chapotraphouse

Earthly pleasures have no meaning, all that does is line go up

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=G9lXnwuZ2qs&t=3167s Timestamped. CW: Transphobia shortly in

Anyone ever seen pigpoopballs? Haha I think it’s quite funny when a lib(eral) starts talking about voting, as if it’s a consequential action taken against our current political order.

Thanks for reading this free post. Check out some free comments below.

https://fxtwitter.com/eyuplovely/status/1848324467660853422

THANKS VERY COOL GOOGLE I'LL JUST LET THE PLAGIARISM MACHINE THAT TELLS PEOPLE TO EAT GLUE AND BURNS DOWN THE RAINFOREST TO DESIGN MY CURRICULUM

ACTUALLY WE PROBABLY DON'T EVEN NEED TEACHERS WHEN WE CAN JUST SIT STUDENTS DOWN IN FRONT OF A CHROMEBOOK AND FEED THEM AI SLOP ALL DAY AND THEN THEY CAN USE AI TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

So about the CW: this author is an Israeli neoreactionary, a "race realist", and a seeming Ashkenazi supremacist. I am not looking to downplay that, and I am posting this with some caution. (In particular, there is a racist barb in this article against Candace Owens and Kanye West.)

Having said that, they are also fairly knowledgeable about Jewish history, including Zionism, antisemitism, the Holocaust, etc. and as far as I can tell they are relatively intellectually honest about these things - certainly more intellectually honest than the Israeli goverment's propaganda vessels, or pro-Israel American politicians, etc. I'd be lying if I said I haven't learned anything from reading this guy's stuff.

In addition to the article linked above, they also wrote two follow-up posts:

Antisemitism as the Resting State of the Far Right

Wrapping things up on antisemitism

The last article, if you can look past the predictable communist-bashing stuff, includes a point that I think is fairly useful and important:

There is a stupid belief common to both antisemites and the antisemitism industry, which is that America, and white countries in general, are always one step away from breaking out into antisemitism... In the 1930 Federal German election, the NSDAP won 107 out of 557 seats, so any German Jew under the impression that everything was hunky dory on the antisemitism front must have been on some pretty strong opium. More than that, though, there had been explicitly antisemitic parties, including ones that had antisemitism in their name, in the German parliament for 50 years. Hell, the German Conservative party officially included antisemitism in its electoral programme in 1892. The idea that one day ‘for no reason at all’ Germans became antisemitic and elected the Nazis has literally no basis in fact at all; it was the product of nearly a century of dedicated propaganda.

This is the kind of stupidity that comes from seeing antisemitism as a ‘virus’ rather than an ideology. You could get a virus at any moment; you might get Covid tomorrow and be bedridden for literally minutes. Ideologies aren’t like that though. How likely is it that Libertarians will take over America three years from now? Not very, but they have had a party getting 2 or 3% in elections for decades and a whole nonprofit ecosystem promoting their beliefs. Do antisemites have that? So what are you even talking about?

I don't know where else to post this, it's a response to some anti-tanki shit I saw locally on the local cool leftist instagram clique 🥸

Its a good critique on online ~~anti-communists~~ very correct ultra-left-ists or whatever they call themselves

https://culture-centered.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-whiteness-of-binaries-that-erase.html

I'm definitely try and see Prashad talk later this month

Of course, I knew Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism (really, those two concepts are inseparable and feed each other) were very prevalent in American society going back a long time, with it really ratcheting up after 9/11. But ever since the Zionist entity’s terrorist pager attack last month, the sheer depth, pervasiveness, and how it’s just out there in the open and considered perfectly acceptable has genuinely surprised me. It seems to have started with that attack and subsequent events have only reinforced it.

White Americans just seem to delight whenever they think the Arab/Islamic “terrorists” are attacked. They do not care about who the “terrorists” actually are or how many people suffer. It’s not worth interrogating what the “terrorists” are fighting for or who was harmed because to the white folks, the Muslim/Arab people don’t matter. They’ve been dehumanized to the point where their lives are considered worthless.

To give an example, there is a person in my life who I’m about to cut out (should have a long time ago) who texted me something to the effect of “that pager thing was crazy, but looks like they got a lot of terrorists”. I tried to keep my cool and explain how normal people like doctors and ambulance drivers were hurt and killed too, because lots of people use those pagers. Dude literally just used a shrug emoji in response, because I guess those people aren’t worth giving a care about.

Everything I’ve seen especially in recent weeks really shows how bad it is. Brown people in Western Asia don’t matter because they have a different religion and they are “prone to violence” and they aren’t as “developed” as us. I feel like this is really where the support for Israel comes from. Not from ideas of Israel fulfilling apocalyptic prophesy, but just because white Americans can turn on the TV and see people in Israel who look like them, who have a religion that is semi-compatible with theirs, and who live in a society that seems to be very “Western” fighting off the “savage Islamists”. It plays into their already primed-for-racism-and-chauvinism” brains.

While I don’t think American media is the source of racism and Islamophobia, I do think the last 20+ years of movies, shows, and games has really fueled the fire. I think (hope?) in the future people will look back on this period of “corn-fed white bearded operators killing all the Muslim terrorists” media in the way we look at minstrel shows now.

My comment: sorry if this is racist, but this has definitely been my experience when meeting Israelis when traveling through Asia. This goes especially for Israelis just off of their conscription tour. They're especially shitty and mean to the locals. To be fair, I've met the random cool Israeli that hates their country and ran away from conscription, but they tend to be the exception.

My first encounter with Israelis was when I was backpacking through South America in my twenties, and I remember being shocked by how consistently awful they all were. I guess after their mandatory military service they tend to go traveling for a bit, and whenever I'd run into them they were reliably some of the nastiest people I'd ever encountered.

They weren't ever nasty to me, though. I am a white westerner, and I never had a problem with them. They were nasty to the impoverished brown-skinned people who were hosting us. They were obnoxious and bullying toward local guides, they'd leave the place in a mess, and they were always trying to screw over the locals for a better deal or extra meals or favors. One time they tricked a hostel into putting up a sign in Hebrew for other Israeli backpackers which said ugly things about our hosts (they told the hostel owner it was a great review), which I only know because they were laughing hysterically about it and told me. They consistently treated the people who were looking after us like they were much lesser than us. Their pushiness and entitlement were just unbelievable.

It was a very educational experience for me. I knew the Palestinians were being treated unfairly because my father had told me so, but I also had a great love of Jews and Jewish culture. I had visited Auschwitz and Dachau and Anne Frank's house in my travels, and I remember having some romantic ideas about kibbutzim. This was my first time directly encountering the reality that there is something unhealthy about Israeli society. Not Jews or Jewish culture, but Jewish Israelis.

Now I see evidence of this on my news feed every day, in the IDF soldiers prancing around in the undergarments of dead and displaced Palestinian women, in the AI translations of Hebrew tweets, in the polls which show widespread Israeli approval for the atrocities in Gaza, in Israeli TikTok videos mocking the suffering of the Palestinians, in the Israelis showing up in my comments justifying the worst things in the world in the most depraved ways imaginable.

My encounters with Israelis in South America were an early taste of ugly things to come. Everything I glimpsed then I've been seeing online over the past year. I keep thinking about those obnoxious pricks I met all those years ago, and about how they didn't know at the time that they were giving me very useful information for me to make use of in the future.

When Israel supporters tell you to shut up about Gaza until you've been to Israel and met Israelis, just ignore them. Don't go to Israel; you're a westerner, they'll be nice to you. Go to one of the tourist spots in the global south that Israelis like to visit, one with lots of brown-skinned people who've been colonized by the west, and watch how they treat people there. That will show you what Israelis are really like.

https://xcancel.com/rebeccaballhaus/status/1848030534498177169

https://archive.ph/3gYUm

"I see nothing for the future." The young man is not impressed by empty platitudes about the greatness of America?

https://archive.ph/WqZGz

Take one young Pittsburgh man I met in a recent focus group. A college graduate working part-time as a bartender, he felt weighed down by hopelessness, adrift in a country where rising costs, stagnant wages and lack of affordable housing have made even the modest ambitions of other generations feel out of reach for him. “Hope is great,” he told me, “but I see nothing for the future.”

The young man’s experience reflects a broader crisis of confidence and purpose, rooted in economic insecurity and social disconnection. The Covid pandemic exacerbated the alienation, with many first-time voters spending thousands of hours isolated and online in their formative years.

While these struggles affect the whole country, they weigh especially on young men of all educational, racial and ethnic backgrounds. Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z men report feeling regularly stressed by an uncertain future, stirring painful memories of the Great Recession they witnessed as children. These feelings erode self-esteem and diminish their interest in personal relationships and long-term planning, leading many to describe their future as “bleak,” “unclear” and “scary.”

Today’s young men are lonelier than ever and have inherited a world rife with skepticism toward the institutions designed to promote and defend American ideals. Men under 30 are nearly twice as likely to be single as women their same age; Gen Z men are less likely to enroll in college or the work force than previous generations. They have higher rates of suicide and are less likely than their female peers to receive treatment for mental health maladies. Most young men in my polling say they fear for our country’s future, and nearly half doubt their cohort’s ability to meet our nation’s coming challenges.

The rest of the article is garbage. It makes it seem that it was easy for Trump to be a Pied Piper. And the text entirely ignores the bipartisan failure to address the issues of younger voters. I wonder why the writer would have that POV and ignore the democrats' failure?...

By John Della Volpe

Mr. Della Volpe is the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. He runs a research firm that conducted polls for a PAC supporting the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigns.

Here's a suggestion by the brain genius.

To reignite the hope of the emerging generation, Ms. Harris should make a sweeping national call to both military and civilian service — name it the Generation Z Compact to Rebuild and Renew America. Such a plan would offer a sense of identity, community and patriotism, while providing economic stability and skill-building — things many young men feel they are missing.

Comments are off because of course they are.

This is aimed at US election day, because the US controls the western world. And most of us are unfortunately westerners.

We all know that the election is gonna suck. How will you cope? How will you celebrate? How will you give yourself a reason to wake up the next day?

My plan is avoiding all human contact for the day as best as I can, and going out for a run. Then I will come home and make rice and tofu. Maybe with some kimchi I have stored.