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The trains ran. The meals came. The compromises began.
An Associated Press article posted Monday on Daily Kos reports on the Iran strikes on US military bases in the Middle East. It also reports on Iran strikes on Israel and Israel strikes on Iran. I’m definitely not keeping up with this story. I’m beginning to think I shouldn’t try.
Alex Samuels of Kos wrote Democrats are trolling the nasty guy by staging a Pride concert at The Kennedy Center, which the nasty guy controls. He may control it but members of Congress have a privilege of renting space there.
So even though the nasty guy has ignored pride, has attacked LGBTQ people – especially trans people, and many of the staff of The Kennedy Center quit when he took over, the venue will have a bunch of gay people on its stage, a bit of “guerrilla theatre.”
Samuels’ article does not give a date for the program, who will be performing (the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington is mentioned), and who will be attending.
June 26 was the tenth anniversary of the Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage across the country. I’ve heard a couple tributes on NPR, including one on Michigan Public’s Stateside program. A Michigan couple brought one of the three suits that were combined when the case went before the Supreme Court.
That suit, DeBoer v. Snyder, started as a case trying to overturn the ban on LGBTQ people adopting children. April DeBoer and Jane Rowse both wanted the other to adopt their children, to give all the children two parents. The judge in the case said a few time he thought they should refile the case not to overturn the ban on adoption but to overturn the ban on marriage. That message took a while to sink in.
Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a chart showing the percent of Americans who think same-sex marriage should be valid. Back in 1996 less than 35% of Democrats and about 17% of Republicans supported same-sex marriage. The peak support by Republicans was about 2021 when it was 55%. Support has now dropped to 41%.
Peak support by Democrats is now, with 88% in support. For America as a whole peak support was in 2023 at 71% and is now at 68%.
We’ve made a lot of progress in acceptance in the last 30 years. But this right could be pulled way too easily.
For a bit of fun scroll up from the marriage acceptance chart for a Brief Sanity Break showing an unusual game of chess.
Also to mark the tenth anniversary an Associated Press article posted on Kos discussed how views on same-sex marriage have changed over the decades. Back in 1988, less than 40 years ago, only about ten percent of US adults agreed that gay couples should have the right to marry and about 70% disagreed. At the time the that was the same for both Democrats and Republicans.
In 1996 – the year of the Defense of Marriage Act – 27% of US adults said same-sex marriages should be recognized in law. At that time Democrats were nearly twice as likely as Republicans to agree.
In 2004 Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage and Bush II campaigned on a constitutional amendment to ban it. About 40% of US adults supported same-sex marriage, including about half of Democrats and 22% of Republicans.
In 2015, when the Supremes legalized same-sex marriage, about 75% of Democrats were in favor while only about 33% of Republicans were.
The chart mentioned above shows over the last three years Republican support has fallen from 55% to 41%, the steepest multi-year fall. Democratic support has continued to rise.
An important point is that Republicans under 50 are about 60% in favor of same-sex marriage while just 36% of those over 50 are in favor. The Republican numbers will improve.
I had mentioned that Zohran Mamdani has won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Mamdani was born in Uganda and is now a US citizen. Alix Breeden of Kos wrote about a particular reaction to his win.
That reaction is from Republicans who are saying he is supported by terrorists and will work to destabilize or civilization. Electing him will be cultural suicide. That is coupled with the message that he can’t win, so he doesn’t deserve a place on the ballot. And don’t waste your vote on him. Yeah, the usual false accusations.
What Mamdani might do is try to nudge the city a bit out of being controlled by the rich. That is the only part of civilization he might destabilize.
In Thursday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitow Kev quoted Robert McCoy of The New Republic:
MAGA Republican groups are calling for the deportation of New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.
On Wednesday, the day after the 33-year-old democratic socialist handily secured his party’s nomination, the New York Young Republican Club, or NYYRC, took to X, begging Trump immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to revoke Mamdani’s U.S. citizenship and deport him.
In the comments is a tweet from Captain Fanta. It shows a storefront in southern California displaying piñatas that look like ICE agents.
A tweet from Bea shows two images, one labeled domestic terrorist, the other labeled ICE agent. The image labels every component of their outfits. The only difference is the gun. The easy conclusion is that the ICE agent is a terrorist. But that’s not Bea’s only conclusion:
w/the exception of the firearm, one can buy EVERY SINGLE item on this list from amazon. yes, even the zip tie cuffs.
no gov't id and/or signed judicial warrant after 2 asks? call 911.
-masked man = kidnapper/human trafficker
-no plates = stolen vehicle
-approaching ppl w/a gun = mass shooter
A cartoon posted by Toonerman shows the nasty guy and the dog that serves as Toonerman’s voice of truth.
Nasty guy: Israel and Iran are trying to make a liar out of me.
Voice of truth: Like he needs any help being a liar.
There is one more quote of interest, though interesting enough I went for the full article. It is by Colin of The One Percent Rule on Substack. He wrote about Germans during the Nazi years and how that relates to today. His academic specialty was psychology of business ethics.
Somewhere along the way he started researching cognitive warfare. He read many books about ordinary people in WWII. The books had in common the intention to take away people’s ability to think for themselves. Today we have declining literacy and the ability to think critically.
Many of the atrocities were enabled by ordinary people who failed to think critically about the consequences of what they did. This isn’t an excuse. It’s a way of saying evil can come from thoughtlessness, indifference, and not exercising moral judgment.
One book Colin read was Defying Hitler a memoir by Sebastian Haffner. To know when democracy dies watch your neighbor. Or yourself for when you stop asking questions and just nod along. Wrote Colin of the book:
His memoir, despite its title, begins not with Hitler, not with a rousing speech or a climactic battle, but with a duel: one private individual, face-to-face with a state demanding his thoughts, his gestures, his time, his soul. It is not a battle of equals. The outcome seems inevitable. Yet Haffner offers us a disturbing truth: the erosion of freedom does not come by force alone. It comes by consent, by inertia, by a quiet willingness to go along.
Another book is They Thought They were Free by Milton Mayer. That book describes the author’s Nazi friends. They had ordinary jobs – bakers, clerks – and helped neighbors. They were the little people. Their seduction was practical “The trains ran. The meals came. The compromises began.”
Haffner noted that to the German boys that grew up during WWI war was thrilling. It was also national grooming. By the time they found war appalling they could no longer dissent.
Mayer noted none of his Nazi friends felt responsible. They hadn’t chosen evil. But they hadn’t chosen. Each step was so small none saw the overall pattern.
The first warning: Propaganda isn’t just the lies of the powerful. It’s also in children’s games and songs and the silence of the adults.
The second warning: Authoritarianism isn’t just hate. It is also habit and custom. People join because it is easier, because resistance is exhausting, especially when one is alone.
The third warning: Keep thinking, even when others have stopped.
People also join because of the comradeship. That relieves the individual from responsibility for their actions. The crowd hugs while it corrodes. The ordinary man will rationalize, adapt, and submit.
Mayer found institutions, such as churches, schools, and police, weren’t taken by force. They offered themselves up. The individual didn’t had institutional protection.
We don’t want to disagree with the crowd and risk exile. The internet has only made the crowd larger and more inescapable. Fascism arrives with a slight compromise, a fear of speaking out.
Are you willing to continue to question things? How much discomfort are you wiling to endure? The crowd is always waiting.
Colin recommended reading through the Wikipedia article on “Strength through Joy.” I didn’t read it, but did scan it. This was a Nazi program to offer leisure activities to the masses that were previously only available to the privileged. It included sports, adult education, and cultural events. Though my scan and keeping Colin’s article in mind I could see one of its goals was to embed the ordinary person into the crowd, where dissent was much harder.
I sometimes listen to the program Today Explained put out by Vox. I hear it on the NPR affiliate Michigan Public. Thursday’s episode was about the Israel/Hamas war and war crimes. I haven’t written about this war in a long time. In the first half of the program, about 12 minutes, host Noel King talked to Suzy Hansen, who has written about International Humanitarian Law after WWII. I am working from the transcript.
The IHL says that when a country wages war there are things they can’t do. Those things are labeled war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. We also built courts to prosecute crimes of war.
People generally agree that the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was a war crime. There is less agreement whether it was an act of genocide.
On the Israeli side, withholding food and water, cutting of electricity and fuel, bombing to damage hospitals and cultural sites, and the high civilian death toll are all war crimes.
Experts ask whether the attacks are proportional to the military aims. The civilian death toll and the tolerance for it is much higher than the norms of international law.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants to three Hamas leaders and two Israeli leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu. But warrants are different from arrests, which haven’t happened.
The war continues because when resolutions come up in the United Nations Security Council the US vetoes them. Also, even though the US State Department knew Israel was depriving Gaza of food, the US continued sending weapons to Israel.
In the second half of the program, about the same length, King spoke with Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies at Brown University. He is also Israeli and Jewish.
Bartov said there are two parts to the UN’s definition of genocide. One, is there an intent to destroy a group as a group. Two, is that intent being implemented. Bartov said that he saw evidence as undeniable in early May 2024. That’s when he realized a pattern to what the Israeli Defense Force was doing. They would tell the Gazans they had to leave a particular area. In May 2024 this was Rafah and about a million Gazans were there. Once they moved the area where they had been was bombed and flattened. Israeli leaders say they have to wipe out Gaza. The actions show a systematic destruction, including schools, museums, and hospitals. These are the things that allow a group to reconstitute itself. Bartov recognized the goal was to destroy the ability of Palestinians to live as a group in Gaza.
Bartov also noted the children in Gaza have the largest percent of child amputees in the world. They haven’t received enough food and live in atrocious conditions. They are traumatized and will never be normal and healthy.
The “G” word is not mentioned in Israel. The country was created as a refuge for the victims of the largest genocide, the Holocaust. The idea that the country created because of genocide is committing genocide cannot be grasped and accepted. But Israel is also saying there is no other way to destroy Hamas without major damage to the population because they use the people as human shields. Hamas cannot release the hostages because that is the only thing keeping the IDF from finishing off Gaza.
The plan Israel is now putting out there is to squeeze the population of Gaza into 25% of its territory and destroy and empty the rest of the strip. Gaza isn’t all that big and a quarter of that is tiny. There is now no infrastructure in that small space and the population is two million. That will not work and shows the intention of genocide.
I went looking for size comparison and found one by Newsweek that overlaid Gaza on a few American cities. Gaza is 141 square miles. I think Detroit (without suburbs) is 134 and Gaza holds more people that Detroit ever did.
Israel has said since its founding that because the world stood by during the Holocaust the world cannot tell the Israelis what to do. That claim has now run out.
The world has international bodies that are supposed to prevent genocide. Those bodies were created at a time when strong states could do what they wanted with weaker neighbors. Those bodies aren’t working anymore. But the world still has a responsibility to stop these actions or we will return to that former era.
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