litano.bsky.social
Professional health policy guy, amateur medical history nerd. I've also got severe hemophilia A, so hmu if you ever need help managing nosebleeds
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obligatory "fuck substack," but I think Ganz nailed this dynamic almost perfectly www.unpopularfront.news/p/what-happe...
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"I really didn't want to do this, but I guess I have to respond to the recent call-in post and set a few things straight. Regarding these allegations: I abandoned my 4-year-old child because he was lowkey problematic and had bad vibes. 1/32"
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Yes, and then he immediately moved to bury, disavow, and lower the salience of that exact wave of populist anger that buoyed his candidacy that year. That's the point! The whole "fund the police" push was a SOTU applause line for the first big budget fight.
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Also- the whole point is that our intuitions about what's an electoral loser are WRONG, both because of media capture AND because of this block of low-trust voters who aren't polarized on conventional lines but instead flock to positions that inspire mainstream pushback.
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I mean, "listen Jack, I'm the guy who's trying to FUND the police!" clearly isn't an electoral winner, so I kinda question the received wisdom here. "Defund" had a corollary of replacing functions of the carceral state with other programs, but Dems mostly just attacked the caricature of it as well.
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They briefly jumped in but blinked pretty quickly, ESPECIALLY when it came to pushing for the agenda that inspired the movement. The "violent element" aspect is actually a good example of this- Dems could have been far more aggressive insisting that cops or false flag infiltrators were to blame.
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Dems probably couldn't take that aggressive a stance w/ the 2020 protests just because of the white electorate's racism, but they conceded way too much ground to the right's framing here. "The 2020 protests were overwhelmingly righteous and non-violent" even has the benefit of being true!
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I mean, there's also a reason Republicans constantly bring up J6 unprompted- defending the merits of the action defangs it as a line of attack for Democrats. They've turned that an ugly act of political violence that should have been a liability into a load-bearing myth in their political message
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OpU...
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bsky.app/profile/weis... Joe Weisenthal has been banging this drum for a while now
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Agree, but I'll say that some of the later models (especially the "reasoners"- a name that I hate, fwiw) are getting better at this very quickly. Dr. Humphries is obviously more impressed by this stuff than most working historians, but his point about the rate of improvement seems right to me.
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Didn't think I'd being seeing "it's complicated, actually" takes about the motivations for setting Jews (including a Holocaust survivor) on fire on the first night of Shavuot.
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This stage of the discourse spin cycle always makes me lose my mind
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People REALLY want pure mind-body dualism to be true, because the alternative leads to all sorts of uncomfortable places. Similar to the discourse we've had on how mental illness can never cause bad behavior and it's just revealing some intention coming from the separate Spirit to act a certain way.
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I think he actually got kicked off the show before they were asked to the voice acting for that game
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Now, the problem is that this sort of "innate goodness" that's totally separate from the conditions it's honed and expressed in is MOSTLY a myth unless you drill down to very specific metrics. But I think this is what people mean when they make these comparisons- very "time machine"-esque.
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I mostly agree, but counterpoint: I think you could say that "talent" refers to some underlying capacity that's separate from improvements in conditioning, nutrition, analytics, etc. we've seen between Aaron's time and today. If that's the claim it becomes a lot closer.
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You can't really say that these artists owned their work either, but they were given creative freedom due to the pulpy nature of the imprint model and their financial/critical success. And they used that to chart out challenges to the previous paradigm which creators have been imitating ever since.
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Agree there. I'd also say it's one of those cyclical genre things. At some point the romantic tendency in comics became passe and creators started chasing new signifiers. Ironically, I'd argue that this shift was ushered in by a set of relatively empowered creators like Moore, Gaiman (bleh), etc.
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Hell, I think you can make the case that the success of certain books in the 70s has a lot to do with the same artistic slight-of-hand: "romance comics have fallen out of vogue because they're seen as 'feminine,' but guys will still eat these plots up if we repackage them with superheroes."
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I mean, even there- the western superhero comic owes a TON to romance comics. When figures like Jack Kirby, John Buscema, Stan Lee, etc. jumped ship from romance, they took a lot of that genre's storytelling sensibilities and visual art conventions with them into the cape world.
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I'm sorry, both of those proposals were as unworkable and bad-faith as the "accepted" '47 proposal. Giving the specifics of these negotiations more than a cursory glance just entirely breaks this narrative that Israel really WANTED to give Palestine a state, honest, but the meanies wouldn't take it.
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Just flatly untrue. As early as the 30s it was a popular position among Zionist political and paramilitary leadership that partition should be accepted pragmatically and then used as the basis for future annexation and population transfers. This stuff was out in the open at the time!
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Given that this is the case it makes sense to start with the maximalist (and, fwiw, most morally just) ask to start with, both because it's the most practical for galvanizing political energies AND because it leaves the most room to negotiate down to something like an actually just 2state.
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If the Israeli body politic refuses to consider 2state concessions under the current incentive paradigm (I agree), why are we talking about "easier sells" at all? They aren't buying! The solution here will have to involve some level of coercion (economic, military) and some level of compromise.
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2state is ALSO a DOA approach that requires magical thinking, though? At the very least I rarely hear people talk about the practical measures it would take to establish a contiguous Palestine w/ adequate water supply, security guarantees, etc. in the face of current realities on the ground.
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Glad to have a little faith in human decency restored in that case!
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I assume it's a pig butchering scam or a variant thereof. Can be fun to text with for a little bit to waste their time but I assume it's all LLMs these days maxread.substack.com/p/whats-the-...
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What you're saying is true, but almost any version of Trump who could do this ALSO wouldn't be in this position in the first place. The qualities that lead to his biggest victories are the same ones that lead to his biggest defeats- rank bigotry, disdain for expertise, and addled impulsivity.
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Does this view of the asset economy imply some sort of reassessment of Carter’s spendthrift, do-with-less moralism? To me, he comes off a bit like Ike- aware of the problems but still adopting policies that deepen the crisis due to political limits, other crises, and a bad grasp of potential answers
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bsky.app/profile/yosh...
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The Matter of Seggri isn't a simple corrective to The Left Hand of Darkness in the same way that The Dispossessed isn't a simple corrective to The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, but in both cases you can see an author returning to a cluster of themes to deepen and broaden her engagement with them.
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Oh yeah, good call there. One of the things I admire about Le Guin was her capacity to constantly critique and revise her ideas and work. So she eventually agreed that TLHoD stopped short of fully realizing its own premise in the updated "Is Gender Necessary" and returned to those themes in Seggri.
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Some parts of the book haven't aged well, but I think the pendulum of TLHoD's reputation has swung too far toward dismissal and we're due for a correction. I've certainly found myself looking at the conservative "gender harmony through patriarchy and body mod" crowd like the Gethenians look at Genly
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Out of curiosity, have you read Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness? This article is VERY aligned with that book-- whole people should embody both masculine and feminine virtues, and because mind/body dualism is real we can use biotech to free (or at least shape) the mind by shaping the body.
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Pierce's "someone will have to measure the wreckage. Someone will have to walk through the ruins. Someone will have to count the cost" makes for a pretty good slogan. I also appreciate your Mother Night s/o in the section headers-- just reread that book recently and was shocked by how timely it felt
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It's behind a paywall, but Charlie Pierce has an all-time article from June of 2008 calling his shot that Obama's national restoration project was doomed to failure unless he broke with his campaign rhetoric to actually reckon with the flagrant criminality and evil that brought us to the '08 crisis.
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Yeah, it's just charismatic authority all the way down. The fuzziness of the org chart is sort of the point-- that's all cucked rational-legal authority, which has to be overcome and bypassed through force of personality.
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Speaking as an American Jew, I agree! But you shouldn't let that preference blind you to the fact that this is a shitty statement that *does not actually articulate any sort of call to action or defense of Khalil's rights.*
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A: It's good that some democrats, somewhere, have demanded his release. We're talking about Jeffries's statement, which notably does NOT do that.
B: I'd feel much better about a short statement that skipped this context than this statement which skips a full-throated defense of Khalil's rights.
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Well, for a start, it'd be nice if Jeffries actually called for Khalil's release or condemned Trump's plans to continue these Gestapo tactics? Seems notable to me that Jeffries ends his non-statement with a Susan Collins-esque "we will continue monitoring the developing situation carefully."
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I think a lot of people are upset at this because the statement is *cowardly*-- largely keeping its powder dry in case some pesky fact comes out that would lead the Dems to wait for a more sympathetic victim to get targeted before they speak up on behalf of our fundamental rights.
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I mean, yeah, the AIPAC connection is part of the reason that people think that Jeffries is offering a halting, ineffectual statement here. I still don't think that a majority of the people getting pissed at Jeffries over this are part of a nefarious conspiracy of pro-Hamas activists.
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People are mad because Jeffries is offering up a halting, ineffectual defense of Khalil that goes through 2 counterfactuals and a whole host of tortured clauses before landing (weakly) at the core point-- we are not a fascist country that disappears permanent residents for thoughtcrime.
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I think this is a misreading of both Jeffries AND his critics on this score. For one thing, Jeffries doesn't say "Khalil said shitty things"-- it's all "to the extent that..." For another, I would guess that a majority of the people criticizing Jeffries over this have no idea what Khalil said.
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Two gems from this run of articles that I think about often-- Pierce's observation that the Obama campaign offered America "absolution without confession, without penance" and his reminder that "there is no way to apply justice 'going forward.'"