Linkage

Things Katy is reading.

by Chris Hedges in The Chris Hedges Report  

Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis”.

Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?

by Caitlin Johnstone in Caitlin’s Newsletter  

It’s okay to admit you were wrong about this. It’s okay to change your mind.

It’s okay to admit you reacted inappropriately to the news of what happened on October 7 and advocated some Israeli responses that you should not have advocated.

It’s okay to admit that you were wrong to cheer when the bombs started landing on Gaza.

It’s okay to admit you were wrong about the longstanding debate over Palestinian rights.

It’s okay to admit that you shared some things online that you now regret sharing.

I say this because there are probably a lot of pro-Israel people looking at what’s happening in Gaza and starting to feel a bit dissonant about it. Like maybe they’re on the wrong side of this thing after all.

And I just want to reassure you that you can change your position on this. It’s perfectly fine and normal to do so.

in Business Insider  

In January 2020 the median home price was $266,300, according to the National Association of Realtors. It's now $406,700 as of July – a 52% increase.

The White House hopes the initiative will alleviate both these problems, creating more housing and revitalizing the commercial real estate sector.

"This presents an area of opportunity to both increase housing supply while revitalizing main streets. It's a win-win," Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, told ABC News.

Conversions are faster than new construction, 20% cheaper, and produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, the White House added.

via SmokeInFog
in World Socialist Web Site  

On the weekend of October 14-15, the state Labor government in New South Wales threatened to ban a pro-Palestinian protest in Sydney, on the grounds that it could result in incidents of violence and hate crimes. A demonstration opposing the bombardment of Gaza in Melbourne was also met by a massive police presence.

Actual Nazis, walking through Melbourne like stormtroopers and hunting for Jewish people, received a tiny fraction of the negative media coverage that the mass peaceful Palestinian protests did. This glaring disparity only underscores that the official campaign over anti-Semitism is a conscious fraud. The media is cynically using the accusation against people it knows are not hostile to Jews, while largely responding with indifference to those who are actual anti-Semites.

via Michael
in The Guardian  

As governments across Australia urgently seek solutions to the housing crisis, a number of councillors, housing groups and urban planners have raised concerns we might be sacrificing living standards and at risk of creating new urban slums.

via Peter Riley
in The Breach  

The Fairbnb Co-op, which began in Europe in 2014, soft-launched a Canadian platform on Wednesday. It doesn’t have any listings yet, but once a critical number of hosts have signed up, the platform will officially launch in South Georgian Bay, Ont.

In many ways, FairBnb serves an identical function to its namesake. But it will be different from Airbnb in two important ways.

First, hosts must prove that the property is their principal residence, cutting out the estimated 50 per cent of hosts on Airbnb who manage multiple listings. And 50 per cent of the platform’s service fees go into developing community land trusts (CLTs), which are non-profit corporations that own land and use it to benefit their communities.

via LM Little

Inside Airbnb is a mission driven project that provides data and advocacy about Airbnb's impact on residential communities.

We work towards a vision where communities are empowered with data and information to understand, decide and control the role of renting residential homes to tourists.

in The Guardian  

A surge in people being forced to live in bed and breakfasts and other temporary homes in England is costing the taxpayer £1.7bn a year, “shameful” council data analysed by the Local Government Association has revealed.

The worsening shortage of social housing and increasingly unaffordable private rents are among reasons councils are now paying for 104,000 households to live in temporary accommodation – more than at any time in the past 25 years.

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The LGA, the councils’ umbrella group, is demanding the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, use his coming autumn budget statement to increase housing benefit to make more private rented homes affordable to people on welfare, and to reform housing rules to allow councils to build more social housing.

“Council budgets are being squeezed and the chronic shortage of suitable housing across the country means that councils are increasingly having to turn to alternative options for accommodation at a significant cost,” said Darren Rodwell, the leader of the London borough of Barking and Dagenham and the LGA’s housing spokesperson. “Councils need to be given the powers and resources to build enough social homes for their residents so they can create a more prosperous place to live, with healthier and happier communities.”

via Michael
by Samuel L. Perry in Time  

It is practically first principles in the study of group identity that when we identify with a sports team, religious group, or political party, our self-esteem is bound up with that group. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt has famously shown, our group allegiances take on a deeply moral element. We naturally tend to associate our group and its values with moral goodness and our competition with moral depravity.

For Republicans (and Democrats), admitting that fascists and Nazis are on their side of the ideological spectrum—that they have any overlapping worldviews, values, or tactics with “us”—is a tribal psychology no-no. Fascists and Nazis, the exemplars of political evil, must share space with our partisan opponents. It works like a syllogism. Leftists are the bad guys. Fascists and Nazis are also bad guys. So fascists and Nazis are leftists.

by Alfie Kohn 

Consider Republican governor and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s lament, posted on social media in June 2023, as she made a play for Trump supporters: “Do you remember when you were growing up
how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country.” The operative phrase here is “when you were growing up” — that is, when you were a child and therefore likely to be less aware of, or at least bothered by, disturbing news stories, complicated events, and hidden dangers. To claim that life itself is less simple and easy today is to confuse a life-cycle effect (what is true of people at a certain age) with a period effect (what is true of everyone at a certain point in history).