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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I really wish people would look at it in this lens more. I think this is a big part of why we’re see this same issue in many developed countries. Like, yes. Xenophobia and racism is a part of it, but the other, more actionable part of it is that all of our viable political options have turned into technocrats who have used their political and economic expertise to fatten the richest people, and largest, most profitable industries at the expense of the poor for decades. This reality has bred resentment, distrust, and disinterest in politics, especially of political moderates and “status quo” politicians. All major left-wing opposition has been suppressed, or neutered, and as a result the only truly “oppositional” seeming politics come from far right nut jobs and they end up being the release valve for the political frustration. People can only hear “the economy is doing great”, while watching their children struggle to afford even a modest standard of living (by the standards we’ve come to expect) for so long before they become desperate for a significant change.







  • The fact is, however, that they impinge— as they always have— on the Arab residents of the territories, and then they have a distinct cutting edge to them. Both in theory and in practice their effectiveness lies in how they Judaize territory coterminously with de-Arabizing it.     There is privileged evidence of this fact, I think, in what Joseph Weitz had to say. From 1932 on, Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund; in 1965 his diaries and papers, My Diary, and Letters to the Children, were published in Israel. On December 19, 1940, he wrote:

    _“. . . after the Second World War the question of the land of Israel and the question of the Jews would be raised beyond the framework of “ development”; amongst ourselves. !t must be clear that there is no room for hoth peoples in this country. No ‘development’ will bring us closer to our aim. To be an independent people in this small country. If the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and wide-open for us. And if the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable.

    When the War is over and the English have won, and when the judges sit on the throne of Law, our people must bring theirpetitions and their claim before them; and the only solution is Eretz Israel, or at least Western Eretz Israel, without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point! The Zionist enterprise so far, in terms of preparing the ground and paving the way for the creation of the Hebrew State in the land of Israel, has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with ‘‘land-buying ’— but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all: except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a singlevillage, not a single tribe. And the transfer must be directed to Iraq, to Syria, and even to Transjordan. For that purpose we’ll find money, and a lot of money. And only with such a transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers, and the Jewish question shall be solved, once and for all. There is no other way out."_
    

    These are not only prophetic remarks about what was going to happen; they are also policy statements, in which Weitz spoke with the voice of the Zionist consensus. There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists, beginning with Herzl. and when ‘salvation’ came it was with those ideas in mind that the conquest of Palestine, and the eviction of its Arabs, was carried out.

    ~The Question of Palestine, Edward Said

    There’s literally dozens of other quotes like this one from people instrumental in the founding of Israel in this chapter, and they are similarly genocidal. It was honestly pretty transparent what they were going for.








  • No. Not at all. If I remember correctly, Guyana has a ~2500 person military. But it’s still weird because even though Venezuela has a more capable military and shares a border with Guyana, it’s not clear how Venezuela would actually invade. There is no road from directly Venezuela to Guyana, the area their border is on is dense, sparsely populated forest. The only road between the two countries goes through Brazil, who has a real army, and has moved troops to the border, I think. The other option is an amphibious assault, but that’s sketchy too because amphibious assaults are notoriously hard and there’s a US (and I think UK) naval presences just off the coast. So, like, Guyana’s military can’t really defend itself, but it’s also unclear how Venezuela would actually prosecute an attack.




  • It stands out to me how they make a specific goal on increasing renewable capacity but make no such goals to reduce fossil fuel production. My concern is that if we don’t consciously do the latter, the extra renewable capacity will, in effect, be used to increase power output without reducing the absolute quantity of fossil fuels significantly. There’s a lot of capital wrapped up in fossil fuel extraction, and we would be asking a lot of very power entities to take a haircut on their RoI by not continuing to use it. I think it’s a non-trivial problem that is really not being taken seriously enough in these kinds of talks.


  • I mean realistically the most obvious thing to me is that something has to be done to make the prospect of having children less daunting. I can’t speak to Japan, but for my friends here, in our early 30s, we’re only just now getting to a place where moving out of our parents/a 5 person roommate situation is feasible. Many of us don’t have long-term romantic prospects, and work all the fucking time. Ok top of that, having a kid just sounds terrifying. The cost, and amount of effort needed to see a kid not have a terrible life is daunting (I’m a teacher. Just imaging the amount of effort I, as a parent, would need to put in to have a average kid succeed in a school environment is horrifying)

    I imagine a real intervention for this sort of thing looks like less work; good, free child care; our cities building culturally relevant community spaces that people actually want to go to outside of the internet; and creating a culture of community-oriented sharing of the responsibilities of caring for children. In short, we’d need to make our society one that’s less hostile to having kids. That seems pretty obvious, and from my understanding, a lot of these factors are worse in Japan than in the US.