Two vague thoughts:
1. Whereas down here, the people whispering in Abbott's ear to call in DPS on the students are all hardcore Christians trying to bring about rapture. (He doesn't really need anyone whispering in his ear, to be fair. He's organically this way.)
2. I'm having one of those moments where, yes, the people with an absurd amount of money control the decision making, but why do they have to systematically make things worse for other people? Brought to you again by thinking about fucking Abbott and how he's trying to punish public schools because he wasn't quite able to ram his voucher plan through last year. That was with a $32 billion surplus in the budget. Which came from sales tax (mostly). And which was (mostly) refunded to home owners via a property tax credit.
I literally can't understand why no one fussed about how a sales tax surplus was being returned to home owners. My blood pressure is going up just thinking about it.
Religion is the opium of the masses
Anti-semistism is the socialism of fools
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel
...
accusations of antisemitic tropes are the first refuge for secretive efforts by plutocrats to influence government and university officials ???
There was so much money thrown at Summer Lee's various opponents that I got called by human-administered surveys maybe a half dozen times. They were clearly trying to figure out how to get well off Jewish people to vote for anyone else.
Or Albuqurque throwing out the belongings of homeless people. Like, with such enormous problems in the world, it kills me that so much time and effort gets put into making things worse with no discernible upside.
I literally can't understand why no one fussed about how a sales tax surplus was being returned to home owners.
Americans have long supported the redistribution of wealth through government action.
5: This is a fairly straightforward and correct explanation of how Elon Musk became the richest man alive.
Because it involves Israel/Palestine and secretive organizations, this incredibly depressing article is on topic.
What do you mean by "competing"? Do you see a struggle for control of Arab society between the government and the criminal organizations?
Yes. They are trying to take over Arab society. Not for any ideological reason, of course. They are far more organized and sophisticated than the government, and they are competing with the government for [control over] the engines of growth and infrastructures. From their point of view, the Arab communities are [themselves] infrastructures. That's where the "soldiers" come from, through them, the organizations can launder money through legitimate businesses, and they can function as banks, because the [legitimate] banks discriminate against Arabs. [. . .]
No society is without violence, but what is happening in Arab society [in Israel] in recent years is not just violence. You can see it in the numbers. If Arab society in Israel were an environment in which people murder one another and have always done so, the numbers would be consistent, they would be the same all the time. But they're not - in 2008 things looked completely different.
So it's not a cultural thing, it's something that's happened in recent years: social changes, problems of enforcement and of course the economic implications. It's a complex problem that requires complex solutions, and we have to look at it with complex vision. It's not cut and dried. The government always excluded Arab society, there was always a lack of a police presence in Arab society, but that society also changed and so did policy toward it.
What do you mean about Arab society having changed?
As a young activist, I wanted change, feminism, modernization. I always said that we needed to "dismantle the hamulot [clans]." Today, I can only cry and pray for the return of the hamulot. There were respected people [at the heads of the clans], and everyone listened to them. Today no one listens to anyone. Chaos. The economic situation is bad, zero employment, absence of law enforcement.
||
I find myself, by unhappy accident, drinking Budweiser. It is even more mediocre than I had been led to expect.
|>
I saw linked, probably here, shortly after October 7th, someone comparing the attack to a prison revolt, and mentioning that Israeli prisons are full of Palestinians and run by their gangs.
Is there a single right-wing cause or tendency for which Eric Adams is not a stooge?
Re:7 Interestingly, I was just reading an article yesterday about how the 'Ndragheta, Cosa Nostra and Camorra have turned away from traditional mafia rackets in order to siphon money away from government and legitimate* businesses via tax fraud, fake invoice schemes and planned bankruptcies. The punishments are more lenient, the enforcement is more difficult and the profits are astronomically better. Pretty soon they'll be letting out money at interest!
*Now that I am an exempt employee, does that make me an even more legitimate businessman?
"I saw linked, probably here, shortly after October 7th, someone comparing the attack to a prison revolt, and mentioning that Israeli prisons are full of Palestinians and run by their gangs."
As at April 2022 there were 4450 Palestinians in Israeli prisons out of a total of around 20,000 inmates. Of those, 1000 Palestinians and a total of around 5000 inmates had not been convicted of a crime.
I wasn't the one who made that comment, but I have one about that too if you truly can't get enough! Same interviewer, also a somewhat laboriously transcribed interview, but pretty riveting. Definitely no good guys here, nor reliable narrators; always interesting when people reveal their thinking. I had to ask myself how much of it I could believe, and I think I buy (within reason) his portrait of Hamas as an organization, and the point about regional rivalries, with the implication that there are possible ways to transcend that dynamic. And the account of Sinwar is indelible.
More to add to the ceaseless litany of horrors
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/18/israeli-abuse-of-jailed-palestinian-leader-marwan-barghouti-amounts-to-torture
When the people committing the crimes against humanity are bragging about those crimes, it sure makes politicians on the other side of the world look like the genocide-supporting fools they are:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/21/israeli-soldiers-and-police-tipping-off-groups-that-attack-gaza-aid-trucks