frandroid

Alright now I'm procrastinating at work, so let's see...

The Agenda with Steve Paikin - Still Plenty of Strange New Worlds for Star Trek to Explore

Fuck Steve Paikin, but Robert Picardo was in Toronto to shoot Starfleet Academy and Paikin got to interview him. Picardo is awesome, you can't really have a bad interview with him. His interview on InvestiGates was good too.


Free City Radio - Interview with Shir Hever on the call for an arms embargo on the Israeli state

Shiv Ever is an Israeli who now lives in Germany and spends a lot of his time working on the BDS campaign. In most of his interviews, he describes the negative impacts that war in Gaza has had on the Israeli economy. Let's say that it's kind of collapsing. He's full of hope for the future of Palestinians. Stuff we need to hear.


Disrupting Japan - The forgotten mistake that killed Japan’s software industry

Okay this might be the most niche I've ever gotten. Not that I was wondering why there wasn't a great software industry coming out of Japan before noticing this episode. Seriously though, it was such a behemoth of technology in the post-war era until 2000 (i.e. until networks and software started to matter more than hardware) that being told that its software industry is shit made me ponder. (I knew that the PS/2 or /3 was insane to develop for, and contributed to the XBox taking part of its market share because Microsoft had a developer-friendly platform that PC Developers already knew well... But I digress)


Movement Memos - Breaking Down Sudan’s Struggle: What the World Is Missing

A good overview of the conflict in Sudan, from an always great podcast. I wanted to share American Prestige's episode but it's members-only. This one is as good, and features Toronto BLM alum Yusra Kogali.


Ideas - Why the 1976 novel Bear is still controversial — and relevant

Marian Engel's 1976 ursosexual novel Bear was not a joke but a real literary work, and you may ignore it at your own peril.


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The Hundred Years [sic] War of Palestine: I just finished the 1982 invasion of Beyrouth. Timely.

Moral of the story: Don't believe anything the Americans promise to the Palestinians.

Nostalgia: The massacres at Sabra and Shatila resulted in large protests in Israel.

Currently Reading:

The Hundred Years War on Palestine. Going more slowly than I'd like. Not that it's huge or difficult to read (though it's Chomskian in its footnotes) but I haven't made time for it. I'm surprised by how much Benny Morris it is referencing but that's where some of the scholarship is.

I have a bunch of library books I'm not reading, but now Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine has come through and there's a super long queue for the holds, so I *HAVE* to read it. So I've decided to read a chapter a day. In Chapter 2, he describes the Great Revolt of 1936-39 against the British Mandate, and the British response. It has uncanny similarities with the current war on Gaza.

Well over a hundred such sentences of execution were handed down after summary trials by military tribunals, with many more Palestinians executed on the spot by British troops.* Infuriated by rebels ambushing their convoys and blowing up their trains, the British resorted to tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of armored cars and locomotives to prevent rebel attack, a tactic they had pioneered in a futile effort to crush resistance of the Irish during their war of independence from 1919 to 1921. Demolitions of the homes of imprisoned or executed rebels, or of presumed rebels or their relatives, was routine, another tactic borrowed from the British playbook developed in Ireland. Two other imperial practices employed extensively in repressing the Palestinians were the detention of thousands without trial and the exile of troublesome leaders.

* For a chilling account of arbitrary summary executions of Palestinians by mixed units of British soldiers and Zionist militiamen under the command of Orde Wingate see Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 429-32. Wingate comes off as a murderous psychopath in Segev’s account; he adds that some of his men privately considered him to be mad. The Israeli Ministry of Defense later said of him: "The teaching of Orde Charles Wingate, his character and leadership were a cornerstone for many of the Haganah’s commanders, and his influence can be seen in the Israel Defense Force's combat doctrine"

Guys, I have so many good episodes for Podcast Friday (particularly about things other than Palestine!), but it turns out that Friday is the worst day for me to do these write-ups because that's when my procrastination bites me in the ass and I feel more urge to do my actual work rather than this, so I have a large backlog that's becoming more irrelevant as time passes. But today I'm less super-panicked about it, so here's the episode I'm currently listening to as I post, because it's pretty good.

The Dig - The German Question w/ Emily Dische-Becker

As you may know if you're following Israel/Palestine politics a little too much, Germany has turned fighting anti-semitism as a state religion but even that has been converted to Zionism along the way (with Germany providing about 30% of Israel's weapons during their current massacre on Gaza, compared to the US providing all but 1% of the rest). Denvir brought in a German anti-Zionist intellectual to discuss this question, and man it is wild. From a marked increase in Jews getting in legal trouble for criticizing Israel, recent German converts to Judaism becoming state-sponsored rabbis so they can tell who's a Good Jew and and a Bad Jew, to the anti-Deutsche movement (i.e. how some antifa white men have become staunch supporters of U.S. imperialism), to the AfD's multilayered instrumentalisation of anti-semitism, to Germans converting to Judaism already in 1948 because they thought it would give them a social advantage (!), to the leftist-Israeli and Palestinian diasporas living side by side in Berlin, to artistic censorship of other minorities, to fabricated anti-semitic mobs, to expecting Arabs migrants to identify with Nazis rather than the victims of the Holocaust, there's a lot mental backflips going on there. Dische-Becker has razor-sharp wit and lands many punches, enough that the usually cool Denvir cracks up in reaction to some the batshit crazy stuff that she reports on. Both highly entertaining and disgusting.

I've posted a two-hour-long podcast interview with Tareq Baconi a few weeks ago, describing the history of Hamas and how it came to its current political posture. I've also listened to Baconi being interviewed on a few other podcasts and TV shows, but always from a friendly perspective. This week, Baconi was interviewed by the New York Times' Ezra Klein from what I would call the liberal Zionist perspective, possibly the most insidious of all. Here Baconi shines even more. Here's a salient excerpt.

Ezra Klein:

When I try to think about what negotiations between Israel and Hamas would look like, this kind of sits at the center of it for me. Israel’s view is that Hamas will not accept the existence of a state that is majority Jewish, right, a state that is built on that line. And it sounds a little bit to me like you’re saying that however you describe that, that is also Hamas’s view. And so there is a kind of ineluctable conflict here.

And I think sometimes about what this might look like 100 years in the future, if you imagine in an optimistic world that something happened and there was a negotiated settlement, and you had two states living alongside each other and those states had lived in peace for some time, and you could imagine immigration opening up between them and so on. But that’s not where we are.

We are in a place where there has been mass butchery of Israeli civilians by Hamas, mass bombing and killing of Palestinian civilians by Israel. There have been decades-long history of suicide bombings of Israeli children and buses and elders, decades-long bulldozing and sniping and shooting of Palestinian lives.

These are not peoples who feel safe next to each other. So the idea that there’s going to be free movement between them, it doesn’t feel realistic. I mean, people want to live in security first.

And if you’re going to accept that Israel is not going to do anything that it feels compromises its security, and Hamas has given it every reason to believe that its security would be compromised by Hamas having more permeability into its borders, I guess I don’t understand how you get from there to, well, we can dismantle the Jewish state, and people will live alongside each other. I don’t understand, then, how tactics and ends match up here, because you’d have to first convince people that security is possible, and I see almost everything here as having been doing the opposite.


Tareq Baconi:

I think that’s a really important question, and it’s one that I think about often. And there’s a few things to say here. The first is that the notion of security has been limited to Israelis, that there is only an interest in Israeli security. And this has been an underpinning demand of the peace process and all forms of diplomatic negotiations.

Nowhere is the idea of Palestinian security mentioned, even though we are talking about a nuclear power and an advanced military that’s occupying a people with no state and without a military.

And when we’re talking about security, we’re only talking about Israeli security. I appreciate that’s not how you framed it. I’m saying that this is how it’s framed in the peace process and in negotiations. So that’s part of the problem, that here, we only talk about security for one set of people.

The other is that, again, the fear that the colonized people will do to the colonizer what the colonizer has done to them is not limited to Israeli fears. Whites, white Afrikaners, feared what the Black South Africans would do to them if apartheid was dismantled. And white Americans feared what would happen to them if Jim Crow was dismantled.

Yet, we had to dismantle those systems. And the idea that security could only be provided by maintaining those systems has been disproven. And if there’s anything that we can learn from Oct. 7 is that the idea that Israeli Jews can be safe while apartheid persists is shattered now. It was shattered in the most horrific and bloody way, but it was shattered.

So the idea that security can be produced by maintaining this oppressive rule over Palestinians, we can’t go back to that thinking now. And so everything you outlined is exactly the line of questioning we should be asking.

Now that we understand not only historically and in other contexts, but specifically in Palestine Israel, that there can be no security while apartheid persists, what are the alternatives? And I don’t think we’ve even begun asking those questions.

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Seriously, the whole interview is like this. Ezra Klein shooting hellfire missiles from the Zionist liberal F-16 and Baconi glancing it all off like it was mere sand thrown his way, using the power of the throw against itself, like the most accomplished judoka do. I think I'll have to listen to this interview 5 times to fully absorb its brilliance. (There's a whole transcript at the linked page, if audio is not your thing.) Go to Pod.link to find your favourite podcast player's link to this episode

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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy.

CANADALAND - (Détours) - Le coût de l’expression

(Podcast in French--I'm writing in English for French context to anglos, and writing in French for English context to francos, and then I just keep going in French I guess :))

In 1968, Pierre Vallières, a noted Québecois author, published "White N----- of America", a complaint about the state of French Canadians and a foundational primer for Québec sovereignty. In the last year or two, three people with our national broadcaster (CBC/Radio-Canada), Wendy Mesley (discussing the book off the air with her producers) and two French broadcasters (on the air) mentioned the book while pronouncing the whole n-word.

Mesley s'était fait demander de ne pas utiliser le mot, mais se défendant que le livre était historique, elle l'a ré-utilisé plus tard. Certains de ses collègues se sont plaints, Mesley s'est fait enlever son poste d'animatrice lors d'un remaniement, et est finalement partie à la retraite. C'est toute une débarque pour celle qui était l'animatrice de fin de semaine du National et qu'on a longtemps pensé allait remplacer Peter Mansbridge, l'animateur-monument du National.

On the French side, two hosts used the full book title on the air to discuss the case of a University of Ottawa prof who was reprimanded for using it in class. Some people complained, which led the CRTC (comms regulator) to investigate both cases. Then the CRTC published its report, which said that CBC should issue a formal apology. This made a bunch of boomer journalist personalities in Québec publish an explosive public letter demanding that R-C appeal this report. In turn, this generated more discussion on TV, radio and newspapers of all kinds, which almost all repeated/reprinted the book's title in full, while discussing "Freedom of speech."

Dans tout ce débat, il manque les voix des personnes racisées et des journalistes plus jeunes. Émilie Nicolas, qui est chroniqueuse au Devoir, à la Gazette, contributrice chez Canadaland (une rare chroniqueuse culturelle qui traverse les deux langues et trois contextes (Québec franco et anglo, et Canada anglo)), invite Vanessa Destiné, une chroniqueuse qui est familière avec la culture interne de Radio-Canada. Deux femmes noires qui discutent du problème sous plusieurs angles intéressants, sans avoir à répondre aux questions d'interlocuteurs blancs qui sont obnubilés sur la question de la liberté d'expression, et ne pensent pas du tout aux conséquences.

Un segment particulièrement intéressant discute de la sursolicitation de certains chroniqueuses noires lors de débats sur la race, l'harcèlement auquel elles font face en ces moments, et une reconnaissance de celles qui sont "tombées au combat", qui ont dû arrêter de commenter sur ces questions dû à ce harcèlement trop intense.


Commons: Mining - The Crying of Lot 8

Canadaland's Commons podcast did a series on the Canadian mining industry, which is more or less the HQ of the global mining industry due to lax legal oversight. The last episode is a particularly good exposé of the kind of murders, rapes and other abuses committed by Canadian mining companies abroad. The episode also goes into difficult efforts and successes for activists trying to sue companies in civil courts to account for their actions.



The East is a Podcast - Dr. Salman Abu Sitta & Visualizing Palestine in Conversation (2019)

Dr. Salman Abu Sitta is the creator of the Visualizing Palestine project. Here he is on a panel being interviewed about the project, how it came about, how they go about obtaining information from multiple archives, and great insights that came about in the course of the project.


Métis In Space - Generation Energy Science Interview

Another panel recording! A scientist turned poet, an alternative energy engineer and the manager of a long horizon research organisation discuss climate change and doomsday scenarios in an indigenous context. That was fascinating.


I have lots more podcasts to feature but when it's been more than a week I've listened to them, my memory fades and I can't really write a good summary...

You'd think that the scope of the deal would be the news: Hamas convinces Israel to release 1000 prisoners in exchange for its one hostage. And yet all the headlines blare "Shalit to be released", "Israeli to go home", etc.

Obama réagit vivement aux constructions à Jérusalem-est

The time is now or never. If he lets that one go, he will never make any progress.

Pour Amjad Atallah, de la New America Foundation, «le problème est qu'il n'y pas eu, jusqu'à présent, de conséquence politique à l'attitude de défiance continuelle des Israéliens envers les positions et les intérêts américains».

Duh.

«Je l'ai répété à maintes reprises et je le répèterai encore, la sécurité d'Israël est un intérêt national crucial pour les Etats-Unis et nous nous assurerons qu'ils sont en sécurité», a-t-il dit.

You just can't start a negotiation like this.

I truly don't understand the United States' position. I mean I'm assuming good will from this administration here. Clearly Israel is satisfied with the status quo, and as it has demonstrated last year, will push further. It's clearly obstructing any kind of negotiations since it perceives all it would do would be to weaken its position. What's in it for the United States anyway? I mean I don't think Obama desires to put Palestine in a state of subservience to Israel. So what is he trying to do? What is the national interest of the United States of solving the conflict? How much is that worth? I think it's worth an enormous amount of good will. Possibly the largest goodwill gain the U.S. could make since the second World War. What's that worth, in a world of decreasing American influence? I mean I'm convinced peace would benefit greatly to Israel as well, so it's not like it's a losing proposition.

National Union's Katz reminds Emanuel he's Jewish

Katz claims that in a private meeting with the unnamed leader, Emanuel said, "In the next four years, there will be a peace agreement with the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples, and it does not matter to us who is the prime minister."

Political postering? (hat tip: richardhetu)