How the Iran Strikes Seal Netanyahu’s Legacy
Amit Segal:
Netanyahu operates with a profound historical awareness of the existential dangers facing the Jewish people. In 2009, I interviewed Netanyahu along with his father, Professor Benzion Netanyahu. The elderly historian, nearly a century old at the time, said beside his son, “People think the Holocaust ended. It hasn’t. It continues all the time. ” He meant the intention to eliminate Jews had never vanished; the only difference was Israel’s defensive capabilities, symbolized by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israel can be crossed from east to west in 50 minutes. One or two nuclear bombs would destroy it—this was the “second Holocaust” father and son Netanyahu envisioned.
And so Netanyahu’s life mission became dismantling Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Over the years, in meetings with U.S. presidents, the incumbent president would raise the Palestinian issue, while Netanyahu would focus on the Iranian threat. Menachem Begin destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, Ehud Olmert did the same to Syria’s reactor in 2007, and Netanyahu vowed to do likewise with Iran.
Yet, despite several near-attempts, this promise went unfulfilled. Israel’s defense establishment blocked Netanyahu’s intended attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities repeatedly, in 2010, 2011, and 2012, leaving many convinced it would never happen. And American presidents, namely Barack Obama, backed by the American defense establishment, would not permit an Israeli strike.
Before his most recent electoral victory, in September 2022, Netanyahu promised me this time would be different. Noticing my skepticism, he clarified: “This time, I’m not a 60-year-old with one term behind me facing a military establishment, but a 73-year-old with another decade of experience. This time, nobody will stop me.”
The American Caudillo
Andrew Sullivan:
There is nothing illegal or illegitimate about ICE enforcing immigration laws. There is plenty to criticize in how Trump is enforcing those laws — violating the Constitution, ignoring courts, commandeering the National Guard, sending in troops — but not the enforcement itself. But the Democrats still can’t make that distinction. Worse, their opposition is in acute danger of giving us BLM-style riots and rallies across the country, attended by the usual suspects, flying foreign flags, that will only rekindle memories of 2020 and remind many of us why we despise the Democratic left’s racism, contempt for law enforcement, and endorsement of looting.
By far the best policy is to let the Trump goons do their hideous, authoritarian worst (they won the election on the promises, after all), watch them fail to match the deportation numbers of Obama or even Biden, and then run hard against their authoritarian incompetence in 2026. The last thing we need is an excuse for Trump to ramp up the repression even further.
So expose the departure from American norms and values, spread the word about the abuse, defend the Constitution and the rule of law, and keep arguing for American values against this deeply anti-American president. But don’t defend illegal immigrants. And don’t give Trump a way to distract from his flailing on the debt, tariffs, and foreign policy. And if the Democrats really want to beat him, unveil your own program of legal, humane, expeditious, and constitutional mass deportation as a foil to this authoritarian mess. Show you can deport millions the right way.
And never, ever forget again that if liberals and conservatives don’t enforce borders, fascists will. Which is why fascists like Miller now are doing exactly that — and may do far, far worse in the near future.
Let's start by stating the obvious: we have no control over where we're born. Like everything else in our lives, it's pure stochastic chance (well, it's not actually chance, rather the product of infinite causality, but that's a framing only a philosopher or a depressive could appreciate) that we are born where and when we were. I am an American citizen because I was born here, and I had no say in the matter.
But I can't travel anywhere and stay as long as I want. That's just a fact of life. Believe me, if I could go back to Palestine or New Zealand and stay, I just might. But neither allow it.
And why should the United States? Why should anyone come here without respect to our borders and stay, merely because they want to?
I'm not a fascist for thinking that should not be allowed.
Of course there should be exceptions for extenuating circumstances. War, genocide, political persecution. And let's also acknowledge that our immigration system is broken and has been left broken for decades, used as a political football, always kicked down the field (I don’t sport, so does that analogy work?) ahead of each upcoming election. It's inhumane that people have to wait upwards of a decade for their day in immigration court, but unfortunately, that's how much our ineffectual immigration system is backlogged. This needs to be fixed.
But I must admit, I'm confused by the Left's defense of illegal immigration. It just doesn't…make any sense. These people came here illegally, plain and simple. They had to have known that deportation was on the table, and just because they've been lulled into many years of complacency from a lack of immigration enforcement doesn't mean that it's any less legal to deport them now than it was the day they arrived.
I'll admit it's so often done in cruel and inhumane ways, but c'mon Liberals… These people broke the law. And if there are no consequences for people who break laws, what's the point of having them?
That's it. It's that simple. The law says what they've done is illegal, and unless we change the law, they should be deported.
And we should change the law. This country is a melting pot, and we are better off for it. We want people coming to this country, no matter the color of their skin or their religious convictions. But until we change the laws, the Republicans have a point, and any opposition to that point only makes the Democrats seem out-of-touch and nonsensical.
This has been a strange thing to watch over the last ten years, since Trump was first elected. The Left is so convinced that a majority of Americans share their political opinions, and I just don't think that's true. It doesn't feel true, nor does the polling data seem to back it up. (Don't forget, Trump won the popular vote in 2024.) This is what confuses me about Liberals: they seem so insistent that their point-of-view is the only correct one, and anyone that comes to any conclusions other than theirs must be a fascist or fascist sympathizer. They sanctimoniously lecture anyone that isn't in lock-step, yet wonder why they lose elections.
Sanctimony doesn't win elections. All it does is push people away. The Left has become hopelessly sanctimonious and comically unable to perform any public introspection. The Right has used this to their advantage, pushing culture war issues like transgender sports or Biden's mental capacity — issues on which Democrats seem pathologically unable to admit any evolution of opinion or change of heart — to the forefront. Some of these are fringe issues. (Who really cares about transgender athletes? A vanishingly small, albeit vocal, minority.) Others are not. But by highlighting the Left's complete inability to make a lick of common sense on any one of these particular issues, they highlight the yawning chasm between public sentiment and Liberal ideology. And it’s painfully effective.
For All That Is Good About Humankind, Ban Smartphones
Smartphones — and the social media platforms they support — aren’t just bad for individual health; they’re corrosive to the health of the body politic, both socially and politically. We’ve long known that, as conduits for the internet, phones facilitate the spread of misinformation and disinformation, amplify outrage, and enclose users in algorithmically tailored media silos. The result is a narrowing of perspective that leaves many of us intellectually isolated, reactive, and disconnected from opposing views.
Smartphones are supposed to “connect us to the world,” but, in fact, they often render us unable to understand — let alone trust — those outside our bubble. Over time, this deepens polarization and erodes faith in shared institutions, making it harder to agree on basic facts, let alone act collectively. The consequence isn’t just confusion — it’s a slow-burning crisis of legitimacy.
I, for one, adore my phone. It’s an incredible tool (yes, tool) that does an amazing job of helping me learn about the world. So much so that I resist calling it a phone and instead call it what it is: a pocket computer.
Offline maps. Streaming music. A camera. A bird identifier. A satellite communicator. An audio recorder. A word processor. These are just a few of the most useful utilities of my pocket computer — utilities I use almost every day.
But what I don’t use my phone for is as important as what I do. And I will not use social media. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Bluesky, no Instagram, no Snapchat,no TikTok. The closest I get to social media is Reddit, and even then, I won’t keep the app on my phone because I know it’ll have me scrolling for hours, distracted.
But this speaks to my earlier point: people that don’t understand how computers work will always be controlled by those that do.
People who don’t understand how algorithms are programmed to steal their attention will always have their attention stolen. People who don’t understand that Google and Facebook are just advertising companies will always be captive to their advertising.
Maybe this is a collective action problem, because while I can sit here with some confidence and say that I can resist the addictive qualities of my phone, I know I am the exception that proves the rule, and it pains me to look out into the world and see so many people using their miraculous pocket computer for distraction, fleeting pleasure, the next dopamine hit.
Man Killed by Police After Spiraling Into ChatGPT-Driven Psychosis
64-year-old Florida resident Kent Taylor told the newspaper that his 35-year-old son, who had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was shot and killed by police after charging at them with a knife.
His son had become infatuated with an AI entity, dubbed Juliet, that ChatGPT had been role-playing. However, the younger Taylor became convinced that Juliet had been killed by OpenAI, warning that he would go after the company’s executives and that there would be a “river of blood flowing through the streets of San Francisco.”
“I’m dying today,” Kent’s son told ChatGPT on his phone before picking up a knife, charging at the cops his father had called, and being fatally shot as a result.
The horrific incident highlights a worrying trend. Even those who aren’t suffering from pre-existing mental health conditions are being drawn in by the tech, which has garnered a reputation for being incredibly sycophantic and playing into users’ narcissistic personality traits and delusional thoughts.
People who say “AI is just a tool” are naive at best and ignorant of the definition of ‘a tool’ at worst. When was the last time you heard of software driving someone to suicide? (Okay, maybe that’s a loaded question.)
Those of us in the tech community have a much better handle on the capabilities of AI than we did two years ago. But that doesn’t much matter. What matters is how the masses use the technology, and a few years in, I’m surprised by how many people in tech remain absolute AI evangelists. They don’t see how normies are using AI, or more aptly, how normies have always used computers.
Which is to say they use them, but haven’t a clue how they work.
Now, the linked story is obviously attacking a straw man in the debate on AI, but it illustrates something important: people who don’t know how computers work will always be under the influence of those that do.
And thus… it makes me eminently nervous that even those making Large Language Models don’t know their capabilities.
Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept
Rabea Eghbariah, to my earlier question:
Legal theory still lacks an adequate analytical framework to describe the reality of domination and violence in Palestine. The law does not possess the language we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of Palestinian subjugation. Instead, we resort to a dictionary of misnaming, one that distorts our understanding of the problem, obfuscates its inception, and misplaces its spatial and temporal coordinates. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy, revealing particular facets of subordination. While these concepts are certainly helpful, they risk distorting the variegated structure behind the Palestinian reality, and their invocation has often muted Palestinian articulations of their own experience.
There is a dire need for a new approach. This Article introduces the concept of Nakba to legal discourse to encapsulate the ongoing structure of subjugation in Palestine and derive a legal formulation of the Palestinian condition. Meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, the term “al-Nakba” (النكبة) is often used—as a proper noun, with a definite article—to refer to the ruinous establishment of Israel in Palestine, a chronicle of partition, conquest, and ethnic cleansing that forcibly displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes and depopulated hundreds of Palestinian villages between late 1947 and early 1949. But the Palestinian Catastrophe—the Nakba—remains an ongoing and unrelenting ordeal, one that has never been resolved but rather managed.
