The trouble, or so I’ve been told, is that like so many of the homeless she refuses help when offered, and both the policy and the culture of institutionalized do-gooding prevent the people who might save her life from doing anything about it. To force help on dying people must not be considered. And for the current generation of said do-gooders, that’s the end of the story. Nothing to be done. For reasons that I find impossible to understand, just utterly senseless, many progressives have decided that forcing help on the homeless and the sick is a worse outcome than simply letting them die. And letting them die is exactly what we’re doing.
At some point you have to admit that your preference for altruistic neglect is still just a preference for neglect.
My culture cannot handle nuance.
Several decades ago, about the time I was born, there was a push to empty and close “institutions,” known otherwise as “asylums.” Abuse, neglect, and a lack of accountability were rampant in these places, and shuttering them and changing our understanding and expectations of healthcare for the disabled or mentally unwell was an unequivocal good.
But what did we replace that system with?
For those with money and time, assisted living facilities or home care is an option. But what about everyone else?
With mental institutions banished to the dustbin of history, they were never replaced with a viable, more humane alternative.
Located within Jerusalem’s northeastern municipal boundary but severed from the rest of the city by the separation wall, Kufr ‘Aqab’s residents have grown accustomed to the systematic neglect they face from the Israeli authorities. But the current crisis is the worst it’s ever been. During the few hours that the water does flow, residents try to do everything they can with it: take showers, do laundry, and clean the house. The rest of the time, they are forced to buy water from private suppliers and store it in containers on the roofs of their apartment blocks.
While I was living in Palestine, this was all too common. Israel controls Palestine’s water and would regularly destroy the rainwater catchment cisterns we would construct or repair on the rooftops of Palestinian homes and refugee camps.
Us internationals (i.e. those of us with expendable income) would resort to paying for private water delivery for the community, out-of-pocket.
This is a human rights abuse and Israel does it knowingly and systematically.
…the court found that even though investigators seek warrants for geofence location data, these searches are inherently unconstitutional. As the court noted, geofence warrants require a provider, almost always Google, to search “the entirety” of its reserve of location data “while law enforcement officials have no idea who they are looking for, or whether the search will even turn up a result.” Therefore, “the quintessential problem with these warrants is that they never include a specific user to be identified, only a temporal and geographic location where any given user may turn up post-search. That is constitutionally insufficient.”
No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you … You do well to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed.
Family, family, family. All in the name of family.
…my dad passed away two weeks ago. His name was Mike Loftus and he was 65 years old, so if your dad’s older than that, it should’ve been him. Fuck your dad.
Has there ever been a better argument for the Internet? A total stranger sharing their grief with vulnerability and humor.
There's a very strange, contradictory line of thinking in the minds of many Americans that goes something like, "well, if the Jews were the victims in WWII, then they either A) couldn't possibly inflict violence on others because they must know better, or B) they deserve to inflict violence on the Palestinians — the Holocaust!"
And then there's the Zionist justification for this violence. "Israel must be kept safe and secure by any means necessary. Look at what happens when the Jews don't have a nation-state — the Holocaust!" This particular jingoism is well-received by the American Right, as they justified torture — oh, sorry, "enhanced interrogation" — in the years after 9/11.
"Look at what the Palestinians did to us on October 7th!" is not a justification for doing to them what Hamas did to you. Israel, you can't proclaim to be more civilized, then behave just as poorly.
"Look what they made us do" is the twisted logic of a child, not an adult.
Along with fate, the Druze belief in reincarnation is powerful and provides comfort now. The Druze see a body as merely the soul’s repository—so much so that even after burying a child, a person never again visits the gravesite.
“That they’re living new lives inside the bodies of kids born now—this gives us strength and patience,” said Ameer Braik, an uncle of one victim, Hazem Abu Saleh, 15. Hazem’s cousin Fajr, 15, was murdered at the field, too.
“We believe that when a Druze child dies, he goes to other Druze parents,” said Ivan Ibraheem, Milar Shaar’s cousin. I asked whether he believes that Milar’s soul has already entered another family’s baby. “Yes,” he said. “I hope those parents treat him as well as we treated him.”
Strangely, his story is remarkably similar to not one but two stories I know of personally from my time living in Montana. A guy, or should I say a dude, finds a dead bear on the side of the road, moves it to another more populated place, thinks it's funny.
But it's stupid. Is it disqualifying stupidity? No. But is it a stupidity that's remarkably common among men, particulary (though obviously not exclusively) out West, of a certain class? Go to any bar in Big Sky or Jackson or Bozeman and you'll discover that this shit is obnoxiously common.
RFK has certainly become weird enough in the minds of most people that he’ll never be elected. What bothers me is the entitlement he’s displaying here. Sure, it might pale in comparison to Hunter Biden on the board of a Ukranian energy corporation or Trump’s, well, entire life, but c’mon. Rich people doing rich people shit isn’t charming.
People who regularly eat processed red meat, like hot dogs, bacon, sausage, salami and bologna, have a greater risk of developing dementia later in life. That was the conclusion of preliminary research presented this week at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.
The vast majority of processed meats are classified as “ultraprocessed foods” — products made with ingredients that you wouldn’t find in a home kitchen, like soy protein isolate, high fructose corn syrup, modified starches, flavorings or color additives. Many of these foods also have high levels of sugar, fat or sodium, which have long been known to adversely affect health.
A dispatch from the empire if there ever was one.
Ninety percent of interactions between Americans is someone trying to sell something to someone else.
You build yourself up. You think ‘look at how good I’ve been, so helpful and earnest.’ Then you wake up one morning and realize your head is a mess. This beautiful construction you’ve made isn’t as shiny as you thought, not nearly as stable. There are cracks in the walls. You have not been born anew, and you are not that good. You’re afraid, sad, dark. And the dark leaches into the ground, pulling you with it.
To illustrate the claims in this book, I rely on three primary metaphors throughout. The first is of humanity as an imprudent teenager. Most of a teenager’s life is still ahead of them, and their decisions can have lifelong impacts. In choosing how much to study, what career to pursue, or which risks are too risky, they should think not just about short-term thrills but also about the whole course of the life ahead of them.
A friend — one of the rarified few that doesn’t shy away from a debate about big ideas — recently sent me this book in response to one I had sent him. If only because it’ll test the tensile strength of my own beliefs, I’m excited to read it. (Though that’s not the only reason.) Yet I can already feel myself chomping at the bit and chafing at some of the premises of the book.
Given that I don’t sosh meed, I thought I might use this space to work through some of my thoughts in close-to-real time.
Matt, if you happen to see this, thank you, and my first quibble is with that first metaphor: tell me why, given what is happening to our planet, is most of humanity ahead of us? That presumes a lot, no? It presumes that human nature will change from what it’s always been to…something else, something less consumptive.
Maybe that’s the premise of the book (I’m only on page 9, after all) — that what I call ‘fundamental human nature’ isn’t fundamental…and thus perhaps not human nature?
Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning. There is, after all, no global “capitalist world view,” no “capitalist civilization” proper: the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the Real of the global market mechanism.
This, then, is what drives millions to seek refuge in our opiums: not just the new poverty and lack of prospects but the unbearable superego pressure in its two aspects: the pressure to succeed professionally and the pressure to enjoy life fully in all its intensity. Perhaps, this second aspect is even more unsettling: what remains of our life when our retreat into private pleasure itself becomes a brutal injunction?
Every year the New York-based photographer Victoria Sambunaris takes extended road trips across America with a large-format 5×7 view camera. Although by now she has photographed nearly every part of the country, she devotes special attention to the West, focusing not only on the easy natural splendors but also on resource extraction and the vast infrastructure and transit networks that have enabled restless national expansion. In the portfolios that result, an image of an enormous strip mine might be followed by a spectacular view of a light-filled canyon and then a panorama of a truck yard filled with multi-colored shipping containers. The photographs evoke a sense of wonder at the scale of the landscape and an ambivalent awe at the scope of our presence in it.
Victoria Sambunaris is one of the few photographers that seems to share my love of the American West.
Not the capital-B Beautiful parts of it — the Yosemites, the Yellowstones, the Redwoods — but the "flyover" West. Interstitial Wyoming, middling Montana, eastern Oregon. The scale and scope of the American West is unlike anything else, if only for our species' ability to imprint itself onto land at sheer scale. Strip mines, earthen dams, river diversions, nuclear testing facilities, irrigation canals.
Leave behind the cities and you begin to see another side of human nature laid bare. It's deeply unsettling, but it's honest.
This election will have real consequences, but reality is in danger of being squeezed off the agenda in favor of a heightened performance piece that calls itself the election but is actually a multimedia event, cut up and memed across social platforms, re-edited, rolled in conspiracy theory and baked under oodles of manipulated footage, ready to pop up on your last remaining sane aunt’s media feed.
Biden’s cabinet is carefully mixed, for better or worse, with progressive and conservative-leaning Democrats — a balance that reflects the President’s preferences as a leader. But Harris is less of a known quality. Faced with this reality, we can only look to her inner circle. There, with its deep ties to Silicon Valley and the business wing of the Democratic Party, the real vision of Harris 2024 starts to emerge.
The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.
These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce. We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself — in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better.
In 2019, Ms. Harris was competing on progressive bona fides with the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She was running at a time when progressive voters were uniquely focused on criminal-justice reform and suspicious of law enforcement, which was a problem for Ms. Harris, who had built her political career as a prosecutor. Hemmed in by these dynamics, Ms. Harris struggled to define her brand.
She faces a different moment today. Less than four months from the general election, she would be competing not for progressive points but to keep the felon Donald Trump out of office. She would be doing so at a time when many voters are concerned about crime and public safety, and when prosecutors have assumed heroic status in the fight to prosecute Mr. Trump and his cronies.
Based on personal conversations, there are (at least) three prevailing sentiments on the Left:
The first is the “Never Cop” Left, which is adamant that they do not want a former cop in the White House. This is largely the “Defund the Police” crowd, a stance I personally think is deranged to the point of unreason. Policing is a necessary component to our (or any) culture, though reforms to the criminal justice system are absolutely necessary.
The second is a feminist angle. They argue that at this point, any vote against Kamala is simply because she’s a woman, and thus this “entrenched misogyny” will get Trump re-elected. This is a little confounding, though it largely comes from the same folks that argued that the only reason people voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 was because they hated Hillary…because she was a woman. This crowd seems unwilling to confront Hillary’s many flaws — flaws that had nothing to do with her being a woman, but rather her being an establishment figure that represented continued corporate control of the Democratic Party and politics in general. In other words, Clinton was a status quo that many people found intolerable.
The third group is uneasy with the process by which she was anointed as the presumptive nominee. Remember, she won no primaries. There has not been an open contest. And while she’s won enough delegates to secure the nomination (though it won’t be official until the convention), the voters did not have a say. Though I am no longer a member of the Democratic Party, I count myself in this camp.
For the last three-plus years, Kamala has been kept on the sidelines by Biden’s team, never having been given a chance to shine. Quite the opposite: she was tasked with dealing with immigration, and that has largely been a disaster during Biden’s term. She hasn’t been given the opportunity to show off her personality, to show that she’s a competent, intelligent, capable person. When I go back and listen to many of her speeches, she has clearly been told to play to the far Left, and as such her speeches come off sounding, um, let’s say…detached. (A close friend called them “word salad.”) Is this fair? No. Is this messaging and media distorting reality? Sure. But let’s be honest: a candidate is only as electable as people think she/he is. That’s the whole damn game.
As such, Kamala has been hamstrung by the Biden Administration for much of Biden’s term as president. And now, that has come back to bite the Democrats.
Which is why I think this article articulates exactly the right tack. Highlight her record as prosecutor. Highlight her tough-against-crime elements. Yes, I’m aware that crime has fallen across much of the country in the last three years (with some very notable exceptions, often in Democrat-controlled cities). But that’s just not how people feel.
Believe me, no one gets as heated by the differences between perception and reality, but if they are going to defeat Trump, the Democrats have to quit telling voters their feelings are wrong and instead meet them where they are.
That’s politics, baby.
It strikes me as somewhat unbelievable that I should have such interesting, kind, intelligent, thoughtful friends.
If life were a lottery, I somehow hit the jackpot, and despite my numerous anxieties and gripes and fears about the future, I'm a remarkably lucky human being.
We owe President Biden our gratitude, not just for his service as president, but for the wisdom to recognize ego for what it is. He was right to drop out of the race.
The Democrats still have the spirit of democracy in them yet, and I’m rooting for them. Let’s hope they pick a candidate that inspires us, not one that’s merely a cynical response to Trump.
While I’m heartened by the events of the day, I can’t shake the feeling that the last few weeks have laid bare some problems that run deeper than I had initially thought. I watched good people from my own end of the political spectrum endorse, explicitly or otherwise, the assassination of a presidential candidate. I’ve watched many of those same people cling to a candidate so obviously unelectable and insist that I had lost my mind for saying as much. The Left, my political home, has succumbed to the pressures put upon it by years of Trumpist populism, and they are not better off for it. Trump, and more pointedly the fear of Trump, stole a little of their souls, and that breaks my heart.
I don’t know where we now sit. I hope the Democratic Party can rise to the occasion, and I am holding my breath.
There’s still hope, but only if we on the Left remember that after the election, regardless of who wins, we have work to do. We have to push back on corporations and the money they pump into our elections, swaying the outcome. We must go to places that make us uncomfortable and be with people that challenge us. We’ve got to convince Trump supporters that we care about them, and that we don’t think them all to be ignorant racists. We have to meet people where they are, without judgment — or rather we should be as transparent and honest and humble about our judgments as we are able.
I fear that this country places too much stock in the office of the president, and whoever wins in November, we will largely be placated into another round of political somnambulism. We must resist this.
Stay curious, be kind, and get outside your comfort zone.
