Dude I am 100% on your side on all of that. If anything I was saying sounded like I was saying rape didn't happen, that wasn't the intent. Just factual nitpicks about details of what the report itself did and didn't conclude.
I don't at all disagree with your main conclusions, but some factual nitpicks:
The UN didn't claim there was photo or video of rape actually happening. The whole thing is sort of a red herring, an artful construction to ask a different question other than "was there rape?" in order that the answer can be no.
UN report on Sexual violence during the October 7th attack
UN report on war crimes in general during the conflict, of which sexual violence by both Hamas and the IDF forms a part
A lot of the UN's reports actually don't weigh in on the question of whether the rape that was committed on October 7th was done by Hamas fighters or by an associated body of Palestinians that accompanied them. In a lot of cases there was no way to tell what the affiliation of the man involved in any given instance was, although he was obviously part of the general body of the attack, and so they simply stuck to saying, rape happened.
Like I say, no real disagreement with your main point, just some nitpicks. Linkerbaan has for whatever reason picked the one pro Palestinian thing he could go to bat for that makes him look like the monster, and where the actual evidence makes the Palestinian side into the bad guys. It's weird. There is not a shortage of things to bring up that make the Israelis the bad guys.
I for real thought this was a programming post at first, about the supervillain software company, and thought oh shit oh fuck why do people have palantir packages installed what did I miss
For those not in the know, there was a select group of restaurant employees who used to be able to tell when some shit was going down geopolitically because all the takeout places near the White House would get this big flood of orders for the people in various US government buildings working late. It would often precede sudden big shit happenings (e.g. us invading places) that were otherwise unexpected.
Idk if they have fixed the information leakage or if it’s still that way but apparently it used to be very reliable and notable to the people working in the restaurants.
Part of the activist left is absolutely voting for Biden; anyone who’s been working for progress in this country and actively working and experiencing success and failure and the hard work that goes with it would I think easily able to see that letting Trump come to power would be such a severe and wide ranging setback to so many of the things they’ve been working for, and the action of just showing up one morning is so trivial in comparison to a lot of the other things they have to do for years to even move the needle by a tiny amount’s worth of difference, that it’s a no brainer.
I think there’s a significant grouping, also, that’s so horrified by his enabling of a genocide that they don’t plan to vote for him. But, their main focus right now is on putting pressure on the Democrats to stop their support for Israel (with apparently a certain small amount of success), and on direct action against the war, not really specifically anything focused on the general election except for a general feeling of disgust at the Democrats.
Depending on what you mean by “hard left,” you may or may not mean those groupings, and may instead mean some other people on the internet who are super vocal (and often seem weirdly fixated on criticizing Biden for a variety of reasons honest or dishonest, not just the war, and on the vital importance of people not voting for him, much more so than other left activist things that they seem not to be as interested in.)
They're not being silenced or anywhere close to it. The prosecutors asked the judge to order the defendant to stop talking to them about some aspects of the case, I guess because they don't want anything that might build any sympathy for the guy they're prosecuting, and the judge (apparently, from all appearances, since they wrote the story and seem to still be talking to the guy uninterrupted) said no.
And then the guy wrote a story like "hey it seems like every single action these prosecutors are taking is like they want to put him in prison, what the fuck is that, that's not balanced."
FWIW it's not a paywall; they just want your email address
I think Rove is wrong. He's like Carville -- he used to be a legendary master because he absorbed the shape of the landscape, but then he solidified, and he thinks it's still 2004 and always will be, and that nothing's changed since then.
Trump's base wants to start a civil war with the Democrats. If Trump wants to win, he needs to sound like an angry crazy person. It's when he tries to be normal that it all goes sour for him. That has no spice to inspire the electorate, and it doesn't suit him and he doesn't do a good job with it anyway, and all the people who were looking for a sensible leader have long since left the GOP's tent.
It has yet to pass the Senate, and Biden said he would veto it.
Of course, Biden is still swearing to everyone that he is still sending shipments except for the one that he paused because of Rafah, and that he plans to keep doing it. And, his administration conducted an investigation which somehow managed to conclude that they "may have" been committing war crimes but that it's not clear enough that we would have to stop shipping them weapons or anything which we would be legally obligated to do if they "conclusively" were doing anything criminal.
Fuckin assholes
In general, they get grants of cash from the US which they are required to use to "purchase" from US suppliers more or less any weapons (with few export restrictions). We're giving them weapons but they still get to pick out what they think they need. This is a pretty good overview which seems like it's mainly missing:
What's with the all caps
If the Biden administration is serious about protecting press freedoms, officials from Washington might want to have a stern talk with federal prosecutors in Detroit.
Biden's officials absolutely should not have a stern talk with prosecutors from anywhere; the DOJ's day to day business is totally separate from being dictated by any political official for very good reasons.
If you told me the FBI and federal prosecutors were overreaching and being wildly way too aggressive, I'd agree with you, but that has not a lot to do with Biden and it bloody well should stay that way.
Even that being said, I don't see all that much in this other than them aggressively investigating and prosecuting. That's their job. There's all this stuff like:
When Naser returned to the U.S. from the trip, he found himself subjected to intense FBI questioning and surveillance. And he wasn’t alone. Dennison was an unwitting pawn for the FBI. Anyone who communicated with him became a target.
In April 2023, federal prosecutors complained in a court filing that Naser “gleefully shared information” with me. My calls with Naser became a central focus of a hearing in June 2023, during which prosecutors admitted that the protective order did not prohibit Naser from talking to me about the evidence in his case.
“He did not improperly distribute this information,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Dmitriy Slavin in the June 2023 hearing. “Because information that is general discovery which is still concerning this case, there’s no limit on him sharing that information with the media, and he has made it his mission to share that information with the media.”
So basically, they asked him questions and served him with search warrants, and then they charged him with a crime. When he talked to journalists, the prosecution asked the judge to make him stop (and from the fact that he didn't stop, it kind of sounds like the judge told them no.)
And, while doing so, they cooperated with local law enforcement to do their investigation, which they had some ability to do because the guy pepper-sprayed his boss and took money (which he "believed he was owed") from the cash register.
I am sure that it is not fun being questioned by the FBI or charged with a federal crime, but this guy's using all this language like "Prosecutors appear to have subjected me to this attack" (their court filings). I mean it's their job to attack the defendant. And then it's the defendant's job to defend themselves (which is often an unfair battle if you're in a foreign country and the full weight of the federal government is trying to fuck you over). The prosecution doesn't get to decide if you go to prison; that's the judge's job to sort out with the prosecution doing their best to attack you. I get that it's an unfair process that needs reform but I don't see what is so outlandish about them in this case doing a prosecution of the guy they're trying to prosecute.
AI isn't yet slurping any significantly obscene amount of power from the grid, although as it gets more ubiquitous that will surely change. The individual data centers are massive things but they are outnumbered by orders of magnitude by all the rest of it
The big villain in senseless datacenter power usage is cryptocurrency
Plus most of the rest of it, of course, acres of racks burning through the world's resources to run the world's ten millionth pink slime news factory or Youtube click fakery cluster, or whatever
But AI isn't yet adding its useless weight to the groaning pile in any significant way