A collection of strangenesses, bad ideas, and other such matters as may cross my mind from time to time. I mostly lurk here on tumblr, and only login once every few weeks. So be patient with those asks!
The US should stop funding Israel and the money should go to Americans first. AOC and Bernie needs the money for healthcare
The math on "fund Israel instead of Medicare for All" doesn't math.
The US sends Israel roughly $3.8 billion a year - $3.3 billion baseline under a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), plus the emergency supplementals Congress passed after October 7. The nonpartisan Urban Institute puts Medicare for All at $32-34 trillion over ten years.
That's at least $3.2 trillion per year in new federal spending.
Most people zone out and their brains go to static when they try to understand numbers on this scale - so let's do it visually:
Do you see it, Anon?
Ceasing support for Israel aid won't build an American Universal Healthcare system in the same way that giving up avocado toast won't enable Gen Z to buy a house.
The "fund healthcare with Israel aid" crowd consistently ignores the fact that most of the aid for Israel already goes to Americans.
Israel is required to spend the entire Foreign Military Financing (FMF) amount on American weapons, systems, and defense equipment manufactured and sold by US companies - a requirement the Obama administration tightened.
The money goes to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon. It produces jobs in Alabama and Connecticut.
So...why do we keep hearing this nonsensical association between aid to Israel and the US failing to have universal healthcare?
Antisemitism has always worked by inserting Jews between people and whatever they feel they're owed.
We've seen this before:
The Crusades failed because of military overreach and strategic collapse. Instead of taking responsibility, the Church blamed the Jews, thereby protecting its own authority and giving humiliated crusaders a scapegoat instead of a reckoning.
The Black Death swept Europe because of a bacterial pandemic. Instead of accepting a natural explanation, authorities blamed the Jews for poisoning the wells. This gave terrified populations someone to punish and deflected scrutiny from their own powerlessness.
France's military was humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 because of poor leadership and strategic failure. Instead of holding their own commanders accountable, the French military establishment blamed a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus. This protected the careers and reputations of the actual culprits.
Germany lost World War One because of military collapse and strategic exhaustion. Instead of accepting defeat, the military leadership blamed the Jews for stabbing the army in the back, which shielded the officer class from accountability and planted the seed for the next war.
Weimar Germany experienced hyperinflation because of war reparations and catastrophic fiscal policy. Instead of addressing structural economic failure, politicians blamed Jewish financiers, giving a desperate population an enemy to hate and buying the political class some time.
Tsarist Russia had endemic poverty because of serfdom's aftermath and imperial mismanagement. Instead of reforming their own institutions, the Tsar blamed the Jews for exploiting the peasantry, redirecting revolutionary anger away from the throne and toward the shtetl. Nothing lets off steam like a good pogrom.
American culture has been shaped by industrialization, commercialization, and mass media. Instead of grappling with those forces, cultural conservatives blamed the Jews for controlling Hollywood, neatly avoiding any serious examination of the market forces they themselves championed.
The United States lacks universal healthcare because of lobbying, Senate procedure, and forty years of political failure. Instead of addressing any of that, they blame Israel for eating the budget, letting the actual obstacles off the hook entirely.
The specific grievance changes. The structure doesn't.
Jews make a convenient scapegoat precisely because Jews are a small, visible minority with enough presence in public life to be a plausible explanation, but not enough numbers to outvote the lie.
Blaming Jews is what a society does when it has failed its people and needs to deflect the consequences of that failure. It is the political coward's way to avoid the hard, unglamorous work of building coalitions, passing legislation, and holding their own institutions accountable.
It's much easier, they realize, to have an enemy than a problem.
Went to the grocery store with my kindergartener. We weighed some bananas: 2 pounds even. We weighed a watermelon: 4 pounds even. We weighed some mangos: a little over 1 pound. We weighed the watermelon AND the bananas: 6 pounds even.
“That’s funny” said the child “because 2+4=6 and two pounds and four pounds is six pounds. It’s like the same as math!”
“What happens if you add 6+1?”
“SEVEN”
“What if we put one pound of mangos on the scale?” <mangos added>
“IT’S THE SAME!!”
“OK, what’s 7-4?”
“Three?”
“What if we take the four pound watermelon off the scale?” <watermelon removed>
“Mama! Are you telling me math works In Real Life? Think of all the things you could measure!!”
Are YOU gonna let THE GOVERNMENT tell YOU what YOUR GENDER is? That doesn't sound like Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to me! PROTECT your individual FREEDOMS and call your senator: we want the GOVERNMENT to stay OUT OF OUR PANTS! GENDER FREEDOM NOW!
Two men in your neighborhood are married... to EACH OTHER? Congratulate them for exercising their AMERICAN RIGHT to follow the footsteps of our FOUNDING FATHERS! They've got a fully AMERICAN spirit of FREEDOM and REBELLION! GOD BLESS THE USA.
Your coworker has a different RELIGION from yours? Well, that's just INTERESTING and you should talk about it on your UNION-APPROVED LUNCH BREAK. The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA was FOUNDED on Freedom of Religion and ANYONE should be allowed to seek the AMERICAN DREAM!
You think someone might be in this GREAT country ILLEGALLY? NO YOU DON'T! No one is in this country illegally! The minute anyone steps on our SOVEREIGN SOIL they're your FELLOW AMERICAN and where they come from is NO ONES BUSINESS.
As Americans stew over the looming risk of job-stealing AI and data centers in their back yards, the feds are raising the alarm about a new
In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.
More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.
This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump's counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.
Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation.
Among the documents in the tranche obtained by WIRED is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat.
"The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City," the report reads. The term "anti-tech violent extremism" does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.
In the same Intelligence Bureau assessment, analysts also describe a novel threat emerging in the wake of the arrest and trial of Ziz Laota, an extreme rationalist who allegedly led a small cultlike group, three members of which have been charged with murder, tied to an obsessive ideology focused on the existential risk posed by AI.
While the Zizian ideology is extremist in nature, a less extreme version of the same fears surrounding the cataclysmic potential of AI are a common concern among AI alignment experts, machine learning engineers, and even frontier AI companies. Nonetheless, the Intelligence Bureau warns that "paranoid views regarding AI" may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizians' trial, thanks to their "attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent," and belief that "humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality, or face existential consequences for failing to do so."
The NYPD intel assessment follows the department’s collaboration with the FBI last year to monitor the Signal chat of an activist group coordinating volunteers to monitor public hearings at immigration courts in New York. According to documents obtained by The Guardian, the FBI surveilled activists as part of a broader investigation into "anarchist violent extremist actors," one of the threat categories named in the new counter terrorism strategy.
Created in the wake of 9/11, 80 fusion centers now pockmark the country and serve as go-betweens for federal intelligence agencies and state and local law enforcement. In addition to concerns about portions of the American populace disturbed by the rapid proliferation of AI, these centers are also gathering and circulating “intelligence” about alleged threats to data centers.
A Western Pensylvania fusion center, for example, claimed that "adversarial actors, including state-sponsored entities, criminal groups, and extremists, such as homegrown violent extremists or environmental extremists, may target US data centers" and that "these actors could also exploit the strategic importance of data centers to the US economy, using them for activities like cryptocurrency mining or leveraging third-party entities, such as front companies, to gain access to US data and infrastructure."
I cannot help but notice how the FBI frames all opposition as an “emerging threat”. And so implicitly denies any room for a robust civil society to debate or express opposition to the proliferation and over-use of AI and the huge power-hungry data centers it requires.
So a while back, a fairly left-wing friend of mine was shocked at the thought of Left-Wing Holocaust Denial, asking how it could even be possible, how can the Left even deny the Holocaust given everything (quote: "why would the LEFT be in denial? After you read Elie Wiesel, you can't deny any of it. Same with Maus, Frieda Appleman-Jurman's memoirs, and all that. Also, Lois Lowry won a Newberry medal for Number the Stars"). So I've been chewing on this for a while now.
First, Right-Wing Holocaust Denial is straight up "denial that the Holocaust happened"--often with an undertone of "But we wish that it had and it was a great idea". They deny the number of deaths, or excuse the Nazis, or say that the Jews had it coming, or say that it didn't happen at all, that sort of thing. It's a very blunt, straightforward form of denial.
Comparatively, Left-Wing Holocaust Denial takes a different, more sophisticated form that functions on multiple levels--with an undertone of its own along the lines of "the Jews are exaggerating to try to portray themselves as victims"--and to talk about this form of denial, I have to explain what the Holocaust was.
So this gets a bit long, because what is being denied is long, but I will ask you to bear with me.
But, TL:DR:
Right Wing Holocaust Denial denies the body count and the atrocities...
Left Wing Holocaust Denial denies everything that built up to it, the centuries of Othering and murders, and the aftereffects.
The Holocaust, 1939-1945, was the culmination of literally centuries of anti-Jewish hatred from Christian Europeans, dating back well over a thousand years.
For one example, there were anti-Jewish riots in France in the 1020s in misplaced vengeance for the Islamic destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009 CE. Decades later, the Crusaders butchered 99% of the Jewish population of northern Europe, beginning in 1096 and continuing for centuries, such that a population of nearly 100,000 in 1050 CE was reduced down to less than a thousand in 1350 CE, as genetic studies show.
Jews were vilified as "Enemies of Christ", and various forms of attack to whip up mobs against Jews became common enough to get names of their own: Blood Libel (the accusation of Jews stealing children and murdering them to use their blood) and Host Desecration (the accusation that Jews were stealing consecrated Hosts and "torturing" them in order to attack Jesus), among others. These resulted in thousands of Jews being attacked, harmed, killed, and expelled.
Pogroms, massacres, and expulsions were just part of the pattern; Jews were effectively second class citizens at best, confined to marginal parts of cities (the original ghettos), subject to ritual humiliation (there was a part of Carnival in Rome that featured "The Running Of The Jews" where the Jewish population of the city had to race and be beaten by the Christians and there are designed-to-be-humiliating carvings of Jews on churches), and so forth. Jews were the scapegoats of choice--a powerless minority made to do the dirty work (such as tax collection) by the powerful and then liquidated when the lower classes got upset, as a distraction (King: "It's not my fault you're hungry!" *motions to table laden with food* "It's the fault of those greedy Jews who I force to work as tax collectors! Go kill them instead of me!"). And that cycle further entrenched the hatred.
Martin Luther took this to new heights during the Reformation; initially, he was "nice", saying that the Christians should treat the Jews gently to get us to convert... and when we didn't, he got nasty, writing a book titled "On The Jews And Their Lies" where he outlined a "how to persecute Jews and make their lives utter hell so they'll convert" prescription of behavior.
And this all became deeply baked into the culture of Europe, in plays, architecture, pop culture, stories, and conspiracy theories over the centuries. Even after the ghetto walls were torn down in the early 1800s by Napoleon and Jews were allowed to integrate into mainstream society, that hatred did not go away. If anything, the resentment grew, culminating in outbursts like the Dreyfus Affair, where a French-Jewish artillery officer was made into the fall guy for another spy, because he was Jewish.
There was a "Jewish Question" in the countries of Europe. A political National Question that went, "What shall we do with these Jews who live in our lands who we do not want?" And many of the Jews desperately wanted to prove that they were Good Model Citizens, but it didn't matter. Some of us, seeing the writing on the wall, and that the Europeans would never accept us, started agitating for political separation and independence--Zionism.
During this time, the old religious-based hatreds were being ostensibly phased out, and it was the era of "scientific racism", so a new word was coined--"antisemitism", to replace the old "Judenhass", to sound more "scientific". More anti-Jewish accusations were created, such as the "Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion", which is a Russian-made forgery that is supposedly the record of a meeting of Jewish elders in their master plan to control the world; it was written to distract hatred away from the Czar and onto a scapegoat. (Essentially just an updated version of the kings' tactic of scapegoating the Jews from centuries earlier)
So the hatreds stayed, regardless of what new clothes they wore. After World War One, when the Nazis said that the blame for the loss and subsequent humiliation and economic collapse of the Weimar Republic was because of the "Jews stabbing us in the back", there was a massive population of people who were already primed to hate and resent Jews and just needed that excuse to focus that hatred. They passed laws that specifically stripped citizenship from the Jews on racial grounds, instituted blood purity laws--again, on racial grounds--and built up to the Holocaust, where the Jews were not seen as human, but as vermin, out to contaminate their pure race.
In the process, they killed nine out of ten Jews who lived in Europe.
Their hatred to the point that they diverted efforts to fight the Allies just so that they could kill Jews. Local people hated Jews so much that they collaborated with their own conquerors, just so they could kill Jews. Because they hated us so much, had hated us for centuries. Their "Final Solution" to "The Jewish Question." This part is what the Right Wing denies.
And then, in the aftermath, nobody wanted the remaining victims. Literally, the British said, "We'll carve off part of our Empire to give to them rather than let them come here."
So, after centuries of hatred and marginalization, Europeans gave into their hatreds that they had been raised with and murdered us in our millions, and we were traumatized.
And some of us went to the USA--the few that the US was willing to take in--and many more, not having any other place to go, went to British Mandate Palestine with the hope of self-governance in the future Jewish territory... having learned that they could not trust non-Jews.
That is the Holocaust and what led up to it, and some of the aftermath of it.
Left Wing Holocaust Denial erases all of that, except for the Holocaust itself, which is taken out of context as a moral lesson.
The Left Wing Unofficial Narrative Of The Holocaust is that the Nazis arbitrarily picked several groups of fellow European Whites, the Jews being just one of them, agitated against them in order to make an Enemy, and then killed them in order to cement power. Thus, in this narrative, the Holocaust was thus an aberration brought about by demagoguery and propaganda. Thus, it is imperative to remember "Never Again", because it can happen to anyone.
According to this narrative, "Jews" are just White Europeans who practice a different Abrahamic Religion, and who played the aftermath of the genocide for undeserved sympathy points to get a colony of their own where they could become oppressors in turn, and that they are getting special treatment that ignores the other victims of the Holocaust.
In doing so, the Left needs to ignore...
...the racial aspects of the Holocaust and the decades and centuries before it--the blood purity laws, the specific "racial science" that Othered Jews, and so forth--in favor of a "Jews are White" narrative.
...that the Jews were specifically targeted by the Nazis for extermination, to the point of irrational, self-defeating fixation, whereas only the Roma were as targeted for complete eradication alongside the Jews--in favor of a "But what about the other victims too?" narrative.
...the Nazi obsession with hating Jews (which has not gone away) as a fundamental part of their ideology, and pretending that the Nazi hatred of Jews is no different than the eugenics and political oppression that other groups were victims of--again, in favor of a "Other people were victims of the Nazis too!" narrative.
...the centuries of hatred and victimization that preceded the Holocaust and culminated in it--in favor of a "Jews are just European White People" narrative.
...the trauma that happened when you've lost your homes, your families, your way of life, and your society, and nobody made any efforts to help you, and how it becomes apparent, after trying to fit in and integrate for decades, that you can be Perfect Citizens and the Christians will still hate you so we need to defend ourselves for our own sakes--in favor of a "Jews are oppressors and didn't learn the right lessons from the Holocaust" narrative.
So, TL;DR:
Right Wing Holocaust Denial denies the body count and the atrocities...
Left Wing Holocaust Denial denies everything that built up to it, the centuries of Othering and murders, and the aftereffects.
Btw tomorrow is going to determine whether one of the Democratic Representatives to Congress from Philly will be a guy who campaigned with Hassan Piker and whose campaign Instagram called the Bondi Beach massacre a false flag or if it will be a normal Democrat. 🫠
A second hamasnik protest outside of Park East synagogue last week, in which a police officer was injured due to protesters trying to break down the barrier
The mayor AGAIN siding with the protesters
Another nazi hamasnik hate rally that marched through a Jewish residential neighborhood in Brooklyn a few days ago, in which Jews were harassed and physically assaulted
One or both of these marches (I can’t really tell bc the coverage kinda overlaps) had Hezbollah flags flown in them
That insane NYTimes op ed piece that would make even the worst medieval blood libeler blush
A flag with a magen david and a swastika flown above a NYU building
This is all off the top of my head of what’s happened in NYC in the past week and a half or so. I’m being dead serious when I say we’re barreling straight towards a major pogrom here.
I'm probably never going to find it again, but there was a response to one of those "artworks we think we can make" posts that was like "Okay, go for it." Like, dead serious.
Are you going to come out of it with a Klein-level work? No. Dude was bonkers skilled. But I am here to tell you that if you've ever gone to Home Depot and shuffled through paint chips and been like "God, this is such a gorgeous color, I fucking love this color" and then immediately been like "...but I can't imagine painting a wall with it." and bought a can of soul-killing eggshell off-white or what the fuck ever, you absolutely can go pick up a $10 canvas from a craftstore and a $5 sample of that color and just hang 6 square feet of it on a wall and enjoy the fuck out of it.
For real, buds. If you see an artwork and you're like "Shit, I could have made that," that is a reminder that god can't stop you and probably neither can science.
You are an unreliable narrator because your coping mechanisms for your deep-seated trauma forbid you from acknowledging the reality of the situation. I am an unreliable narrator because I sincerely have no idea what the fuck is going on.
You are an unreliable narrator because your coping mechanisms for your deep-seated trauma forbid you from acknowledging the reality of the situation. I am an unreliable narrator because I sincerely have no idea what the fuck is going on.
