jayxenos

Jay. Australian, gay, writer, politics. A man's character is his fate.

[The Baffler @thebafflermag]

Queerness is not an upper-class pursuit, and the study of it does not begin and end at the walls of the Ivy League campus. From the Archives: Matt Brim takes a hard look at the class problem of queer theory.
https://t.co/zgPzVzCBby

[vivek @itsreallyvivek]

https://t.co/ZhOgyq7Vgn

[Nicole Penn @nmpenn]

You can read and download Gordon Wood's essay in full here: https://t.co/BQeaI3L9hU

[Nicholas Stephanopoulos @ProfNickStephan]

Light a candle in memory of the Voting Rights Act, which died today, aged 60.

Sure, Section 2 wasn't officially struck down. But it might as well have been. It's now useless to minority voters under virtually all circumstances.

[John Cassidy @JohnCassidy]

Here is the link: clever headline!

https://t.co/NprJge9hzQ

[Tom G Palmer @tomgpalmer]

#Mearsheimer gets #Russia wrong. Here’s how. https://t.co/4hixu04cK9

[Queer Majority @QueerMajority]

"I only wish more people who saw this dogma for what it is were unafraid to voice the truth about it." - @benappel

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

if you read enough fiber research you either start thinking you’re going insane or realize the entire nutrition industry has a financial incentive to keep you buying protein powder instead.

you need to eat your fiber and i’m not even trying to be nice about it.

95% of Americans are *deficient* while enough fiber alone reduces all-cause mortality by 30%, colorectal cancer by 26%, and your gut bacteria literally digest your own intestinal lining when you starve them of it.

fiber should be a bigger supplement category than protein but since it actually makes you healthier there’s no interest in selling it

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

My latest

China is Scrambling: The Overnight Pivot

Xi Jinping is scrambling. The word is not used lightly. For a leader who has built his image on strategic composure and long-horizon thinking, the current moment is acutely dangerous. Not because China faces a direct military threat, but because every available response to the crisis in the Persian Gulf leads Beijing into a trap of its own contradictions.

https://t.co/CkFYMYO6mx

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

Zanjan is 300 kilometers northwest of Tehran. It is not a nuclear site. It is not where the IRGC commands its missile forces. It is not on any published target list that any Western analyst predicted before this morning. And it is being bombed.

Ahram Online confirmed Israeli-US aircraft struck a depot site in Zanjan. IRNA, Iran’s own state news agency, reported explosions. Multiple OSINT accounts circulated footage of detonations consistent with precision-guided munitions hitting stored ordnance, the kind of secondary explosions that happen when a bomb hits a warehouse full of things that also explode.

Now pull the map back and understand what Zanjan tells you about the scale of what is happening inside Iran tonight.

Tehran. Isfahan. Qom. Karaj. Kermanshah. Tabriz. Lorestan. And now Zanjan. Eight cities across a country the size of Alaska being struck simultaneously by two air forces operating from carriers, regional bases, and stealth platforms that Iran cannot detect. This is not a targeted operation against a nuclear program. This is the systematic dismantlement of Iran’s entire military supply chain. Depots. Command nodes. Radar installations. Missile storage. Leadership compounds. The target list has expanded by hundreds of percent according to Israeli sources who described thousands of hours of intelligence preparation. Every site Iran spent decades building and dispersing across its geography to survive exactly this kind of attack is being hit in a single campaign.

Zanjan tells you the intelligence penetration is total. These are not obvious targets. A depot in a northwestern city that does not appear in any IAEA report or Congressional Research Service briefing means that American and Israeli intelligence mapped Iran’s logistics network down to the warehouse level. They know where the missiles are stored before they are loaded onto launchers. They know where the spare parts sit. They know which depots feed which launch sites and they are severing every supply artery in parallel so that what survives the first wave has nothing to reload with for the second.

Iran built its military doctrine on dispersal. Spread everything across a country of 1.6 million square kilometers so that no single strike can be decisive. Hide production in mountain tunnels. Store missiles in civilian areas. Scatter command posts across eight provinces. The entire strategy assumed the enemy would hit the obvious targets and miss the rest.

The enemy hit Zanjan. The enemy is not missing anything.

When a military campaign reaches cities that no analyst predicted, it means the target list is not a list. It is a map. And the map covers everything.

Iran did not prepare for a war this wide. Nobody told them to.

https://t.co/BrzGRrU3VW

[Richard Fontaine @RHFontaine]

It’s early and uncertain, but a few things are clear:

1. Khamenei’s death opens the region’s largest Pandora’s box. He served as either Supreme Leader or President since 1981, and defined Iran’s post-revolution trajectory. No one knows what follows his departure.

2. Regime change via air power is extremely difficult. Trump called on protestors to rise up, but the IRGC and Basij will still have the guns and the people still won’t. The security forces will need to crack or dissolve for a true political transformation.

3. That said, the transformation of Iran, either domestically or in its foreign policy, was impossible while the Supreme Leader ruled. It might be possible after his departure.

4. Trump has framed this as the necessary response to an imminent nuclear and missile threat. Not really. Iran wasn’t enriching uranium and doesn’t have ICBMs. The forcing function was the opportunity to topple a dangerous, repressive, and bloody regime while it is dramatically weakened.

5. Iran’s response so far has mixed predictable actions - shooting at Israel and U.S. bases - with others, like its attacks on civilian areas in Gulf countries. All the latter will accomplish is to unite the region against Tehran.

6. We’re witnessing the anti-Powell Doctrine in force. No attempt to build a national consensus behind war, no ground component to attain overwhelming force, no clear objective.

7. Instead Trump has preserved the flexibility to adapt based on how things unfold. He could stop in a couple of days and say the nuke and missile threat is taken care of and it’s now over to the Iranian people. He could instead continue for weeks, aiming at decisive regime change. It’s a different approach to war.

8. Hamas’ terrorist attack aimed to destroy Israel. Instead it lit a fuse that blew up the Axis of Resistance, Assad’s Syria, and now Khamenei’s Iran. For all the risk and danger, there is unprecedented opportunity for a better Middle East.

9. For all its military might, the U.S. will have only a limited role in determining the outcome. Events are in motion with no one actor calling the shots.

[Adam Thierer @AdamThierer]

"If the Kids Are Online, We Should Be Involved" by Rod Wilson (via @WSJ)

"If we want contributing adults rather than digitally dependent ones, we should focus less on shielding teenagers from the modern world and more on forming them to navigate it." 🙌

https://t.co/oo6esN0y1Y

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

How should we understand the the rise of national populism in Australia & the rest of the world?

It’s the immigration, stupid, writes @epkaufm

https://t.co/KcZ6hhQXQB

[Charlotte Clymer 🇺🇦 @cmclymer]

A few weeks after the horrific Oct. 7th attacks, I wrote an op-ed for The Daily Beast that I hoped would be something of a wake-up call for those on the far-left—and in progressive spaces generally—that antisemitism was metastasizing and the broader movement has a responsibility to enact zero tolerance for anti-Jewish hatred.

At the time, it felt as though any opinion whatsoever on the Gaza crisis was vulnerable to being hostilely conflated with biases held by any given observer operating in bad faith, and naïvely, I thought bringing attention to some of the worst examples of antisemitism might give folks a chance to reflect, re-adjust, and make it clear that hatred against Jewish people would not be tolerated.

It’s been 29 months since the attacks, and in that time, it’s pretty clear that antisemitism in the United States has only worsened — not just from any one political ideology but across the board.

This is not just a problem of the right or the left or the center, but when I observe someone in left or left-leaning spaces claim the left doesn’t have an antisemitism problem, I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Of course the left has an antisemitism problem.

Let me give you an example of something that happens like clockwork.

Anytime I post online about an antisemitic hate crime, there are responses from real people on the left (not bots) that engage in an absurd whataboutism exercise.

“Yeah, that’s terrible, but what about Gaza?”

“Okay, now do Israel.”

“Have you posted anything about Gaza?”

Well, I have posted (and written pieces) about the horrific violence against innocent Palestinian civilians, but it remains unclear to me why acknowledging the murder of any Jewish person by a vicious antisemite is required to be coupled with disclaimers that include an itemization of other acts of violence.

Why is the life of any Jewish person only to be honored and their death only to be mourned and the atrocity that took their life only to be held accountable if—and only if—other atrocities are acknowledged in the same breath?

That never made sense to me, and I once naïvely chalked it up to incompetence. The past few years have made clear that it’s an intentionally undermining tactic and an active erasure of violence against Jewish people.

We can talk all day about how most people on the left don’t do this, which is true, but if we’re not holding things like this accountable and establishing a strict standard across the movement that this behavior is unacceptable, does it really matter if it’s most people on the left or a small fraction?

An authentic rejection of hatred does not come with the expectation of something in return; it is done solely for the sake of rejecting that hatred.

Let me give you another example. For some on the far-left, in order for me to demand accountability for Netanyahu and stopping the deeply inhumane violence inflicted on Palestinian civilians and supporting self-determination for the Palestinian people, I must also claim that Israel shouldn’t exist, let alone defend itself.

That is not only batshit insane and wildly impractical beyond any reasonable adult’s comprehension, but it has accelerated into using this mindset as an excuse to harass, discriminate against, assault, and murder not only anyone with any association with Israel, regardless of their politics, but any Jewish person anywhere.

For some of these people, any act of discrimination or violence against an Israeli citizen, no matter their background, and/or any Jewish person anywhere, no matter their views, somehow gets drawn into an irrelevant debate over Zionism.

I personally support a two-state solution, but I fail to see how that discussion is in any way relevant when teenage boys are heckled at a hockey game for wearing kippahs or when a college student has “Zionist” shouted at her on campus because she’s wearing a Star of David necklace or when Jewish people are maimed and murdered by an antisemitic sociopath throwing a Molotov cocktail at them solely for raising awareness about innocent Israeli citizens being held hostage by Hamas or when a Jewish gathering is the target of a mass shooter who clearly just wants to murder Jewish people and any Jewish person will do.

Many people on the far-left will immediately condemn actions like these but will also fail to acknowledge how this mindset is partly an outgrowth from tolerating with their silence the use of “Zionist” as a catch-all slander for anything related to Judaism and Israel.

I am well aware there are Jewish people who oppose Zionism—and progressive Zionists—who are horrified by the actions of Netanyahu’s government, and I would never equate good faith criticism of Netanyahu and the Israeli government with being antisemitic.

Moreover, I’ve been deeply and consistently critical of Netanyahu and the current Israeli government, and not once have I ever been called antisemitic for voicing my views.

But I will also not tolerate the conflation of Judaism and the people of Israel with the horrific actions of Netanyahu’s government, and I really don’t think the far-left and much of the left generally is doing enough to have zero tolerance for that either.

It’s not that our Jewish siblings don’t just feel unsafe, as though this is some failure of psychological strength on their part.

They are, in fact, not safe. They are clearly not safe. Not here in the United States. Not in Israel. Not anywhere in the world.

And to deny that is to be completely detached from reality.

The time for discussion on this and considering bad faith argumentation on it and permitting the enabling of it is over. It should have been over long ago.

If you’re the kind of person on the left who believes that expressing antisemitic views through other vehicles is appropriate, I want nothing to do with you.

I don’t care how many other causes we agree on. I don’t care if you’re a huge champion of trans equality. I don’t care if you’ve supported my work.

We’re just done. There will be no email. There will be no text. I am not going to go fifteen rounds with you in unpacking why the antisemitic thing you said actually means something else when we both know what you clearly intended.

If you express hatred or antipathy or even what you feel is some “harmless” stereotype against the Jewish community, you have decided to end our relationship.

I am not your non-Jewish colleague or friend who will tolerate your bullshit, hateful thinking.

I wouldn’t tolerate it with misogyny or white supremacy or any other form of hatred, and I am sure as anything not going to tolerate it with antisemitism.

There is no need for nuance here because the nuance doesn’t exist. If you’re a grown adult who buys into any form of anti-Jewish hatred, you are not my friend or my valued colleague.

It’s simple as that. The choice is yours.

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Link to full essay for easier sharing here: https://t.co/XBwIgxNXTX

[Hans Mahncke @HansMahncke]

The social media ban for teenagers which is being fast-tracked across the Western world, is a Trojan horse for ending internet anonymity. That is the short of it and the long of it. Resist it at all costs.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

Banning teenagers from social media is a bad idea, I argue today in the Washington Post. It's less like banning them from alcohol or tobacco, as some advocates say, and more like banning them from books or movies – there are lots of books I don't want my kids reading before they're old enough, but to ban them entirely would be insanity.

The evidence that social media and the internet are bad for kids is strikingly weak, bordering on nonexistent, considering the strength of the claims that are being made. That doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about – the evidence may change – but it leans in favour of pluralism via parental choice.

For many bright kids, the internet can be a lifeline to interests and people they won't get access to at school. Imagine, for example, trying to follow developments in AI without access to Twitter.

For even more of them, the internet is a remedy for the punishing boredom of being a teenager. If we've misdiagnosed why teens are unhappy – and, for example, school is the big cause rather than the internet – we could make things worse.

I am not a believer in "anything goes" when it comes to under-16s. But the answer is to strengthen parental controls, including with more regulation if necessary, not to impose a single prohibition on all teens and families.

Gift link below.

https://t.co/X5slIhacIp

[Antony Green - elections @AntonyGreenElec]

The success of local Independents, the contest in Kooyong and what it tells us about where national politics is going.
https://t.co/bwuj5zT4pA

[Athanasius @Athanasius_45]

A list with download links for all the older Loeb books that are in the public domain (279 all in all):

https://t.co/s2j0LVIkVP

[Iain Jordan @iainjordan]

This speech by @doctorow about LLMs and related generative AI is an original and intellectually thrilling analysis which introduced some new ideas to me. https://t.co/rFbgoJhOcH

[Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson]

Today in Current Affairs, professor Ron Purser exposes how AI's destruction of the university is even worse than you think, and goes well beyond students cheating with ChatGPT: https://t.co/TAUD4R7gxK