Olivia
Online
Payam M
@iwaspye
father, nerd, oozer of sarcasm. RTs are pinky promises.
Joined January 2014
181 Following
26 Followers
65 Posts
Poking the longevity guru bear today. (Not that he will care as he sits in his cave counting his money.)
I can’t seem to ignore the longevity gurus https://t.co/hqZ9kGYje8
Glenn is wrong on basic facts. But even if his facts were right, he still can't explain the completely unique importance of Israel to the Western left. He proves it here in every step where he tries to disprove it.
(Sorry it's long. It's more for the record than to get clicks. Plug it into your favorite AI for a summary.)
The wrong facts: Biden didn't give Israel "$18 billion in cash alone." He gave Israel a credit line that can only be used to purchase directly from US defense contractors. It was almost all hardware, and a significant portion of it (almost $7 billion) was replenishment of purely defensive missile-defense systems -- systems mostly jointly developed with the US and which then, after using Israeli knowhow to build out the world's most cutting-edge missile defense technology, are being integrated into the US arsenal. David's Sling and Arrow are developed jointly, Iron Beam was developed together with Lockheed Martin. Iron Dome is co-owned.
In other words, part of that transfer of money is essentially federal grants to US arms manufacturers, and part of it is America basically using Israel as a cost-effective R&D shop to upgrade its own capabilities.
That figure also includes the costs of US operations in the region. It's a bit rich to try to argue that these operations are only to protect Israel. US operations against the Houthis, for example, weren't about Israel at all, and in fact did nothing for Israel. Houthi attacks had already shut down and bankrupted Eilat Port by the time America got into the picture. The shipping blockade was mostly hurting Egypt and the Europeans. (This was JD Vance's complaint about Trump's attacks on the Houthis: Why weren't the Europeans doing it?)
I should say; I'm not exactly strongly opposed to weaning Israel off US aid. Israel is rich now, richer per capita than Britain and France.
And Israel has always respected the American taxpayer far more than America's European allies ever did. Consider this: Even before October 7, Israel spent some 5% of its GDP on its own defense -- and only then asked America for help. Europe, on the other hand, spends an average of just 1.9% on defense -- far less than America's 3.5% -- and receives $60 billion a year from America in the costs of deployments to protect Europe.
One of these relationships is respectful and mutual. The other is disrespectful and exploitative. I'll let the mathematicians in the crowd figure out which is which.
If the aid ends, Israel won't fall. And America will still be buying Israeli tech.
And if you stop looking at cashflow and just count the actual hardware America is sending over to the region, it might be worth noticing that America has sold Saudi Arabia three times more military hardware (in dollar value) than it's ever sold to Israel.
This is mostly wrong too: "The US gives billions more to countries like Egypt and Jordan to prop up governments on the condition that they don't oppose Israel."
That money was originally to bolster the peace, yes. But it's not about that anymore. Try to take away the aid to Egypt and you'll hear from Egyptians that their economy is teetering on the edge of collapse. Abandon Jordan to their own devices and you'll hear from Jordanians that Iran and Turkey are trying to overthrow the monarchy and turn the country Islamist. It really isn't about Israel anymore.
"The US uses its veto power at the UN and isolates itself from the world to shield Israel, as it did multiple times under Biden."
This is true, but it's also a stupid direction for Glenn to go. Because UN votes are about as ridiculously lopsided against Israel as you can get. There are more censures of Israel in UN institutions each year than against all the dictatorships and rights abusers of the world combined. And it's not close.
Even if you genuinely hate Israel, surely we can agree that it isn't worse than North Korea, China, Russia, Syria, Belarus and Iran combined, right? Bringing the UN into this conversation is a data point in my favor, a demonstration of the completely unique place of Israel in the leftist imagination.
"As for why there were Gaza protests in the EU and elsewhere, that's simple: EU countries, the UK, Australia, Canada are massive pro-Israel governments that aid and support Israel in countless ways."
What? You could, at a stretch, make this argument of Germany. But Spain? Italy? Canada?
This is just pablum to mask the point that Glenn can't actually explain the unique scale, duration and regularity of the anti-Israel protests in these countries using the military-aid excuse.
"Their citizens are also responsible for what Israel did in Gaza, which is why they protest."
Yeesh. Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are among the world's largest arms exporters. The Saudi-led coalition in the Yemen war (85,000 children died in that war from starvation alone) flew Eurofighter Typhoons (made jointly by Germany, Spain, UK and Italy) and drove Leclerc tanks (France).
If selling Israel weapons systems makes Britons "responsible" for Gaza, why did no German, Frenchman, Italian or Spaniard feel responsible for Yemen? Why did no one in those countries march? Why did no one even notice?
Glenn is again making my point while trying to argue I don't have a point.
"Middle East citizens protest in part because many of their governments accommodate Israel (Jordan, Egypt), while others feel a kinship with Palestinians for religious and ethnic reasons."
Why don't Arab nations feel a kinship with Yemenis? Or Syrians? Turkish forces alone probably killed several thousand Syrians in that country in recent years. Why don't Turks seem to care?
More to the point, Glenn, what are those "religious and ethnic reasons" that make 400,000 dead Yemenis at Arab hands a cultural irrelevance in the Arab world -- not to mention the man-made catastrophes in Sudan and Libya -- while Gaza alone sets the region on fire?
"By contrast, the US Government doesn't support or aid Iran and is no way responsible for what it's doing."
Agreed. But you know, Amnesty International USA couldn't even bring themselves to condemn the regime. And that's their one job. Why is that?
And US allies using vast quantities of US weapons systems are backing different sides in the catastrophic Sudan war. Does America really have so little potential leverage there that it's not even worth talking about the humanitarian catastrophe underway there?
"Protests would be irrelevant and nonsensical."
Every single Iranian protestor or advocate you'll speak to -- have you spoken to any? -- will tell you that Western attention right now is vital. You're choosing to believe that your voice would be irrelevant because you don't want to feel guilty for your own emotional distance.
A great and powerful cognitive dissonance is driving your strange new dismissal of the power of activism, of speaking truth to power.
"It'd make far more sense to demand that Americans, British and Europeans protest the savage, brutal repression in Saudi Arabia and Egypt since those governments actually fund and prop up those tyrannies."
Sure, that would make sense. So where is that demand? Where is that protest?
¡Que ridículo!
50k is a joke when I can easily recreate this for way less
An appeal to U.S. Central Command @CENTCOM from Gaza by Palestinians who are experiencing horrendous terror & barbarism at the hands of Hamas: "Please use your drones to capture footage of what happens in the Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, specifically the Hind al-Daghma Medical Center, where unspeakable torture, war crimes, breaking of limbs, and horrors are taking place. Let human rights organizations do field visits asap to inspect this hospital and many others and assess the continued extent of Hamas's torture program, which the group has decided to no longer film or show on video after Qatari pressure." Hamas continues to use hospitals as interrogation centers, given that they lost all of their buildings, facilities, and safe spaces for doing so.
Get Hamas out of Gaza's hospitals and restore the sanctity of medical facilities, which are now being used for terrorism, fascism, and violent extremism by the Islamist group.
My single best essay so far will be sent out tomorrow with free and open access to everyone. Subscribe now to get it delivered to your mailbox.
Such a clear and thoughtful analysis. Thanks for sharing!
The crisis, which lasted for nearly a year, started when Iraq denied access to U.N. WMD inspectors in 1997 and failed to comply with the U.N. Security Council's resolutions and the U.N. inspection program, UNSCOM. As a matter of fact, only a week before the declaration was published, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met Iraqi Foreign Minister Saeed al-Sahaf and French President Jacques Chirac in Paris, seeking to push for a resolution but failed to do so. Already for several years before 1998, the International Left, still hysterically reacting to the fall of the USSR, had made the U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Iraq the imperialist crime of the century. For several years, the international and Arab press, media outlets, journals, and academic output were filled with dystopian stories of how the U.S. is systematically and intentionally denying Iraqis access to food and destroying their water supply to ensure their starvation and death. U.N. institutions, entirely staffed by Third World intellectuals, issued reports with fantastical data and outdid even the propaganda of Saddam Hussein. Hussein had claimed that sanctions induced famine and poverty killed over 500,000 children, a number described a decade later in an investigation by the British Medical Journal of Global Health as "a massive fraud," while U.N. agencies claimed the number was over a million children.
In this atmosphere of psychotic anti-American hysteria, especially in the French and the Arab intellectual circles, which are nearly monolithic on the left, the crisis of 1998 exacerbated the paranoia filling press and media coverage with apocalyptic warnings of the coming genocide and the end of humanity at the hands of American barbarism, established truths since the day of Sartre. At one point, the European and the Arab press hysterically claimed that the Clinton administration was planning to use the atomic bomb against Iraq, promising an unprecedented volume of human casualties. On their part, Arab states, which hosted U.S. troops, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, initially committed themselves to denying the U.S. military the use of local bases for the purpose of air strikes against Iraq, but ultimately they acquiesced.
Link to free access essay below
The crisis, which lasted for nearly a year, started when Iraq denied access to U.N. WMD inspectors in 1997 and failed to comply with the U.N. Security Council's resolutions and the U.N. inspection program, UNSCOM. As a matter of fact, only a week before the declaration was published, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met Iraqi Foreign Minister Saeed al-Sahaf and French President Jacques Chirac in Paris, seeking to push for a resolution but failed to do so. Already for several years before 1998, the International Left, still hysterically reacting to the fall of the USSR, had made the U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Iraq the imperialist crime of the century. For several years, the international and Arab press, media outlets, journals, and academic output were filled with dystopian stories of how the U.S. is systematically and intentionally denying Iraqis access to food and destroying their water supply to ensure their starvation and death. U.N. institutions, entirely staffed by Third World intellectuals, issued reports with fantastical data and outdid even the propaganda of Saddam Hussein. Hussein had claimed that sanctions induced famine and poverty killed over 500,000 children, a number described a decade later in an investigation by the British Medical Journal of Global Health as "a massive fraud," while U.N. agencies claimed the number was over a million children.
In this atmosphere of psychotic anti-American hysteria, especially in the French and the Arab intellectual circles, which are nearly monolithic on the left, the crisis of 1998 exacerbated the paranoia filling press and media coverage with apocalyptic warnings of the coming genocide and the end of humanity at the hands of American barbarism, established truths since the day of Sartre. At one point, the European and the Arab press hysterically claimed that the Clinton administration was planning to use the atomic bomb against Iraq, promising an unprecedented volume of human casualties. On their part, Arab states, which hosted U.S. troops, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, initially committed themselves to denying the U.S. military the use of local bases for the purpose of air strikes against Iraq, but ultimately they acquiesced.
Link to free access essay below
Required reading.
“Again and again, the Palestinians have served as the tip of someone else’s spear. But the tips of spears tend to break when thrown, and when they do, it’s evidently easier to blame the wall they hit than the person who threw them.”
As we eagerly await to see our people back home free from their sadistic captors, one essay above others stands for me from the past two years, by Dr. Shany Mor @ShMMor: Ecstasy and Amnesia.
The essay highlights the Arab and Palestinian decades-long pattern of launching wars of annihilation against Israel (unfortunately there are no others) while whipping themselves into ecstasy, only for amnesia to set in once they fail to achieve their goal of annihilation, thus erasing (and even reversing) any notion of cause and effect, action and consequences.
This then allows the pattern to repeat, because the idea that their suffering and ruin has anything to do with their choices and actions is entirely erased.
Is there any chance this pattern will not be repeated this time around?
https://t.co/XvJMFHyqCp
When you don't know the history and don't care about minorities being decimated if they don't fit into your ideological matrix, you start spewing claptrap about "an essentialist racist “Clash-of-Civilisations-y” argument about the human condition" or "inherent Arab evilness."
Alonso thinks it's racist to say the Arab world is in deep crisis. That literacy is declining in parts of it, that over 80% of Egyptian girls face female genital mutilation because of cultural shifts related to Islamism, that numerous genocides have taken place in the Arab world just in my own lifetime, that hundreds of thousands routinely die in wars that dwarf even the terrible suffering of Gaza, and that millions have been set to flight just in the past decade.
Every word in that paragraph is covered extensively in UN human development reports about the Arab world, but I'm racist for pointing out that the Jews absolutely should not disarm and choose - as he demands of us - to go live in that civilizational space as a vulnerable minority.
He also claims to be battling Zionism, but knows nothing about Zionism's basic argument.
Zionism never argued there was such a thing as "inherent Arab evilness." Alonso wishes it had, because he needs me to be a racist to validate his own bigotry.
Zionism argued something very big and very deep: that modernizing societies undergoing the deep structural identity shifts from localized and communal identities to mass-societies and the vast, imagined identities of nationalism would not be able to contain minorities, any minorities, and that they would turn on them with murderous impulses, that this process was inherent to modernization, and so unavoidable, and that the Jews therefore faced a "catastrophe" first in Europe (Zionism started as a warning about white European bigotry, for Pete's sake, not "Arab evilness"), and then would spread and cause antisemitic catastrophes everywhere else that was modernizing in similar ways.
With the enormous and wonderful exception of the English-speaking world, this Zionist theory of modernization proved correct nearly everywhere. That's the great tragedy.
And Alonso, who thinks I insult to distract, is an ignorant bigot who blames the great emptying of the Arab world of its Jews on the Jews.
Jewish-Arab coexistence is possible - right up until it fails. It has failed a great many times.
And it wasn't Zionism that made it fail. Not ever. It was Arab nationalism and Islamism.
The Jews began fleeing the Arab world after '48 because they finally had somewhere to go - not because everything was going great until that moment.
And the same Arab nationalist and Islamist forces that drove the Jews out did the same to millions of others too. Countless millions, in fact, have fled the Middle East since the fall of the Ottomans, including several million just in the past decade, fleeing the same basic forces that drove out the Jews.
Jewish-Arab coexistence is possible as long as Arabs want it. They do not. Just ask them.
So you're demanding that the Jews to disarm, that they ignore their history and the history of literally every minority in the Middle East, and that they then hope for the best.
Amazingly, even the "coexistence" of which you speak was usually a power structure you would label systemic racism if it wasn't Jews on the bottom rung.
There was a massacre of Jews in Baghdad in 1828 - long before Zionism. (And many more massacres, but I don't feel like looking up more years.)
And in the peaceful times, Jews had special legal limits on where they could live, the clothes they could wear, special taxes levied only on them (the "rabbi tax," for example).
You really should know this basic, basic stuff if you're going to campaign publicly about it.
"Look at all the times they didn't massacre you" is not as convincing an argument for a long-suffering minority as you seem to think.
There's a lot more wrong with this thread - and I don't mean stuff I disagree with, I mean disturbingly incompetent and ahistorical claptrap that he should be ashamed to have ever put to print.
The crazy salad he makes of "self-determination" - he seems to think the term is some kind of antithesis to nationalism, and not the original argument for nationalism.
He seems to think Jews can be perfectly safe in the modern Middle East if they just surrender their state and self-reliance and self-defense. The problem of Jewish safety, he seems to argue, is solved by his say-so. Jews should be safe in Baghdad, after all, as long as there’s no Zionism around to piss off the Iraqis.
And that's what's so interesting about this thread, about what it tells us about his knowledge, moral compass and international law advocacy.
He either doesn't know about or doesn’t give a shit about the many suffering minorities of the Middle East. You know, all those minorities unlucky enough not to have had a Zionism of their own over the past century of almost nonstop ethnic cleansings in the Middle East: The hundreds of thousands of murdered Kurds, the decimated Syrian Christian community, the frightened Copts and brutalized Yazidis, the marginalized minorities of North Africa.
He probably thinks their fate is also a function of, you know, Zionism.
I'm actually amazed he'd write all this, admit all this, bare his historical illiteracy to the world. Is he actually this ignorant or is he lying? Does it matter? He’s either a bad thinker or a bad propagandist.
Pro-tip, Alonso: Zionism will not be dismantled with this fuzzy-headed garbage. Do better.
Anyway, moving on from this clown.
🚨BEST analysis by fantastic @MattiFriedman on Ta-Nehisi Coates & those like him who lazily & narcissistically project America’s racial history on Israel & Palestinians with disastrous, but remarkably effective, results on the equally fantastic @dansenor’s podcast "Call Me Back."
I will never be a biological woman, obviously.
But, that doesn’t mean I cannot socially live as a woman and mostly integrate as a woman into society.
And it certainly doesn’t mean people on the Internet need to dehumanize me constantly.
So, Ta-Nehisi Coates after spending a few days in Palestine and Israel said in an interview with Trevor Noah he might struggle, if he were Palestinian, with the urge to "if the wall comes down" take up arms alongside Hamas or similar groups and participate in attacks like October 7th.
So let me explain, even though I am traumatised by the conflict and the effect it has had on my family and Palestinians in general, why I as a Palestinian am against Hamas.
1/ They are religious extremists who believe in Islamic supremacy, not political equality between Jews and Muslims. Their vision of
Palestine is essentially a theocratic ethnostate.
2/ They commit atrocities not only against Israelis (totally wrong), but also against Palestinians who they disagree with (also totally wrong).
3/ The atrocities they committed against Israelis include crimes against civilians, and include terrible and evil acts like murder, rape, and kidnapping.
4/ Committing atrocities against Israelis leads to war and destruction of Palestinian property and infrastructure, and death of Palestinians. This leads to a horrific cycle of escalation and suffering on both sides, but mostly on the Palestinian side, as we have seen in Gaza since October 7. Even before this, their jihadist activities lead to restrictions on life in Gaza not only imposed by Israel but also imposed by our supposed "Arab brothers", Egypt who also share a border with Gaza.
5/ Ultimately, life for Palestinians has gotten much worse under their rule, and in the context of their jihad. Empirically, that is what counts the most. Judge them by their results, and the results have been terrible.
I don't know what moral or logical rot Coates might be suffering from, but many Palestinians understand that Hamas' ideology and strategy are not working. In fact, in the most recent AWRAD poll, 62% of Gazans said that they thought October 7th was an incorrect action.
I suspect Coates is ultimately suffering from the same pathology that leads some wealthy, elite Western Palestinians to support Hamas. If you are living in Qatar, London, New York, or California you don't have to dealt with the CONSEQUENCES of Hamas.
They fall into their romanticised jihadist vision that ignores the actual reality of life on the ground living under the control of jihadists, and living through wars started by jihadists.
I personally suspect Coates would hate to live under Hamas, and he would quickly learn that this is a horrible life, and come out sounding very different.
My deepest apologies to those who were in attendance at my presentation today on "America at the Crossroads: Social Justice Approaches to Teaching and Learning" at the American Humanist Association's 83rd Convention. The Q&A session that I had agreed to facilitate was hijacked by the AHA's new CEO Mr. Fish Stark who began muting me, refusing to let me address questions posed to me from the audience as I had agreed to, and engaged in a tirade/rebuttal in response to points I raised that he felt were objectionable. Mr. Stark's inappropriate actions managed to demonstrate the illiberal rejection of viewpoint diversity and to highlight the ways that Critical Social Justice Ideologues like himself attempt to and do silence others they don't agree with. As a Lifetime Member of the American Humanist Association, I am embarrassed by Mr. Stark and the organization will falter under his illiberal leadership. It was wrong for Mr. Stark to disrespect me as a speaker and those who had posed questions to me and were hoping to hear answers from me, not him. I will keep speaking and people will keep turning away from the toxic ideologies that you promote and that you are attempting to make the vision of an organization that used to welcome viewpoint diversity and free thinking. Mr. Stark, it's sad to see you and others like you drive AHA into the dumps; you and your likeminded comrades do not have my support.
For @theFP, I review Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book: a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion.
https://t.co/QhDw7nPTea
Most Popular Users
Elon Musk 
@elonmusk
241.7M followers
Barack Obama
@barackobama
119M followers
Cristiano Ronaldo
@cristiano
114.5M followers
Donald J. Trump
@realdonaldtrump
111.9M followers
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
107.2M followers
Rihanna
@rihanna
98.7M followers
NASA
@nasa
92.4M followers
Justin Bieber
@justinbieber
91.8M followers
KATY PERRY
@katyperry
90M followers
Taylor Swift
@taylorswift13
84M followers
Lady Gaga
@ladygaga
75.5M followers
Virat Kohli
@imvkohli
73.5M followers
Kim Kardashian
@kimkardashian
70.9M followers
YouTube
@youtube
68.8M followers
Neymar Jr
@neymarjr
66.5M followers
Bill Gates
@billgates
65.2M followers
Selena Gomez
@selenagomez
63.1M followers
The Ellen Show
@theellenshow
62.3M followers
CNN
@cnn
61.8M followers
X
@x
60.7M followers