Alon

Alon, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

In more "left-wing anti-Semites think opposition to anti-Semitism is a German rather than Jewish thing" news, Greta Thunberg held a rally in Leipzig against Israel a week ago. She lives in Sweden, where the national government has fascists with anti-Semitic roots in the coalition. White anti-anti-racists who don't socialize with minorities think anti-racism is an invention of guilty white liberals and human resources; left-wing anti-Semites think guilty Germans invented anti-anti-Semitism.

Alon, 7 months ago to random

I'm glad Gérald Darmanin is seeing anti-Semitic extremism at protests and banning them. Now, let's talk about Gilets Jaunes sympathizers, anti-immigration protests, anti-gay rights protests, and everyone else who Darmanin hopes will vote for him in four years (and won't, because they're captured by R-Haine)...

Alon, 8 months ago to random

After an obligatory five minute delay, we got to Hamburg.

Alon, 9 months ago to random

What's the least frequent intercity rail route anywhere in the world that's actually successful? I know some French lines with a train every three hours but they're not especially successful - the main TGV lines run every 1-1.5 hours, maybe with one irregular two-hour gap sometime. In Germany everything runs hourly.

Alon, 9 months ago to random

Why are people boosting reactionary "medieval peasants actually were freer than modern office workers" shit into my feed? And why is it from kolektiva.social of all places? No, people, peasants who owed a heritable debt and had to give their best animal to the lord when the head of the household died and couldn't leave the farm were not actually free. Stop acting like your boredom at meetings is oppression and stop doing reactionary socialism.

Alon, 2 months ago to random

Pedestrian Observations: Trains on the Moon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/03/20/trains-on-the-moon/ cc @nyrath

Alon, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

Wait, Brussels Metro Line 3 is at this point 2.6 billion €/4.8 km? WTF? @DiegoBeghin https://www.thebulletin.be/brussels-metro-line-3-project-could-be-delayed-or-suspended

Alon, 1 month ago to random

Iran is confirmed to have launched dozens of UAVs and cruise missiles to attack Israel, in retaliation for the assassination of an IRGC commander in Syria. The drones are slow and will take six to nine hours to get there; the missiles are faster and estimated to make contact in two hours.

Alon, 7 months ago to random

Hamas just fired rockets on Ashkelon (okay, it's war, that part I get), calling it a colonial city. And that's what I mean when I complain that Hamas has not articulated any war aim short of "ethnically cleanse the Jews out of Israel." It recently shot down talk of negotiations for a prisoner exchange. It downplays its own casualties, where usually it announces them in order to point out Israel is the stronger side as the occupier. Its intent, evinced in both words and actions, is genocidal.

Alon, 5 months ago to random

In Europe, we don't really have an inequality problem. We have a growth problem. Most required fixes are inequality-neutral:

• Improving cross-border infrastructure, labor mobility, and corporate ownership to increase scale
• Liberalizing labor migration
• Increasing Anglophony

Some fixes are inequality-reducing, like combating Italian economic dwarfism. Some are inequality-increasing: reducing place-based subsidies to declining regions. But on net, what we need is growth, keeping ~0.3 Gini.

Alon, 1 month ago to random

When writing alt history, I like playing with the wank/screw dichotomy in the genre (wank = country or faction gets stronger/richer/portrayed more positively; screw = the opposite). For example, let's say Germany unifies under a Großdeutsche Lösung, is forced to democratize in 1885, avoids starting two world wars and the Holocaust... but it's so economically dominated by Junkers that it ends up a lot like real-life Italy, with a huge low-productivity traditional sector.

Alon, 9 months ago to random

What are some examples of positive, non-stereotyped portrayal of nerds or smart protagonists on television and in film? I'm thinking of Malcolm in the Middle, Prison Break, and maybe the Ross arc on Friends (except it has held up poorly) - what else?

Coming to think of it, these are all male nerds, not female ones. Chloe on 24 is portrayed sympathetically, but is a supporting character.

Alon, 9 months ago to random

What are some examples of walkable urbanism in deserts? The American Southwest and the Gulf states are both famous for their total unwalkability; are there walkable desert cities?

For example... how walkable are Egyptian cities? Alexandria is busy building a giant highway on the waterfront; most people don't drive but that's poverty, not walkability.

Alon, 4 months ago to random

In Israel, the main operational discussion right now is about the Philadelphi Axis - the route from Rafah Crossing to the rest of Gaza. Hamas is in control of it and thus of the distribution of all supplies into Gaza (except the parts under IDF control, which have only 10% of Gaza's population at this point). Israel would like to sever it, but is running into the issue of needing to plan how to administer the delivery, and so far it's been reluctant to talk at all about administering Gaza.

Alon, 1 month ago to random

Baltimore highway bridge collapses after a ship hits it. Death toll is still unknown but it is said that there may be 20 people in the river.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/16-mile-bridge-baltimore-collapses-after-ship-collision-fox-baltimore-reports-2024-03-26/

Alon, 6 months ago to random

From Anti-Muslim to Anti-Jewish: Target Substitution on Fringe Social Media Platforms and the Persistence of Online and Offline Hate

"First, increased anti-Jewish speech was partly driven by the same far-right communities and extremists who previously promoted anti-Muslim speech... Together, this study demonstrates a robust link between the dislike toward Muslims and dislike toward Jews, and how fringe groups organize the dissemination of hate."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-023-09892-9

Alon, 7 months ago to random

It's been 3.5 days since Gallant said Israel would begin a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip in two days. No ground invasion yet, just ineffective air strikes on Gaza and some operational air strikes on Syria. https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/10/live-updates-israel-strikes-2-syrian-airports-gaza-humanitarian-crisis-unfolds

Alon, 1 month ago to random

I have an alt history of what-if-the-US-stays-British; in the timeline, Zionism didn't do much, and the entire Levant is one Syrian state, ~5% Jewish.

Dear followers, please persuade me to write it up as a normal narrative and not as live updates (like @ww3real) by the Jewish-Syrian-British protag.

Alon, 8 months ago to random

Don't talk to me about basic income; talk to me, concretely, about the Swedish guaranteed minimum income.

Don't talk to me about land value taxes; talk to me, concretely, about the land and property tax regime in Pennsylvania.

Don't talk to me about a nuclear-powered cornucopia; talk to me, concretely, about electricity in France (or Belgium, or prewar Ukraine).

All of those things that you think will bring utopia have been done, in a partial but close enough form that they can be analyzed.

Alon, 9 months ago to random

In a city with a metro system, each trainset should be painteed a separate theme, both for the art and for passenger recognizability ("I lost my bag on the train with the sunflower scenery"). If the lines have separate fleets (as in Paris and London but not Berlin), then the art could even be color-coded, so the Central line gets paintings with reds, the Piccadilly with dark blues, etc. What are some examples of themes for such painting?

Alon, 9 months ago to random

My assumption at this point is that every small instance admin is either paid by Musk or a useful idiot who acts like they're paid by Musk. Anyway, I finally signed into Bluesky on this computer. https://twitter.com/TaliaRinger/status/1688565640380948480

Alon, 5 months ago to random

The Fediverse increasingly has worse disinformation than other spaces. The problem is, the users don't read the news very much, and many have a culture that rejects reading and discussing news. So the pool of people who talk about the news is too small for fact checks. Media literacy here is so low that people go viral with massacre denialism because they read something in Middle East Eye and don't know it's Qatar's Global Times, a propaganda outfit used for things Al-Jazeera won't touch.

Alon, 6 months ago to random

A couple Israelis here, like @exmaahal and @yuvalne make an argument against reoccupation of Gaza: Israel did that, and wasn't safer for it - it's been 18 years since the disengagement, same as between the founding of Hamas and the disengagement, and the more recent 18 years, until 6.10, were a lot safer.

Alon, 7 months ago to random

Hey, @bryanculbertson, the line about how the Bay Area has about the same annual public transit spending as Switzerland is from Elizabeth Alexis, who I think is comparing total operating subsidies. For capital investment, I'm not even sure what you'd compare, since who the hell knows how much they're going to spend on BART to San Jose or California HSR or any other megaproject of uncertain funding status in the next 10 years.

Alon, 8 months ago to random

How come schoolteachers in New York are so much whiter than the student population? Only 40% of teachers in the city aren't white (the headline in the link reports statewide demographics, but the body of the article mentions the city); the city is 65% nonwhite and the public school student body is 85%. https://eu.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/albany/2020/01/30/new-york-teacher-diversity-white-black-hispanic/4605102002/ https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/reports/doe-data-at-a-glance