Seeing more right-wing troll accounts from Mastodon dot social lately. These are all recently created but have PFPs and bios and things, unlike the hasbara throwaway accounts.
I think these people have been ejected from their instances or perhaps they’re on instances that get defederated by everyone else, so they put up alt accounts on Mastodon dot social which has spotty moderation.
Just said something on my synagogue listserve to the effect that Israel has hijacked the term “antisemitism” to advance its own interests and silence critics, often at the expense of American Jews, so effectively that Israel gets more support and consideration from much of our political class than we, actual people who live in America, do.
That popular leftist account with a Picrew avatar of a red-headed woman is saying egregiously incorrect things for likes and retoots again.
This time it’s “Joe Biden obviously has no plans to tax the rich” when his proposed presidential budget included raising taxes on the very rich, and more significantly, the IRS is aggressively going after rich tax cheats more aggressively than they have since…well, since I can remember.
There’s a lot of “the outcome of X is predetermined because lots of other people are doing/will do Y so it doesn’t matter if I do Z” going on, so people can justify shirking their responsibilities to each other.
This is about electoral stuff but also things like even minimal COVID mitigation and combatting climate change.
Well, yes and no. It wasn’t the House that the John Lewis VRA got stuck in, but the Senate, because Manchin and Sinema (mostly Manchin) preferred to keep the filibuster in place as a CYA measure. https://mastodon.social/@davidbrin/112491210974906425
Someone made a good point on our Synagogue listserve:
“To the extent that we decide we must hold allegiance to the term Zionist as a litmus test in Judaism, I wonder if we might inadvertently be communicating to young adults that their sorrow and anger around Israeli policy might mean there is no longer a place in Judaism for them.”
In any case, I am not young, but my view is I simply do not get involved for or against Zionism, in it or out it, towards it or away from it. It's not part of my life.
If you think “overpopulation” is at the root of environmental crises like climate change and you won’t acknowledge that the problem is actually an economic system that promotes relentless resource extraction, consumption, and externalizing costs to the environment, then you need to answer my follow-up question of “how many people do you think need to be genocided and which ones?”
It’s a fair question and you should show you’ve thought through your position.
In general I don’t want to tell people to kill themselves but for people who seriously believe “humans are the virus” and “there are too many people,” I feel strongly tempted to say that they should demonstrate the courage of their convictions.
(But the supernumerary people are never them or their friends.)
I played a lot of (too much of?) #Fallout 3 and NEW VEGAS from the late aughts through the early 2010s but it’s only on seeing the TV series and replaying FNV that I realized: hey, the worst bastards in the setting are all revanchists, accelerationists, or revanchist accelerationists.
I think it’s because the TV series really hammers the point home in a way that the games maybe don’t, even though it’s a strong through line in the series.
Blocked a self-described anarchist who said progressives are “closeted shitlibs.” Not in conversation with me but while talking to someone else. This person doesn’t even know I exist, probably, but that’s fine, the point is I don’t want us to get to know each other better.
You can take a person out of the reactionary right wing but that doesn’t mean you take the reactionary out of a person I guess.
@MisuseCase anyone using “shitlibs” is telling me they are part of the problem, role-playing radicals who can’t wait to be safely faux-oppressed so they can feel like their life has meaning and drama and who will flip to whatever position gives them that rush.
@AnnaAnthro Probably on purpose because he likes trying different things and I think also he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed. So it’s very on-brand for him to do Something Completely Different for what’s essentially a comeback role.
I think he’ll be the lead in a romantic comedy sageuk set to air later this year, which is a little more conventional, for him.
“Most of the people arrested at the campus protests were not students or faculty” is an oft-repeated (by police and media) lie that is debunked over and over again by students and faculty participating in (and getting arrested at) these protests. Almost all the people getting arrested are students and faculty.
The purpose of the lie is to prevent us from facing the reality of what’s being perpetrated on our kids and their teachers.
I get the strong impression that even if a lot of people on Fedi think that #Biden drawing a red line on #Rafah and pausing military aid shipments is some kind of trick, the government of #Israel doesn’t think so, and is doing the typical thing abusers do when they’re denied cooperation that they have come to take for granted: hurting the person who withdrew it from them, or at least anything close to hand.
Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has been complaining that #Biden cares about the #Palestinians too much and has been forcing the government to hold back on killing them, etc. So now Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, et. al. are going “withhold weapons to warn us against killing them are you? You can’t tell us what to do! We’ll kill them anyway to show you.”
Some of the attitudes and behavior you see from conservatives and self-described liberals makes more sense when you understand the mindset: dead Jews and theoretical Jews are useful, but actual living Jews with opinions (and we have many opinions!) are inconvenient and difficult.
Today is Bike to School Day so my son and I went to school on our bikes. He still has training wheels and had to walk the bike up some steep sections but he did very well. And I was able to get home in 10 minutes.
I’ll be able to go pick him up on my bike and we can ride home together, since I locked up his bike on the rack at school.