I recognize that this probably qualifies as “picking holes” as he said, but his questioning of Hamas seems to be more of a rhetorical device than a sincere request for information. It’s not like things had been good in Palestine before the October 7 attack, so questioning why they did it sort of implies that it was out of the blue and not in response to decades of failed attempts to peacefully end settlement expansion and violence against Palestinians. And while acknowledging the horrors that Israel is raining down on them, is it not obvious why Hamas would still have hostages? The hostages are their only bargaining chip, and without the hostages, Palestine would’ve already been wiped off the map.

I’ve been a Radiohead fan for a long time, and I’ll continue to be, but this was an unexpectedly neoliberal take to criticize both sides and yearn for going back to how things used to be, completely ignoring that how things used to be is how we got here. That’s how time works.

I think of this quote from JFK pretty often, and it just refuses to stop being relevant, and apparently more people need to hear it. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” That’s the reason for the attack. The reason for having hostages is “to cling onto hope for survival against an otherwise guaranteed complete genocide.” They’re holding on and hoping that the world that is watching actually does something to help them, and we just aren’t.

I wasn’t really thinking of covid. Biden made sure we got free test kits mailed to us when they were impossible to find, but yeah otherwise he just kept on course. Covid vaccines were maybe the one thing that I agreed with trump on. And he could’ve sailed to reelection if he had just let the experts talk to the people instead of sowing doubt about masks and lockdowns. If he had just sold red masks that said “trump 2020” on them, he would’ve won reelection while lining his pockets.

Biden’s first half achievements that I was referring to were things like the infrastructure bill and the chips act. Inflation cooled, shit got fixed, manufacturing started coming back, and we started investing in a greener path forward. He should’ve communicated those accomplishments much better because most people don’t really get a glimpse beyond what catches their attention in everyday life. Like egg prices. But there’s a very good reason that egg prices rose, and it has very little to do with Biden and everything to do with bird flu, culling, and supply & demand; reduce your egg use for 6-12 months and the prices will come back down.

The same strategy will not be so effective in the incoming crisis due to tariffs, mostly because trump is such a stubborn dipshit that I’m not sure he’ll ever fully walk it back. He always chickens out of the high rate shit (probably mostly as a pump and dump scheme) but he’ll never admit that he was wrong about what tariffs are and what they do when deployed the way he insisted on doing them. His whole thing is pretending to be brilliant at business, but he doesn’t know basic shit that most people know before even enrolling in econ 101, so that’s pretty damning for the knowledge of the tens of millions of people he managed to trick into believing that he’s even remotely passable at business. His multiple bankruptcies are evidence of either incompetence or maliciously fraudulent looting, and the latter is only really necessary if you’re so bad at business that you have to cheat to get ahead despite the monumental inheritance left to you.

Sorry for the wall of text lol.

I would say that Biden did better than I had expected in the first half of his term and then more or less coasted off of that momentum through the second half. The probable dementia can’t be ignored, but even without that he should’ve been doing more. He mostly stabilized shit, which is what a status-quo neolib is supposed to do, and he even expanded equitability and built framework for a better tomorrow, but he was I guess too humble to brag about it? He should’ve been holding up graphs every week and told the people “this is an improvement, and you may not be fully feeling it yet, but you will over time. I’ve expedited relief to get to you faster, but that means it’s on the scale of years instead of decades. The downside of bureaucracy and democracy and proper checks and balances is that solutions can take time, but that’s also a benefit in that any would-be malevolent authoritarian couldn’t break everything overnight. Just hold on. We’ve stopped the bleeding, and now the healing takes a little time.”

Instead, we got bounced from our hospital bed and immediately started picking at the scabs with a rusty knife. We’re fucked. Tariffs? What a fucking moron. We’ll be referring to turned-out pockets as trump flags by the end of the decade.

They mean more “bored of life” than “bored in the moment”.

Used habitually, it can be a pacifying kind of drug. You’re unhappy with things, so you get stoned to get a little escape. If you didn’t have the out of that little escape, you might be more inclined to make choices and put in the work to make lasting changes.

On the other side, shrooms makes you uncomfortably confront the shit that you don’t like about yourself and neural pathways get a chance to reroute, so you can kinda give yourself the kick in your ass you need to see the problem and make changes.