ULGH!

I’m pissed at Lula. I like his general movement, but I see two lessons we all need to recognize:

1. Every left-leaning movement needs youth and dynamism. No matter how much we may appreciate elders like Bernie Sanders, politics is a contact sport, and if we can’t find people who aren’t grand parents, it’s because we haven’t been training our bench. We can include our elders, but we need to have much more regular turnover, with far fewer elder leaders.

2. We cannot allow corruption in leftist movements. This shit is WAY too important. The global far right has major structural advantages, and public trust is one of the biggest requirements for antifacist movements. When leftists get associated with self-interest, it blows the project apart and creates openings for this shit.

I hope Lula wins, but after this, get the new leaders with iron-clad integrity ready and get the old guard the fuck out of leadership into an advisory capacity.

We have to break this cycle. A successful leftist movement should gain power between elections, not be back to defending itself from coin-toss election after coin-toss election.

I take issue with this framing on multiple levels.

First: our goals should not be to score political points on Twitter: they should be to provide security, dignity, and political rights to the persecuted.

Second, inviting political activists exiled by a country we materially support to the US is like demanding ICE deport foreign nationals to nicer third countries: it misses the point completely. This shouldn’t happen. And US lawmakers have the power to stop it, so that’s what they should do.

Finally, the current Democratic leadership is Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies. Despite highly visible outliers, this whole premise assumes Democrats want to support human rights in Israel. This is like believing that Trump is working tirelessly to bring Epstein’s coconspiritors to justice.

Yeah: the filmmakers themselves have said this repeatedly as well.

With all due respect, Democrats shouldn’t be offering safe harbor to exiled dissidents: they should be threatening to sanction Israel if it exiles dissidents.

They should be a doing a lot of other things too, but we need to be much clearer with our demands. These people are Israeli, and deserve protection in their own country. I don’t think they want to leave, I think they want their country to change.

I choose to believe that 10 years from now, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor will be leaders of a free Israel-Palestine, and the people who called for their denaturalization will be dead or living out life sentences for perpetrating atrocities.

I hope Abraham and Szor are careful, though. That future does assume that they survive long enough to reach it.

Either way, there can be no doubt that history will view their journalism and activism with great admiration.

Walkin’ on the Sun, by Smashmouth

It’s from '97, but for anyone who wants to know what the end of the twentieth century sounded like, this, imo, is it.

Source?

This is so bleak. I’m constantly trying to stave off doomerism, and focus on what we can do to help, but this article is just a gut punch.

If you wish to share this or any other opinion expressed by an actual Palestinian or person who can speak to their opinion through first hand knowledge, please share.

Otherwise, please recognize that they are not characters in a fictional story for you to write your own opinions onto. They are human beings desperately fighting to be heard and have their agency respected.

What’s your point?

Honestly? Good.

I’m glad fascists are increasingly going mask-off.

The polite fictions were getting us nowhere. The US has been a rogue nation for decades, and the faster it loses international influence and legitimacy the better.

Yeah, kind of a crappy omission but the Guardian.

I’ve just started having these conversations with my mom, because her mom just passed away at 99.

My mom isn’t as temperamental as you’re describing, but she doesn’t like talking about death. However cleaning out her mom’s old condo has forced her to think about it, and that’s the lens of the conversations.

It’s not going to be one conversation, btw. I think that’s the key thing to understand: you’re not trying to figure out how to talk to them about end of life planning one time, you’re trying to figure out how to talk to them about full-life planning maturely from now on.

I would focus on specific issues rather then a broad concept; relate it to things that others are going through as a reference point; discuss it through the lens of ensuring a long, dignified life instead of about the end part; and try to offer appealing solutions rather than problems that they need to solve.

For instance, ‘I was just talking to a friend who was visiting their dad, and he had a bad slip moving trash to the curb and is now thinking of moving into an retirement village. I’ve always imagined you guys living here forever, and I wanted to check if that’s what you guys want to do too, and if there are any renovations you’d be interested in to make it more comfortable.’

Yeah, it’s weird. It’s good, but it’s very weird.

I think that’s a good theory, since it’s very unexpected to see him saying these things.

For what it’s worth, I can imagine that he’d turn on Netanyahu to maintain favor with Trump, but ultimately I think his hunger to see a war that ushers in the biblican end-times supercedes all other motivations for him.

Asking the real questions frfr

That’s very cool.

‘Wait, comedian-musician-director Bo Burnham did WHAT??’

…

‘oh good it’s someone else’

I read the article expecting the same thing, but it said that Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palantir recently released a big statement warning the US not to restrict open models.

Which is weird. I don’t believe for a minute that you and I are on the same side as those jackals, but I guess they are not as dumb as I expected on this particular day (be sure to check again tomorrow, though).

This whole thing is stupid and I want this bubble to burst. I don’t look forward to the economic consequences for people like my parents who live on retirement savings, but lord, this whole economic system is just totally cooked and it can’t go on like this.

I can speak from experience here, because this actually happened to me!

My partner (born female) and I married in our late 20s. He was already casually gender non-confirming before we married, and I described myself as hetero-flexible. His transition was rather gradual, with no strict coming-out event, but it was something we discussed openly. After he began presenting as male on work settings, I began identifying myself as bisexual.

It worked out very well. As the person above noted, you can really call yourself whatever. If you wanted to, you could identify as straight with an exception made for a single person. Although I would advise against it, as your partner might take some offense, and it confuses people if you identify in a way that conflicts with your long term partnership. Most co-workers assume I’m gay because I’m married to a man, and I don’t bother to correct them.

Sometimes it comes up, because my husband and I have a biological son together, which isn’t a secret. Sometimes when taking about him and genetics, it leads me to explaining all of this. But as you can see, it’s unusual, but not that hard to explain.