It’s my birthday this month. Please consider joining me in donating to UNRWA who has been the leading group working in Occupied Palestine since the Nakba.

I’d like to thank everyone in the online discourse for pointing out that my reading of Trump’s threats as genocide may have left out the one worse interpretation: Nuclear weapons

Genociding a national populace is bad. Doing it via nuclear weapons, would be worse. Maybe it’s a me problem that I hadn’t considered that a threat to eliminate a civilization to involve nuclear weapons. I guess watching month 29+ of an ongoing, non-nuclear, traditional genocide, had me thinking we’d do another genocide the old fashioned way. Silly me. Or maybe, luckily?, I’m pretty confident a nuclear genocide would actually be less likely to be carried out.

The Trump Cabinet is truly a murderers row of dumb asses whose egos far outpace their intelligence, and they would definitely talk themselves into the idea that you can fire off just a few nukes, and everything won’t go to shit. But the military leaders who would have to translate those orders into action, have literally spent their entire careers gaming out how those types of action play out. Spoiler alert: It’s not great

Even if the US was the only world power with such weapons, and there was therefore no risk of escalation, or you know, destroying all human life across the planet, it would still be an historically terrible idea. Yes, even for the little nukes. Calling them “tactical” doesn’t make them not, the worst and most destructive device we’ve ever created. Just flat out bad, in the short and long term.

But there is still a taboo around nuclear weapons. We as a global society haven’t used one except for the US in World War II. Talking about that use won’t fit here, but suffice it to say, it was justified through racism, and required dehumanization of the Japanese. Sound familiar? The actual value of nuclear weapons since has been not using them. Nuclear deterrence is seen as more valuable than nuclear use.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide however, have had their taboos softened or all out removed in our political establishment. Our government’s treatment of the individual victims of genocide in Palestine is indistinguishable from the Jews turned away during the Holocaust, best known in the story of the St. Louis being sent back to Europe. Then, as now, propaganda about the security risk of immigration provided a thin cover over outwardly racist and bigoted hatred of the other. We see it too in Miller’s Mass Deportations Now policy. It doesn’t matter why you are here, or what you are doing here, you aren’t white, so you should be forcibly expelled, under the threat or very real application of violence.

What is different with the current genocide, is our government is funding, supplying, and protecting the genocide from international response. The very same international systems and responses created to stop the Holocaust from happening again.

So this is different. It’s direct US impact on the genocide. It’s US weapons being dropped from US planes. US bullets being fired from US guns. All of it bought with US dollars, shipped by US companies, from US ports.

In many states, including NJ, it’s against the law to call for that support to be stopped. NJ’s anti-BDS law, only limits BDS actions against Israel, not any other country. The IHRA law being considered at the state level, and the Resolutions being passed at the municipal and county levels, only restrict speech about Israel. So our involvement with the genocide in Gaza, and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Lebanon, are just different, and it’s not antisemitic to acknowledge that.

IHRA, ironically, and completely un-self aware, says that Israel cannot be subjected to double standards different from any other country and yet explicitly names several things you only cannot say about Israel. So these aren’t serious, well thought out and well tested legal standards. They’re blatant, clear, and unapologetic attempts to protect Israel from justified, evidence based criticism nad reaction. The same criticism and reaction that would be permitted to be leveled against every other country in the world, including the United States where we stand while taking those actions.

So what are we to do?

Very few of us are in a position to directly change the way our government acts on foreign policy. So we must bear witness. That may feel easier to say, than to do. But the good news is that it’s easier than ever to bear witness. Open your social media app of choice (as long as it’s not Truth Social). Like posts. Work your way up to sharing/resharing posts. Work your way up to writing a post of your own. It can be simple. “I don’t support genocide.” “I don’t think ICE should tear families apart and murder people in the streets.” These aren’t controversial things to say, but it’s important that we say them.

Go to Al Jazeera, Zeteo, or Drop Site’s site and learn what isn’t being covered in the NY Times or on the nightly news. You don’t even have to leave your home. Subscribe to independent media like 404 Media, Handbasket, or Flaming Hydra.

But if you are able, if you can attend a protest, or start a protest if you can’t find an existing one. Show up. If you have the means, donate to a group doing immigration support, or mutual aid, or helping the victims of our own country’s genocidal and ethnic cleansing campaigns.

One way or another, do something. We must bear witness.

Watching

Omar El Akkad is one of the leading voices of humanity and morality in our time. Listen to him every chance you get.

Omar El Akkad on Trump’s genocidal threat

Anand Giridharadas continues to focus on the Epstein class, which goes far beyond one man, and definitely helps explain Trump’s Administration.

Reading

Ceasefire Means Different Things to Different People by Aalia Mauro

Which means the United States publicly claimed, through its chosen intermediary, that Lebanon was included in the ceasefire it agreed to, and then immediately backed Israel bombing Lebanon anyway.

Iran’s parliamentary speaker came out and listed the three specific clauses the U.S. violated before negotiations even formally began.

One: Israel continuing to strike Lebanon, in violation of the ceasefire’s explicit geographic scope.

Two: a U.S. drone entering Iranian airspace, which was shot down.

Three: the U.S. denying Iran’s right to uranium enrichment, which was included in the sixth clause of the framework that Trump himself called “a workable basis on which to negotiate.”

Three violations. Before the first formal negotiating session.

Has there ever been a more diplomatically unreliable pair of governments than the United States and Israel? The question isn’t rhetorical. Iran had to use two of its ten peace deal points just to say: when you agree to stop fighting, please actually stop fighting. That’s the baseline they’re working from.

Ceasefire Means Different Things to Different People

Iran’s 10-point deal, Israel’s definition of peace, and what it looks like when an empire quietly loses

Existence and Belonging: Six Reflections on Palestine by Steve Salaita

You felt joy because of years of seeing that smug son-of-a-bitch Netanyahu, alongside his abusive wife and idiot son, gloat as he killed our icons and leaders, our defiant Sayyed, our intrepid Anas, our beloved Refaat.  You felt joy on behalf of all the children who are orphaned, traumatized, incinerated by Israeli bombs.  You felt joy because all other modes of expression have been suppressed by Zionists across the professional spectrum.  You felt joy by remembering how mercilessly the genocidaires mocked and ridiculed people trapped beneath rubble.  You felt joy as a defense against the incessant pathological whining from the very perpetrators of these atrocities. 

Of course you felt joy, even if you tried to stop it.  In the end, you felt joy because you’re humane.  You’re not allowed to admit it in the West because that would make you a monster—merely extending the principle of self-defense to Arabs or Iranians is enough to make you a monster in the West.  The West, in other words, has warped and restricted your sense of humanity, in service of its own monstrous pursuits.  You’ve been uprooted, redefined, emptied of your ancestors’ values.  Not any longer, though.  The genocide has made it so that not a one of us should ever again accept moral authority from this wretched hemisphere. 

Redefining “resistance” as hate speech was an attempt to shut an oppressed group out of the public sphere. A group whose very existence is controversial in the eyes of their oppressors. So we must ask, whose joy is allowed? Is Black joy, LGBTQIA+ joy, female joy, permitted?

In an ironic, or maybe sad, twist, Palestinian Joy was, ultimately, resistance. Instead of the banned flag raising the organizers held an extremely successful and well attended celebration of Palestinian culture next to a bare flag pole. Somehow even the American Flag that flies there 364 other days a year chose to side with the oppressors. The Administration decided no flags would fly at Town Hall that day. But if the word resistance is hate speech then what are these acts of resistance against hate?

From “Man” to “Resistance," Oppressors Always Fear Words by me - 10/2024

Trump Surrenders to Iran by Nicholas Grossman

Negotiations could go nowhere, but for now at least, the United States accepted in principle to lift all sanctions on Iran, unfreeze Iranian assets, and recognize that Iran controls Hormuz, imposing a toll of up to $2 million per ship. America will end all attacks on Iran or its allies, withdraw U.S. forces, and get Israel to stop as well. 

That’s supposed to include an end to Israeli operations in Lebanon—where they’re fighting with Iran’s ally Hezbollah and razing villages to establish a “buffer zone”—but Israel says they’ll continue (as of this writing, Israel is still bombing). The UAE and other Gulf states reported launches from Iran after the ceasefire, but that could be because Iran spread its forces and reduced communications to avoid detection, and the order to stop hasn’t fully filtered down yet. Those and other problems could disrupt negotiations, but America has stopped shooting, and if Trump follows through on even some of these concessions, Iran will have won this war.

…

From Iran’s perspective, a brief halt to fighting is beneficial even if the U.S. gives none of the discussed concessions. If the war restarts, Iran still maintains control of Hormuz, got a pause to assess the damage and catch their breath, and gained some diplomatic points with China, which reportedly pushed Iran to accept a ceasefire. The world saw the United States act more eager for a deal and Iran display greater resolve, making some countries more likely to pay Iran’s toll instead of waiting for the U.S. to restore freedom of navigation.

Trump Surrenders to Iran

Donald Trump started and now has lost a humiliating, illegal, and stupid war with Iran.

Living through Trump's time bomb by Marisa Kabas

And we learned Wednesday that Israel did not believe they were subject to the cease fire, continuing to ceaselessly attack Lebanon as a proxy for Iran. More than 100 targets were hit with 1,000-pound bombs in less than 10 minutes, killing mostly civilians while they were going about their days—just as I was in New York. 

“First responders in Barbour worked to find people trapped under the rubble,” The Guardian reported on Thursday. “Firefighters sprayed water on the smouldering remains of the building while forklifts lifted crumpled cars to clear the road for ambulances. An emergency worker on the scene said they had not yet found any survivors, only pieces of people.”

Only pieces of people.

By late afternoon Wednesday, Israeli’s murderous carnage in Lebanon threatened the US-Iran cease fire, a term that felt and continues to feel ridiculous when the fire is far from ceased. There were reports Iran was charging ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, meaning we were now paying for something that just days earlier had been free.

Approach to Building a New Epoch for Economics by Stephen Rockwell

I like to debate Stephen about whether AI’s benefits can outweigh it’s moral, ethical, economic, political, and environmental costs. But we are deeply aligned on the idea that our society and economy are deeply broken and we must commit to radical rethinking to solve our problems.

Even without the impending upheaval from those two domains on the mid-term horizon, strong arguments can be made for a broad reconsideration on the underpinnings of our economic system based on our system failures on climate change, inequality, and poverty.

Our first job is to establish or re-establish first principles within the domains:

1. Nurturing the Earth’s health including its climate and natural environment.

2. Ending poverty and high levels of inequality.

3. Centering human systems to deliver on human rights.

4. Ensuring artificial intelligence supports human development over machine supremacy.

5. Determining whether, and by what means, humans will become an interplanetary species.

Approach to Building a New Epoch for Economics

Mapping the Exploration Ahead

Writers Write by John Warner

That’s reading. Reading is also allowing oneself to be persistently confused by something you don’t understand rather than asking Claude to explain it to you and then accepting that. Sun’s idea that editing - good editing - can be reduced to a rubric suggests to me she does not understand editing, and perhaps is missing something important about writing.

…

The core theses of the chapter are that we have already been flooded by content because of the nature of the marketplace for writing on the internet (e.g., clickbait), AI is going to make it worse, and for AI content to truly get traction, it is going to need a human face in front of it. In the chapter I cite a couple of instances where publications had invented fake people to cover over AI slop. What I failed to fully anticipate is people at the top of the profession deciding that they may as well join the flood, using their previously established reputations to launder the automation-assisted text production.

The distinctions between automation-assisted text production and writing may not matter to you. If so, fair enough, but I also wonder what you’re doing here. Go wallow in the infinite universe of slop. If you don’t want an infinite universe of slop, maybe these distinctions matter more than you think.

For those who value writing, what should we do? My approach is to read and support writers. Click on my links above and subscribe to all of those others. Read novels by writers like Elizabeth Strout who you know is not outsourcing her work to an LLM.

Remember that you can read and Claude can’t, so when you let Claude read and interpret something for you, you’ve given your perceptions over to math. I mean I got into writing because I hate math!

Writers Write - by John Warner - The Biblioracle Recommends

People who use AI to produce text are doing something else, which is fine for them, but it's not writing.

Go Ahead and Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You. by Hamilton Nolan

The tepid, conformist nature of your AI-assisted prose will only make my unexpected bons mots stand out more sharply. While you lean on a technological crutch of grammatical mediocrity to drag your essays over the finish line, I’ll be metaphorically zipping past you on my “magic carpet” of words emerging directly from my own declining and unpredictable brain. Over time, the intellectual box into which AI has seduced your creative process will suffocate you, leaving your bereft readers little choice but to drift into my subscription base.