Most of the violence and oppression gets exported, so it’s probably best to just sit tight here in the heart of the empire.

Vance himself was a DEI student at Yale. Hypocrisy doesn’t matter.

The lynching narrative presupposes that the perpetrators are a mob of otherwise normal people driven to take justice into their own hands by extreme ignorance and prejudice that can eventually be overcome by education in tolerance. Is that how you feel about the Israeli settlers? The way I feel about them is that they are not normal yet severely ignorant people. They are invaders who know exactly what they are doing. There is no pretense of justice for them to take into their own hands. They cannot be taught to coexist with the Palestinians they are trying to ethnically cleanse from the West Bank. They need to be driven at gun point back to Long Island or at least Israel 1948. Calling it lynching minimizes the settlers’ culpability.

You should consider how using the wrong words for things might be playing into the hands of Zionists. Maybe you are.

Part of what makes a lynching a lynching is subversion of the criminal justice process and yes that probably often involved cops joining the lynch mob. However, these Israeli settlers aren’t subverting anything. They are not vigilantes. They are attacking and terrorizing Palestinians without any pretext of justice.

The problem is this case is that ‘a lynching’ implies that the mob is going against the authorities, which is absolutely not the case when it comes to settler violence. The Israeli soldiers are there to protect and facilitate the settlers in their attacks against Palestinians. Under no circumstances does the IDF deserve the benefit of the doubt and the article makes it clear that they are the ones who abducted Hamdan anyway.

China already gets a lot of (undeserved) bad press. An experiment breaching containment and causing a pandemic is bad for scientific research everywhere.

Okay, sure, but to what end? It’s not clear to me how accusations of an accidental release are bad for China. Is the purpose actually to cover up intentional sabotage by an anti-China entity? It’s not clear to me either who it helps or hurts for the COVID-19 outbreak to have been a completely natural occurrence.

[extremely space orc voice] Gotta be red to build faster.

I really don’t think it’s that hard to believe that some postdoc in Wuhan screwed up and let it loose accidentally.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a billionaire IRL.

Anything that can be reused. Containers and packaging material should have a significant return deposits.