catonkatonk [none/use name]

It was a better outcome that was expected. Labour’s vote share is weak. Keir’s vote share in his own constituency halved. He’s become the least popular opposition leader to ever win by any metric. The lowest turnout in, like, a hundred years despite this nominally being a regime change election shows a lack of belief and enthusiasm for the current system. Greens did historically well. Independents from the left did historically well. Not just the ones that won, but the ones that came strong second. Many of Labour’s seats were won on a knife edge. It was not a resounding victory of the kind Blair won, which imo was the worst case scenario. Yes, FPTP means none of that technically matters. But also, it does, because many of Labour’s MPs know they’re on thin ice if they want to win again.

The predicted outcome was a license for absolute red tory arrogance. Wes Streeting was gleefully rubbing his hands at the prospect of selling off the NHS, but maybe winning by only 500 votes will make him think more carefully about that. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe he doesn’t care about being re-elected because he’ll have a gravy train waiting at the station when he leaves.

But I still think there’s something worth celebrating, because despite the compliant media, despite the total Conservative collapse, Labour barely got a better share than they did in 2019 and a significantly worse share than they did in 2017. There is an appetite for left politics, it is a spectre that is haunting the UK. It’s not going to be sated by elections and establishment politics, I’m not under any illusion about that. But the poor turnout indicates that nobody else is either, which is significant. The desire is there, the disillusionment with the current system is there, the results show it.

The danger was always that Farage would be the main beneficiary of this failing system, but this election indicates to me that there is absolutely an opening for the left to win people over.

Feel like pure shit.

I think there is probably some Hazing rituals that IDF members go through where they are made to do horrible things to Palestinians

Actually I do remember reading something about this from someone who had served in the IDF. I can’t remember the source and my memory isn’t great, so keep that in mind, but they said something like, in the early days of their service, recruits were made to go into the West Bank and arrest some random Palestinian. They’d let them go eventually, but the point was to march into someone’s house and parade them in front of their neighbours before driving off with them.

There was an interview from within the entity that had a portion deleted that has stuck with me since I first read it:

“The genre of the dancing soldiers may seem amazing to us Israelis as a nation. It’s fun. It’s great for morale, but it doesn’t look good in any other context. And that’s exactly the thing - this association: the soldiers are not private individuals. The world does not look at a reservist in Gaza as a neighbor from my building, and the soldiers are not ‘all our children’. In the eyes of the world, soldiers represent an army. On the other hand, think about all the TikToks that come out of Gaza - there is no tendency to point to them and say ‘this is all Hamas propaganda’. A separation is made there between the citizens of Gaza and Hamas. But in the Israeli experience, we don’t distinguish ourselves in this way. Our society is militaristic, for us militarism is great, it’s part of who we are, but in foreign eyes it is not perceived positively.”

The wolves are self-aware.

At the same time, it struck me as deeply strange that the question would even need to be asked. Many Israelis come from other parts of the world where they would be not have been raised in that specific Starship Troopers-esque society*. And yet they acclimatise to such a degree that they kind of forget how genocidal glee looks like to the outside world. It’s bizarre.

*Yes, yes, I know, but there’s degrees to it. When Americans saw Abu Ghraib, it was not the majority position that the soldiers should have been even crueller.

I can’t get a read on Boric. Very confusing individual. Can any kind comrades tell me what he’s all about.

The immensely frustrating thing about him is that he would be the perfect politician for the moment if it wasn’t… for those things. We need someone on the left who not only doesn’t give a fuck about lib sensitivities, but actually goes out of their way to point out that libs are disgusting, immoral, shameless and violent. That libs have lost all moral and pragmatic credibility, and have no business policing the respectability of anyone else. Exactly the way Galloway does. Instead all we get from most of our left politicians is varying degrees of cowardice, timidity, and deference to a machine that has no intention of allowing the left to succeed. But Galloway is throwing some of the most marginalised and vulnerable people in this country under the fucking bus to get approval from a bunch of red-faced fucks. He doesn’t even need to do it!

The report will limit itself to the events of October the 7th.

Have a horrible feeling they’ll throw out the whole case on a technicality. Anxiety through the roof, I can’t watch.