Wednesday: Hili dialogue

December 6, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Ден на грпка” in Macedonian): Wednesday, December 6, 2023, and National Gazpacho Day, a day of cultural appropriation You cannot eat it unless you’re of Spanish or Portuguese ancestry:

It’s also National Microwave Oven Day, St. Nicholas Day, National Pawnbrokers Day, and, in Canada, National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*War news from the NYT. The whole tenor of the NYT’s coverage of the war is about how Israel’s military response to Hamas’s attack is damaging everything, and, frankly, I’m tired of this bias, for the military is also eliminating Hamas, which impoverished Gaza as a military and terrorist government.

But here’s one example of where they try to justify Hamas’s toll of Israeli’s killed, even though Hamas lies like a rug. This also includes some war news that’s surely accurate, but I’m now convinced that the editors of both the NYT and the Washington Post want the war to end with Hamas still around and Israel pulled back to its former border—and perhaps the papers even secretly want Israel to vanish, which would happen if Hamas is not taken down.  An excerpt:

The Israeli military said on Wednesday that its forces were advancing around the southern city of Khan Younis, where Israeli commanders have described house-to-house gun battles with Hamas fighters in some of the heaviest fighting of the two-month-old war.

A military spokesman, Avichay Adraee, warned Gazan civilians not to approach Salah al-Din Road, the main highway that connects Khan Younis to northern Gaza, calling it “a battlefield” and “extremely dangerous.” Gazans attempting to head north to seek refuge should instead use the main coastal road, he said in a post on social media, although it was unclear whether many people would do so given the intense bombardment — or how many could see the information given communications disruptions in Gaza.

On Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, head of Israel’s southern command, had said its forces were battling in “the heart” of Khan Younis, where the fighting was “the most intense day since the beginning of the ground operation” in late October.

Hamas said it had killed 10 Israeli soldiers in the city and had injured several more, a claim that could not be immediately verified. Nir Dinar, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said the army did not comment on casualties until after soldiers’ families were notified.

Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, also claimed in online posts that its fighters had totally or partially destroyed 24 Israeli military vehicles; that its snipers had shot at least six soldiers in the city; and that eight Israeli soldiers were injured with an anti-personnel bomb, though it did not say where.

Get a load of this “reporting”:

None of Hamas’s claims could be immediately verified, but the pace of the posts seemed to confirm Israeli accounts of intense urban combat around Khan Younis, the largest city in the coastal enclave’s south.

In other words, “we can’t verify Hamas’s claims about the deaths of Israeli soldiers, but they are buttressed by how fast Hamas issues posts, so the claims are probably true.”

*From reader Ken, some rare good news:

According to this section of the Death Penalty Information Center’s Year End Report, for the first time since such statistics began being kept, more Americans (50%) believe that capital punishment is unfairly applied than that believe it is fairly applied (47%).

There may be hope yet that we will become a civilized society.
The Year End Report is chock full of interesting information.

*You’ve probably heard that climate-change activist Greta Thunberg has become an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause against Israel.  If you want to read more about it, here’s a Guardian op-ed sent in by reader Niklas, “We won’t stop speaking out about Gaza’s suffering—there is no climate justice without human rights.”  Somehow Greta has managed to connect her movement for awareness of global warming with Israel’s “genocide” against Gaza. Here’s how she does it (remember, she’s the first author of this stuff):

More than 15,000 people, of whom at least 6,000 were children. That’s how many people Israel has reportedly killed in the Gaza Strip in a matter of weeks – and those numbers are still rising. Israel has bombed basic societal infrastructure and civilian targets such as hospitals, schools, shelters and refugee camps. Israel has imposed a siege, preventing food, medicine, water and fuel from reaching the 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in the occupied Gaza Strip, leading Oxfam to accuse Israel of employing “starvation as a weapon of war”.

Dozens of United Nations experts have described the situation as “a genocide in the making”, hundreds of international scholars have warned of an unfolding genocide and prominent Israeli genocide expert Raz Segal has called it “a textbook case of genocide”. But most of the world, particularly the so-called global north, is looking the other way.

Despite these horrors, some have chosen to focus the public debate on attempts to delegitimise statements about Gaza made by young people in the climate justice movement. Contrary to what many have claimed, Fridays for Future has not “been radicalised” or “become political”. We have always been political, because we have always been a movement for justice. Standing in solidarity with Palestinians and all affected civilians has never been in question for us.

Advocating for climate justice fundamentally comes from a place of caring about people and their human rights. That means speaking up when people suffer, are forced to flee their homes or are killed – regardless of the cause. It is the same reason why we have always held strikes in solidarity with marginalised groups – including those in Sápmi, Kurdistan, Ukraine and many other places – and their struggles for justice against imperialism and oppression. Our solidarity with Palestine is no different, and we refuse to let the public focus shift away from the horrifying human suffering that Palestinians are currently facing.

That’s a pretty tenuous connection, but it gives Thunberg a chance to vent her spleen against Israel. Although the article does mention the Hamas attacks of October 7, it doesn’t mention the hostages; and the bulk of the article is devoted to condemning Israel, not Hamas or Palestine. All this goes to show is.that although Greta might be savvy about promoting climate-change awareness, she’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to judging military conflicts.

The authors didn’t neglect giving their pronouns, but one has “all pronouns’!  All of them?

Greta Thunberg (she/her), a Swedish activist who inspired Fridays for Future, a movement of school strikes against global climate inaction

Alde Nilsson (all pronouns), a global development student and climate justice activist with Fridays for Future Sweden

Jamie Mater (they/them), a researcher and climate justice activist with Fridays for Future Sweden

Raquel Frescia (she/they), a writer/researcher and climate justice activist with Fridays for Future Sweden

*Here’s a new Gallup poll on the proportion of Americans in various groups who support or don’t support Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

The first bit of data:

Half of Americans approve of Israel’s military action in the Hamas-led Gaza Strip, and 45% disapprove, according to a Gallup poll conducted several weeks after Hamas launched a deadly attack on Israel that led to a major military operation by Israel.

I would have thought that the green bar would be longer. Nearly half of Americans apparently think that Israel should have done either nothing or very little in response to Hamas’s brutal attack.

More: a big age effect, so the youngest Americans are least approving of Israel’s going into Gaza, while older people are more approving. (No surprise there.) People of color are far more disapproving than are white people, while there’s not much effect of education on the data. Finally, Democrats are far more disapproving than Republicans, while Independents are in between.  The Democrats are clearly clueless, and Biden is right to buck them, though how long he can fight the “progressives” on this one is unknown.

And what about Biden’s handling of the crisis?

President Joe Biden’s 32% approval rating for his handling of the Israel-Hamas situation is lower than his already-anemic 37% overall job approval rating in the new poll.

This approval deficit is especially pronounced among the groups who are most opposed to Israel’s military action in Gaza: Democrats, people of color, women and young adults. These groups express significantly less approval for the job Biden is doing on the Middle East situation than they offer for his job performance overall.

Finally, 72% of Americans are following the Middle East situation either very closely or somewhat closely, a figure that increases with both age and education.

*Here’s a video from Tom Gross with the caption below. As you’ll see, Amit was released, so it’s a sort of happy ending, though we don’t know what happened to her in captivity.

Amit bravely tries to fight off seven armed terrorists. She is the freedom fighter, not them

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows off her knowledge of evolutionary history:

A: What are you looking at?
Hili: At a V-formation of dinosaurs.
A: Those are probably geese.
Hili: It’s possible.
In Polish:
Ja: Na co patrzysz?
Hili: Na klucz dinozaurów.
Ja: To chyba gęsi.
Hili: Możliwe.

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

From Bat: Columbia University circling the drain. You can bet that someone will be defending the “offensive” today. However, this conference was canceled by Columbia on the grounds that the organizers violated university protocol.

From the Absurd Sign Project 2.0:

From Masih; what a horrible existence this poor protestor has to lead.

How the UN is complicit in propagandizing kids and fomenting Jew hatred:

From Barry, who adds, “See? A dog can be helpful.”  Yes, to a cat!!

From Jez (I may have posted this before):

From Bat: “A minute and a half clip of Julia Steinberg from The Free Press testifying before Congress on education that ties DEI structure with the Jew hatred she sees at Stanford and on other campuses”:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a woman who died in the camp at about 32:

Two tweets from the estimable Dr. Cobb. First, an obsessed d*g:

Matthew calls this one “saucy,” but it’s good advice:

25 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1492 – After exploring the island of Cuba (which he had mistaken for Japan) for gold, Christopher Columbus lands on an island he names Hispaniola.

    1648 – Pride’s Purge removes royalist sympathizers from Parliament so that the High Court of Justice could put the King on trial.

    1790 – The U.S. Congress moves from New York City to Philadelphia.

    1882 – Transit of Venus, second and last of the 19th century.

    1884 – The Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., is completed.

    1897 – London becomes the world’s first city to host licensed taxicabs.

    1904 – Theodore Roosevelt articulated his “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, stating that the U.S. would intervene in the Western Hemisphere should Latin American governments prove incapable or unstable.

    1917 – Halifax Explosion: A munitions explosion near Halifax, Nova Scotia kills more than 1,900 people in the largest artificial explosion up to that time.

    1917 – World War I: USS Jacob Jones is the first American destroyer to be sunk by enemy action when it is torpedoed by German submarine SM U-53.

    1933 – In United States v. One Book Called Ulysses Judge John M. Woolsey rules that James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is not obscene despite coarse language and sexual content, a leading decision affirming free expression.

    1957 – Project Vanguard: A launchpad explosion of Vanguard TV3 thwarts the first United States attempt to launch a satellite into Earth orbit.

    1967 – Adrian Kantrowitz performs the first human heart transplant in the United States.

    1969 – Altamont Free Concert: At a free concert performed by the Rolling Stones, eighteen-year old Meredith Hunter is stabbed to death by Hells Angels security guards.

    1975 – The Troubles: Fleeing from the police, a Provisional IRA unit takes a British couple hostage in their flat on Balcombe Street, London, beginning a six-day siege.

    1982 – The Troubles: The Irish National Liberation Army bombs a pub frequented by British soldiers in Ballykelly, Northern Ireland, killing eleven soldiers and six civilians.

    1989 – The École Polytechnique massacre (or Montreal Massacre): Marc Lépine, an anti-feminist gunman, murders 14 young women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal.

    1992 – The Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, India, is demolished, leading to widespread riots causing the death of over 1,500 people.

    1999 – A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.: The Recording Industry Association of America sues the peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster, alleging copyright infringement.

    2006 – NASA reveals photographs taken by Mars Global Surveyor suggesting the presence of liquid water on Mars.

    2017 – Donald Trump’s administration officially announces the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

    Births:
    1732 – Warren Hastings, British colonial administrator of India (d. 1818).

    1886 – Joyce Kilmer, American soldier, author, and poet (d. 1918). [Mainly remembered for a short poem titled “Trees” (1913).]

    1888 – Will Hay, English actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1949).

    1896 – Ira Gershwin, American songwriter (d. 1983).

    1908 – Herta Freitag, Austrian-American mathematician (d. 2000. [Known for her work on the Fibonacci numbers.]

    1908 – Baby Face Nelson, American gangster (d. 1934).

    1913 – Karl Haas, German-American pianist, conductor, and radio host (d. 2005).

    1917 – Irv Robbins, Canadian-American businessman, co-founded Baskin-Robbins (d. 2008).

    1918 – Tauba Biterman, Polish Holocaust survivor (d. 2019).

    1920 – Dave Brubeck, American pianist and composer (d. 2012). [His death was noted here yesterday.]

    1944 – Jonathan King, English singer-songwriter, record producer, music entrepreneur, television/radio presenter, and convicted sex offender.

    1948 – JoBeth Williams, American actress.

    1955 – Rick Buckler, English drummer, songwriter, and producer.

    1956 – Peter Buck, American guitarist, songwriter, and producer.

    1956 – Randy Rhoads, American guitarist, songwriter, and producer (d. 1982).

    1957 – Andrew Cuomo, American politician, 56th Governor of New York.

    1958 – Nick Park, English animator, director, producer, and screenwriter.

    1962 – Ben Watt, English singer-songwriter, musician, author, DJ, and radio presenter.

    1967 – Judd Apatow, American director, producer, and screenwriter.

    1968 – Karl Ove Knausgård, Norwegian author.

    1977 – Andrew Flintoff, English cricketer, coach, and sportscaster. [Better known as Freddie, he’s currently recovering from an accident that occurred when filming the TV show Top Gear.]

    1993 – Elián González, Cuban technician, known for a child custody and immigration case held in 2000.

    Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six:
    343 – Saint Nicholas, Greek bishop and saint (b. 270). [For a dead dude, he’s going to be pretty busy later this month…]

    1746 – Lady Grizel Baillie, Scottish poet and songwriter (b. 1665).

    1771 – Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Italian anatomist and pathologist (b. 1682).

    1855 – William John Swainson, English ornithologist and entomologist (b. 1789).

    1882 – Alfred Escher, Swiss businessman and politician, founded Credit Suisse (b. 1819).

    1882 – Anthony Trollope, English novelist, essayist, and short story writer (b. 1815).

    1889 – Jefferson Davis, American general and politician, President of the Confederate States of America (b. 1808).

    1892 – Werner von Siemens, German engineer and businessman, founded the Siemens Company (b. 1816).

    1951 – Harold Ross, American journalist and publisher, founded The New Yorker (b. 1892). [James Thurber’s The Years With Ross is a touching memoir.]

    1988 – Roy Orbison, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1936).

    1993 – Don Ameche, American actor (b. 1908).

    2015 – Nicholas Smith, British actor (b. 1934).

    2016 – Peter Vaughan, British actor (b. 1923).

    Reply

    1. 1957 Project Vanguard – many of us of a certain age (elderly) can recall seeing the image of the Vanguard (navy) rocket lift off the launch pad and then quickly explode on our black and white tv’s of the day. We saw more Vanguard explosions over the next year as eight of the eleven Vanguard launches ended in failure with three launches achieving an orbiting satellite. We were chasing the Russians’ successful Sputnik launches but just a month (Feb 1, 1958) after the first Vanguard failure, an Explorer satellite was successfully launched which kicked off the U.S. orbital space program using a modified army Redstone rocket. This is pre-NASA which was created in October of 1958.

      Reply

    2. 1920 – Dave Brubeck, American pianist and composer (d. 2012). [His death was noted here yesterday.]

      Brubeck was a competent pianist, but his most important job as a bandleader was to keep his baby grand between the two stars of the quartet, saxophonist Paul Desmond (the composer of many tunes, including “Take Five”) and drummer Joe Morello. The two reportedly loathed each other.

      Reply

      1. If Desmond’s sound was the dry martini, Morello might be what – something with club soda? The percussive bubble pop sounds.

        Reply

  2. Greta “no solutions only demands*” Thunberg :

    “Advocating for climate justice fundamentally comes from a place of caring about people and their human rights. ”

    This is a gnostic claim. The epistemological root is in self-knowledge – gnosis. The “knower” i.e. wizard has the secret knowledge that ordinary people lack. The ordinary people can save themselves by gaining climate consciousness (in that epistemological world) – analogous to class consciousness in Marxism (derived from Hegel’s dialectic).

    As for the dialectical shell game being played, it all makes sense by accounting for the objective of The Revolution – which uses problematics in the material world to advance. That development is from Marx (“the point is to change it”)- to transform the material world into the Ideal (the Ideal which Hegel developed).

    It’s all for the Revolution.

    *quote from 2014: “Our job is to demand solutions not provide solutions.”

    https://news.sky.com/story/no-home-comforts-for-greta-and-crew-as-they-sail-to-new-york-11784736

    Reply

      1. See?

        The design of dialectical political warfare predicts this battle over identity/minutiae – use the friend / enemy distinction (Mao Zedong) to destroy, in this case, interpersonal relationships (as far as anonymous commenters on WEIT can go).

        I could list ways I personally use energy, resources, my current bibliography, and the temperature and humidity.

        What would it matter – I am not a wizard, but no one else is either, and none of us should be allowed to claim power/authority on that basis.

        Look also how far removed this is from evaluation of the quote above.

        Reply

  3. I am not surprised in the least that Thunberg links Gaza and Climate Change. As we’ve seen, through the lens of Critical Race Theory, any non-Western ethnic group is automatically Oppressed by virtue of their not being white which implies White Supremacy which is really just double-talk for Capitalism. Similarly, Climate Change, aka Global Warming, is caused by green house gases which are the result of, basically, economic activity (specifically Western; China gets a pass), which mean Capitalism. To the Thunberg’s of the world, the only solution to both problems is to end Capitalism. In fact, to them the only solution to every problem is to end Capitalism.

    Reply

    1. A book I picked up recently that is worth reading :

      The Future of Everything – the science of prediction – from wealth and weather to chaos and complexity David Orrell, 2007.

      Mostly apolitical clear look at modeling, and question/answer on how it all works/what it means. I am not endorsing nor refuting this book’s conclusions, but saying it made me think – in particular so genuine advances in energy can be separated from yet another excuse for communists to get total control.

      Also to your “capitalism”, I note that Marx and perhaps Engels were the ones to establish free-market economies – which they of course resented – as the demiurge strawman of “capitalism”. Capital is necessary but insufficient for stability in an economy (though I am not an economist).

      Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations I think is where free-market economy was developed first?

      Reply

    3. For me, Greta has now lost ANY credibility to talk about climate change in the future, as she inadmissibly conflates the issue with identity politics, or more precisely post-colonialism. Because it is to be feared that she will use the same tactics in future if it suits her agenda.

      Reply

  4. In other news, rock star Denny Laine, guitarist for the Moody Blues and Wings, died yesterday from a lung disease. He was 79.

    Reply

  5. Jerry has put his finger on the crucial question to ask anyone who supports “Palestinian counteroffensive”/Hamas, viz., “Do you endorse Israel’s existence as a nation-state?” Let’s ask this question of the editorial boards of the news media, too. No hemming and hawing, state your position clearly. If there’s any good that can come from this horrible war, perhaps it might be that we can leach out the heretofore hidden anti-Semitism that permeates society more extensively than I would have thought.

    Reply

      1. “Jews needed a secure and defensible homeland because Europeans tried to kill them” is not something that (most) Palestinians and their supporters deny. Their problem is with who was the one who had to cede part of their own land to the Jews to make that possible.
        There are things one can say that have some effect on people who deny Israel its right to exist in its current borders, but “Jews needed a homeland because of European persecution” isn’t one of them.

        Reply

  7. … We have always been political, because we have always been a movement for justice.

    One of the many problems with this “all oppression is connected” view of nonprofit, charity, and single issue organizations is that it weakens the organization. Instead of focusing on a single problem and addressing that well, activity is diffused over multiple Good Causes and the original Good Cause becomes less important, both to the general public and to those in the organization.

    It also lowers the membership. Just because someone cares about climate change, free speech, church/state separation or women’s rights doesn’t mean they buy into the entire package of progressive causes. Skeptics either quit in disgust or get thrown out by the Purity Spiral referred to in todays Jesus and Mo.

    Reply

    2. Yes – because the Revolution uses, chews up, and discards that which no longer advances the Revolution.

      Klaus Schwab describes how he recruited Thunberg in his one of his books, I think The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

      As such, it seems a natural progression for the personalities being used for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals to absorb and act on more of those targets, and apply activism to them.

      But the Revolution is not working this time either, and not without destruction. Whatever gets used up will be revived with whatever fresh revolutionary potential is around at the time.

      Reply

  8. I would like to add another favorite book to the two I nominated yesterday. It is Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” another historical novel. At times it is a bit difficult to follow, given that the author switches back and forth in time and place, but each section is labeled as to both, which helps.

    Reply

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