritatingly pretentious. And of course, Coates is simplistic and wrong in his racialized understanding of Palestine’s situation. The real adversaries in Gaza are Hamas’ leaders and foot soldiers, who have long instrumentalized the suffering of the Palestinians in order to extract more international aid.

    Doesn’t he (and don’t you) ever wonder why the top Hamas leadership was so wealthy? It was all a hate-driven grift, at the expense of Palestinian children and families.”

    Thread here:
    https://x.com/WindDustStars/status/1842234809248034960

  9. On the polling post thread Niketas wrote,

    “To really be able to reason rightly, you have to continually look for things that might prove your position wrong rather than just rack up things that support it. Very few people have any desire to put work into potentially proving themselves wrong.”

    I agree about putting in the work, I’m not even sure it’s laziness, I think some people just aren’t very curious.

    However, I don’t think one has to have an interest in proving oneself wrong. Being sufficiently focused on efficiency, or optimization would be enough. “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

    Niketas appears to have a background in Physics. Newton himself, even Einstein, would likely be somewhat shocked at what the current model states is going on at the sub-atomic level. But they would be open to accepting the current model based on the quantity of experiments that have been run that support it over Newton’s model.

    Leftists have a view of the world, and human nature, and political systems. We all do. It’s just that every time an experiment is run based on their assumptions the data do not support their theories. I think most all of us, especially the changers here, picked up on that pattern. It turns out humans need challenges. Handing them the necessities of life like the Eloi in Wells’ “Time Machine” results in a populace about as robust as the Eloi in Wells’ “Time Machine.” It turns out humans need competition to thrive. It turns out gender differences are hard coded into our DNA. It turns out continually asking children how they feel, and if they are OK creates anxiety in children, rather than confidence…

    The problem with Leftists is they don’t connect the failures of the real world examples where their theories are tried with evidence that the world actually functions much differently than they believe. Human nature and DNA at the “sub-atomic level” cannot be altered no matter how hard we try to vote or legislate it away.

  10. Niketas,

    Perhaps people care not so much how Jews vote but where they put their considerable political influence, you know, money. Prominent Jewish business leaders contribute a lot of dough to Dem causes and campaigns. They punch way above their demographic weight.

  11. @Yawrate:Prominent Jewish business leaders contribute a lot of dough to Dem causes and campaigns.

    Why don’t we seem to know there are prominent Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans doing the same? Because they are. On the Right we just don’t seem to be talking about it.

  12. Good tweet from B. Donald re the immigration bill that never passed. Every time that a D tries to blame Trump about the non passage of the bill, this list should be the response.

    https://x.com/ByronDonalds/status/1842934736383357413

    Why the Senate Border Deal FAILED:

    1–Codify Catch/Release
    2–Let in 1.8M Illegals
    3–Fund Sanctuary Cities
    4–Fund NGOs Moving Illegals
    5–Lawyers to Illegals
    6–Work Permits to Illegals
    7–Nothing to Deport Illegals
    8–No Immediate Wall Funds
    9–Weak Asylum Screening
    10–$60B to Ukraine

  13. Article at The Federalist by an Army veteran who participated in the Katrina recovery and rescue effort, comparing it to what is being done, and more importantly, is NOT being done, for Appalachia after Helene. The difference is huge. His opinions on why: (1) Administrative incompetence, (2) the possibility that the military units are on alert to be sent to the Middle East and therefore cannot be deployed to the mountains, and (3) politics, since Appalachian voters are heavily conservative.

    https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/04/comparing-helene-to-katrina-suggests-americans-are-left-to-die-because-democrats-run-the-white-house/

  14. @miguel:When mobs are stalking chinese all around the world then we’ll talk if half all the chinese had been previously wiped from the earth

    This is too cryptic for me. If I want to see the GOP win elections in 2024 or 2028, don’t I need to be primarily concerned with who voters are in the US and how many of what kind there are in 2024 and 2028? I’m not sure why a reference to the Shoah is germane to that, but if you explain in more and small words I might get the connection.

    Certainly, if you’d like to not see a second Shoah in Israel, the GOP winning elections is germane to that. But I think we should support Israel because that’s the right thing to do, not because it might win over the votes of a very small slice of the population.

  15. Best info on Milton:

    https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/storminfo/

    And Mike;s Weather page has all info:

    https://spaghettimodels.com/. He’s doing live updates every 5 hours now; next at 2pm EDT.

    For us in Jax, high res models show 40kt winds except at coast where it reaches hurricane levels. trying to get my daughter to leave Orlando, and come here as of now it’s expected to be somewhere between Cat 2 and 3 over Orlando. West coast is going to be slammed, maybe worse than Ian, and Orlando hasn’t been hit with something like this. It will travel directly up I4 exiting around Daytona, Palm Coast still at a 1 or 2.

    Given how the feds have treated red western NC, I’m sure there will be an attempt to block aid to DeSantis’ state since they hate him.

  16. @Rufus:the second paragraph in the blockquote is mine, not Karol’s

    I figured something like that, because I couldn’t figure out who Karol thought he was trying to win over with THAT quote. And I then couldn’t find it in the original, so that was cleared up.

  17. Niketas,

    Regarding why non-Jews care about how Jews vote, personally I don’t think a lot about it. I agree with neo that Jewish voters are less of a monolith than is often portrayed. However, Karol Markowicz is Jewish and it is she who wrote the essay.

    To answer your question, Niketas, I think it’s two things;
    1. For some reason some people think and care about what Jewish people are doing a lot. I don’t get it, but it’s a recurring theme across nations, cultures and history. Andrew Klavan has a theory this is because they are God’s people and a lot of people hate, or are in conflict, with God.
    2. For some people I think it’s a human desire to look for and point out hypocrisy, or just plain judge people.

  18. Yes, there are a lot of prominent Jewish donors to Dems. But there are some to Republicans–Sheldon Adelson was a huge Trump supporter, and I believe his widow is now as well. Ackman seems to be a new convert (to the R cause), and I think endorsed Trump. I’m sure there are many others, as Jews are also prominent in conservative circles, going back to Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz (even if their sons lost their way).

  19. I think karol said that out of dissapointment not anger look at the unherd link above

  20. Used to be when Jewish Liberals got mugged they’d wake up, think a bit about what just happened to ‘em, scratch their heads and wonder whether they had been delusional all along, arriving at the only reasonable conclusion that made sense.

    Nowadays, the hell with “sense”. When they get mugged they all too often seem to be saying, “Hey, mug me again. And again. And again. I can take it and I support it cuz I know yer doing it fer all the right reasons. Keep mugging me—and my people—so that we can make the world a better place. That’s right! KEEP IT UP! More!! MORE!!! Because ANYTHING’s better than letting that orange-haired Nazi (we know he’s one because you’ve told us so many times) back in the White House.”

  21. @Rufus, Kate:Karol Markowicz is Jewish

    I knew that, so was not surprised she cared about it.

    Karol Markowicz is a woman

    Didn’t know that, but I’ll be careful in the future not to misgender. In many, though not all, cultures Karol is a man’s name, and I may have missed other clues to the right pronoun.

  22. Barry Meislin:

    That’s quite the generalization.

    I have written for 2 decades on the difficulty of political change. Jews are no exception; change is difficult. And yet I’ve seen plenty of articles and videos post-10/7 in which American Jews say they no longer support the left although they used to. I’ve seen polls that reflect a significant number who have changed. Is that number as large as you or I would like? I very much doubt it. But that’s true of political change in general.

  23. Sure is. And yes, some have changed…many of ‘em relatively recently…

    …but if they HAVE changed—IF—it’s because they‘ve finally realized(!) that they’ve been absolutely CLOBBERED.

    And even then….
    – – – – – – –
    Regarding that orange-haired Nazi, this is what many of ‘em have been—OR STILL ARE—up against:
    ‘Jen Psaki: Where Are George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Mike Pence? You Have 33 Days To Endorse Harris For “The History Books”‘—
    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/10/04/jen_psaki_on_cheney_endorsement_of_harris_where_are_george_w_bush_mitt_romney_mike_pence.html

  24. Did you catch that the New Zealand Navy had just five ships, down to four yesterday when they had to scuttle one when it ran aground on a survey mission? First such loss since 1945.
    ==
    The commander of the ship was elevated to that position in 2022 when one Peeni Henare was the ‘defense minister’. The current ‘defense minister’ is one Judith Collins. Mr. Henare admits to no occupation other than electoral politics.
    Miss Collins ‘ere entering electoral politics was a lawyer. The former is a stalwart of New Zealand’s portside party, the latter of the notionally starboard party.
    ==
    The commander of the scuttled ship was born in Yorkshire, trained as a schoolteacher, enlisted in the Royal Navy in Britain in 1993, and relocated to New Zealand in 2012 evidently permitted to slide into a roughly equivalent rank upon enlistment there.
    ==
    You guessed it. Dyke.

  25. Niketas asked: “Why don’t we seem to know there are prominent Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans doing the same?”

    That’s a bullshit question. You know damn well what the answer is, just as you really do not find miguel’s statement “too cryptic.” (What, was it only moderately cryptic?)

  26. Always liked Judy Collins.
    Every time I hear—or even think of—her rendition of “Bold Fenian Men” I get blown away….

    Sweet…

  27. “…out of disappointment not anger…”

    How ‘bout “out of total exasperation”? Or “Sheer disbelief”?

  28. I’m afraid Harris only needs 268 electoral votes to become president. If Trump “wins” the election 270-268, the Democrats will use threats, bribery, blackmail, “any means necessary” to turn a couple of electors.

  29. Shirley they cant be serious neither is msnbc

    I think the tenure of ardem cannot be easily surpassed

  30. New Zealand is not a serious nation nor are New Zealanders a serious people. Haven’t been for a long, long time. They are a Timothy Chalamet/Soft Boy nation.

    One is reminded of Hobbits and the Shire, blissfully ignorant that they live “within a day’s march of foes that would freeze [their] blood”, and of those (i.e., Americans) who keep them safe.

    So far.

  31. @ Niketas Choniates: It’s not primarily about the Democratic beneficiaries of American Jewish donors, or primarily about who American Jews vote for. It’s about Israel, “the Little Satan,” as a proxy for the West. Your words are those of someone who apparently doesn’t think that Israel’s fight is your fight. Good luck to you.

    @ Art Deco: “You guessed it. Dyke.” As a “dyke” myself, I concede that DEI is, over the long term, a formula for widespread incompetence in our institutions. But perfectly qualified commanders sometimes scuttle ships. As if no one but a “dyke” ever did this. In short, we don’t know that this commander’s being a “dyke” was the cause of the ship’s being scuttled. In brief, Ctlr + FU.

  32. @Molly G:Your words are those of someone who apparently doesn’t think that Israel’s fight is your fight.

    I think you are confusing me with some other commenter, as I very clearly stated at 1:24 pm:

    I think we should support Israel because that’s the right thing to do, not because it might win over the votes of a very small slice of the population.”

  33. As if no one but a “dyke” ever did this.
    ==
    Hasn’t happened in nearly eighty years and she manages it during an ordinary survey mission. Unlike Joe Blow off the sidewalks of Christchurch, she has masses of intersectional pokemon points. Perhaps there’s no connection between the two phenomena. Not the way to bet. The way to bet is on a whitewash.

  34. A couple obvious points:

    Yawrate wrote: “[Jews] punch way above their demographic weight.”

    Correct. Not just in political donations, but via powerful people in government, finance, education, media, entertainment, law and tech. Did I leave anything out? 🙂

    Not to mention that Jews and Christians have been at odds since Jesus’ time.
    And yes, antisemitism and antichristianism are real.

  35. Barry posted this in the Kamala thread from yesterday, but I wanted to bump it up.
    As usual, Mark makes a number of good points.

    “‘Underwater’ in North Carolina …and Michigan“—
    http://jewishworldreview.com/1024/steyn100724.php

    During Katrina, federal, state and local government all sank to the occasion. But Bush was the Republican, so the media stuck it to him rather than, say, New Orleans’ hack mayor, Ray Nagin, since convicted of bribery and money laundering and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. Two months after the hurricane, the Democrats took Congress, and thereby formalised Katrina as marking the end-point of the Bush presidency.

    As I noted back then, it’s not a healthy sign to be talking about meteorological phenomena in party-political terms. But that’s the reality of America today. Significant proportions of eastern Tennessee, which has a GOP governor, and western North Carolina, which has a Dem governor, are underwater and cut off from the rest of the planet. But the national media’s priority is to get Harris and Walz across the finish line in five weeks’ time, and covering what the BBC calls scenes of “biblical devastation” with thousands of residents missing would not be helpful to that. So no need for Joe Biden to leave his Delaware beach house and give a press conference while wearing a butch bomber jacket, or to appoint Kamala his “hurricane czar”:

    A decade ago I wrote:

    Increasingly, key levers of society are being ceded to the irredeemably stupid and mendacious, who seem to be the only ones capable of navigating the rocks and rapids of political correctness. One has the uneasy feeling that similar scenarios are playing out every day around the western world. How long before the planes start dropping out of the sky?

    And that was before “DEI” was a thing, and before the “Leader of the Free World” put a bald lipsticked kleptomaniac tranny with plural pronouns in charge of nuclear waste. Eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina are cut off in part because the entirety of the western world has bet its future on the “smart” phone. And, as millions of Americans are learning, in today’s world if you haven’t got cell service you haven’t got nuffin’ – and those telephones are fragile and vulnerable not only to hurricanes but also to cyber-shutdowns and EMP attacks.

    Ah, but as Politico tuts:

    Trump drags Hurricane Helene into 2024 campaign

    Yeah, because, unlike Katrina, this hurricane is nothing to do with whoever’s running the executive branch of the United States. As to who precisely that is, all we can say for certain is that, of the more than seven billion people on earth, it’s not Joe Biden, because he’s focused on collective bargaining in Yemen, and Kamala Harris, because nobody would put her in charge of anything.

    Well, except for half the voters in the United States.

    If those numbers hold up, expect a lot more of western North Carolina in your future.

  36. @IrishOtter49:That’s a bullshit question. You know damn well what the answer is, just as you really do not find miguel’s statement “too cryptic.”

    You’re replying to me, but I’m not sure to whom your heat is directed, neither did I understand why miguel replied the way he did. I can only speculate about that.

    True, I pointed out that American Jews make no difference to national American elections but that’s simply numerical fact and not different from a point neo herself has made many times, for example December 2023:

    Jews are also a tiny tiny percentage of the voting public, and usually their vote doesn’t matter at all because they are concentrated in blue states where even without them, Democrats would be winning.

    Compare with my phrasing:

    Jews are such a tiny fraction of the population concentrated in areas that are overwhelmingly blue. I can see that someone who is Jewish might be frustrated about how Jews vote, but I’m not really sure how it would be broadly consequential.

  37. miguel, sometimes you go beyond cryptic, but I think I get your drift in re Bourbons & Cake (although Marie Antoinette never really said that the way people think).

    What LibsOfTikTok pointed out, with the receipts:

    BREAKING:
    @fema’s Disaster Relief Fund monthly report reveals that nearly $4 BILLION was spent on “COVID-19 aid” in September of 2024, the most of any month since October 2023.

    Billions of dollars are being spent on a pandemic that’s been over for years while Helene victims are struggling.

    See for yourself where the priorities lie in Kamala’s America.

    Well, to be overly fair, the money seems to have been spent, or at least allocated, before Helene hit, but what in the world FOR?? Since 2023???

  38. @Dax:Not just in political donations, but via powerful people in government, finance, education, media, entertainment, law and tech.

    Also true for Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans. Just one example, Indian-Americans lead the following corporations: Microsoft, Google, Adobe, IBM, Micron, Starbucks. There’s some pretty outsized influence.

    Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, and American Jews are about the same size slice of the electorate and a similar slice of leaders of powerful institutions. It would make a lot of sense to worry about all three equally if we’re trying to figure out how to win elections. I don’t see that we do, and I don’t understand why, but my guess is the demographic information in our minds is out of date.

  39. In case you might want to know….Milton now at 180mph. Is there a CAT 6? I think it reached it. Predicted to be the most destructive hurricane in Florida history. I think Tampa is gone…predicted 15 ft surge, and Orlando will be devastated, along with Daytona on exit.

  40. Thank you for the video on Marie Antoinette, Neo. Both entertaining and informative. It coincides with the second season debuting on “Masterpiece Theater” too.

  41. physicsguy, I hope you have persuaded your daughter to come stay with you. Orlando is not set up to handle winds like this, although the storm is projected to move through quickly. I think the most massive damage is expected to be on the Gulf coast from the storm surge.

    I note Gov. DeSantis has been vocal about preparations. Partly because he’s very competent and partly because Florida’s been doing this for decades, Florida will be as prepared as can be, and I expect rescue and relief efforts to be fast. DeSantis reportedly declined to take time for a call from VP Harris.

    I compare this to preparations by our own (D) governor. I saw the maps showing that rain and flood potential on my home computer, and so, surely, could the NC emergency agencies and the governor. They were unprepared and slow to respond.

  42. @ miguel > “He has learned little in a year.”

    Jacobson’s post was interesting as a reaction of a Jewish Zionist (or at least Israel supporter). His plea to the anonymous poster-defacers was actually quite poignant, I thought.

    Then I read this other post in his “recommended list.”
    https://unherd.com/2024/07/why-im-sticking-with-joe/?=refinnar

    The man is delusional.
    Not because he prefers Biden over Harris, but because of his reasons for doing so:
    “Even slurring his words at 81 he makes more sense than Trump ever did at 40. Despite his lapses and confusions, with Biden you feel his words had meaning once upon a time. They reach back to a world of intelligibility he once moved in. They are what’s left after a catastrophe. They are the noble ruins of an edifice that once stood proudly.

    In a world of shysters and liars, Biden can proudly boast he is neither mountebank nor rabblerouser. Ask yourself what heart Biden ever quickened into rash action. That’s right — you can’t recall one. Neither can he.”

    I’ll give him the “proudly,” but there is not and never has been anything noble there. Indeed, he is — still — a mountebank. Maybe not a rabblerouse; no one cared enough about his to rouse, and of course Democrats by definition are never rabble, even if roused.

    Go back to your first essay, Mr. Jacobson, and read it again.
    Ask yourself what your noble President Biden contributed to those moments that distressed you so badly.

    Connect a few dots.

  43. @ John+Guilfoyle – you don’t need an account; I don’t have one and have never had any trouble accessing the UnHerd posts. If a “banner” pops up wanting you to register, look around for the X and close it.
    However, I only read what someone else here has pointed out; it’s not on my list of regular perusal.

  44. @ Miguel > “Otoh”

    Not sure how many hands you are looking at, but thanks for the link — for context, Dokoupil was interviewing Coates about his new book, and he committed an unforgivable act of journalism: he asked questions.

    CBS, in its relentless search for truth, thought that was a bad idea.
    On the gripping hand — for a little more context from that post — who assigned Dokoupil to do the interview in the first place?
    PS The Free Press Editors wrote this, which I think is unusual unity.

    https://www.thefp.com/p/cbs-marks-october-7-by-admonishing-tony-dokoupil

    Adrienne Roark, who is in charge of news gathering at the network, began her remarks by saying covering a story like October 7 “requires empathy, respect, and a commitment to truth.”

    “This goes way beyond one interview, one comment, one story. This is about preserving the legacy of neutrality and objectivity that is CBS News,” she said. “We want every show to be a place for courageous and robust conversations and discussions.”

    Keep in mind that this editorial meeting was held on the one-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. The harshest thing that Dokoupil said in his interview with Coates was: “If I took your name out of it, took away the awards, and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away—the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”

    That’s putting it mildly. As our own Coleman Hughes wrote in his review of Coates’s book, it “doesn’t even mention the word Hamas—or Fatah, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or Hezbollah, or Iran—once. In his telling, the threats don’t exist, only the barriers that Israel erects to contain them.”

    We suppose that has the advantage of eschewing complexity. But this simplistic telling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict omits so much complicating history that it’s no different than a lie. It would be like writing a book about the Civil War that blames the war on the Union without ever mentioning slavery.

    The other thing worth noticing is CBS’s double standard. Here was Gayle King on May 26, 2020, after the news broke that George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers. “I am speechless. I am really, really speechless about what we’re seeing on television this morning. It feels to me like open season… and that sometimes it’s not a safe place to be in this country for black men,” she said, holding back tears.

    In the case of King—on the subjects of wokeism, racism, Black Lives Matter, and gun rights—her “lived experience” is an asset to the newsroom. As it should be. But for Dokoupil, his experience as the father of Jewish children who live in Israel, has no place in an interview with an author sharing his cartoonish indictment of the world’s only Jewish state.

    The sad truth is that Coates is not speaking truth to power. He is echoing the new consensus of the powerful.

    See also David+Foster on October 7, 2024 at 11:51 am

  45. @ Barry > “Jen Psaki Wonders Why the Men Who Democrats Used to Call Hitler Won’t Speak Out Against the Man They Currently Call Hitler“—

    Sometimes people are delusional, and sometimes they are just propagandists.
    Note how Psaki started her video (at the previous link, transcript at LI):

    JEN PSAKI: Of course, it is great, it is good to have Republicans like Liz Cheney, and Cassidy Hutchinson, and the more than 100 Republican officials who have endorsed Harris, all speaking out about the fact that one candidate will defend the constitution, and one won’t.

    When you start off that far removed from reality, you can’t get back.
    They have literally (not figuratively) flipped the Constitution’s defenders 180 degrees.

    Commenter coyote made the obvious observation — unless you’re a regular MSDNC viewer.

    Psaki doesn’t understand why, if they don’t care for Trump, they don’t come out for Harris.

    Simple answer: as bad as they might think Trump is, Harris is far worse.

    The slyly unstated implication is that if one is bad, the other must be wonderful. Totally wrong, but pure Josef Goebbels.

    Next question.

    Do I think some of those Republicans currently staying mum might vote for Harris anyway?
    Some of them supported Biden IIRC.
    Some registered Republicans ARE voting for Harris (h/t Karmi).
    https://www.nj.com/politics/2024/10/legendary-texas-republican-makes-shocking-harris-trump-prediction-about-afraid-gop-voters.html

    But then, some Democrats have moved into the Trump column.

    My suggestion: follow the money (who is getting it, and who isn’t, under Biden Inc.)

    And then there is this from the LI post:
    Reminder: Liz Cheney did not leave the Republican Party. We threw her out. pic.twitter.com/wP06tPg0yv
    — Big Fish (@BigFish3000) October 4, 2024

  46. Re: Ta-Nehisi Coates

    Such a small, bitter man. His Black Panther father beat him as a child. White racism.

    It’s a disgrace that the American intellectual elite embraced Coates as they did and still do.

    “Between the World and Me” is a short, terrible book. James Baldwin, he ain’t.

  47. BTW, I think this O’Keefe video has been mentioned in some past thread, but it is apropos to the media situation. Can anyone doubt that whatever MSNBC pushes is only what helps the Democrats?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgtijsQKrTs
    BREAKING: MSNBC Producer Admits MSNBC Is ‘Doing All They Can to Help’ the Harris Campaign

    The woman talking to the mark ( Basel Hamdan, a writer and producer for MSNBC’s show “Ayman,”) is so obvious in her questions, I am amazed he didn’t catch on to her real purpose. Hint: she’s not there because he’s so cute.
    Being drunk on a date in these days of undercover journalism is no way to keep your job.

  48. How can you NOT read a post with a headline like this?
    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/10/07/elon_musk_if_trump_loses_how_long_do_you_think_my_prison_sentence_will_be.html

    It’s linked to an interview with Tucker Carlson, so proceed at your own risk.
    These are some of the timestamps, for reference.
    (0:00) Elon Musk Is All in on Donald Trump
    (6:35) Providing Starlink to Victims of Hurricane Helene
    (9:22) If Trump Loses, This Is the Last Election
    (21:49) The Epstein and Diddy Client List
    (33:38) Vaccines
    (35:49) The Movement to Decriminalize Crime… pic.twitter.com/jNqB1ThqQz

    — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 7, 2024

  49. neo:

    Your analysis of Coates sounds spot-on. Coates got trapped into blaming whites for his pain.

    Though white I experienced plenty of emotional trauma and some physical abuse growing up, which I won’t rehash. Somehow, from reading science-fiction, self-help books and Aldous Huxley, and listening to the optimistic messages of sixties, I chose to get smarter and stronger, and not to blame others.

    My conservative friends may not understand my fondness for the hippie movement, but it was the first place I felt safe and appreciated. It was there I started healing and growing up.

  50. @ Irish – if I can figure out who Miguel is replying to, which is hard when other comments intervene as they invariably do, I can make a pretty good stab at what he is saying. I don’t get all his references lined up if there isn’t a starting point.
    When there is just a cryptic one-liner and a link, I confess to falling for the click-bait.
    It’s usually worth the look, but it’s like opening a box of Cracker-jack without knowing what the prize will be.

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