Erik Baker
@erikmbaker
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I teach history of science & labor at Harvard. Proud @hgsuuaw alum, associate editor @thedrift_mag . Writing MAKE YOUR OWN JOB for @harvard_press .
Joined June 2019
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I did a lot of writing this year, but what I'm most proud of is the final manuscript of my book, which I shipped off to the publisher this afternoon. Coming to you next year!
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Legitimately stunning to watch Disney transform practically overnight into a supervillain for conservatives. It's hard to overstate just how important Disney was to the project of conservatism - culturally, socially, even economically - for nearly a century.
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At first I thought it was just poor impulse control but it's possible that DeSantis legitimately did not realize that he was picking a fight with the most litigious entity in human history
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I'm obsessed with him. He's like a Hitchcock villain, a vortex of queer negativity
George Santos just left Tim Burchett’s office with a baby in his arms. When asked if it was his baby, he said “not yet.”
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Among the many failings of the Jedi in the waning hours of the Republic, perhaps the most fateful was their invention of the dreaded "hybrid meeting format"
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Newly published video recorded inside Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, during the May 24 attack, shows officers approaching the classroom where Salvador Ramos killed 21 people, but then retreating down the hallway and taking cover when gunfire is heard.
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One of the great scientific breakthroughs of our time was when Nathan Fielder discovered that the perfect response to someone saying something wild is "Oh, okay"
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They're preparing the handoff lol
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Can't keep up with it all but thanks to everyone who's reached out to say my piece resonated with them. A friend spotted this flyer in NY last night. It's an honor to contribute in some small way with my words to the struggle for a free Palestine.
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We've reached levels of "the worst person you know just made a great point" scientists previously considered impossible
BREAKING: Russia's Putin compares the Israeli siege of Gaza, which he calls 'unacceptable', to the Nazi blockade of Leningrad.
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RIP to the other empires that were destroyed by the gods for their hubris, but America's different. And better. Maybe even better than the gods...
QUESTION: “Are the wars in Israel and Ukraine more than the United States can take on at the same time?”
POTUS: “We’re the United States of America for God's sake! The most powerful nation in the history of the world!” 1/
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It amazes me how confidently people will say things like "mental illness doesn't excuse bad behavior." Like okay, I get what you're saying, but surely you realize there are some colossally difficult philosophical questions at play here
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Taking critical psychic damage from the lede of this 1979 WaPo op ed, and the reality that we are living in a previous generation's dystopia
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One of the chief legacies of Orientalism today is the widespread idea that Palestinian lives have less moral worth for reasons you can only grasp if you are an expert on the mysterious dynamics of "the Middle East"
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"Max: the one to watch for HBO" might be the funniest corporate branding campaign of all time
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All of this is happening to defend universities' right to invest in a genocide without students being mad at them
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Reminds me of my belief that within a few decades, "lifespan inequality" will be so glaring that it will become an object of political contestation
Reclusive Gene Hackman, 93, looks fit in first sighting in years
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Universities responding to encampments with collective punishment tactics related to food and water access is honestly astonishing
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Years ago, I attended a meeting about the future of democracy at Harlan Crow’s “house” (which was staged as a museum). I left deeply shaken by the Nazi memorabilia on display. Apparently I wasn’t alone. 1/5
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Don't want to speak too soon but it's looking like Tucker is yet another W for deplatforming. I remember all these takes warning that if he lost his show he'd be like, "unleashed" and more dangerous than ever. Turns out he's just irrelevant.
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Something very sad and disturbing that I didn't quite appreciate is how many Americans are actively nostalgic for the moral clarity they feel they experienced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11
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This is such credulous framing, lol. Absolutely no reason to take the justices' performance of disinterested scrupulousness at face value. They aren't "skeptical of its legality," they are going to declare it illegal because they oppose it on political principle.
Breaking News: The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed deeply skeptical of the legality of the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan.
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This is how the NYT is reporting the Jabalia refugee camp bombing.
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Perfect illustration of Godard's distinction between making political films and making films politically
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If I think about this trend too hard I legitimately black out with rage
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When the siege tower comes out that's how you know a peaceful learning environment is being restored
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Hello Mr Tarantino, yes, I know you're hard at work on your "last film," but I think you'll want to hear this,
Marx almost moved to Texas in 1843. Imagine a settler Texan Marx who never met Engels, didn’t wasn’t involved in 1848, no access to the British library, was away from European workers movement. Just some hick kraut whose only contribution is some bad Hegelian poetry.
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Did a cockroach write this
Nuclear war is bad. Very bad. Don't get me wrong. But based on my research so far, it's more survivable than you think. The key to survival is realistic optimism and a positive mental attitude. In the meantime, here's how anyone can start food prep.
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For sheer nihilism this episode ranks among the worst displays of any White House in my lifetime. Absolutely unforgivable.
“The Gaza Ministry of Health is just a front for Hamas ... a terrorist organization … We can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called ‘Ministry of Health,’ at face value.”
— NSC’s John Kirby on Biden saying he has “no confidence” in Palestinian death count
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It all reminds me of the bit at the end of the original Twin Peaks when Windom Earle finally makes it into the Black Lodge and meets Killer BOB only to get mercilessly destroyed by him. The evil spirits you are trying to unleash on the world will not thank you for your efforts.
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Honestly one of the most cowardly and dishonest euphemisms I've ever seen, I can't believe places like the NYT are still doing this
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As I've discussed before, the fatal mistake of nearly every Lynch character is to actually get what they want - and that's a mistake establishment conservatives have made spectacularly.
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This is absolutely infuriating. Feeling very powerless this week but at least I can make this clear: As long as I teach here, Palestinian students and their allies will always be welcome in my classroom.
the only campus cancel culture that’s ever been real
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Every historical-materialist bone in my body resists this conclusion, but it's hard not to suspect after the last 3 election cycles that the main reason Trump was elected was simply that Hillary Clinton was a world-historically terrible candidate
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I'm sorry but this is by far the funniest "political correctness is out of control" complaint I've ever heard
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*Youth pastor voice* I know one man who thought about the Roman Empire every day
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Still doesn't seem real that we get to read this guy every week in the New York Times.
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"Children are their parents' property" has got to be one of the beliefs most widely shared across the political spectrum
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Just a mind-blowing goal line fumble from the Dems on Jan 6. Spent 18 months letting resentment build against Biden while their opponents dissembled about what happened, only to finally drop the bombshells during the most intense civil rights crisis in recent US history
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english has a cool built-in heuristic for detecting bullshit
are most of the nouns and verbs being used latin/greek or germanic in origin?
if germanic, the things being discussed are probably real physical actions and things: tree, walk, cow, shit, fall, wood, buy, leg, go
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Socialism with Bostonian Characteristics
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Something I genuinely did not understand before the last year is that the consensus definition of McCarthyism in the US is "falsely accusing someone of being a communist"
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It would be extremely bad if loneliness became a right-coded concern. The empirical evidence for its pervasiveness is overwhelming and it is imperative not to concede the terrain to the incel story about how men just can't get laid these days.
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I think it's easy to overstate the novelty of a lot of the dumb conservative culture war stuff we're bombarded with
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The mushroom clouds have broken me. Some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century repeated before our eyes. God have mercy.
Footage for the unprecedented lsraeli air attacks hitting Gaza Strip.
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Harvard admin are currently *systematically* overruling faculty decisions to promote leftist professors. This has happened in departments all over the university over the last 2 years.
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Ross Douthat's great because he's like "isn't life under liberal capitalism dissatisfying" and I'm like, sure. and then he's like "wouldn't it be better if you were chained to the wall in the dungeon of the Duke of Bergen County" and that's where he loses me
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This is totally unacceptable and should alarm and outrage academics everywhere. If history is any guide, this kind of crackdown on proscribed political expression will soon be emulated elsewhere.
brandeis sjp just had their charter revoked because they planned to hold a vigil for the dead in palestine. and obscene and indefensible choice by the administration, which claims mourning is a “genuine threat”
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@bigblackjacobin
They're going to digitally replace all the racial caricatures in the back catalogue with grotesque sketches of DeSantis
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Andor fans don't want you to know that George Lucas made three entire Star Wars movies about trade policy, military bureaucracy, and incipient fascism
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Interesting. My politics are based on what I believe to be true and good
I'm pretty far left, but every time someone makes the argument that substance users in the subway have no impact on the people around them (except an "aesthetic" one, sorry) I get nudged a tiny bit toward the right
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Per Baza: Prigozhin's body has still not been identified at the crash site, despite previous reports (Tsargrad) to the contrary. Genetic material has been taken from the 10 bodies and sent to Moscow for testing.
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This would assuredly have been terrible, but there is something soul-crushing about a corporation shunning the work of a pacifist anarchist as some kind of anti-war gesture
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It is tempting but ultimately mistaken to concede Rufo's claim to be a master media manipulator. The reality is that decision makers at these outlets more or less agree with Rufo substantively on campus politics.
Lol congrats to the NYT, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic for getting played like a fucking fiddle by this leering dipshit, great job guys
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Students: You should take the Sackler name off of all those buildings
Harvard: Best I can do is rename the grad school after DeSantis's sugar daddy
“Billionaire hedge fund CEO and Republican megadonor Kenneth C. Griffin donated $300 million to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Harvard will rename the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after Griffin.” 🥱
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Astonishing to see this reported so frankly in the AP. The media's usual ideological strategies are confounded by the sheer enormity of the crime taking place.
After months of warnings that Israel’s siege is causing famine, children begin to die in Gaza
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People keep asking if labor is back and I haven't had an answer. But yeah, I'm thinking labor is back
NOW: NYU students have established a new ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ after NYPD swept their first encampment in Gould Plaza
Hundreds of UAW members and supporters marched to the encampment
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I've said this a million times but I think this line gets Lynch almost exactly wrong - his work is preoccupied with the impotence of revealing the "hidden truth," precisely because the drama of uncovering perversion is *internal* to the fantasy
lana del rey and david lynch have seen something the truth behind the american curtain and their art is the only cultural product i can think of this century that portrays it accurately
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Be careful what you wish for! I'm more than happy to walk students through the key debates of early 20th century conservative thought - "Fascism: Positive Good or Necessary Evil?", "Should Women Be Able To Vote?", "How Many Races Are There Exactly?" etc
“Very few professors know much at all about the conservative intellectual tradition,” writes Jon A. Shields. “Many assume there is little of value in it.”
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People have to prepare themselves for the slim but not totally unthinkable possibility that Bono will live to see the 22nd century
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By refusing to score touchdowns in the red zone, the Chicago Bears subtly refuse to be subjected by the normative conventions of the sport of football, a parodic gesture which opens up new ways of being-on-the-field and problematizes the hegemonic concept of "good" football
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Clearer than ever that the main function of the concept of "war crimes" is to maintain the fantasy of the possibility of war without atrocity
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There's an intense bloodlust in our culture that is constantly looking for socially sanctioned outlet and greets it with relief
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It's interesting how years ago, when Bari Weiss and Emily Yoffe were still pretending to be reputable mainstream journalists, leftists claimed that they were profoundly evil people with profoundly evil intentions, and then that ended up being true. Not sure what to make of that
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Everyone who supported the Iraq War but in a reasonable, liberal way - Chait, Yglesias, Sullivan, etc. - has now declared war against trans people and wokeness. That's where this impulse went.
You guys ever wonder about what happened to Dissent-contributor Paul Berman and the post-9/11 liberal-left war against "Islamofascism"? No? What about Norman Geras? The Euston Manifesto?
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It is so bizarre that in the span of approximately a week it has become common sense among every liberal commentator that Richard Nixon would not have been elected president if college students had not protested the Vietnam War
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It's very strange to me that testing is so invisible in discussions of the toll of nuclear weapons. I think the fact that the US killed half a million of its own citizens in the back half of the 20th century is just impossible for a lot of people to grapple with.
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No doubt the song's sentiments are sincerely held by many of its listeners. The problem is the way that right-wing politics are conflated with aesthetic "authenticity" in a way that left-wing views also held by millions of working-class people never are.
The viral country song can be both politically odious and an "authentic" expression of resentments held by a significant number of working-class people in the United States, many millions of whom disdain the idle poor and support Donald Trump
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Does everyone finishing up their dissertation suddenly feel like it's the worst piece of scholarship ever produced and a total waste of time and effort
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I think it's great that Bob Dylan wrote the bitterest, angriest anti-war song of all time to impress his Communist girlfriend and then never evinced any particular interest in the subject again
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Power ranking movies about how everyone loses it a bit when it's really hot outside:
1. Do the Right Thing
2. Beau Travail
3. Rear Window
4. Barton Fink
5. A Streetcar Named Desire
6. 12 Angry Men
7. Shopping for Death (Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode)
8. A Few Good Men
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"Coach"
We need a nonbinary/non-gendered version of “Sir” and “Ma’am” since I often feel the urge to use it while out, to get a stranger’s attention in order to tell them something
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Completely agree, weird that no one's ever noticed this. It seems almost like, and I'm just spitballing here, it has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation
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Not among the media, not among elected officials, but among ordinary people out in the street around the world, this feels like a turning point. All the horror is becoming literally intolerable.
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@found_anon
Rough but alive is not exactly what one would have predicted in the 70s for Gene Hackman in the year 2023
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Rehabilitation of the idea of Nazi/Soviet moral equivalence, or that there was no "right side" on the Eastern Front, has been one very disturbing downstream ideological consequence of Putin's invasion in the West
Double genocide theory really is antisemitic and it really is being mainstreamed
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Just saw someone claim that CRT caused the Holocaust only to get an angry reply challenging him to prove the Holocaust actually happened and I think that means it’s time to log off for the day
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Rebranding forced displacement as humanitarianism has been one of the most crazy-making parts of this operation
WASHINGTON (AP) — White House: Israel agrees to 4-hour daily 'humanitarian pauses' in fighting in Northern Gaza to allow civilians to flee.
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On this day in 1965, according to the Pentagon Papers, Lyndon Johnson authorized the use of napalm in the US bombing campaign in North Vietnam. It's an anniversary that's rarely marked, but it's a date that deserves to live in infamy.
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I was taught growing up that forcibly expelling communists and fellow travelers from public life was bad, a classic example of government overreach, and I always assumed that was the standard liberal take.
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It's simply not the case that you have to be stupid or malicious to doubt the perfect moral integrity of the individual self
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The three main protected classes
Ron DeSantis's ultra-MAGA Florida isn't safe for people of color, LGBTQ+ people, or even multi-billion dollar corporations.
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I recently lost someone who was very close to my family in a freak car accident and I am now just a fanatical anti-car extremist. Evil machines that continue to poison our society physically and spiritually.
With pedestrian deaths in the U.S. at their highest point in four decades, advocates and urban residents across the nation are urging lawmakers to break from car culture.
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You know what, I'm tired of living in fear. I'm just going to come out and say it: I don't think Nazi Germany had a right to exist
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One key premise of Serious Centrist Thought is that no one who wears a uniform to work should ever earn more than someone who wears a suit
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It's cool that six months prior to this exchange, the New York Times published an op ed by a sitting senator encouraging the invocation of the Insurrection Act to order the military to crush protests
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Sally Rooney has exhibited more clarity and courage these last few months than every famous white American novelist put together
"what is happening in Gaza is not only Israel’s war: it is a US war, and it is most particularly Biden’s war. Israel simply could not afford to carry out this prolonged and resource-intensive assault on the Palestinian people without US money & weaponry."
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Two paragraphs with the power to instantly kill a historian of science
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The night of April 30 2024 will live in infamy. One of the most shameful chapters in modern American higher ed history
25 protesters within the pro-Palestine encampment were hospitalized overnight, a UC Divest at UCLA spokesperson said in a press conference.
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Just completely appalling. And what a photo - ours is a monstrous society.
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Since the Holocaust the woke mob won't even let you criticize world Jewry without making it seem like you're some kind of antisemite
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Disturbing to think that close to 100% of worthwhile writing in the US on the crisis in Palestine since Oct 7 has come from a handful of small magazines constantly teetering on the brink of financial insolvency
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It is a total moral disaster and an unforgivable insult to historical memory
Increasingly worried about the future of Holocaust education. How many young will see the Shoah's invocation in the recent weeks and conclude that its legacy is only for repression?
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Despite the popular image of the Holocaust as bureaucratic, executed through tight chains of command etc the truth is that all genocides rely on people performing atrocities they aren't explicitly ordered to carry out and the creation of anarchic spaces in which they can do so
Haaretz reporting on the World Central Kitchen airstrike features a IDF source blaming the attack on “units in the field” acting in their own, matching their reporting from Sunday that civilians are regularly killed by IDF units acting without any formal rules of engagement
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Probably the single most propagandistic US news outlet on this issue, which is really saying something.
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I genuinely love when academics try to describe some uniquely messed up part of our jobs and accidentally describe a structural feature of labor under capitalism. Every journey begins with a single step!
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