Monday: Hili dialogue

May 29, 2023 • 6:45 am

NOTE: My podcast with Aron Ra this morning had to be canceled as he had a family emergency. Hopefully we’ll reschedule, and I’ll let you know when.

It’s Monday, May 29, 2023, and a holiday—Memorial Day—in the U.S. You can celebrate well as its also National Biscuit Day, though I thought we had that recently. By now you should know where to get the best biscuits in America, and therefore in the world.

Two biscuits is not enough!

And sumer is icomin in, lhude sing cuccu.  I don’t know what these flowers are, but I love them and I’m sure every gardener knows them. I passed them on my walk yesterday.

It’s also International Coq Au Vin Day, Learn About Composting Day, World Digestive Health Day, International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, Oak Apple Day in England, and  Statehood Day in Rhode Island and Wisconsin.

There’s a very plain Google Doodle today in honor of Memorial Day (click to see where it goes, and note the waving poppies at the bottom):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT gives some of the details of the debt-ceiling salvation engineered by Biden and the Republicans.

The debt ceiling would be increased until 2025, after the next election. The deal sealed by Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy would raise the debt ceiling for two years to take it beyond the 2024 election, so neither would have to address the issue again in the current term.

Domestic spending would be capped, but not as much as Republicans wanted. Mr. McCarthy’s Republicans insisted that any increase in the debt ceiling be conditioned on spending cuts, so the agreement he reached with Mr. Biden would limit certain programs to last the same two years for which the debt ceiling would be raised. Republicans had originally sought a 10-year time frame for spending limits but agreed to the shorter horizon.

The deal holds nondefense spending in 2024 at roughly its 2023 level and increases it by 1 percent in 2025, in part by redirecting funding from other programs. Among other things, the agreement would cut about $10 billion out of the $80 billion that Mr. Biden previously secured to help the I.R.S. go after wealthy tax cheats, and would use that money to preserve domestic programs that otherwise would have been cut.

Defense, Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ programs would be shielded. The agreement would protect the military and entitlements like Social Security and Medicare from spending cuts imposed on other parts of government. It would also fully finance medical care for veterans, including expanded services for those exposed to toxic burn pits.

Some recipients of government assistance would face new work requirements. New work requirements would be imposed on some recipients of government aid, including food stamps and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

Major energy projects would be granted a streamlined review process. Environmental permitting for major energy projects would be streamlined. A single lead agency would be charged with developing a single review document according to a public timeline

And here’s my prediction from yesterday. Once again I am RIGHT (this isn’t rocket science, of course):

My prediction again: a raise in the debt limit that must be frozen for two years, and enough cuts to satisfy most Democrats and a few Republicans. (But what do I know?) Medicare and Social Security will stay.

I’m da king out dere, faddah!

*Oh dear Ceiling Cat, the odious theocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to be headed for victory in Turkey’s runoff Presidential election. Just like the Americans who elected Trump don’t know what’s good for the country, so it is with the Turks who voted for Erdogan.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared headed to victory late Sunday after facing his hardest election in years, according to vote counts by state-run and opposition-affiliated news agencies. The results, if confirmed, meant he had prevailed over a challenger backed by a united opposition movement, ensuring Erdogan’s dominating tenure at Turkey’s helm would extend into a third decade.

The preliminary results were the latest affirmation of Erdogan’s gift for political survival. Confronted by an electorate bludgeoned by a long economic crisis — largely of the president’s making — Erdogan shifted the public conversation to debates over terrorism and national sovereignty, outflanking his opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who emphasized pocketbook issues and the president’s increasingly authoritarian practices.

. . .Erdogan’s lead in the preliminary tallies confirmed the place of his loyal supporters, many of them conservative Muslims, as a central force in the country’s politics. It left the opposition wondering what might have been, had they selected a candidate more charismatic than Kilicdaroglu, a bespectacled party bureaucrat who adopted more hard-line rhetoric in the middle of his campaign to attract nationalist voters.

And Turkey’s overseas allies, including the United States, faced another five-year term with the mercurial Erdogan, a prickly partner who has leveraged his government’s relations with a constellation of actors — including Russia — for domestic political gain.

Is “prickly partner” the journalists’ way of saying the impolite word for sphincter? Because that’s what Erdogan is.

*German Jews are protesting the concert appearances of Roger Waters, the ex-bassist for Pink Floyd, and now an undoubtable anti-Semite whose shows have nudged right into Nazism.

Several Jewish groups, politicians and an alliance of civil society groups gathered for a memorial ceremony and a protest rally against a concert by Roger Waters in Frankfurt on Sunday evening.

They accuse the Pink Floyd co-founder of antisemitism – an allegation he denies.

Waters has also drawn their ire for his support of the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts and sanctions against Israel.

Frankfurt authorities had initially tried to prevent the concert taking place, but Waters successfully challenged the move in a local court.

The concert is taking place in the city’s Festhalle, where in November 1938 more than 3,000 Jews were rounded up by the Nazis, beaten and abused, and later deported to concentration camps.

It was even worse. As Billboard adds:

Perhaps most offensive was a segment of the show featuring the names of activists killed by authorities, including anti-Nazi activist Sophie Scholl, Mahsa Amini, who was killed by Iranian morality police, George Floyd and Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager murdered by the Nazi regime at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The latter’s name was listed just before Shireen Abu Akleh, a veteran Palestinian-American journalist who is thought to have been killed last May by shots from Israeli soldiers during a shootout with Palestinian militants. The paper reported that the juxtaposition sparked “outrage from Israeli and Jewish activists and officials around the world.”

After an intermission, Waters reportedly returned to the stage wearing a costume similar to a Nazi SS soldier’s uniform with a red armband while pointing a fake rifle at the crowd. The set piece also included a giant inflatable pig with a variety of symbols and words on it — including a prominent Jewish star — that floated over the crowd as “banners in the style of the Third Reich but with crossed hammers instead of swastika” hung from the ceiling.

Well, Waters should have the right to spout whatever nonsense he wants, and I don’t think he should be investigated or punished for what he did. (BTW, he also blames Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on NATO.) WIth speech like this, the best remedy is counterspeech. I will add that the investigations of who killed Shireen Abu Akleh were inconclusive, and the Palestinians refused to let anybody look at the bullets that killed her. The IDF would never deliberately target a Palestinian journalist, though, as they know what rancor they’d face for doing that.

Here’s a photo from the Berlin concert of Waters in uniform, holding his “gun” (from YouTube via the NY Post🙂

*Molly Worthen, who teaches at the University of North Caroline, argues in a NYT op-ed “Why universities should be more like monasteries.”

Worthen first describes two very popular classes at Penn, one involving living a monastic semester, giving up your phone and taking a vow of silence, the other, “Existential despair”, does this:

Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and José Saramago’s “Blindness.” Then they stay up late discussing it. “The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad. In the middle they’re sad. They stay sad. I’m not concerned with their 20-year-old self. I’m worried about them at my age, dealing with breast cancer, their dad dying, their child being an addict, a career that never worked out — so when they’re dealing with the bigger things in life, they know they’re not alone.”

That seems more like a life lesson, not a college course, but so be it. Worthen’s point, though, is this:

Students are hungry for a low-tech, introspective experience — and not just students in the Ivy League. Research suggests that underprivileged young people have far fewer opportunities to think for unbroken stretches of time, so they may need even more space in college to develop what social scientists call cognitive endurance.

Yet the most visible higher ed trends are moving in the other direction. Rather than ban phones and laptops from class, some professors are brainstorming ways to embrace students’ tech addictions with class Facebook and Instagram accounts, audience response apps — and perhaps even including the friends and relatives whom students text during class as virtual participants in class discussion.

No laptops, no phones, and above all no AI. Instead, they should have this:

Most important, students need head space to think about their ultimate values. Contemplation and marathon reading are not ends in themselves or mere vacations from real life but are among the best ways to figure out your own answer to the question of what a human being is for — a question that is all the more pressing at a time when the robots soon may be coming for the white-collar jobs in medicine, law and finance that the secular intelligentsia treats as shorthand for personal fulfillment. To use the trendy pedagogical jargon, here are the student learning outcomes universities should focus on: cognitive endurance and existential clarity.

Colleges could do all this in classes integrated with general education requirements: ideally, a sequence of great books seminars focused on classic texts from across different civilizations.

Sounds like the old “Great Books” program of the University of Chicago, but supplemented, as it should be, with non-Western texts.

*We’re gonna follow Theranos grifter Elizabeth Holmes all the way into her cell, and then we’ll drop the issue. But who can resist the WSJ article titled, “Inmates await Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes: ‘I want to be her friend.’” Oy!

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes could find some bad blood awaiting her at the Bryan, Texas, prison camp where she is expected to begin her roughly 11-year sentence on Tuesday. Literally.

A copy of the bestselling book “Bad Blood,” which documents Theranos’s rise and fall, was spotted in Federal Prison Camp Bryan’s library earlier this year, an inmate who was released in March recalled.

The book—plus a steady stream of prison gossip—has helped heighten anticipation for Holmes’s arrival at the facility, where a judge has recommended she serve her time, current and former inmates said in interviews with The Wall Street Journal.

“Some people are like ‘I want to be her friend,’” said Tasha Wade, a current inmate who was convicted last year of defrauding a former boss to take vacations and pay for cosmetic and dental procedures. “But other people are like, ‘I can’t believe that’s all she got for taking all that money,’” Wade said.

Well, I don’t want anything bad to happen to her—beyond what already has—but I I doubt that the other prisoners will give her a hard time. For one thing, it’s a minimum security federal facility: the country club of prisons. Also, she’s connected.

The Bryan camp is a minimum security, all-female facility located about 100 miles northwest of Houston. It houses up to about 720 inmates convicted mostly of white-collar crimes, low-level drug offenses and for harboring immigrants who were in the country illegally, according to BOP and current and former inmates.

And a bit about what she might do for 11 years:

Most inmates who self-surrender, as Holmes is expected to do, arrive at Bryan’s main gate in private vehicles. From there, they are searched in a reception area, and escorted to the laundry room to receive their short-sleeved khaki uniforms.

The prison’s tradition is that new inmates do a 90-day stint in the kitchen, the inmates said, noting that there are exceptions. The job pays 12 cents an hour and is considered one of the prison’s most grueling, said Lynn Espejo, a former inmate from Arkansas who was convicted of defrauding a physician’s office where she worked. Espejo, who now works in advocacy on behalf of other inmates, maintains her innocence.

Other inmates work as groundskeepers, clerks or as telemarketers in a call center operated by BOP’s commercial arm, Unicor. But those who have been convicted of crimes such as wire fraud, like Holmes, are barred from the Unicor job, inmates said. A prize posting is in the commissary, where clerks get first dibs on items such as hot giardiniera ($2.80), crochet needles ($5.50 for five) and MP3 players ($88.40).

You can get commisary $$ from your relatives, so she’ll be living like a queen in dere, faddah!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili makes a funny:

Hili: It is tweeting.
A: What is tweeting?
Hili: I’m a cat, not an ornithologist.
In Polish:
Hili: Ćwierka.
Ja: Kto ćwierka?
Hili: Jestem kotką, a nie ornitolożką.

. . and a photo of Szaron:

********************

From Now That’s Wild:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Atheist Daily:

From Masih, a woman in custody stripped by male cops.

Translation from Farsi by Google:

Narrated by Mozhgan Keshavarz, women’s rights activist: “They said that you should be naked so that we can take a picture of your whole body. If you leave here, don’t say anything. They tortured me. I was embarrassed. I was putting my hands in front of my private parts, the officer shouted: stand facing me and remove your hands. Now sit down and do it with your legs open!”

From Ken, with his notes:

If Boebert thinks that the Soviet Union was a bastion of fighting Anti-Semitism, maybe she should have a talk with some of the old-time refuseniks. Then again, she’s given no sign that she’s educable on this or any other topic. Boebert got herself elected to congress strictly because it’s a great platform for trolling — well, that and self-enrichment. When Boebert was appointed to the House’s natural resources committee. her (soon to be ex-) husband scored an $800,000 a year gig as a natural-gas “consultant,” despite his lack of any obvious qualifications.
Way to drain the swamp, Republicans.

From Barry, who says, “That’s a helluva way to die.”

From Malcolm, role reversal:

From the Auschwitz Museum:  A seventeen-year-old Dutch girl who did not survive.

Tweets from Professor Cobb, the first showing a leucistic hawk:

Cat pickleball!

I didn’t know that squid could become transparent. They should do this most of the time!

19 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Further new today

    Russia’s Interior Ministry has put U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham on its federal wanted list “under an article of the Criminal Code,” the state-run news outlet RIA Novosti reported on Monday.

    Russian Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin ordered the initiation of criminal proceedings against Graham on May 28, citing the senator’s “Russophobic statements.” “In a video recording shared on the Internet, during a meeting with the president of Ukraine, American Senator Lindsey Graham spoke about the U.S. government’s financial involvement in causing the deaths of Russian citizens,” read the Investigative Commitee’s press release. It’s unclear what crime Graham has been charged with.

    As Reuters has previously reported, the full version of the video of Graham’s conversation with Zelensky shows that the former’s comment about the deaths of Russians and his statement about American investments were not made consecutively, as a shorter edited version of the video released earlier made it appear.

    https://meduza.io/en/news/2023/05/29/russia-puts-u-s-senator-lindsey-graham-on-federal-wanted-list
    🙄

  2. On this day:
    1453 – Fall of Constantinople: Ottoman armies under Sultan Mehmed II capture Constantinople after a 53-day siege, ending the Byzantine Empire.

    1660 – English Restoration: Charles II is restored to the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland.

    1851 – Sojourner Truth delivers her famous Ain’t I a Woman? speech at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

    1886 – The pharmacist John Pemberton places his first advertisement for Coca-Cola, which appeared in The Atlanta Journal.

    1913 – Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score The Rite of Spring receives its premiere performance in Paris, France, provoking a riot.

    1914 – The Ocean liner RMS Empress of Ireland sinks in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence with the loss of 1,012 lives.

    1919 – Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is tested (later confirmed) by Arthur Eddington and Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin.

    1953 – Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on Tenzing Norgay’s (adopted) 39th birthday.

    1973 – Tom Bradley is elected the first black mayor of Los Angeles, California.

    1985 – Heysel Stadium disaster: Thirty-nine association football fans die and hundreds are injured when a dilapidated retaining wall collapses.

    1985 – Amputee Steve Fonyo completes cross-Canada marathon at Victoria, British Columbia, after 14 months.

    1988 – The U.S. President Ronald Reagan begins his first visit to the Soviet Union when he arrives in Moscow for a superpower summit with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

    1999 – Space Shuttle Discovery completes the first docking with the International Space Station.

    Births:
    1860 – Isaac Albéniz, Spanish pianist and composer (d. 1909).

    1874 – G. K. Chesterton, English essayist, poet, and playwright (d. 1936).

    1903 – Bob Hope, English-American actor, singer, and producer (d. 2003).

    1906 – T. H. White, Indian-English author (d. 1964).

    1917 – John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States (d. 1963).

    1929 – Peter Higgs, English-Scottish physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate.

    1932 – Paul R. Ehrlich, American biologist and author.

    1945 – Julian Le Grand, English economist and author.

    1949 – Francis Rossi, English singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1953 – Danny Elfman, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actor.

    1959 – Rupert Everett, English actor and novelist.

    1967 – Noel Gallagher, English singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you:
    1829 – Humphry Davy, English-Swiss chemist and academic (b. 1778).

    1911 – W. S. Gilbert, English playwright and poet (b. 1836).

    1951 – Fanny Brice, American singer and comedian (b. 1891).

    1957 – James Whale, English director (b. 1889).

    1958 – Juan Ramón Jiménez, Spanish poet and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1881).

    1979 – Mary Pickford, Canadian-American actress, producer, and screenwriter, co-founder of United Artists (b. 1892).

    1997 – Jeff Buckley, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1966).

    2010 – Dennis Hopper, American actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1936).

    2012 – Doc Watson, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1923).

    1. Yes, definitely alliums, in the onion and garlic family, sez gardener extraordinaire Susan.

      2. I ran it through the PlantNet app and id’d it as Allium giganteum. As Mark said about the redbud caterpillar, you don’t even need to know stuff anymore!

  4. On the subject of Roger Waters, whatever his views are on Israel and and the invasion of Ukraine, the crossed hammers thing is iconography from Pink Floyd’s extremely successful album The Wall. It’d deliberately fascistic, but the album and the film frame this as part of the protagonist’s mental breakdown. You’re not supposed to think of it as good.

    1. Quite right. Waters was certainly not on the side of Nazis when he parodied the NF in The Wall. The problem is that he has carried his leftism to the point where it meets up with some of the extreme right. If we are to criticize that trenchcoat and armband, I’ll have to enter into evidence about half the operas I have attended in the last thirty years, where trenchcoats and facist-chic are all the rage with costume designers and stage managers. I think that once they realised any opera at all can be performed in trenchcoats they stopped spending on any other kind of costume. I blame Ian McKellen for doing it so well in his 1995 Richard III.

    2. I came (late, due to jetlag and travel) to say “allium” and “the wall” but i see both are well covered. So I’ll go and try to sleep.

      Btw did anyone see Trumps all caps memorial day rant?

  5. Although he supports the BDS movement, Roger Waters is not likely to be a Nazi sympathizer. The only objectionable thing that I know about him is the BDS thing. The imagery in his concert, including the arm band symbol with a pair of walking hammers, comes straight out of the the Pink Floyd album The Wall. The album and the concert performances on it feature a kind of dark story where a fictional fascist regime is seen to rise. Rather than being supportive of Nazism, I suspect the props and effects during his concert is a continuation of what Pink Floyd did, which is to use imagery of fascism and corporate greed (the latter would be the pig) to juxtapose what is evil to what is good.

    1. There are a number of us dating ourselves here. Remember masses of undergraduates crowding the theater to the strains of Comfortably Numb?

      My guess is that the journalist had not even been born then. Still, I wonder how it cannot dawn on her that an aged rocker is doing a shtick from his glory days.

  6. The flower you passed on your walk is, according to my wife, an agapantha

    1. Sorry, James. it’s definitely a type of ornamental onion, such as Allium giganteum. The blooms smell pungent like onions too! For that reason, I love them in the garden, as the squirrels don’t devour them.

  7. The debt ceiling deal is described in nominal dollars, i.e., ignoring inflation. The 1% is mote like 6% or 7% in real dollars, and given the limited range of programs susceptible for cuts, it will turn out be substantial.

  8. I’m not seeing a gun, real or fake, in the photo of Roger Waters.
    The video of the Berlin concert accessed from the link shows him holding a sub-machine gun with both hands and appearing to fire it in the general direction of the audience. It appears to be an MP-40, the archetypal small arm associated in war movies with SS soldiers and paratroopers. So it is not just a German gun, it is an SS gun often used for efficient impromptu executions at short range of larger groups like POWs. An anti-Nazi message might have been more convincing with a Tommy gun or some such, just as easily recognizable even to German audiences, surely. But the MP-40 has a certain je ne sais quois, sexiness.

    Are we to supposed to be easily reassured that the gun is indeed fake? I see briefly a hose or cable emerging from the pistol grip, suggesting that it was indeed an externally powered stage prop and not a real firearm but unless the program notified the audience that the show was going to use such a prop/stage effect, I can see the police investigating whether firearms offences were committed even with a replica that breached the peace. (In stage plays where an actor fires a prop gun, he doesn’t fire it at the audience.)

    Long ago I abandoned the idea that musicians of any kind had anything to tell us about how we should organize society. They all just want to get rich doing something they like doing and they’ll write and sing whatever sells. So I don’t really care if Roger Walters likes Nazis or just hopes to make money in his dotage dressing up as one. (In Germany you can’t display the swastika, hence the armband has to pull its punches.). Maybe like many on the Left he supports BDS just because he thinks the Jews have always been the real Nazis and so he uses Nazi iconography on stage to hit them where it hurts, …or he just wants to sell more tickets to Nazi sympathizers in the AfD, what do I know?

  9. Tomorrow, we’ll see the remarkable transformation of former Theranos founder Baritone Blood Barbie into either Lockup Barbie with drab khaki jumpsuit or On-the-Lam Stealth Barbie with adaptive camoflage wardrobe (GPS ankle bracelet sold separately).

    Who will it be? The suspense is killing me and I have a bet with a buddy.

  10. Some people are really confused about the controversy involving Roger Waters.

    Waters wrote almost all of the lyrics for Pink Floyd and much of the music, taking on a larger role in the band over the years. Each of their albums is in a really different style, The Wall, from 1979, is musically mainstream rock. The lyrics involve someone who, due to various forms of pressure, turns into someone similar whom he despises, at the end realizing his mistake and breaking free. It obviously has autobiographical elements. Much of the imagery involves WWII. Waters’s father died in that war, fighting the Nazis, and is held in great honour by his father until this day. (His mother, on the other hand, gets criticized in the song “Mother” for being overly protective.). The story is that he got the idea after spitting on a kid at a concert in 1973 or so, realizing how the pressure had turned him into something he hated. Note that only the first Pink Floyd album has pictures of the band on the cover, and Meddle, from 1971, is the last to have any at all (on the inner cover). Pink Floyd managed to maintain an “underground” image despite being hugely successful. There was hardly any “70s rock star” behaviour and it was about the music, not the band. As late as the hugely successful The Dark Side of the Moon from 1973, Waters could walk around in the audience, wearing a Pink Floyd T-Shirt, and not be recognized by most.

    The film of The Wall and the concerts, especially by Waters after he left Pink Floyd, make more use of the WWII imagery. However, anyone with even a bit of interest realizes that the Nazis are the enemy and that the character emulating them is doing so as part of his psychosis which, again, at the end he breaks free from.

    Musically, Pink Floyd have some really good albums and most of the lyrics, mostly by Waters, are very good, among the best in rock music, and sometimes appreciated by those who have no idea about the band or even rock music. The Wall is a masterpiece, perhaps the best concept album of all time. Much rock music is written from the first-person perspective, the singer singing about himself (yes, usually him, not her). The Wall, however, has to be approached as one would approach, say, an opera, or perhaps songs by the heavy-metal band Iron Maiden (the latter based mostly on literary and historical themes). The person singing is playing a role, like an actor, and not all roles are positive.

    After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Waters performed the album, with a star-studded cast of guests, at one of the main locations of the Berlin wall. I was there. It was an event, although “Roger Waters performs The Wall at the wall” was a cheap pun. I think that he also considered performing it on Wall Street. Over the years, his solo productions of The Wall became more involved, making the story less personal and more general and with enemies other than the Nazis. His other solo work, while musically not as good and lyrically too obvious for me, is also critical of many problems in society, attacking mindless media consumption (Amused to Death echoing Neil Postman), Thatcherism, and so on.

    So far, so good.

    The current problem with Waters, which has been building up over the last 20 years or so, is that he takes a typical woke pro-Palestine stance, piling on criticism of Israel (not of Jews) and creating the impression that Palestine would be the most enlightened society on Earth if Israel would just leave it alone. As we all know, this twisted narrative is now completely mainstream among much of the so-called left. He also criticizes various evils of capitalism, and, whether or not you agree, I think that that is legitimate even though he himself is very rich. The pro-Putin aspects of this come from the the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend fallacy, and can be found among many far-left parties in Europe, in the latter case, perhaps in part because they mistakenly see Putin’s Russia as a continuation of the Soviet Union. Ironically, behaviour such as that of the Soviet Union is what The Wall targets: the oppressed becoming the oppressor. While similar criticism of Israel is often wide of the mark, it does apply to some of the more extreme right-wing Israeli politicians (showing a breakdown of conventional categories, right-wing and Jewish not being in conflict here), but of course applies much more to Palestine and many other authoritarian countries.

    To sum up, what we have is a formerly good artist who has gone woke. Waters isn’t the only one. The irony is that he is acting out the scenario from The Wall, the (alleged) oppressed becoming an oppressor, but this time in real life and without realizing the irony. I last saw him in 2016 or so and found the show too woke and over-the-top. Despite my appreciation of his lyrics and music, and I do try to distinguish between art and artist, I decided that I would never return. His recent interviews accusing NATO of the war in Ukraine and similar to a large subset of the woke. Like in the case of other artists, and other people in general, who have gone woke, I find it sad.

    However, accusing Waters of being a Nazi is completely off the mark. His criticism of Israel, however unfounded, has nothing to do with anti-semitism, though, like many, he, perhaps unwittingly, repeats anti-semitic tropes and so on. Many woke people go overboard with their criticism of Israel, but are certainly not Nazis even in a metaphorical sense. The fascist imagery has been part of The Wall since its inception and those using that as evidence that Waters is some sort of Nazi are, perhaps deliberately, taking it completely out of context. I live in Germany, where there is hightened sensitivity to Nazi imagery and so on, but those protesting Waters because of that have simply not understood that aspect of his show. (One can still disagree with many aspects of it, of course, as I do.)

    Something similar happened with the band KISS. The two “S” letters are supposed to look like lighting bolts, but someone said that they look like SS runes. I remember the “KISS are Nazis” trope from the States in the 1970s, a typical right-wing evangelical-Christian slur, along with the claim that it is an acronym for “Knights in Satan’s Service”. Folks, Nazis look very different from the guys in KISS. I was never a fan of KISS, and think that their whole shtick is rather silly (though some have compared it to kabouki theatre), but such accusations are downright stupid. As a result, even to this day, in Germany they have to use a different logo. One has to remember that in New York in the early 1970s, there was no internet. Gene Simmons had probably never seen the SS runes in his life. It was just a silly coincidence. The irony is that his real name is Chaim Witz and he immigrated to the USA from Israel, where his mother had immigrated after the Holocaust, in which most of her family had died. He’s a cultural Jew and speaks Yiddish and Hebrew (and German and Spanish; he’s a bright guy, whatever one thinks of his band). So, the current criticism of Waters regarding imagery at his concerts is on par with such criticism of the KISS logo. The additional problem with Waters is his pro-Palestine stance, which slips into anti-Israel, but of course equating criticism of Israel—-such as the massive criticism of Netanyahu by Jews within Israel—with Nazism is just stupid.

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