As Israel braces for attack, ordinary citizens fear that Netanyahu has destroyed a country and a dream
“We used to be better than they are, we used to be good.… Now we are the same.” Journalist Aviya Kushner writes at The Forward about her encounter at an Israeli light rail station with a woman older than the state of Israel itself.
Israelis opposing Netanyahu use the word “hamadena” to describe what Netanyahu is destroying. “For Israelis, that word, hamedina, or ‘the state’ is not just the State of Israel, but the dream of the State of Israel.”
I think the elderly woman is oversimplifying. I, too, used to believe Israel was good. Since the reaction to the Oct. 7 attack, I have come to see that Israel is founded on injustice.
Israel is not unique or fundamentally evil. As Ezra Klein said, nearly every state is founded in blood.
However, Israel can’t just go back to locking the Palestinians in the basement and nailing the door shut. Israel has to do better.
This is a thoughtful article, and I agree with the overall thrust. But I disagree with key premises. Many people don’t use social media or just use it occasionally. This is true even in the tech industry, marketing and journalism.
The ‘Trans Boxer’ story isn’t what you think: Gender wars, Russian influence ops, and our addiction to rage bait — Unusual circumstances are great for inciting Internet rage wars, and Russia is happy to fan the flames.
📷 Some things I saw walking the dog
We had stopped for a minute for me to pick up the dog’s by-product. I heard the chickens before I saw them. and thought, “WTF is that?” The sound was simultaneously very familiar and utterly strange.
We live in an ordinary Southern California suburb, not farm country by any means. By SoCal standards, we live in the city. I have heard people keep chickens around here, but have not encountered it in person for 15 years or so.
When you see an El Camino, you are required to photograph it and share the photo. Those are the rules.
“I lost my routine, community and, in a way, my purpose.”
“Why I was gone.” Andrea Lopez-Villafaña, managing editor, daily news, for the Voice of San Diego, is a DREAMer. Brought to the United States as a small child by her parents, she qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2013. DACA requires her to re-apply for the right to work in the US every two years. But the federal government was slow to process applications and in June she was forced to take an unpaid leave of absence from work, returning recently.
I missed her voice on the Voice of San Diego weekly podcast, and was glad when she came back.
People who’ve lived their whole lives in the US should have an easy path to citizenship and not have to suffer this ridiculous bureaucracy
Dave linked to this series of posts on Threads and said it’s “a tutorial on why the social web is so useless.” Yep.
Whether it’s Kamala Harris helping to raise other people’s children or Donald Trump going to Epstein Island to have sex with other people’s children, both candidates have made a lifelong impact on other people’s children.
Microsoft is reportedly merging the chat and text channels bits of Teams into a single interface, which would remove a pebble from my shoe.
I tried Stage Manager on the Mac yesterday and loved it instantly, which is surprising because I've tried it a couple of times in the past and hated it instantly.
This time, however, I’m using Stage Manager on my new 34" Dell Ultrawide display, which I received last week, rather than my ancient 14-year-old 27" Apple Cinema Display.
I like to have one app open on my desktop at a time, not a clutter of windows. With the Apple Cinema Display, that was simple: maximize the app. But that result is far too wide on the Dell.
Stage Manager lets me have one app centered on half-width and everything else tucked off to the side, for easy access. Plus I can have two or more apps sharing a screen (Apple calls them “spaces”), which suits me when I have a document in one app and I’m taking notes on that document in another app.
Spaces, which is older technology, is very similar. I’ve hated it in the past, but maybe I should give it a try again. Maybe I would like it, too.
Just thinking about how different the scene between Marty McFly and his mom would be if George RR Martin had written Back to the Future.
I laid my phone down on a window ledge barely wider than the phone and instantly thought, “Bad idea. If there’s an earthquake, the phone will get knocked to the floor and might be damaged.”
I have gone native.
Welcome to the shitpost election, by Casey Newton:
… sharing weaponized misinformation in the form of lazy jokes has quickly come to define the developing presidential campaign between Harris and Donald Trump. Across social networks, Democrats and Republicans are flooding the feed with obviously untrue statements about one another and calling it a joke.
I normally eschew both-siderism but Casey Newton may be right on this one. Certainly, Democrats jumped gleefully on couch jokes.
I am using a Microsoft Teams recording and transcription to take interview notes. It’s the first time I’ve used Teams for that, and it requires me to stare at my own ugly face while reviewing the recording much slower than in real time.
This is excruciatingly painful. I am a slack-jawed baboon.
Sonya Massey’s mother called 911 and asked police not to hurt daughter before shooting death. “Donna Massey told a dispatcher: ‘Please don’t send no combative policemen that are prejudiced.’” Heartbreaking.
A conspicuously dressed-down shooter won Olympic silver. Then he went viral.
Rachel Treisman at KPBS.org: While other Olympic shooters showed up wearing “cyberpunk-looking gear … large ear protectors, visors and sci fi-esque shooting glasses, [Turkey’s Yusuf Didek] played it a different kind of cool with regular eyeglasses and barely visible ear plugs.” He wore “a jersey that looked like an ordinary T-shirt, and [shot] with his free hand tucked in his pants pocket,” giving off “a noticeably casual vibe. So casual, in fact, that scores of social media users jokingly wondered whether Turkey had sent a hitman to the Olympics.”
Perry's Cafe, a San Diego landmark for 39 years, will close
I’ve seen this place, with its vintage space-age Googie architecture, from the highway near Old Town often. I’ve never been inside, though I’ve always meant to. Inside, it’s a classic diner of a type that seems to be a dying breed — my favorite kind of restaurant. RIP.
According to Roxana Popescu at the San Diego Union-Tribune, Perry’s will be replaced by a 223-unit residential complex, preserving some of the original building.
Former San Diego Democratic Party chair Will Rodriguez-Kennedy announced his exoneration from a sexual assault accusation. He stepped down when the accusation surfaced two years ago. His successor was killed in a motor vehicle accident recently.