[Killer Whale]

Don't anyone tell them about Joy Division/New Order...

I'm old enough to remember when that was a massive deal.

[kreuzberger]

I'm old enough to have forgotten...

[Malcolm Armsteen]

I'm old enough to have never known...

[Philip Marlow]

Quite a few acts have been pulling out of SXSW. This has been met by the kind of typically balanced ‘good riddance to bad rubbish, and stay out of Texas’ response you’d expect from the Republican Governor Greg Abbott, placing the festival organisers in the deliciously uncomfortable position of having to defend their choice of sponsors while distancing themselves from the raving maniac in the Governor’s mansion.

Meanwhile, some of the biggest brains US politics has to offer have put their Mekon-sized heads together and come up with a stunningly brilliant idea…

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/tiktok-ban- ... ree-speech

As outrage at the Israeli war on Gaza and US backing for it continues to grow, US politicians have responded calmly and reasonably with a measure that threads a fine line between advocating for the US government’s position on the war and respecting the intelligence and basic rights of ordinary Americans.

Just kidding. They’ve put forward an idea that stands to anger large swaths of the public and massively encroach on ordinary Americans’ right to free speech, all while having little to no effect on US voters’ growing repugnance toward Israel’s war: banning TikTok.

[The Weeping Angel]

Just a couple of points the tiktok ban isn't about Israel it's about tiktok being owned by China and acting as a propaganda network for China, also if they divest from China there's no ban. Secondly Jacobin can get get fucked, thirdly this is the sort of response US politicians are getting from Tiktok users

What has this idiot being learning on Tiktok I ask.

[Youngian]

"I learn on TikTok more than I learn in school." One of the most chilling things I've ever read.

Bruce Springsteen “learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school” but he’s done alright.

[Bones McCoy]

That's the voice of the "dun me own resurch" Brigade.

[Philip Marlow]

Just a couple of points the tiktok ban isn't about Israel it's about tiktok being owned by China and acting as a propaganda network for China, also if they divest from China there's no ban. Secondly Jacobin can get get fucked, thirdly this is the sort of response US politicians are getting from Tiktok users

What has this idiot being learning on Tiktok I ask.

Only with its consent darling. And even then, at least the offer of dinner and drinks preceeding. Even no-account lefty scum like to be wooed from time to time.

[The Weeping Angel]

I've said some daft things in the heat of the moment and that wasn't one of my better moments. Anyway my main point still stands this bill tells tiktok it must divest from China and sell otherwise it will be banned. Tiktok of course often neglects to tell people that instead they've been saying congress wants to ban tikitok hence why we've got people not just ringing up congresspeople threatening them but threatening to kill themselves.

[The Weeping Angel]

This is just ridiculous

https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/banned-at ... dium=email

IT’S THE KIND OF CONTROVERSY that could only happen in the progressive intelligentsia: a row about a literary journal’s retraction of a liberal, Jewish, Israeli writer’s essay on her moral and emotional struggle after the October 7th Hamas attacks and during the war in Gaza.

The essay, “From the Edges of a Broken World” by Joanna Chen, appeared on March 4 in the prestigious twenty-year-old online journal Guernica. Its publication was met with a social-media storm in which more than a dozen of the magazine’s volunteer staffers resigned—including Guernica co-publisher Madhuri Sastry—and several writers withdrew their submissions. In response, the magazine’s editors removed the essay from the site with an expression of regret for its publication and a brief promise, as yet unmet, that an explanation would be forthcoming:

THE ESSAY THAT IGNITED the firestorm, still available in the Internet Archive, has received high praise for its searing sense of humanity, vulnerability, and empathy. Chen, a British-born writer and translator, could not be a more model Israeli progressive: She refused to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces after her family brought her to Israel as a teenager, and for the past few years she has been a volunteer for Road to Recovery, a nongovernmental organization that drives children from Palestinian territories to Israeli hospitals for treatment. As writer and social critic Phoebe Maltz Bovy has noted in Canadian Jewish News,

You can read read the essay in question here

https://web.archive.org/web/20240305095 ... ken-world/

[MisterMuncher]

Just a couple of points the tiktok ban isn't about Israel it's about tiktok being owned by China and acting as a propaganda network for China, also if they divest from China there's no ban. Secondly Jacobin can get get fucked, thirdly this is the sort of response US politicians are getting from Tiktok users

Respectfully, It's pretty understandable that people are convinced that the TikTok ban bills are based on user ideology given there's a not-small list of platforms owned by toxic entities giving air to fucking horrendous people. I've yet to see a convincing case that TikTok is objectively worse than any of the chans or KiwiFarms, even without accounting for scale. Nor have I seen a particularly convincing argument that I'd be objectively worse off with my data in the hands of a functionary of the CCP than one of Elon "Fucking" Musk's

[Oboogie]

Not sure where to put this because it's, as yet, unconfirmed what the story is.

What we know so far is a man, who was heard to make antisemitic remarks, has been arrested for an arson attack on a house owned by Jews in East London. Four people have been hurt.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68625205

[Oboogie]

MET police think there's nothing wrong with carrying Swastikas on demos.

[The Weeping Angel]

[Abernathy]

I think that this today from Alan Duncan, of all people, is quite significant, quite important.

Asked about calls for ban arms sales to Israel in response to its conduct in the war against Hamas in Gaza, Duncan said: “We should stop arms sales immediately. Anything in support of what is becoming a total catastrophe in Gaza is morally unacceptable.

“And what we have to accept is that it’s not just what they are doing now that is wrong, it’s what Israel has been doing for years that is wrong because the Israel Defence Force does not follow international law, it has been backing and supporting illegal settlers in the West Bank who steal Palestinian land.

“It is that land theft, that annexation of Palestine, that is the origin of the problem which has given rise to the Hamas atrocity and the battles we are seeing.

“The trouble is that there are people at the top of our own politics who refuse to condemn the settlements and therefore are not supporters of international law.”

https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/veteran-to ... rom-lords/
Veteran Tory calls for pro-Israel peers to be ‘removed from Lords’

[Philip Marlow]

I’ve managed to get through the majority of the conflagration so far without hearing from Melanie Phillips.

Thanks Nathan J. Robinson. Thanks a lot.

[Rosvanian]

Could anyone familiar with her, er, work, really be surprised by Melanie Philips views? She's been an extremist all of her life. Extreme left then extreme right, we know it's the same shit. Incredibly she was a talking head on Radio 4's The Moral Maze for years. She's a fucking disgrace.

[Philip Marlow]

It struck me back then that her being cited in Breivik’s manifesto made perfect sense, and didn’t require any kind of perversion or misreading of her work. If you took the case that she was advancing seriously - that radical Islam was in the process of conquering the West (she actually compared the state of Europe at the time to the last days of the Weimar Republic) - and that our own governments were either useful idiots or actively in collusion - then some form of armed resistance wouldn’t necessarily have seemed unjustified. The Knights Templar crap obviously didn’t originate with her, but the framework of Breivik’s thinking was definitely there.

Looking back, it’s a little terrifying how many mainstream writers he was able to cite and have their arguments fit pretty easily into his worldview. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was another one.

[The Weeping Angel]

Iran launched a load of missles and drones against Israel btw.

[Andy McDandy]

Israel reported most of them were shot down, very low casualties. Looks like it was a pretty indiscriminate effort. Jordan weighed in on the Israeli side, which is nice and confirms the Hashemite kingdom as the token sane guys on the block.