I think to some extent this was a vote against democracy, with Trump's supporters saying, "We don't want to have to think, or work, or choose. It's too hard. You take care of things, Don, and don't bother us with the details."
The defining ad was the one that ran against Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. (I happened to be driving from Ohio across the length of Pennsylvania the week before the election, so I can vouch for the fact that it was the exact same ad, with only the names changed.) Each candidate was castigated for supporting trans rights, with the ending tagline reading, "He's not for us, he's for They/Them." That's about as nasty as an ad can get, and it states baldly one of Trump's main arguments: It's Us against Them, with "Them" being anyone not white, straight, Christian, and male.
Even if the country comes through this intact, the whole hell of it is that the country simply is not very liberal-minded. I have had a pet theory for quite a while that what the electorate really wants is a Republican program carried out by Democrats. It does seem like the heroic era of American liberalism ends with Biden, the last survivor of its high water mark. As with a number of things at this point in life, I feel I have little choice but to be glad I got to spend so much of my life during the era. A rather less noble feeling I have is that if the Plain People of America think they'll be better off aligning themselves with the bosses, then let the bosses kill them and eat them. Let the bosses shoot them for sport.
"Last survivor of its high water mark" i.e., last person still in office active in that era. While you're learning what the word genocide actually means you might also take the opportunity to learn to read.
Israel has destroyed every single institution of higher education in Gaza. Every university, rubble. Israel has killed over 17,000 children. Gaza now has the highest cohort of child amputees in history. Israel has deliberately targeted basic infrastructure. There is no clean water, there is no food.
You people desperately don't want it to be a genocide, because then you might have to face the truth that the slaughter of Palestinian children just isn't that important to you.
I am going by the dictionary. Per the American Heritage: “The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.” There is certainly a valid human rights argument to be made that if the existence of the State of Israel requires a periodical bloodbath such as this then the State of Israel should not exist. However, even if every Jew and every Arab Israeli who would prefer not to find out how the new regime deals with collaborators were to evacuate Israel leaving behind not so much as bean in the cupboard, the result would not be peace, freedom and democracy, it would be another war to determine who gets to rule Palestine.
Resorting to dictionary definitions for complex and disputed concepts that are decided within the juridical realm is not serious.
The current UN Convention says that "genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
The UN is hopelessly corrupt, as can be seen by the information coming to light that many UNRWA workers are also Hamasniks.
The casualty figures being cited sound like they’re from the “Gaza Health Ministry,” which is just a propaganda arm of Hamas.
For years, Hamas has been diverting foreign aid coming into Gaza and using it to construct terror tunnels (in which they hide themselves and hostages, while not allowing civilians in) and missiles, essentially just turning large portions of the strip into a launching pad from which to launch murderous attacks on Jews.
No doubt, the casualty figures are high, but to a large extent, this is because Hamas, a sadistic death cult, has intentionally created this situation. They want a large number of civilian deaths, because it makes Israel look bad in the court of public opinion.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. You read a news story about UNRWA and looked no further into the question. You have no reason to suspect the Health Ministry is lying, just your own bigotry. I have spoken to UN workers who have been in Gaza. You simply want to evade the actual reason any of this is happening, which is Israel’s illegal occupation, regarded by the UN, every major human rights organization, the former head of Mossad, and the former Northern Commander of the IDF as apartheid.
Thinking of Hamas but not the IDF as a sadistic death cult is telling on yourself.
Feel free to explain where UNRWA is lying and how you come to possess the truth:
Repeated listening on election eve: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, "Land of Hope and Dreams," as recorded in New York City in 2000, with tears of hope and dread.
Listening in early hours of last Wednesday: Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska (album), the same as in the early hours of November 9, 2016. "Sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world," a line I doubt has been quoted in the endless hours of cable TV election postmortems. Followed by Robert Johnson, "Me and the Devil Blues": "And I said, Hello Satan / I believe it's time to go." I don't believe Trump is Satan, but he does traffic in temptation, the temptation that you can be the worst version of yourself and be rewarded for it as richly as he has.
For weeks now, I have been thinking of your book "The Manchurian Candidate" and how it took a while for me to read it because I knew I would head into the heart of darkness with it. I should have thought "a heart," not "the heart." My reluctance seems, from today's vantage point, naive, innocent even. And now? I got nothin', nothin' at all. Bobby, my little longhaired dachshund, is it. We have each other and I try to make that enough.
Trump president for life but death itself is a great democratic institution. He will die eventually and will a namesake or follower be as strong? We've already seen mid-term elections favor Dems. Down the ballot races and initiatives do not rebuke Dems either. We need to gird ourselves for what is to come and try to help those who are innocent victims. Dems have lost the battle but the war rages on and who if anyone wins it, remains uncertain.
Chilling words; in the midst of grading papers, I am struck by the fact that very few of my General Education students (in college) could parse this passage. Maybe one of them or their peers will invent an app to help them do so… which brings to mind Jill Lepore’s argument in the latest New Yorker about the “artificial state.” If apps do all the work for us, is there even a state worth defending? It’s too early to tell.
This is distressing, considering the man who wrote it barely had any formal education at all, and that his Lyceum audience in 1838 was probably full of young men who hadn't completed secondary school.
First of all, it's "whoever won the electoral majority," not "whomever."
Second of all, corporate leaders are not going to let him get away with abolishing elections, for God's sake. Capital runs the state, not the other way around.
This imagines "capital" as being homogenous and unchanging. Charles "Engine Charlie" Wilson helped make peace between GM and the UAW. Charles "Electric Charlie" Wilson headed the civil rights commission whose report led to the Dixiecrat walkout in 1948. Now we have Elon Musk, Trump's new BFF, and Peter Thiel, who bought Vance his Senate seat, and tech world's pet ideologist Curtis Yarvin, who wants to turn in the republic for rule by a CEO/Founder.
I am less worried about elections being abolished than being made entirely lacking in suspense, in large part by controlling or cowering all the media that matters.
It doesn’t imagine capital as unchanging in every respect at all, just the central one: it is devoted to its own expansion. If the state interferes with that, it will make its power known. Whether this or that oligarch benefits is not the question. I speak of capital in the abstract & you think mentioning a few individual capitalists is a sufficient refutation.
I think to some extent this was a vote against democracy, with Trump's supporters saying, "We don't want to have to think, or work, or choose. It's too hard. You take care of things, Don, and don't bother us with the details."
The defining ad was the one that ran against Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. (I happened to be driving from Ohio across the length of Pennsylvania the week before the election, so I can vouch for the fact that it was the exact same ad, with only the names changed.) Each candidate was castigated for supporting trans rights, with the ending tagline reading, "He's not for us, he's for They/Them." That's about as nasty as an ad can get, and it states baldly one of Trump's main arguments: It's Us against Them, with "Them" being anyone not white, straight, Christian, and male.
Even if the country comes through this intact, the whole hell of it is that the country simply is not very liberal-minded. I have had a pet theory for quite a while that what the electorate really wants is a Republican program carried out by Democrats. It does seem like the heroic era of American liberalism ends with Biden, the last survivor of its high water mark. As with a number of things at this point in life, I feel I have little choice but to be glad I got to spend so much of my life during the era. A rather less noble feeling I have is that if the Plain People of America think they'll be better off aligning themselves with the bosses, then let the bosses kill them and eat them. Let the bosses shoot them for sport.
"Last survivor of its high water mark" i.e., last person still in office active in that era. While you're learning what the word genocide actually means you might also take the opportunity to learn to read.
This is dishonest. There are many people who study genocide who have reached the reasonable conclusion that Gaza fits the definition. See just e.g.:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976
Israel has destroyed every single institution of higher education in Gaza. Every university, rubble. Israel has killed over 17,000 children. Gaza now has the highest cohort of child amputees in history. Israel has deliberately targeted basic infrastructure. There is no clean water, there is no food.
You people desperately don't want it to be a genocide, because then you might have to face the truth that the slaughter of Palestinian children just isn't that important to you.
I am going by the dictionary. Per the American Heritage: “The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.” There is certainly a valid human rights argument to be made that if the existence of the State of Israel requires a periodical bloodbath such as this then the State of Israel should not exist. However, even if every Jew and every Arab Israeli who would prefer not to find out how the new regime deals with collaborators were to evacuate Israel leaving behind not so much as bean in the cupboard, the result would not be peace, freedom and democracy, it would be another war to determine who gets to rule Palestine.
Resorting to dictionary definitions for complex and disputed concepts that are decided within the juridical realm is not serious.
The current UN Convention says that "genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Note "in whole or in part."
The UN is hopelessly corrupt, as can be seen by the information coming to light that many UNRWA workers are also Hamasniks.
The casualty figures being cited sound like they’re from the “Gaza Health Ministry,” which is just a propaganda arm of Hamas.
For years, Hamas has been diverting foreign aid coming into Gaza and using it to construct terror tunnels (in which they hide themselves and hostages, while not allowing civilians in) and missiles, essentially just turning large portions of the strip into a launching pad from which to launch murderous attacks on Jews.
No doubt, the casualty figures are high, but to a large extent, this is because Hamas, a sadistic death cult, has intentionally created this situation. They want a large number of civilian deaths, because it makes Israel look bad in the court of public opinion.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. You read a news story about UNRWA and looked no further into the question. You have no reason to suspect the Health Ministry is lying, just your own bigotry. I have spoken to UN workers who have been in Gaza. You simply want to evade the actual reason any of this is happening, which is Israel’s illegal occupation, regarded by the UN, every major human rights organization, the former head of Mossad, and the former Northern Commander of the IDF as apartheid.
Thinking of Hamas but not the IDF as a sadistic death cult is telling on yourself.
Feel free to explain where UNRWA is lying and how you come to possess the truth:
https://www.unrwa.org/unrwa-claims-versus-facts-february-2024
This is not happening because Israel occupies the West Bank, it is happening because Israel exists, as the Hamas charter makes perfectly clear.
Repeated listening on election eve: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, "Land of Hope and Dreams," as recorded in New York City in 2000, with tears of hope and dread.
Listening in early hours of last Wednesday: Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska (album), the same as in the early hours of November 9, 2016. "Sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world," a line I doubt has been quoted in the endless hours of cable TV election postmortems. Followed by Robert Johnson, "Me and the Devil Blues": "And I said, Hello Satan / I believe it's time to go." I don't believe Trump is Satan, but he does traffic in temptation, the temptation that you can be the worst version of yourself and be rewarded for it as richly as he has.
For weeks now, I have been thinking of your book "The Manchurian Candidate" and how it took a while for me to read it because I knew I would head into the heart of darkness with it. I should have thought "a heart," not "the heart." My reluctance seems, from today's vantage point, naive, innocent even. And now? I got nothin', nothin' at all. Bobby, my little longhaired dachshund, is it. We have each other and I try to make that enough.
Trump president for life but death itself is a great democratic institution. He will die eventually and will a namesake or follower be as strong? We've already seen mid-term elections favor Dems. Down the ballot races and initiatives do not rebuke Dems either. We need to gird ourselves for what is to come and try to help those who are innocent victims. Dems have lost the battle but the war rages on and who if anyone wins it, remains uncertain.
Chilling words; in the midst of grading papers, I am struck by the fact that very few of my General Education students (in college) could parse this passage. Maybe one of them or their peers will invent an app to help them do so… which brings to mind Jill Lepore’s argument in the latest New Yorker about the “artificial state.” If apps do all the work for us, is there even a state worth defending? It’s too early to tell.
This is distressing, considering the man who wrote it barely had any formal education at all, and that his Lyceum audience in 1838 was probably full of young men who hadn't completed secondary school.
Wishing you good luck with your teaching.
First of all, it's "whoever won the electoral majority," not "whomever."
Second of all, corporate leaders are not going to let him get away with abolishing elections, for God's sake. Capital runs the state, not the other way around.
This imagines "capital" as being homogenous and unchanging. Charles "Engine Charlie" Wilson helped make peace between GM and the UAW. Charles "Electric Charlie" Wilson headed the civil rights commission whose report led to the Dixiecrat walkout in 1948. Now we have Elon Musk, Trump's new BFF, and Peter Thiel, who bought Vance his Senate seat, and tech world's pet ideologist Curtis Yarvin, who wants to turn in the republic for rule by a CEO/Founder.
I am less worried about elections being abolished than being made entirely lacking in suspense, in large part by controlling or cowering all the media that matters.
It doesn’t imagine capital as unchanging in every respect at all, just the central one: it is devoted to its own expansion. If the state interferes with that, it will make its power known. Whether this or that oligarch benefits is not the question. I speak of capital in the abstract & you think mentioning a few individual capitalists is a sufficient refutation.
Unchecked power and populism risk destabilizing democracy and harming supporters.
Astonishing. And why, like Lord Buckley before me, I'm a Lincoln cat.