FtttG
User ID: 1175
I think it's rather telling that apologists for the Cuban regime always point to the American blockade as the ultimate cause of Cuba's economic woes. It's hardly a ringing endorsement of communism that communist regimes can function perfectly well, provided they can freely trade with their capitalist neighbours. Communism isn't just parasitic at an individual or societal level: it's fractally parasitical, no matter at what resolution you examine it.
FtttG
1d ago
Last week I also read Jack Kerouac's Tristessa, his account of his platonic relationship with a Mexican prostitute and morphine addict. I'd never read anything by Kerouac, and on paper his writing style (stream-of-consciousness narration peppered with overwrought religious adjectives and a lackadaisical attitude towards punctuation) sounds like everything I hate about experimental prose. But I was surprised to find it oddly compelling, such that I read this (admittedly very short) book in two days. It helps that, unlike in On the Road, Kerouac doesn't commit any serious misdeeds or act as an accessory to anyone else's: he comes off as genuinely protective of the title character, and it's darkly amusing how this bumbling gringo gets exploited and ripped off by just about every Mexican he meets.
FtttG
1d ago
I love supermarkets, but I get DeLillo's point that they can be a bit weird if you approach them from a virgin point of view. But this point should have been made once.
FtttG
2d ago
God, I hated White Noise. "Wow, supermarkets are kind of weird and alienating huh?" Yes, Don, I suppose so. I don't think you needed to devote a quarter of your novel to making that point.
FtttG
2d ago
Seven years ago, I stopped at a petrol station in Italy and found a discarded copy of Robert Gutwillig's After Long Silence. I decided to take it with me, and it sat unread on my bookshelf ever since.
On my morning commute the other day, I finally decided to give it a go. After ten pages I was already bored, and gave up.
Luckily I'd prepared for this eventuality, and also brought A Canticle for Leibowitz with me. It's a very old, battered copy with extremely fine print, and I'm only about five pages into it. The prose is a bit baroque for my liking, but I'm interested to see what happens next, which is more than can be said for the previous book.
FtttG
2d ago
I was thinking about this comic earlier and it occurred to me that it's sort of a neat encapsulation of why Israel exists.
FtttG
4d ago
It's more of a chronological categorisation than an ethnic one. Ashkenazim who emigrated to Israel around 1948 would presumably have a lot of ancestry in common with Russian Jews, but the Russian Jews are mostly those who emigrated from the USSR in a large influx around 1989. Because of this, they're a distinct cohort in terms of culture, language and history, if not ethnicity.
It is surprising that they don't mention Sephardim etc. anywhere in the article. Maybe there really aren't that many of them?
FtttG
4d ago
Second attempt: 288/320.
FtttG
4d ago
I've been banging this drum for a long time.
FtttG
4d ago
When you post a comment, select the rightmost icon below the text window. It goes bold–italics–quote–link–image.
FtttG
4d ago
I think the typos are deliberate foil questions, under the assumption that a person genuinely familiar with the topic would notice that the word was misspelled.
My results: 280/320.
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I only noticed afterwards that exactly five answers are correct and five false. Curious if I can improve my score armed with this knowledge.
FtttG
4d ago
In this way they carry water for the actual anti-semites.
@ymeskhout drew an evocative comparison:
Getting on a soapbox with "We demand that Israel stop trying to get its hostages back from insane terrorists!" is not a winning message, and so they tried to falsely moderate their Jihadi simping. The unabashed loons braying for the complete destruction of Israel could take cover behind the normies who showed up to protests simply because they hated seeing pictures of dead kids on their Instagram feed. Kind of like human shields.
FtttG
4d ago
if one day the shoe is on the other foot and the Palestinians achieve military supremacy?
I'll believe it when I see it.
Ashkenazi (European) Jews, who make up most of the Israeli population
Untrue. Ashkenazi Jews only make up 32% of Israeli Jews, or 23% of Israel's population. The single biggest Jewish demographic in Israel are the Mizrahi Jews, representing 45% of Israeli Jews or 33% of the population of the country.
European and good at science you say?
Among Israeli Jews, 45% are Mizrahi, who are about as European as the Arabs are. I'd hazard a guess that if I conducted a survey in which I showed respondents a photo of a Mizrahi Jew and a Palestinian Arab without telling them which was which, people would perform no better than chance at identifying them. 3% of Israeli Jews are Ethiopian. Less than half are Ashkenazi or Russian.
The idea that the Israel-Palestine conflict reduces to anything as simple as "white settler-colonialists oppressing brown people" is a ludicrous fantasy.
This seems like splitting hairs on two fronts. Some of the most infamous "canonical" school shootings were committed by adults: Sandy Hook, Parkland High, Uvalde, Columbine (Eric Harris turned 18 a week before the shooting; Dylan Klebold was 17). The category "school shooting" is generally taken to include shootings which take place at universities, hence why Virginia Tech is usually considered the bloodiest school shooting in American history. The idea that "school shootings" only refers to mass shootings committed by minors at primary or secondary (but not post-secondary) educational institutions seems like a stipulative definition that doesn't reflect common usage.
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