Just passing through.

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • The left didn’t get a majority, so it’s just parliamentary politics. It’s a bit unusual for France where the biggest party tends to form a government, but that’s a political norm we would have been happy to see broken had the Rassemblement national done as well as everyone expected it to.

    What is more problematic is that the Cabinet is not allowed to vote in parliamentary matters, which Macron needed in order to marginalize the left. So he fired his Cabinet, so that they formally returned to parliament and could vote. The problem is, of course, that they don’t have any replacements, and their roles need to be filled. So now they’re voting in parlament while continuing their duties, giving the sleezebag Gabriel Attal the title “Outgoing Prime Minister Gabriel Attal”, but not changing anything of substance.

    It’s not constitutional, but the courts let it slide, because they’re as terrified of the French left as Hindenburg was of the Social Democrats.


  • Fucking Macron.

    He thinks he’s a stronghold against polarization. Well, this shit is why people flee to the far right and to the far left.

    And treating the French left as a huge threat is plain bullshit. There are two groups who could legitimately feel threatened by the French left - billionaires, who would have to pay taxes to fund the public sector, and the French left itself, which is too incompetent to ever cooperate and would shoot itself in the foot within weeks.

    Meanwhile, Macron keeps destroying the country while promoting himself as the second coming of centrist Christ. A conservative by any other name.





  • That’s incredibly fascinating - I had never heard of Christian Zionism before (though I’m obviously familiar with evangelical Christians in the US and their ideas about a Jewish state). It appears the term Chirstian Zionism first appeared in the mid-20th century, though the idea is older than that:

    The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.

    Advocacy on the part of Christians for a Jewish restoration grew after the Protestant Reformation, and is rooted in 17th-century English Puritanism. Contemporary Israeli historian Anita Shapira suggests that England’s Zionist Evangelical Protestants “passed this notion on to Jewish circles” around the 1840s, while Jewish nationalism in the early 19th century was largely met with hostility from British Jews. (Wikipedia)

    I like the idea that Zion i wherever Jews live/are at home. As far as I’m concerned, fighting anti-semitism and fighting Israel’s version of Zionism is two sides of the same battle.


  • Obviously an international protectorate would be incompatible with a zionist state. It might be more of a no state solution than a one state solution.

    A tricky part of zionism might be that, except for the fact that it’s an inherently evil contemporary ideology, a longing for Zion is somewhat inherit in Judaism. If a version of zionism is to be salvaged I think it requires a rethinking of what Zion is - peaceful coexistence during the Ottoman Empire might be as close as one could ever get to its meaning in a religious sense.

    As it appears today, zionism is a longing for a pure state of a single people, based on romanticized ideas of a hypothetical past that we know literally nothing about. That’s pretty much exactly the same as any other totalitarian ideology.

    I do, however, believe that we have to accept that ancient history matters. Not necessarily because it actually does, but because it creates powerful narratives that are incredibly hard to fight.


  • I have to admit I’m beginning to lose faith in a two-state solution. Part of me is beginning to think an international protectorate with only limited self-governance in a single Palestinian-Israeli state would be the only acceptable way out of this mess.

    There has been shorter moments of calm, but Palestine has been fought over since pretty much forever. Samson’s fighting the Philistines over it already in the old testament. Nothing got better when the Christians started getting involved with their fucking crusades.

    Maybe the only way we’ll manage to put an end to it is by global warming rendering the region uninhabitable. Hopefully a few bedouins will still manage to get by in the desert. They’re hardier than most.



  • All of the US political establishment is strongly pro Israel. I think it’s fair to say they have gotten a lot of blood in their hands in the process.

    Even so, before the October 7 attacks, relations between the US and Israel were pretty much at an all-time low. Netanyahu is Trump’s man. Since the attack however, Biden has pretty much given Netanyahu a carte blanche. At least that’s how it appears to the public.

    Of course Israel is and always has been problematic in its own right. It is however still important to keep a distinction between Israel and the dangerous extremists that run the country. Netanyahu is closer to Yigal Amir than he is to Yitzhak Rabin, and there are a lot of Israelites who recognize him as the genocidal extremist that he is.

    I expect nothing other than support for the state of Israel from an US president. That’s a given at this point. Support for Netanyahu, however, I expect only from his fellow fascists.