Wertheimer [any] @ Wertheimer @hexbear.net

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5 yr. ago

Our best bet at stopping this is getting ankle bracelet companies to go to war to protect their market share.

It took me a very long time to unlearn the notion that "proper English" is a sign of intelligence rather than class privilege.

Eve Fartlow's favorite month

There are 17 states with Alcoholic Beverage Controls who operate state-run liquor stores. I guess it's true that private liquor stores are unable to compete, because they're illegal, but there hasn't been a liquor shortage in what, 92 years?

For this Finkelstein cites Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993), pages 6, 12, 22, 89–90. Let's see . . .

It looks like this part is mostly from 89-90, where she discusses Austin J. App, an American professor who "formulated eight axioms . . . as the basic postulates of Holocaust denial." Unless the pagination on the copy I found is different from Finkelstein's, this must be one passage he's referring to:

App had to turn the Allies and the Nazis into traditional adversaries embroiled in the horrors of war. Reducing the numbers and deleting this unique technological means from the equation were thus a sine qua non for deniers -- one of the reasonable facades behind which they hide: War is an unmitigated evil, all sides are equally responsible, and there is no moral distinction between combatants.

Despite her distrust here and elsewhere in the book of anyone who mentions the internment of Japanese-Americans, elsewhere in the book she also briefly discusses the way Holocaust denial has led American cranks to claim that those internment camps were a hoax.

It's the same playbook as Hindu nationalists attacking Sanskrit scholars for being "anti-Hindu" or Christians calling the end of mandatory school prayer a persecution equivalent to Diocletian's. Just because Lipstadt has gone after actual Holocaust deniers doesn't mean she's not horrible. In fact, as Norman Finkelstein has argued (in The Holocaust Industry, she's actually to blame for amplifying them:

Denying the Holocaust is an updated version of the “new anti-Semitism” tracts. To document widespread Holocaust denial, Lipstadt cites a handful of crank publications. Her pièce de résistance is Arthur Butz, a nonentity who teaches electrical engineering at Northwestern University and who published his book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century with an obscure press. Lipstadt entitles the chapter on him “Entering the Mainstream.” Were it not for the likes of Lipstadt, no one would ever have heard of Arthur Butz.

...

To question a survivor’s testimony, to denounce the role of Jewish collaborators, to suggest that Germans suffered during the bombing of Dresden or that any state except Germany committed crimes in World War II – this is all evidence, according to Lipstadt, of Holocaust denial. And to suggest that [Elie] Wiesel has profited from the Holocaust industry, or even to question him, amounts to Holocaust denial.

I swear I heard about something like this a few years ago. My memory is way too vague on it to overpower Google's enshittified search at the moment but I think it was in one of the Virginias and involved teachers (maybe?) getting cheaper insurance premiums if they went to an approved gym.

You'd think the fire would repel the flies, but apparently Druggies just stink to . . .

Some fictional scientific backup:

At a dinner celebrating Nikolaj's 40th birthday, the group discusses a theory inspired by the work of psychiatrist Finn Skårderud—that humans are born with a blood alcohol content (BAC) deficiency of 0.05% and that maintaining a BAC of 0.05% makes one more creative and relaxed.

Have I got the movie for you

My copium, as someone foolish enough to be a Hawks fan:

The Pacers will win, and Trae Young will take Haliburton's ring as a personal affront. Next season he will go on his own Narrative Obliteration Tour and will show up to training camp five inches taller. He will stop making dumbass turnovers and will facilitate Jalen Johnson's ascension into an All-NBA player. In the playoffs the Hawks will defeat the Knicks so badly that they will play the Knicks again and sweep them for a second time while waiting for their next opponent to finish a grueling seven-game series. Unfortunately, Trae will strain an oblique while taunting the MSG crowd at the moment of his greatest triumph and the Hawks will lose in the conference finals.

Hartenstein

Oddly enough, Hartenstein is Black.

He has never met an AES that he could support. I haven't read the Nicaragua book but here's his summary of more recent events:

The Nicaraguan popular rebellion has been the subject of a debate between the democratic left, which has supported it, and the neo-Stalinist left, which has backed the dictator Ortega.

That's what I thought at first, but as the sentences became increasingly cumbersome I started feeling less charitable. But yeah, maybe she recently made a conscious decision to change her phrasing and still has to fight against the habit.

That last piece from the author of What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis

The

Really looking forward to this sequel to The Trump Prophecy

Gorgias sez:

1. Nothing exists
2. Even if it did exist, we couldn't comprehend its nature
3. Even if we could comprehend it, we couldn't communicate it

Turns out she's Canadian, so if she's doing this out of immense respect for the Oval Office she's even weirder than I thought.