“It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity,” says Hillary Clinton. I am one of those saps who is more bothered by the hypocrisy. Hillary can’t afford to be, I suppose.
Links
The Signal chat seems to be evidence of a war crime, right?
Given the lack of urgency and predictable civilian deaths, does the Signal chat not constitute a war crime!? Does this leaked conversation provide the proof?
I have to hope that enough enthralled by fascism are not fascists
Jason Kottke quotes A.R. Moxon and follows-up with:
Yeah, this is basically why I don’t waste time anymore railing against the many hypocrisies of conservatives — they’re not gotchas that you’re catching them in, they’re part of the domination.
True, but I have to hope their hypocrisy, as evidence of domination, is revealing to those who are not in fact fascists in their hearts then they realize they will be on the short end of the stick. It is worth pointing it out, it just isn't a tool to reform the fascists.
USAID shutdown reportedly styming anti-human trafficking direct service efforts
I worked for nearly a decade with the organization that currently runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline. I do not know the current specific details, but I believe it and am saddened by this news. I and my team supported some efforts to engage with some of the international partners alluded to if not mentioned in this reporting. I have all kinds of feelings about the space (and Polaris's unfortunate support for some very flawed legislation in the US), and I do not have an uncritical view of USAID, but it pains me to understand the many ways people just trying to help people are being crippled, seized-up and disrupted... and now, in this case, to maybe even _know_ some of the people. (Never mind the disruptions to refugee and immigration support separate from the USAID developments, where there are some more close-to-my-old-'home' hits.)
From Wired:
The funding cuts and pauses have immediately made it harder for people to safely escape scam compounds, according to half a dozen sources working to combat scams and trafficking. The cuts have also shrunk services that house and care for human trafficking victims and are limiting investigatory work into criminal groups. After just days of funding disruptions, sources say that the cuts have caused “chaos” for staff working to help survivors on a daily basis. Some organizations have already gone dark, and relief workers add that the withdrawal of services could embolden the criminal groups behind the fraud.
I hear the ghost of Ed Sullivan: “We have a very big shew today!”
I watch us
in our last, most honest minutes
putting bread on credit, double-
bagging bleach and ketchup, trying
to keep what we love alive.
What good comes out of increasing the void of help for the innocent?
I’m not really making an effort at being a news blogger. I have little to add of any unique value. I do not want to sound self-important. If there’s anything to when I do comment on the larger world I do not control or have particular expertise in, it is to assert as much agency as I think we all might have due to any way we might relate to the world, to care about things and to ask for justice.
So, if you know me, you already knew I wasn’t going to be surprised nor accept the justification behind this happening: Israel strikes aid convoy organized by U.S. humanitarian group, killing 5 .
But there is a little more: I knew ANERA people. The people I know and knew are no longer with the organization and generally were not in the field in the occupied territories. I know this is an organization meaningfully contributing to establishing some kind of well being for civilians without being attached to ideology.
The IDF’s actions are reprehensible and evidence of their institutional incapacity to act proportionately or in good faith and only give fuel to their self-stated ostensible intended opponents.
The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts can suck it. The vertical playground at Swampoodle is one of The Childe’s favorite places to play.
It is near several places we make regular errand runs to and, in addition to climbing fun, it provides him a vantage point to observe the train traffic coming in and out of Union Station (The Childe is a trainspotter, although he does not yet know this term).
Like many park areas with something interesting for different groups, it is a small oasis in the city. We need more such things for all of us. (We also need the city to keep the drinking fountains in clean, working order in all the parks. I did just put in a 3-1-1 request with regards to Swampoodle’s drinking fountain.)
This says nothing about me (except to significantly explain my stint of SAHD duty in the latter case), but I am proud to know people directly involved in each of these efforts:
- San Francisco Moves to Lead Fight Against Deepfake Nudes — San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu is a former colleague (and let’s be clear, boss— a co-founder, and CFO and CEO over time) of mine.
- My partner has been directly involved in facilitating this work: Biden administration reveals Medicare negotiation drug discounts
I don’t have to let go of my broader and deeper political critiques to appreciate some of this progress.
Caught up with the most recent episode of Maron’s podcast & enjoyed the bit in his usual rambling opening where he called out Trump on not citing his sources, being a coward for not giving credit to Hitler.
Design to survive the sacrifice
This feels like design for sacrifice zones… I’m not sure I believe that, but I hate the ideas that both people may need things like this and that whatever capital went into this has been dwarfed just by the fight to keep burning fossil fuels, never mind the wealth extracted and costs externalized on our lives by the continued burning.
War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young
We (the United States) have a war culture. We’ve been at war, one way or another, at substantial expense, my entire life, and longer, and most of the time, really. That, and my being politically aware and anti-war on most fronts (with a couple of exceptions that have their own equivocation) for 25 years (ugh), means this resonates with me: “War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young." Also, I used to work for IPA.
The clock ran out on "if" a long time ago.
This still feels like equivocation. In other words: too little. Certainly far too late for tens of thousands of dead innocent civilians, and what infrastructure there was to support the social and physical fabric of a society. (Israel is attacking clean water!)
Not sure this stops, or rights, a genocide. Those are the table stakes now.
Not enough, Joe.
I wish the government would get it right
I do want more aggressive antitrust action from the Department of Justice, including in the industry’s Apple is in, and possibly against Apple itself with well-crafted, technical and market literate arguments, if applicable… but calling Apple a monopoly still seems like a stretch. This DoJ action seems like a technically illiterate attack on on the reasons I choose to use an iPhone.
[Before we put these questions to a sperm whale unit, we’d have to think hard about whether we’d act on the answers. Kristin Andrews told me a heartbreaking story about a chimpanzee named Bruno who was taught sign language at the University of Oklahoma. Bruno was encouraged to build his whole life around the practice of asking humans for things. But after a few years, the scientists’ grant ran out and he was transferred to a different facility. When one of the lab’s scientists visited him there, he was distressed to see that Bruno seemed upset. He kept signing Key and Out. The scientist had taught the chimpanzee to communicate, but even in the face of a clear request, the scientist couldn’t help him. “If these whales start saying Go away; make the ships leave, what will we do?” Andrews said. And how will it reflect on us as a society if we ignore them?](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/02/talking-whales-project-ceti/677549/?gift=S4EwRLGNogt2Kqjs1lNdf1C5Zvy59Sc8vQ93xrMMh-I))
I assume the writers of Extrapolations were up on this whale research a couple of years back.
Dragging myself ... forward.
I was short with my father on the phone today. I couldn’t take his fatalist “it will get worse,” (and he’s a Trump voter) point of view. It may seem ironic to some who know me, because I also can say “It will get worse” — before it gets better. I think I am still not fatalistic, but my hoarder, prepper, some-kind-of-Republican father, who doesn’t even think Trump will fix things, is. It enrages me.
Then, I learn about five-year-olds telling aide workers they’d rather die and aide workers having to invent abbreviations like WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family), and active duty USAF airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolating outside the Israeli embassy, and general awareness of so much more horror in the world, in this country, in this city and just local dysfunction making itself manifest as personal injustices and barriers and becoming whatever excuses… and it overwhelms me. (I didn’t even get to crimes of ecocide and climate inaction.)
So I’m heartbroken, hoping, crushed, dragging myself forward, just trying to be a present father for my own pre-k son, saving my rage and despair for private moments.
Who are we?
A sigh of relief. I think I have a backlog of something on the order of 15,000 suspended sighs of relief—that is, breaths held—but I let that one rip. And gulped in a new one for the Supreme Court appeal to come.
To be fair, I am worried when I see hashtags on my tictacs.
…but I wish this hearing wasn’t so full of grandstanding to promote poor solutions to horrible problems. Not that I am particularly sympathetic to the witnesses.
But what’s new?
State of the World 2024: Ritual and Solidarity
The 25th annual State of the World thread on The Well has commenced. This is one of my favorite rituals. It can get a little hard on the “catastrophizing,” a little digressive, and it isn’t necessarily the most inclusive… it is what it is, and that is part of what makes it interesting. Not necessarily the be-all end-all on the “state of the world,” just this particular group’s (whoever that happens to be at a given time) sense, as much as they can write it out, as much as you or I might chime in, at that moment.
Much of the opening salvo relates to me, as I imagine it does any who have the privilege or wherewithal to look beyond the trenches they’re fighting in day to day.
I appreciate this especially, so far, from JD Work:
I will note that in any of the serious crisis contingencies that I have been involved in overseas, where everything is coming apart at once, those that made it through all shared common characteristic. ... It was those folks who could rely on their communities, and the networks of relationships they had built and nurtured over time, that endured. Even in the worst times.
Fairytale of Gaza
Sky News had a split screen for the funeral of Shane MacGowan and the United Nations Security Council meeting on the UAE resolution for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict. Sadly, unsurprisingly, we expect the United States to veto this call.
Perhaps these were seen as equal events (make no mistake, I am interested in both) because they’re things one might expect Bono to show up to? (Guess which one he [was actually reported to be]* at!)
The sorrow of Dubliners belting out “Fairytale of New York,” around the funeral procession is nothing compared to the cries of civilians in Gaza as thousands upon thousands of their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters are slain and hundreds of thousands are displaced by an occupying force’s collective punishment and overwrought rage.
Maybe it is a split screen because the United Nations being crippled by the United States again is, this time, a funeral for Gaza.
* It seems to be that ultimately Bono could not attend the funeral, despite Sky's earlier reporting at the Church. A recording of his reading was played amongst appearances from Johnny Depp and Nick Cave and bandmates. ...And after Sky stopped the split screen—in favor of MacGowan's service—I recreated it by putting up BBC World News and Al Jazeera on my laptop while keeping Sky on the TV.
Shame on The Guardian. They took the coward’s way. They could have done the work of linking or adding the context they suddenly feared was missing. Meanwhile, these words, whatever each of us make of them, will only proliferate more—Barbra in full effect.
The Hell I do not believe in is real
Children carrying other wounded children.
I’m already incensed, horrified, disgusted at the latest failures of humanity that have produced so many dead children, among so many other dead.
But my pacifist tendencies (the word “tendency” is doing a lot of the work, but it does have a breaking point) are tested at the murder and torture of children (as well as state violence pointed right at me—see, I’m ultimately not a pacifist).
Any response to such to do it ten or one hundred times more is a million times worse.
The Hell I do not believe in for an afterlife is visited upon these children now.
Ugh.
