This Week's Recommended Reading on Substack:
writes that “anyone that happens to read even a bit of the news today knows how much anger and vitriol we live with. It is in the air we breathe, the lives we live, the relationships we care about. Politics, of course, is where it lives most potently. And the Israel-Palestine conflict is perhaps the most distilled version of that anger. And that anger has radiated outwards. The anger and fear of the Israeli people has affected much of the Jewish diaspora. And the anger of activists who have seen the Palestinian struggle thrown aside for decades has led to its own form of anger. And despite what people think, anger actually has its place.” writes that “intellectual heavy hitters like the folks at the Daily Mail have dubbed Gen Z the ‘snowflake generation,’ implying they are liable to melt down under the smallest amount of pressure. And yet, the moment these kids set up tents on a campus quad, the speaker of the House demands that the president call in the National Guard. Looks like everyone’s a free speech absolutist when the question is whether those dapper Nazis can yell ‘blood and soil.’ But when 18-year-olds demand we stop funding genocide, it’s terrorism and time to call the cops.” writes that “like so much of American history, a lot of people claim to see the past clearly, but can’t see what’s immediately before them right here and now. The stakes of supporting protesters when we discuss history are much lower than the stakes of supporting them with real action in the present. But why do university administrators not only fail to see the importance of standing with their students and siding with the movement for liberation, but actively want to oppose it? The answer lies with the nature of the neoliberal university.” writes that “you don’t have to be blind to the real cases of anti-semitism in America to be troubled by accusations of anti-semitism to shut down the most visible protests to a military response that has become increasingly unpopular. The looking glass nature of the argument is reflected back at us: senior Israeli officials who oversaw the destruction of every university campus in Gaza complain that what is going on American campuses is unacceptable. Tarring every objection to Israel as anti-semitism makes it harder to address actual cases of this malign worldview, which unfortunately is not in short supply.” writes “let’s look at another example from Nate Silver—the man who became famous for correctly predicting that Barack Obama, one of the most talented politicians in U.S. history, would beat Mitt Romney, a super-rich weirdo who publicly shared what, until just a few days ago, was the worst dog-related political anecdote of all time, in an election. And this little observation from Nate has such a disturbing undertone that it actually made me kind of scared of him.” writes that “Gaza is the scene of Israeli carnage so pitiless that the International Court of Justice in January found it to be plausibly genocidal. Palestinian journalists and health workers on the ground are documenting that it's also something else: a laboratory for the wars of the future. Playing a recording of a crying baby to kill those who seek to save children is a risible cruelty but hardly an innovative one. Arming a quadcopter, however, is an inevitable idea that Israel now appears to have been the first to bring into battlefield usage. And Gaza will by no means be the last conflict where armed quadcopters kill.”Comments
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