Howard Eissenstat

Scream this from the rooftops.

Trump and bros are turning violence and even death into entertainment. Sometimes it’s masked ICE. Sometimes it’s a mashup of clips from Top Gun with real “kill” footage.

They’re in the business of selling violence. They vilify care about civilian casualties as “woke”

Excellent post. Some downright brilliant stuff in the replies

Quite the thread.

We may be forced to do the stupid shit we were already inclined to do.

I'm sorry, but other stupid shit we did recently has forced our hand.

If you think the wave of edge-lord bigotry that we are seeing in our public officials is going away, I suggest you talk to some high schoolers about what their peers are saying.

I am uneasy with predictions about the future of Iran, but all the most likely ones are all pretty grim for the next generation at least.

no no no no no

"Double tap" is a very specific thing that basically only the Israelis and Russians do that this website has since decided should refer to any strike where you hit a target more than once, for any reason

If you took $1 billion and gave it to the endowment of a different small college each day, they could each provide a free college education to several hundred students per year in perpetuity. Instead we are using that money to bomb schools and kill students in Iran, for no clearly stated purpose.

It actually hurts other pro-Palestine politicians like Mamdani and Abughazaleh to lump Platner in with them and pretend like the bad-faith accusations of antisemitism lobbed at them are similarly bad-faith when lobbed at Platner. This is why someone like Platner can poison a progressive coalition.

Wow! Turkish president's former propaganda director is sent to Vatican as the Ambassador. He's become irrelevant

I really think "Platner's team declined an opportunity to speak to Maine Jews and reassure them" deserves to be a larger part of the story of his campaign than it has been thus far.

The US-Israel relationship is finally facing a reckoning. It doesn't need to slide into antisemitism | Joel Swanson Israel’s role in drawing the US into a war on Iran is attracting healthy scrutiny. It’s also creating a permission structure for antisemitism

"We must be willing to criticize Israel as though antisemitism does not exist, and we must be willing to name and fight antisemitism as though the state of Israel does not exist." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

If you truly believed Graham Platner is not antisemitic at all, you would be sending him to synagogues in Maine to speak to Jews and reassure them of that. That is what Mamdani did during the NYC mayoral election. The fact they are not doing that is... telling.

The Mirage of a New Middle East War with Iran won’t reshape the region the way America wants.

Iran war “could create a power vacuum in Tehran, sour US allies on their partnerships, and produce ripple effects.. without removing sources of regional strife that have nothing to do with Iran. The risks increase the longer the war goes on.”- Dalia Dassa Kaye
www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/...

My latest post asks “What Is Israel’s Plan in Lebanon?”

Short answer: Its goals are far more ambitious and far-reaching than in its 2024 war with Hezbullah.

carnegieendowment.org/middle-east/...

I found my buddy, what was left of him, on the beach. The haunted look in his eyes as he struggled for breath. “They called me ableist,” he said. “Tell my wife…tell her I wasn’t problematic.”

Nam, man. Shit. CO radioed for your location and you had to reply with a land acknowledgement. Plant-based food all over the fucking shop. Spent a week in Saigon (on a hell of a bender) challenging people to define what a woman is, and most of em looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Pronouns on name tags of cashiers at bass pro shop. Gender neutral lifted f350s glittering in the lights of a Zach Bryan concert. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

We thought trigger warnings would help, but they did nothing to stop the brutality of land acknowledgement statement trench warfare, where each side refused to steal more territory.

i still have shrapnel from a 2016 twitter pile-on. never healed right.

“What is a woman???” I cried as the gender-fluid grenades exploded in rainbow colors all over the field, and the diversity cannons echoed in the distance

Chosin Reservoir, November 1950. Watched my best buddy get canceled right beside me. He begged them to spare him, told them he didn’t see color, apologized if anyone was offended. But the pile-on was merciless. By morning his account was locked. Just…disappeared into the discourse.

I too remember the earlier, woke wars. tons of spent microaggression munitions strewn about everywhere, friends crying out for God as they were slowly cancelled...look, if you weren't there, you'll never understand

This isn't funny. I lost family in the great cancelation of 2020. Everyone I know has either been transed or hasn't slept in years because of the forced wokening campaigns of our communist generals. I still have nightmares about the rainbow camouflaged soldiers that invaded my city.

"Jeremy Ben-Ami: I think it’s very important to make the case that when Zionism began, it was fundamentally liberal. There was no distinction. Zionism was inherently liberal, and it’s part and parcel of being a Zionist is to hold liberal values, in my view."

I think the people in J Street are good people, but part of why their worldview is incoherent is that this is a bad history of Zionism. Zionism was never rooted in liberalism. Liberal Zionist is an American invention imposed on it. There were leftist and labor Zionisms, but not "liberal Zionism."

We need to stop blaming a technology for the decisions being made by humans to exploit that technology for profit.

Generative artificial intelligence can't "exhibit anxiety." It isn't embodied. It has no persistent psychological state.

It's not intelligent. It's roleplaying.
Like Kristi Noem.

Can we assign these in high school civics classes?

Every monument, every building he has named after himself

FWIW:

Israel would not have attacked Iran if the US refused support.

Real question:

Is there any expert in the Middle East who thinks this war is a good idea?

I can't think of any.