@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Alon

@Alon@mastodon.social

I write about public transport and do research for NYU's Marron Institute. I've previously lived in Tel Aviv, Singapore, the Riviera, New York, Providence, Vancouver, Stockholm, Paris.

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Alon, to random
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It's very likely that the majority, probably a large majority, of people who are considered to be hostages in Gaza were killed on or right after 7.10 and Hamas is just holding their bodies. https://www.timesofisrael.com/under-a-rug-in-gazan-home-idf-troops-found-shaft-leading-to-bodies-of-4-hostages/

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Colinvparker It's not only a TV thing - real-life hostage takers do it too, and Hamas occasionally does it as well. But Hamas's MO has long been to demand prisoner releases to even give signs of life. Not for nothing, the agreement it made with Egypt (which for a few hours the media said was the ceasefire agreement with the US and Israel too) said that only during the first phase of the ceasefire would it tell Israel how many hostages it had exactly.

interfluidity, to random
@interfluidity@zirk.us avatar

cc @Alon https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-284-gaza-the-decade-after

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@interfluidity Yeah, I saw the pic. The isomorphic mimicry of Singapore is so stupid. It's especially stupid that Israel promulgates it, since its model of development is entirely different and it has enough ties with Singapore to know the difference ("villa in the jungle" vs. the economic center of Southeast Asia).

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@interfluidity I don't think of it in terms of that. Rather, since the Gaza Disengagement, there has been a fantasy among Israelis that Hamas could build Gaza to be like Singapore (and not, say, like Jordan) but constantly chose violence instead. Zero clue about what made Singapore tick, just amplification of the attitude that everything bad that happens to Palestinians is the Palestinians' own fault.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@interfluidity Of course, the standard anti-Zionist and pan-Arab line engages in a similar fantasy that Palestine (or a pan-Arab state) would be a fully developed country if Israel were destroyed and the Jews sidelined, rather than, again, a middle-income country with the same social problems as Egypt or Jordan (or Lebanon).

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

In the Lazar poll from yesterday, the prewar coalition is at 46 seats. The opposition's 74-46 advantage is a bit soft in that Religious Zionism is below-threshold, and in an actual election when it had any risk of not clearing the threshold it would run with Otzma again, but even that only softens the advantage to 73-47 or at worst 72-48. The poll was taken after the ICC indictment of Bibi, Gallant, and Hamas leaders; Bibi is not getting any rally-around-the-flag bounce from this.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@gryzzly The polls have been so consistent since the war started that I'm not even sure individual revelations like this are so important electorally. Everyone knows conflict management has failed, some are just trying to cope by bleating about final victory.

rebeccawatson, to random
@rebeccawatson@mstdn.social avatar

I hate how whenever US liberals defend immigrants they have to say how hard working they are. I just want it to be known that I support immigrants who are just as lazy, if not even lazier, than me.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@rebeccawatson You may hate it, but I and the other immigrants I know react much better to the mentality you criticize than to the mentality (prevalent in e.g. Sweden) of "immigrants are a terrible burden we must all share as a moral duty even though they're all lazy criminals who refuse to assimilate to our superior values." The mentality you criticize is praise for immigrants; the Swedish mentality is the opposite.

interfluidity, to random
@interfluidity@zirk.us avatar

"I sometimes think that 'anti-colonialism,' the sort that breeds leadership from Papa Doc to Yahya Sinwar, is the final poisonous fruit of the European colonial project." https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/05/the-puzzle-of-hispaniola

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@interfluidity The parts of the quoted article talking about the Dominican Republic's growth are really interesting too - and as always for me, there's an infrastructure angle, in that Santo Domingo got the idea of building a subway from New York, but then didn't outsource planning to American consultants, and instead built it its own way at some of the lowest costs per km in the world.

Gurre, to random Swedish
@Gurre@mastodon.nu avatar

The Gaza Strip is less than 2/3 the size of the City of Chiacgo.
It has about 89% the population of Chicago.

What should be going on there is debate on which metro lines to build next. Not where to hide from a war forced upon them by corrupt fascists (on both sides. oh, and are fascists ever not corrupt?).

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Gurre Four-track line on Saladin. It's rather linear, which facilitates public transport.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Gurre Freight is less important - Gaza is small and freight rail shines at very long distances or for heavy goods.

The other issue is a Gaza-West Bank connection. There are some road plans; for rail, best solution is to extend the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem railway into East Jerusalem, then connect Gaza City to the Israeli network, and give the future Palestine Railway slots organized like the Russia proper-Kaliningrad trains or the interwar Germany proper-East Prussia trains.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@DiegoBeghin @Gurre Yes! Zoologischer Garten was the main West Berlin station, with regular trains making no stops in East Germany. There were also cross-border trains, the border station being Friedrichstraße (with an international zone for West-to-West connections on the S-Bahn), and derails to prevent Eastern drivers from using the infrastructure to escape to the West.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Gurre Yeah, but even then, why would such freight trains go through rather than around Gaza?

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@crzwdjk @Gurre Why would you do that by rail and not by ship or truck via the West Bank?

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

ICJ 🤝 Aviv Kochavi

Israel should halt the Rafah operation

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-05-24/ty-article/.premium/icj-to-deliver-decision-on-emergency-measures-against-israel/0000018f-a694-d476-a7df-e7fd24770000

philipncohen, to random
@philipncohen@mastodon.social avatar

Trump says China is building a secret army inside the US -- as if his racist minions didn't already have enough reason to attack random Asian people. https://x.com/atrupar/status/1793787772198690990

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@philipncohen The closest thing China is building to an army in the US is American investors lobbying on behalf of TikTok, who are also major Trump donors.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Pedestrian Observations: Bus Stop Consolidation and Blocks https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/05/22/bus-stop-consolidation-and-blocks/

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@elliots If a bus stop has so few passengers a significant fraction of buses skip it, you should just drop it. The reason is that, at such a stop, if it has a nonzero number of passengers, it typically has just one. A stop with a single passenger gives that passenger a shorter walk of 1-3 minutes but delays a lot of other passengers by 25 seconds each.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Colinvparker @elliots Yes, and this is also how night buses work. In New York, the rule at night is that passengers may get off anywhere along the route that the driver thinks it's safe to stop at. Service planning is also based on taking the drive time along the route and adding a small factor to account for such stops, since there's no traffic.

gavi, to random

ok so what software do i use to write a novel actually. i know scrivener exists but im absolutely not messing with that

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@gavi Any normal word processor or text editor will do?

philipncohen, to random
@philipncohen@mastodon.social avatar

I am pretty sure people started using initials for sexualities -- eg, LGB, eventually LGBTQIA+ -- in the 80s because of conventions in print personal ads. I don't know what year this example is from was but this is how they went. They were everywhere. Maybe can never prove this but it's true.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@philipncohen Wait - GLB/GLBT was more common at one point and then the community switched to LGB/LGBT... https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=LGBT%2CGLBT%2CLGB%2CGLB&year_start=1960&year_end=2010&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

BenRossTransit, to random
@BenRossTransit@mastodon.social avatar

Ostracizing "Zionist" students is anti-Semitism. Period. Whether or not the anti-Zionist opinion of the ostracizer is itself anti-Semitic.
Discrimination against Jews based on their Jewish opinions is anti-Semitism, even when it's not anti-Semitic to hold the contrary opinion.
Example: A Catholic priest who believes Jesus is the son of God is not thereby anti-Semitic. But burning Jews at the stake for disagreeing is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/style/jewish-college-students-zionism-israel.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t00.M_tX.zYA2gy-TIZwm&smid=url-share

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@BenRossTransit @bradweed It's Khamenei, the man has been responsible for the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands of Arabs. A rare case of someone who believes in equality between Jews and Arabs in a single state (equally oppressed by Iranian proxies).

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Arianity @BenRossTransit @bradweed Which ones are you thinking of? Because PACBI specifically said they're boycotting Standing Together on the grounds that they're engaging in normalization, SJP celebrated the 7.10 massacres, major speakers brought by the encampment protesters defended the massacres... and note that all of these groups consider two states to be Zionism, as seen in some common chants ("we don't want no two states").

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Travel plans to the US are getting more solid: flying in shortly before the 15th to visit Boston for a few days, then down to New York until early July. If people in Philly and DC really want I can come down there, but no guarantees.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Will Yes. At the very least, there's going to be an in-person @eta_ny gathering that I'm going to go to. I may do an event at Marron about our high-speed rail project. Philly and DC are up in the air, depending on whether local advocates want to hear me.

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