The Most Important Question

anyone who cares about politics and the well-being of their people must ask is, "What is the best argument on the other side?"

If you honestly care about what is happening around you then you should want to speak the truth and the only way that you can possibly do that is to fairly consider relevant counter-arguments... however much you may despise the Woke Idiots or Right-Wing MAGA Fascists on the other side.

The problem is that the vast majority of us, including me, tend to be terrible at this. The reason for that is because it is psychologically discomforting to think of oneself as wrong and, worse yet, demonstrably shown to be wrong by The Enemy... on the otherside.

The Dark Side.

The Bad People.

I am right and they are wrong!

I am Good and Smart and Caring.

They are not.

{You get me.}

So, the question that I am beginning to ponder is, what are the best arguments coming out of the Democrats concerning how Trump sucks?

I was talking to my better half, who is a liberal Democrat, and she was arguing that The Big, Beautiful Bill cut Medicare and Medicaid to some citizens who are legally entitled to it and that it is going to increase the national debt by 3 or 4 or 5 trillion dollars.

I don't know the truth, yet.

But we shall see.

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Part of the reason that I liked being on political social media is because it is the best way to keep one's ear to the pavement.

By doing so you learn how the issues that concern you are framed.

One thing that needs to be realized by the pro-Jewish / pro-Israel / pro-liberalism camp is that the fight is not between some evil white-Zionist-racist-colonial whateverthefuck of the progressive neo-socialist imagination against the innocent, bunny-like "Palestinians."

This contemporary, leftist, academic way of looking at the conflict conjures the Jewish state as the latest and most miserable form of despised Western Colonialism that must be eradicated in order to create decent lives for the oppressed.

The problem is that this is ideological fantasy.

What is true is that Zionism is the most successful anti-colonial movement in world history.

What is also true is that the rise of political Islam, despite 9/11, is largely ignored by the West -- left, right, and center.

The Islamic Republic in Iran is (or was) the foremost example of the Jihad in the world today. As such it represents one of the greatest opponents of not only the Jewish people, but of liberalism.

Thankfully, there is a liberal movement within Iran that seeks to overthrow the Ayatollahs and the imposition of Islamic religious authoritarianism on that country.

The bottom line is that if you stand with the Palestinian-Jihadis against the tiny Jewish minority in the Middle East then you are standing against the liberal resistance in Iran.

Ultimately, by standing with the Jihadi, you are standing with those who throw Gay people from tall buildings, keep women quite literally under wraps, and who seek the genocide of the Jews as a religious obligation.

Any western liberal who wishes to actually stand with liberalism as a political orientation -- and thus stand with the regular people of Iran -- must stand against the Jihadis and that includes the poor, crazed, pathetic Jihadis in Gaza.

And if you honestly care about the well-being of Gazan children you should be demanding the surrender of Hamas and the release of the hostages because only that can save lives.

The Cover-Up

 

I was just listening to a conversation between Ezra Klein and Jake Tapper concerning the so-called "cover-up" of Joe Biden's cognitive abilities.

The implication of the conversation is that it was not a cover-up. A "cover-up" is a conspiracy and a conspiracy requires a number of people who understand that they are doing something underhanded and they intend to keep their participation secret.

What Tapper was talking about was "group think."

So, it was not that members of Biden's inner circle came together with the intention of deceiving the public, but that they came to believe what they were telling one another in the face of obvious truths to the contrary.

There was nothing nefarious about it and it was not due to personal stupidity. The truth is -- and I see this increasingly as the years go by -- that people believe what they want to believe. And generally what they want to believe is not just what is good for them personally, but what their families and friends believe.

It is a social imperative.

I think it is reasonable to say that what most people believe around politics has less to do with a thoughtful consideration of the issues over time, then it has to do with the tendency toward social conformity and deference to authority.

When it came to Biden's cognitive abilities they, most of them, probably believed that, yeah, he wasn't the Biden of ten years ago, but he's OK.

Everybody else around them thought he was OK and, for the most part, he was OK. Of course, then there were the times when it wasn't... but basically he was.

Or so they thought.

It wasn't so much that they were lying to us as they were lying to themselves.

Just like the rest of us do about any number of issues every damn day.

The Zohran Mamdani

victory for the NYC Democratic Party mayoral candidacy is the most significant challenge yet by the antizionist neo-socialist wing of the Democratic Party to the decrepit Schumer-Pelosi establishment.

I find all this Mamdani Hoo-Ha fascinating.

There is talk concerning the extent to which his antizionism will affect his candidacy and relationship with his voter base. This is obviously most concerning around the fairly sizeable Jewish population which is highly pro-Israel.

His supporters insist that he is not antisemitic and, in fact, just recently he reaffirmed his commitment to the safety of New York’s Jews. 

Speaking strictly for myself, I’d rather throw myself off a cliff than support an antizionist.

The guy spoke in favor of “globalize the intifada,” for fuck’s sake.

The intifadas in Israel, particularly the Second Intifada, meant open season on Jews by Palestinian-Jihadis who killed over a thousand of our brothers and sisters there.

The call for an intifada is a call to blow up busses and set-off suicide belts in pizzerias.

If “intifada” means kill the Jews, “globalize the intifada” means kill the Jews wherever we may be found, including New York.

Frankly, a New York Jew would have to be a stone-cold idiot to support this guy... yet we know that many did. About 20 percent, apparently.

"Do They Pay You..."

 

Reddit - r/headlinepics

TrueHaiku:

Do they fucking pay you to come in here and defend genocide? I mean, the world sees what is happening. We have livestreams and videos now. The world generally sees Israel for what it is. No amount of Israeli cockslurping is gonna change our minds, so what's your goal?

.

Good_Low2461 (me):

It's important for Jewish people to see how the hatred evolves in real time.

See, we didn't have that opportunity in the 1930s because the media wasn't nearly as evolved as it is now.

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hellomondays:

It is antisemitic to say that Jews (not just Israel, apparently) are incapable of upholding human rights in wartime.

.

Good_Low2461

"Human rights"?

My guess is that Israel is doing a better job upholding human rights in wartime than probably any other country in human history.

If you look into it you will find that the civilian-to-combatant death ratio in Gaza is far lower than was the US civilian-to-combatant death ratio in Iraq War II.

One of the main problems that Israel (and the Jews, in general) has is not the never-ending attempt by the Palestinian-Jihadis to murder the Jews in Israel, but the anti-Israel / anti-Jewish propaganda campaign that seeks to spread hatred.

We see this throughout social media constantly.

Israel is portrayed as demonic.

And, really, that was the entire point of Oct 7.

Surely you have asked yourself what Hamas hoped to achieve on that day.

Well, what they wanted was plenty of dead Palestinian-Arabs so that their progressive friends in the Red-Green Alliance could scream from the hillsides how "Zionists" are evil.

And, I tell ya, it worked very well.

--

EyeGod (his response to my claim that Jews are from Judea).

Nope, not all of them.

But, hey, you go back far enough, we’re all from Africa, right?

So, how far do you wanna push your logic?

.

Good_Low2461

That's a fair point.

Antisemitic antizionists basically engage in two styles of attack on the Jewish people and Israel.

The first is in portraying Israel and its supporters as evil.

You know, in the Middle Ages they accused us of killing Jesus because that was the most evil thing that you could ascribe to someone at the time and it justified their killing of Jews.

Now they scream from the hillsides about "genocide" because, today, that is the most evil thing that you could ascribe to someone and it justifies the killing of Jews.

The second is in what I call "The Indigeneity Question."

In this case, the enemies of the Jewish people will say, "You stole the land from the indigenous Palestinians!"

Well, the fact is that the Jewish people, including those of us from European diaspora, have genetic roots that go to the Levant.

So do most Palestinian-Arabs, of course.

But questions of indigeneity are not primarily about genetics, but about culture.

The Palestinian-Arabs are still Arabs.

Their culture is primarily derived from the Arab side of their family.

Their language is Arabic and Islam was born on the Arabian Peninsula.

Likewise, the Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel.

The Hebrew language comes from there, as does our religion.

These are five things

that anyone who cares about the well-being of the Jewish people -- and, thus, the well-being of Israel -- should know in their bones.

1 - The Jewish people, including those of us from the European diaspora, are indigenous to Israel.

See: Tony Masiuk & Dani Ishai Behan, No, Ashkenazi Jews are not ‘genetically European’ (2024)

2 - There is no genocide in Gaza.

It's not a genocide if you can end it at will simply by releasing the people that you are torturing.

3 - There is no reference to a Palestinian-Arab nation or ethnicity in all of human history until the mid-1960s.

This is because there was no such nation or ethnicity.

4 - Israel offers its Arab citizens greater civil liberties and access to economic opportunity than regular Arabs have anywhere else in the entire Muslim Middle East.

5 - Whatever the intention of the antizionist movement within the western-left, it manufactures hatred toward Jews with the intention of replacing the lone, sole Jewish state with a 23rd Arab dictatorship.

--

If the Palestinian-Arabs can be considered a distinct ethnic group it is a result of Arab-Muslim imperialism and religious hostility toward Jewish self-determination and self-defense on historically Jewish land.

Were it not for the never-ending war against Jewish autonomy in Israel the "Palestinian" people would never have come into existence.

It seems pretty obvious

 

that, increasingly, the internet is less about people communicating with one another than it is about computers communicating with one another.

I no longer have certainty that any post, or even comment, that I may be responding to was actually written by a human being.

We know that a significant percentage of it is AI sludge, but we don't know exactly how much. Whatever that percentage is, it is increasing.

The Golden Age of Blogdom is dead and buried.

The small blogs, from back in the 00s and 10s, had an authenticity and sense of community which, to me at least, seems very much over with.

My own little journey into the world of the political blogs started with Daily Kos in the early-mid 00s. There was a real sense of community then and a feeling that regular people were taking back the conversation.

Daily Kos, even then, was quite big. My UID # was fifty-five thousand something, but people got to know one another pretty well.

But, hell, that was a long ago, now. It was when still when I favored Democrats.

I then joined Maryscott O'Connor's now defunct My Left Wing, which was considerably more left-leaning than was Daily Kos. If dKos was about promoting Democrats, MLW was more about promoting socialism or the progressive-left, although none of us were formal in our political allegiances.

She even got written up by the Washington Post in a 2006 article titled, The Left, Online and Outraged: Liberal Blogger Finds an Outlet and a Community

MLW was never more than 1/50th the size of dKos, but we had a pretty strong regular group for awhile. Eventually the tensions within the left tore MLW apart, particularly the tensions between the Jewish left and the antizionist left.

MSOC was stuck in the middle. Although I suspect that she is increasingly antizionist, she always avoided the topic and much like Markos Moulitsas recognizes that it's nothing but trouble for the left, in general.

Then I started up this joint in '09 and it did pretty well for awhile through the mid-late 10s, until I joined Facebook a few years ago and neglected this place.

Now, of course, there is almost nobody here and I am just using this as a space for reflection.