@Harryruth

@dilanesper Shhhhh.

most beautiful part of California nobody knows about

@Microinteracti1 expensive; costs may mk maintaining social welfare systems more difficult. At same time, number of young ppl is declining, putting more pressure on ability to support all this. Wl people really pay the taxes & mk the sacrifices?

@Microinteracti1 How cd Canada or other countries choose anything else after Trump? But I wonder how this wl work out irl. This isn’t to disparage Carney’s remarks. Just to observe that it’s not an easy road ahead. Building an effective military is extremely…

For years, Canada sent 70 cents of every defence dollar straight to the United States. Mark Carney just told Parliament that stops now. The room gave him a standing ovation. It is a striking thing to get a standing ovation for announcing that your country will stop subsidising someone else’s arms industry. But that is where Canada is in 2025. Carney’s case is blunt: the United States is “beginning to monetize its hegemony, charging for access to its markets and reducing its relative contributions to collective security.”   And MAGA is celebrating. Winning. Always winning. USA, USA. Somewhere a man in a red hat is pumping his fist. Let me explain what is actually happening, because clearly no one has bothered. In ten months, the United States has torched eighty years of alliance architecture that its own soldiers, diplomats and taxpayers built from the rubble of the Second World War. Eighty years. Gone. Detonated, with a smile, by people who genuinely believe this is genius. Canada is not drifting away. Canada is leaving. Europe is not hedging. Europe is building a defence industry specifically designed to cut Washington out. Allies are not quietly grumbling over dinner. They are signing contracts with other people. And the MAGA faithful are cheering every single step of it, because someone told them this is what dominance looks like. It is not dominance. It is a man burning down his own house and whooping at the flames. The saddest part is not that America is losing its allies. The saddest part is that half the country thinks that is the point.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Stay connected, Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

@Rowd_19 @Hammonda1 Not to mention imposed a massive slave trade.

@Hammonda1 So Zionism would’ve been better had they imposed a more extreme apartheid, repressed the Palestinian Arabs’ language, & imposed burdensome taxes on them to coerce them to Judaize?

I see much commentary on this which misunderstands the evolution of Islam in particular. Here's a brief thought experiment: How would the Arab-Islamic conquests have progressed had they followed the Israeli pattern? The Hijazi Arabs leading unified Arabian tribes would have come to replace the populations they conquered. Arabs would have gradually forced them out, without offering the option of conversion to Islam. Instead, a constant stream of peninsula Arabs would have been brought in in a vain effort to Islamise and Arabise the state. As original population numbers continued to grow, this Arab-Muslim elite would have resorted to increasingly desperate measures to erase them. Islam would not have evolved since it would have arrived as a fully formed religious system from the start. How would the Zionist movement have evolved had it followed the Arab-Islamic model? A small core would have imposed Hebrew as the official language on all subjects, who in time would convert to the state religion, which was in itself evolving. As it evolved, its intellectual luminaries in law, theology and philosophy would have come from the indigenous convert communities. This highly syncretic process would have transformed the original religious ideology into something almost unrecognizable in time - a hybrid civilizational project leading the world in its time. (NB: On the evolution of Islam - the part where commentators usually get it wrong - there is a now large body of literature by Islamicists and other scholars of the Late Antique world)

@ClistonBrown Agree completely.

@Harryruth32 It’s robbery, for what little we get for it. We need a full accounting of how all that money is being spent.

I’m already taxed enough. I’m not voting for any candidate who’s going to ask me to pay more taxes, especially if I’m not going to see any of the benefits. I’d like to retire someday.

@ClistonBrown Went from reading abt Governor’s race this morning to paying my CA state taxes this afternoon. *Sigh*

@Harryruth32 I figured.

@ClistonBrown Definitely joking.

@Harryruth32 I assume you are joking, in which case that’s a good one.

@dilanesper These are serious dangers, but all manageable *if* we have good governance. Tall ask, esp looking at the governance we have now, but not impossible. To a large extent, the choices are on us.

There's three bits of long-term pessimism that stick in my mind and I simply don't think humans are going to be able to prevent any of the three, let alone all of them: global warming, automation job loss, and AI alignment problems.

No way Trump knew Palantir’s ticker symbol off the top of his head. Who wrote this message for him to post? Who around him is profiting? This is why my legislation doesn’t just ban Congress from trading stocks, but also the President, the Cabinet and other senior officials.

Viktor Orban built the model that Modi and Trump are mimicking. He reconfigured Hungarian democracy in ways that make his removal extremely difficult. On Sunday, his sixteen-year rule may come to an end. My dispatch from Budapest for the @NewYorker newyorker.com/news/the-lede/…

@TheLastNeocon True, but equally true: Arab & Iranian-backed groups stop attacking Israel, no more missiles, no more 10/7; allow Israel to exist in peace. Has to work two ways in order to work at all.

Yes. Stop invading other countries for no reason, stop settling in the West Bank, and seriously negotiate a 2 state solution. If the Palestinians say no, keep trying. As long as you do that Americans will keep supporting Israel

Tonight in Budapest's Heroes' Square, a sea of young Hungarians—who've only known Orbán's corrupt, suffocating regime—are singing, chanting, and daring to dream of freedom again. Their hope is raw, their courage is real. The heart of Europe is beating in Budapest tonight. 🇭🇺❤️🇪🇺

@Observer853211 @MonicaLMarks And yet, excellent chance he’d win PA w/ its 19 EC votes in the general; good chance he’d take most or all of upper midwest swing states. Once you have that, yr practically in the WH. Tossing him aside is political malpractice.

@MonicaLMarks Shapiro is unelectable in the current democratic climate because of his views on Israel, it would be like trying to run Netanyahu

It would be a deft solution. But I think that, if reelected this fall, GA Senator Jon Ossoff is better positioned to square this circle than PA Governor Josh Shapiro. And Ossoff has the speechifying credentials to prove it—not just on Trump’s Iran war, but on Gaza under Biden.

@constans @luistr640poli @souljagoyteller Also involved a massive slave trade of conquered or captured peoples which remained legal in parts of the Islamic world well into the 20th century.

@luistr640poli @souljagoyteller I don’t think it was appreciably different in any coherent way outside of the existence of modernity and the fact that Africa and the Middle East and the new world were the victims. We just don’t like the reaction to it (anti colonialism) retroactively applied to the past

Academic historians won’t call the Arabization of the Middle East “settler colonialism” for the same reason they won’t label the destruction of Carthage a “genocide”: it’s anachronistic, and fundamentally against the historical method. What you want is propaganda

@DavidKlion Tho Shapiro’d win PA’s 19 EC votes in the general.

I actually buy this, but it would be Pritzker or Ossoff, not Shapiro who is DOA with the left

@ClistonBrown What do you see as the pluses for Mahan?

Hopefully the silver lining of this whole Swalwell thing is that reasonable Democrats will take another look at Matt Mahan. But he’s got a long way to go and a short time to get there.

@signulll Loneliness.

it’s remarkable that now only ~18% of households in america are the married with kids kind. slowly but surely the era of the nuclear family is likely coming to an end in america. what will be the replacement?

@Chronodendron The only answer is don’t buy the new Kindle. Ever. If you do, you send Amazon the message that this tactic works. This is why I’ve gone back to paper books. Less convenient in some ways, but Amazon inevitably pulls this crap.

I’m so upset… My Kindle is fifteen years old. It still works fine, and I want no other. I read a lot, and this is the only e-reader that doesn’t hurt my eyes. None of the new models have a screen that so perfectly mimics paper. And now Amazon is forcing me to buy a new one. 😡 I don’t need a touchscreen or sound, and I definitely don’t want adverts! 🤬 The timing couldn’t be worse either… I can’t afford it right now. ☹️ I guess I won’t be buying more ebooks for a while... I’ll just have to read the ones I already have.

It's one thing to say older devices don't support some new feature or service or operating system. But to make the deliberate choice to brick a device that's working perfectly well, in order to force your customer to buy a new one, is a hostile act of predatory capitalism.