Most of the violence and oppression gets exported, so it’s probably best to just sit tight here in the heart of the empire.

Vance himself was a DEI student at Yale. Hypocrisy doesn’t matter.

The lynching narrative presupposes that the perpetrators are a mob of otherwise normal people driven to take justice into their own hands by extreme ignorance and prejudice that can eventually be overcome by education in tolerance. Is that how you feel about the Israeli settlers? The way I feel about them is that they are not normal yet severely ignorant people. They are invaders who know exactly what they are doing. There is no pretense of justice for them to take into their own hands. They cannot be taught to coexist with the Palestinians they are trying to ethnically cleanse from the West Bank. They need to be driven at gun point back to Long Island or at least Israel 1948. Calling it lynching minimizes the settlers’ culpability.

You should consider how using the wrong words for things might be playing into the hands of Zionists. Maybe you are.

Part of what makes a lynching a lynching is subversion of the criminal justice process and yes that probably often involved cops joining the lynch mob. However, these Israeli settlers aren’t subverting anything. They are not vigilantes. They are attacking and terrorizing Palestinians without any pretext of justice.

The problem is this case is that ‘a lynching’ implies that the mob is going against the authorities, which is absolutely not the case when it comes to settler violence. The Israeli soldiers are there to protect and facilitate the settlers in their attacks against Palestinians. Under no circumstances does the IDF deserve the benefit of the doubt and the article makes it clear that they are the ones who abducted Hamdan anyway.

Means, motive, lack of scruples: it’s all there.

I wonder if proof of sabotage actually exists, but whoever has it is withholding it from the public for blackmail.

China already gets a lot of (undeserved) bad press. An experiment breaching containment and causing a pandemic is bad for scientific research everywhere.

Okay, sure, but to what end? It’s not clear to me how accusations of an accidental release are bad for China. Is the purpose actually to cover up intentional sabotage by an anti-China entity? It’s not clear to me either who it helps or hurts for the COVID-19 outbreak to have been a completely natural occurrence.

[extremely space orc voice] Gotta be red to build faster.

My response from the last time I saw this question:

• Trillbilly Worker’s Party - Kentucky-centric Marxist jokers hanging out. They always know how to put a smile on my face, even if they’re talking about bleak stuff.
• Fun City - Well produced live role playing of Shadowrun. The game is a few years in and I am just invested.
• ALAB - Lawyers talking shit. They’re funny and I like learning about interesting cases. One of the characters they covered actually sued them and settled for an interview on the show.
• Desert Oracle Radio - Joshua Tree-centric paranormal stuff. Good for an old X-Files head like me.

I don’t have any bookmarked, but I did a quick search and found this one from 2023, which looks at the available data and circumstances to argue that the lab leak hypothesis is stronger than the wet market one. I’m not aware of any evidence that has been published that definitively proves or disproves either.

People seem to have a stronger aversion to the lab leak hypothesis, which I don’t understand. To me it seems like the simplest, most benign explanation. However, it does open up the possibility of sabotage. Maybe that’s the issue.

That seems like a reasonable challenge to the lab leak hypothesis, but I have to defer to my wife on it. She has a relevant background in microbiology, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology and says that something about the structure of the viruses suggests convincingly that at least one of the COVID variants was of man-made origin. She’s also been working in labs for almost twenty years and has seen too many accidents and near-misses. As a lay person, that explanation makes enough sense to me to find the lab leak hypothesis plausible. Also, I’m not going to disagree with a well-published scientist who is also my wife.

At least the lab leak hypothesis isn’t as sinophobic as the “wet market” one.

I really don’t think it’s that hard to believe that some postdoc in Wuhan screwed up and let it loose accidentally.

Yes. Windshields are important, heavy components which are fastened the the exteriors of automobiles with glue.

I read this article by Yanis Varoufakis that provides well reasoned explanation and criticism of Trump’s plan: https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-trumps-tariffs-are-a-masterplan/

Somehow, the possibility that a plan exists is reassuring.

Got one!

If you can afford the down payment, it really makes a lot more sense to buy your home than rent it.

It beats having a landlord.