@dustcircle I stopped reading at the invocation of Antiwar.com, which is full of right-wing conspiracy theories, prints extremists like Pat Buchanan, and currently supports Putin and opposes Ukraine. Yes, of course that site thinks there's too much concern over anti-Semitism. @NoraGottlieb
@NoraGottlieb@dustcircle Bibi's actions are not why people draw caricatures of him with a hooked nose or of Israel as puppeteering the United States; there are other democratic backsliders in the world, including some who do a lot of foreign policy violence, and they're not portrayed that way. I'm sure there are some people who write for FAZ and Die Welt who say anti-Turkish racism in Germany is the fault of Erdoğan, but reasonable people dismiss those writers as racists looking for excuses.
@Wynter@NoraGottlieb@dustcircle Nobody claims criticism of Turkish military action is racist, because the amount of public criticism of such action in the West is small, and nobody escalates to ideas like boycotting all Turkish people - to the contrary, there's extensive engagement with domestic Kurdish and ethnic-Turkish dissidents. Nor do protesters use Remove Kebab-type slogans.
@Wynter@NoraGottlieb@dustcircle Note also that non-Western countries constantly accuse their critics of all manners of things - racism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, what have you. Lee Kuan Yew and Mahatir Mohamed said shit like "human rights imperialism"; the global human rights community lols at them but doesn't react by boycotting Singaporeans and Malaysians or invoking racist stereotypes of Southeast Asia.
@Wynter@NoraGottlieb@dustcircle In Germany none of this is mainstream, but protesters openly talk about ethnically cleansing ~all Jews from Israel. In the UK, there has been a huge upsurge in anti-Semitism from the moment the war started - it wasn't timed to anything Israel did but rather began right after 7.10. In Canada, there are protests in front of synagogues and hospitals named Mount Sinai. The LRB has long printed pieces complaining the Jews make the Holocaust too much about the Jews.
@Wynter@NoraGottlieb@dustcircle A few months ago, PACBI announced a boycott of Standing Together, the group that's protesting the war and successfully escorting aid trucks to Gaza.
@Wynter@NoraGottlieb@dustcircle "Far too late" for what? The complaints are of famine (which is being alleviated with aid trucks as we speak). And no, it's not the right tactic if the goal is some kind of coexistence; it is the right tactic if, like the majority of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, one believes there are far fewer Israeli Jews than there actually are and the South African solution of majority rule without any concern for what white people think (since they're 13% there) works.
@Wynter@NoraGottlieb@dustcircle Yeah, 36,000 is not Dresden (it's slightly more but on four times the population, and also Dresden was a single night's bombing, and also everyone overrates how many people died at Dresden due to Nazi propaganda).
And the point is that if you say "I support two states" to a Palestine protest organizer, you'll be yelled at as a liberal Zionist. Occasionally they even have been protest chants clarifying "we don't want no two states."
Today was the first time I seriously planned traveling by night train, and it became clear that they can't seriously compete against high speed rail or planes.
Prague is about as far away from Brussels as Marseille. The Eurostar to Marseille (when it runs) is 5h, the night train to Prague is... 15h, with a more unreliable schedule. Even giving an 8h sleeping discount to the night train, it's quite a bit longer.
@DiegoBeghin Yeah, that's why I take day trains and break the trip with an overnight in an intermediate city. There's a reason my vignette of 2048 solarpunk involved me getting back on the train home from Moscow in 7 hours, rather than taking a night train.
@DiegoBeghin@Colinvparker Fun fact: in Judaism, it's not permitted to travel on Saturdays, but there's an exception for long-distance journeys (e.g. by ship) provided one gets on and off the ship on weekdays. Rabbis considered making a similar ruling for trains but decided not to permit it, on the grounds that unlike boats, trains don't offer any serenity for respecting the holiness of the Sabbath.
Hernandez reveals to Cagney that there's an inside agent that will help them. Cagney: “Chink?” Hernandez: “You're not cleared to know.” Cagney looks at her and repeats the slur, this time not as a question.
@timbray@ww3real He is, but as his reaction suggests, he already had a hunch this was happening. The real soft target there is Draper, on the theory that if she's compromised, everything else is compromised so Ma isn't safe either way.
For all of the nationalist and populist desire to decentralize cities, today, for military defense purposes, it's best to keep investing in your large cities for both insurgents and counterinsurgents. An insurgent wants their cities to be like Gaza - defensible in urban warfare, allowing terrorists to blend into the civilian population. A counterinsurgent likewise wants dense cities in the metropole, because those can be defended from cheap rockets by Iron Dome-type systems more easily.
If the threat model is symmetric warfare, then what's important is to get one's GDP up. This again favors large cities with a dense ecosystem of private businesses, allowing companies to be both big (for scale) and competitive (for market discipline). The American system is good at big business, but the combo of insufficient housing in New York and the Bay Area and weak city centers elsewhere means those businesses have to split their office functions across the country, reducing efficiency.
@Colinvparker Reshoring and radically changing what is built. The casualness with which I describe a construction program for 500 carriers in @ww3real follows from what happens when military spending rises to total war levels.