Seattle City Council rejects more dense affordable housing: It would be cool if nonprofits and developers could build larger and taller buildings than zoning codes allow if they had affordable housing and/or community spaces, but only bill sponsor Tammy Morales and councilmember Dan Strauss voted to make that happen. The Seattle Times reports that some new council members said the city should address zoning as part of a larger planning effort instead of passing a lone bill. Before the vote, Strauss proposed a NIMBY-friendly amendment reducing the amount of additional density the bill allowed, but most of the council even rejected that.

ICYMI: Yesterday, I reported that Northwest Film Forum is struggling and cut nearly half of its staff to offset a financial deficit. The vital resource for Seattle filmmakers is not anywhere near closing, but it is enduring a hard time for nonprofits, especially for one that screens cool movies for a relatively niche audience.

KUOW kills youth radio program, staff positions: One of Seattle’s two NPR stations announced $2 million in cuts Tuesday, scrapping its RadioActive Youth Media program, eight current positions, and the open jobs. Caryn G. Mathes, KUOW’s President and General Manager wrote in a statement that the reductions were necessary to maintain long-term financial stability. This is the first time KUOW has cut positions because of financial concerns. It’s an awful year for media layoffs!

Bruce Harrell hires firm to investigate SPD sexism: The Mayor announced Marcella Fleming Reed of MFR Associates will delve into claims of persistent sexual harassment and gender discrimination within the Seattle Police Department. Last week, four women in the department filed a $5 million tort claim alleging Chief Adrian Diaz and other department leaders discriminated against and sexually harassed them. Earlier this year, 27-year department veteran and assistant chief Deanna Nolette sued SPD and Diaz alleging gender and job discrimination. In November, a Black female detective also sued the department for 43 years of alleged gender and race discrimination. Is it just me or are you also sensing a theme…

Seattle judge gives crypto CEO light sentence: CNBC reports Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to allowing money laundering through the world’s largest crypto exchange. In November, Zhao struck a deal with the US government to resign as CEO and resolve an investigation into his company. Binance paid $4.3 billion in fines and forfeiture, while Zhao paid $50 million from his own pocket. He should be happy he got off so easy. The feds recommended a three-year sentence for Zhao and slammed his former rival Sam Bankman-Fried with 25 years for fraud and misusing customer funds.

Fish heist: Someone stole $12,500 worth of smoked salmon from Seattle Fish Guys in the Central District. Owner Sal Panelo told KING5 that one of his employees discovered the break-in over the weekend. Panelo said replenishing the stolen fish will take at least a week, and that the goods would’ve been enough to feed around 200 people.

Happy May Day! It’s a beautiful day to support your fellow workers around the world (especially in countries like Turkey where May Day celebrations have been unlawfully banned) and the weather’s nice, too. Expect a cool and dry day in the 50s. Someone at the National Weather Service in Seattle even made this cute graphic.

Florida’s 6-week abortion ban goes into effect: At six weeks, most people don’t know they’re pregnant. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a 15-week ban that was still less restrictive than neighboring states, which made the state a common access point for reproductive care in the Southeast. Last year, Florida providers performed at least 84,000 abortions. USA Today reported the new law will change that, likely sending that number tumbling and Floridians traveling to North Carolina and Virginia for abortions, if they can afford the trip.

Cops arrest more than 200 at Columbia University: The New York Times reported that 56 years to the day the New York Police Department violently cleared a student occupation motivated by the Vietnam War and University plans to expand into Harlem, cops arrested 230 Pro-Palestine demonstrators that had taken control of the Hamilton Hall building. In a letter to police, University President Nemat Shafik has asked the NYPD to stay on campus until graduation on May 17.

Brown will vote to divest from Israel: Student protesters at Brown University struck a deal with University administrators Tuesday afternoon, reports The Brown Daily Herald. They agreed to clear their encampment and not hold any unauthorized protests between now and commencement in May in exchange for the school’s highest governing body, The Corporation, agreeing to vote on divesting from companies linked with Israel at a meeting this October. 

ACLU releases report on police mistreating LGBTQ+ people: Using data from NORC at the University of Chicago, the ACLU, the University of Illinois, and the University of California, Irvine, discovered that LGBTQ+ people reported more adverse treatment from police. A staggering one in four transgender people surveyed reported experiencing physical force from police, and 44.9% said police had directed insulting language toward them. The report also found LGBTQ people were more likely to be detained, searched, and arrested more than non-LGBTQ people. Overall, the researchers found the treatment corresponded with less trust of the police which … sure makes a lot of sense.

The federal government is cool(er) with pot now? The DEA is set to take marijuana off its list of Schedule I drugs and reclassify it as much less dangerous. The move would knock it down to Schedule III to hang out with ketamine and formally recognize pot’s medical uses. The feds are stopping short of legalizing recreational pot, signaling their allegiance with suburban cops who love busting kids for jazz cigarettes and prosecutors addicted to drug convictions.

Three-year search for viral mystery song ends with a porno: In 2021, a hazy 17-second clip of what sounded like a lost catchy pop song from the ’80s was uploaded on the website Whatzatsong. Nicknamed “Everybody Knows That,” the song had since gone viral on TikTok, and spawned a subreddit dedicated to finding the origin of this infectious little nugget. Well, they finally figured out a guy named Christopher Saint Booth who produces films for SyFy wrote it for a 1986 adult film called Angels of Passion. The song’s real name is “Ulterior Motives” and you can finally listen to the whole thing (and totally hear loud moaning from a woman enjoying more than this song).

Vivian McCall is The Stranger's interim Editor-in-Chief. In her private life, she is a musician and Wii U apologist. If you’re reading this, you either love her or hate her.

48 replies on “Slog AM: City Council Rejects Affordable Housing Proposal, Florida’s 6-Week Abortion Ban Kicks In, Cops Bust Protesters at Columbia University”

  1. I would like to thank the “protestors” at Columbia for showing just how completely out of touch they are after breaking and entering into a university building and completely thrashing it before giving out this comical press conference where they demanded food and suppliers be brought in unless “you want people dying from dehydration”. (https://x.com/DutchBurke/status/1785402117751963873). The punch line is the woman giving the press conference is a doctoral student and her thesis reads like one of Charles posts.

    “My dissertation is on fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860. My goal is to write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism. I am particularly interested in theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination.”

    You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried. Thank you Columbia protestors for this moment of levity.

  2. It will be fun to see what happens if the governing body at Brown University doesn’t vote the way the pro Hamas crowd wants.

  3. agents Provocateurs’re

    QUICK to break windows

    to derail legitimate demands

    because they Know

    it WORKS – ‘specially with

    far-right Reactionaries running

    the Po-po but not to Worry — dissent’ll

    be Outlawed when El trumpfsters Steals the

    next one — tho Uncle Joe seems to be sleepwalking

    thru all this Anti-Genocide activism.

    wake Up, Joe! We NEED You!

  4. @1: Too much original thought for a Charles Mudede post; it lacks both sufficiently extended copy-pasta from obscure hipster Marxists, and enough alcohol.

    @2: They kicked it out to October. Plenty of time for undergrads to forget.

    @3: Still grinding out your pristinely fact-free paranoid conspiracy theories to ‘explain’ what the rest of us read after the subhead, eh? Eliminationist rhetoric is a feature from the student leaders, not a bug added by your nefarious conspiracy of unidentified outsiders.

    Next time, try opening the article.

  5. @5 setting aside matters of pronouns, I get very uncomfortable with calling a 12 year old pregnant by rape a “woman” strictly because she’s pregnant. A 12 year old is a child, or a person, not a woman.

  6. Agree to vote on divesting? LOL like they’re actually going to vote in favor.

    Funny how nobody mentions the 2024 Harvard Youth Poll results putting the Israel/Palestine conflict at #15 of the 16 most important issues that Americans 18-29 were concerned about. Didn’t even crack 35% overall. These protesters just are performative activists yelling into an echo chamber and patting themselves on the back for destroying property and preventing their fellow students from… you know… actually studying.

  7. As a UCLA alum I’ve been following the protests on that campus. The attack on the pro-Palestinian encampment last night looked like the work of right-wing January 6 types, which is unsurprising.

  10. First and foremost, I am not a proponent of war and colonizing or controlling other people and places. At some point, I hope humans can evolve past all of this and truly live in peace. Unfortunately, the protests are not convincing other groups of people to champion your cause as happened eventually during the Vietnam protests. People of all ages came around and called for our troops to come home. While you are focused on this losing strategy, campus shootings and domestic gun violence will continue to happen and the ADHD crowd will have moved on to another cause that they have no impact on. Young folks, if you want the most bang out of your protest bucks, you have to protest something your legislators can very DIRECTLY do something about. If you voted with the same kind of passion that you put into protests, legislators would fear you as a threat to reelection and might actually listen. I learned that from my generation who didn’t vote when they were young and are now paying the price in various ways. I find the demands for universities to divest to be a limp parsley strategy as well That won’t stop the military complex from doing what it does. For that, you have to pose a threat to legislators. Just some thought, I don’t pretend to have all of the answers but I am adamant that these protests are generally producing the opposite of the intention but only time will tell. If the protests end up working, I will be the first to applaud.

  12. @14: If there was some contest for “longest essay on Gaza not containing mention of Hamas,” that might be a winner.

    Meanwhile, “…the poll showed Americans largely want a cease-fire in the war but only after Hamas is removed from power and the hostages they seized during its Oct. 7 attack on Israel are returned.

    “The poll found 61 percent of respondents support a cease-fire only after those conditions are met, while 39 percent support an unconditional cease-fire.”

    (https://thehill.com/policy/international/4629597-americans-israel-hamas-gaza-student-protests-poll/)

    Hamas can release the hostages any time they want.

  13. @15. No, tensor, they can’t. That coward shitbag Sinwar is hiding out in a tunnel with at least 15 of them as human shields, and Hamas’s funders in Qatar and Iran will accept nothing less than a permanent ceasefire and are willing to keep killing their own civilians to bring down public opinion of Israel.

    But Netanyahu has said that he is going to invase Rafah, home to 600,000 children living in the worst conditions on earth, unimaginable suffering, and you think filling more mass graves of kids is the only way to disempower Hamas?

    You have set the record for most posts to never acknowledge the suffering of innocents or to give any agency to the IDF for their intentionally disproportionate and indiscriminate methods, using the constant copout of human shield and placing the blame for every war crime in their hands. You are a jingoist tool that never questions the Israeli administration’s role in committing the worst atrocity against any people in our lifetimes, merely writing off all brutality and mass graves of kids as the only means of self defense the IDF harm. You are okay with this. You are okay with genocide, literal mass graves, of 14,000 kids. To you those numbers mean nothing, and your cognitive dissonance prevents you from thinking critically to brainstorm any possible other solution than to enable this savagery against the innocent.

    On 10/7, Hamas raped and murdered women and girls in the most heinous and brutal ways, by design, with foreign objects and mutilation and dismemberment, and the height of evil, in one of the most evil acts of terror ever witnessed. There can be no acceptable state of Gaza where such monsters can be allowed to rule the region. That I agree with, but you do not hold Hamas accountable by killing ten times the amount of children as soldiers and civilians were killed that day, starving them to death and subjecting them to rampant disease and suffering and trauma. Those methods are totally unacceptable. Victory at any cost is unacceptable. And yes, it is a genocide because the situation on the ground is a de facto genocide. It is beyond self defense, and Hamas is equally culpable for it and should be removed from power by the international community, but the IDF leadershop enabled by the evil of Netanyahu and his racist Jewish Power cabinet must not be the ones leading this invasion which devalues the lives of every human by reducing them to this.

    Challenge yourself to empathize with children that don’t look like yours or speak your language or share your culture. They still deserve protection from the entire world!

  14. @9 LA county has a larger Jewish population than Jerusalem and over 250K Israeli expats, I’m not exactly surprised. A pro-Palestinian encampment isn’t exactly going to be popular around Westwood and Beverly Hills.

  15. @15. Do you agree with Netanyahu against Blinken and the 3rd party negotiators that he will invade Rafah regardless of any ceasefire and hostage release agreement? Because that doesn’t sound like a good faith negotiation for the release of the hostages to any rational actor! It takes two to tango, give credit where credit is due and challenge your own blind spots.

  16. @16, @18: From the same poll I cited @15:

    “At the same time, the poll also found support for Israel to continue its military operation into the city of Rafah, where many Palestinian civilians have fled to after Israel’s offensive began. Israeli leaders have said that Hamas militants are in the city.

    “More than 70 percent of respondents said Israel should move forward with the operation, including 57 percent of those 18 to 24 and increasing percentages with each older age group.”

    So, if my answers do not satisfy you, it appears you have plenty of registered voters in America to whom you can address the complaints you directed at me.

    Meanwhile, please let me know when I have met your quota for use of the term, “humanitarian disaster,” to describe the current situation in Gaza. I can continue typing it as many times as you like.

  17. The student pro-Palestine movement at Columbia has certainly learned well the Hamas tactical playbook: Use force to provoke a reaction, then film that reaction and flood social media with the video, stripped of all context. As the sympathetic likes, shares, and re-tweets pile up, attempt to cry-bully your opponents into unconditional surrender.

  18. It’s pointless to try and remove Hamas from power- they are a terrible group, but they are in power because Netanyahu used them to weaken and discredit Fatah, the moderate, reasonable group which had RECOGNIZED ISRAEL ALREADY IN THE 1990S, forever putting the recognition issue to rest- and the fact that Netanyahu’s obsession with crushing Fatah produced Hamas proves that trying to remove Hamas can ONLY lead to some worse group being put in power.

    The only way to get to peace is for Israel to give up its arrogant fixation with trying to dictate who the Palestinian leadership should and should not be, end the nearly quarter-century of relentless “Iron Glove” misery Israel has inflicted on ordinary Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are unarmed, non-violent civilians with no means of either getting rid of Hamas or getting the hostages released- no non-Hamas member knows where the hostages are- and actually OFFERING ordinary Palestinians something- something which has to include a state comprised of the West Bank and Gaza, a prosperous economy, and a guarantee that whatever Palestinian leadership negotiates with Israel is never humiliated and never forced to play the role of the defeated side- a role which can ONLY lead to whatever leadership is forced to play the defeated side being killed and replaced by extremists pledged to avenge the humiliation.

    It’s time to admit it doesn’t MATTER whether or not Israel gets to claim victory, and that Israel’s leaders are just as much to blame for the conflict as Hamas or Fatah, if not more so.

    There was always the option of treating ordinary Palestinians as human beings, admitting they were driven by the oppressive conditions the Occupation imposed on them, admitting they aren’t just irrational bigoted berserkers, and admitting they don’t deserve to be crushed.

    Why, throughout the entire 75 years, has Israel- even during the supposedly “dovish” 1990s- REFUSED ever to try this? Why did it refuse, even then, to admit Palestinians were going to have to get a state for their to be peace, and that, contrary to Likudnik/Irgun/Lehi myth, Jordan was never Palestine?

    And why am I not surprised that you, tensorna are an inflexible Likudnik?

    Yes, what happened on October 7th was horrific- but that’s not when the conflict started and it’s never been a conflict driven by a simple refusal to accept the idea of Jews living on these lands. You would pretend that it was, though- just as, in every discussion I’ve ever seen, you always stand with the oppressors and the powerful, always on the side of might makes right.

    I wish I was surprised.

  19. @19. I’m not asking you for random polls or splitting hairs over terminology, I am asking you to challenge your intransigence by answering my questions, in their entirety. Whether you call it a genocide or a humanitarian disaster or any other equivocation, do YOU, tensor, find these methods to be acceptable?

    At what point do you draw the line at what is unacceptable? Not a law or definition or poll, YOU. Anything goes as long as Hamas is defeated? Anything? What are the limits of YOUR tolerance for the mass killing of children? You can answer for yourself! And if anything goes, stop trying to pretend you aren’t enabling de facto genocide!

  20. @ 23 Case of beer to you for a well executed Clausewitz quotation. And as one looks at the history of the Arab-Israeli wars, each effort to attack Israel diminishes. There are no more front line states, no easy sanctuary across a border, no unified P governance. We are down to Hamas, dependent on Tehran. In all likelihood, this ends like it did in the 80s when Sharon had Arafat and his fighters bottled up in Beruit, then sent off on an all expenses paid cruise to Tunisia. This time, probably a US brokered evacuation of Sinwars clique at the docks near Rafah, probably to Qatar to meet their political wing.

  21. @23. Anything goes because war is bad, m’kay? Nuke em all, who cares! It’s just war, since all wars are wars of total elimination.

    It is a genocide because rhetoric like yours and the rhetoric used by the IDF and Israeli government has always been genocidal, since the start of this “war”, and it has backed up its rhetoric in kind with its actions. You have just justified genocide as a necessary evil of war. You who would justify shooting puppies by giving moral license to rural culture, are the last person I would turn to for wisdom in this situation.

  22. @4: Wormtongue

    speaking of open-

    ing things up:

    “No, tensor, they can’t. That coward shitbag Sinwar is hiding out in a tunnel with at least 15 of them as human shields, and Hamas’s funders in Qatar and Iran will accept nothing less than a permanent ceasefire and are willing to keep killing their own civilians to bring down public opinion of Israel.

    But Netanyahu has said that he is going to invase Rafah, home to 600,000 children living in the worst conditions on earth, unimaginable suffering, and you think filling more mass graves of kids is the only way to disempower Hamas?

    You have set the record for most posts to never acknowledge the suffering of innocents or to give any agency to the IDF for their intentionally disproportionate and indiscriminate methods, using the constant copout of human shield and placing the blame for every war crime in their hands.

    You are a jingoist tool that never questions the Israeli administration’s role in committing the worst atrocity against any people in our lifetimes, merely writing off all brutality and mass graves of kids as the only means of self defense the IDF harm.

    You are okay with this.

    You are okay with genocide, literal mass graves, of 14,000 kids.

    To you those numbers mean nothing, and your cognitive dissonance prevents you from thinking critically to brainstorm any possible other solution than to enable this savagery against the innocent.”

    –@Garbby, above

    thanks! for your

    Accurate assessment

    of the commentor calling

    itself “tentsores” or whatever

    it happens to be using these days.

    how TF is he not

    Over There lead-

    ing the Charge?

    No one’s been a

    Bigger Booster for

    nutnyahoo’s Genocide

    well maybe

    el Cap’n

    Ahab

    Thanks for making

    El trumpfster our

    next ‘president’

    boys. You’ve

    really done

    ‘well.’

  23. @21

    “It’s time to admit it doesn’t MATTER whether or not Israel gets to claim victory, and that Israel’s leaders are just as much to blame for the conflict as Hamas or Fatah, if not more so.”

    Fucking BINGO.

    oh, and:

    “And why am I not surprised that you,

    tensorna are an inflexible Likudnik?

    Yes, what happened on October 7th was horrific- but that’s not when the conflict started and it’s never been a conflict driven by a simple refusal to accept the idea of Jews living on these lands.

    You would pretend that it was, though- just as, in every discussion I’ve ever seen, you always stand with the oppressors and the powerful, always on the side of might makes right.

    I wish I was surprised.”

    none of us are

    but it’s Nice

    to hear it

    Ain’t just

    kristo.

    thanks AlaskanbnSP.

  24. @ 25 No, not even close. Perhaps if you were with me, in 90, and stood amongst the ruins of what used to be Hama, Syria, after having numerous encounters with Alawi, Bedouin and Christian alike down the Levant, you might also have developed an appreciation for what Thomas Friedman called “Hama rules.” I could not reconcile neither the scale of the democide, nor the open sectarianism and local localities that Friedman had trouble fathoming. It is a very bad neighborhood, solace to be found only in humility and a Greek tragic mind.

    In other words, choose your causes carefully, especially in war

    I’ve chosen Ukraine. I could easily level accusations at the Stranger and the likes of you for an apparent ambivalence for a conflict that is claiming lives that outstrip what is occurring in Gaza. But I don’t. I send my money to charites, sign petitions, and say kind words to my coworker Peter, whose family hails from Lviv.

    Another thing I don’t do – I don’t stand on I5 because I’m upset. Next week my best friend begins radiation treatment for N3 breast cancer. I’ll be coming up the 5 frequently to get her to her daily sessions at Swedish. Her life depends on getting to those sessions. Thank you for considering that.

    PS – I love puppies

  25. What is this, tensor and kossack and Ahab are all Neale Frothingham’s malevolent unholy AI chatbot trinity of word salad sockpuppets circle jerkers?

  26. @28. I am sorry you are going through that. I lost my father to cancer, my legal guardian mother figure to cancer, and the aunt who opened her home to me and pulled me out of homelessness is actively dying as we speak in her final hours or best days of cancer. Cancer cancer cancer. More flights and funerals. And you wonder why I lash out in pain.

    If you can request empathy, if you can understand people who lose dear family and friends and loved ones to senseless violence, then surely you can feel for those in Gaza and Israel alike, IDF soldiers in harm’s way and the hostages’ families, as well as those in Ukraine getting the shit end of the stick from Congression GOP shitheads doing Putin’s bidding, to demand better for those put in harm’s way by these warmongering criminal maniacs who have hardened their hearts beyond their own humanity. That’s why people put themselves in harm’s way in the freeway and force you out of their comfort zones. It isn’t because they have “Selma envy” (barf), it is because, as misguided as you may find their methods, they believe it is the right thing to do. And I am with them.

  27. Oh yeah, my brother-in-law who helped me take care of my dad on is deathbed and whose kids, my newphews, are my pride and joy? Ukranian. My uncle who is taking care of my aunt on her likely deathbed? Jewish.

  30. @4

    ‘Agents Provocateurs’

    Or merely a Fantastic

    freaking pipe dream?

    BBC:

    UCLA clashes: Police criticised

    for ‘delayed’ response to violence

    The office of California’s governor has criticised the police response to violence on campus at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    A masked pro-Israeli group assaulted a pro-Palestinian student camp, before officers were called to the campus.

    Governor Gavin Newsom’s spokesperson said the “limited and delayed” police intervention was “unacceptable”.

    Hundreds of police officers were on campus and around the perimeter on Wednesday.

    State officials and university leaders have said they immediately deployed security personnel to the tent camp on Dickson Plaza when clashes erupted just before midnight on Tuesday.

    But several people on site said law

    enforcement did not act quickly enough.

    “Law enforcement simply stood at the edge of the lawn and refused to budge as we screamed for their help,” UC Divest at LA, a group involved in the encampment, said in a statement.

    The BBC has contacted UCLA and LAPD for a response.

    Protesters started leaving the site roughly two hours after the attack began and police had established control as day broke on Wednesday morning.

    Governor Newsom himself condemned the violence in a post on X, formerly Twitter, separate to his office’s statement.

    “The law is clear,” he said. “The right to free speech does not extend to inciting violence, vandalism or lawlessness.”

    He said those responsible “must be held accountable… including through criminal prosecution, suspension, or expulsion”.

    –by Regan Morris at UCLA,

    and Sam Cabral, BBC News

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68937775

    Pro-genociders

    attacking Peaceful

    Protesters? seems to

    me to be ALL they Know.

    callitwhatchya

    Want . but

    END the

    Genocide

    oh & STOP Attacking

    PEACEFUL PROTESTERS.

  31. Garb @22: “I’m not asking you for random polls,”

    Who said it was “random”? It was taken after six months of brutal urban warfare, and weeks of student protests. It shows that among American registered voters, there is a 4:1 ratio of support for Israel over Hamas, that the student protests didn’t change this at all, and that those same voters support an IDF assault on Rafah by a better than 2:1 margin. On how many issues do Americans show this much support? Can you even name another? Just one?

    Now, consider: for the last six months, the Stranger, supportive commenters, Pro-Palestinian protesters (both off-campus and on) have been yelling constantly about “genocide,” demanding an end to American support for Israel, blocking freeways and such. None of it has moved the needle. At all. Those efforts, all combined, have accomplished absolutely nothing of any kind whatsoever. Now the student protestors are getting hauled off of their campuses, Spring Semesters will end, and everyone will go home for Summer vacation. Nothing has changed.

    And yet, here you are, freshly returned from banishment with neither repentance nor apology, still absolutely convinced you’re totally right about this issue. (Just before you were thrown out of here, you were predicting WW3 if Iran attacked Israel. How’d that work out?) You’ve actually defined “genocide” as “I know it when I see it,” and now you “challenge” me to answer your questions? Really? So what? Are you a schoolyard bully now?

    Just in this thread alone, you have used “genocide” or “genocidal” almost ten times. All have been in reference to Israel. None have been in reference to Hamas, who on 10/7 raped and slaughtered Jews for being Jews, on land Hamas has declared it will cleanse of Jews. And yet, you didn’t “see” genocide there. So no, I do not care that you’re throwing the word “genocide” at Israel. (Any more than do the 70% in a survey of American registered voters who support an Israeli assault on Rafah.) I do not care that you’re throwing similar accusations at me. I really don’t. You’re not the moral authority you imagine yourself to be, and no one need answer to you, no matter how many accounts you set up here.

    So long as the IDF pursues Hamas, without intentionally targeting civilians, without torturing detainees, and without using banned weapons, then their methods are acceptable to me. Anyone who intentionally targets civilians, in any war, is a war criminal, and should be tried and punished for it. Ditto those who intentionally hide behind civilians when attacking. Why that last seems perfectly alright with you is a question you should answer yourself.

  32. @35. . But I’ve always seen right to the core of who you are, your true character, based simply on your revealing commentary here, and especially how you have treated me. Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged. You are an insidious menace.

    Dead kids in Gaza card? Wow, that’s profoundly low, even for you. Your commentary is without dignity, malevolent, and unworthy. Is that all you think it is, a mere tactic to win a debate? To the people who would put their very lives at risk by creating a disruption to raise awareness of a problem we all enable? You think they are out there just because they want to win kudos or acceptance or because they are envious of the Selma marchers? What the fuck kind of claim is that? Only you would project such a low motivation to those actions. No friends of mine would ever make that absolutely disgusting claim.

    I agree that their methods are not my own, but I am with them in spirit and cause, including the kids on campus who are sitting down and expressing their constitutional rights to free speech, not to be assaulted and gassed and flashbanged by fascists. I agree with Catalina that their methods may not be the most effective and perhaps work against their cause. But in terms of raising awareness and forcing the issue, they are very effective because look how riled up they made you? I support their cause, not their methods, but yes sometimes in life you have to be willing to be inconvenienced and knocked out of your daily routine to see that your actions (or lack thereof) matter. People feel so strongly about that they are willing to be arrested and incarcerated. And yet, you call me a terrorist because I have empathy for the wanton slaughter of children and civilians of any race, religion, or creed that we enable through selling of arms used unjustly. What actions have I taken other than to give impassioned pleas for mercy and my best efforts to persuade in these forums, sharing videos and songs to make my points? At least you displayed a moment of moral clarity before your cognitive dissonance snaped you back to your far right core.

    The moderates who all sat on the fence and did nothing while the Selma marchers got hosed and attacked by dogs and brutalized by the police, who put their very lives at risk to inconvenience the masses who were delayed and possibly had to endure real suffering and hardships in kind, were all spat on and degraded by those who later claimed to champion their cause. You would call them terrorists for standing up for their rights. But their message reached LBJ, and he and JFK before him passed Civil Rights. But the law in 1964 only goes so far. It’s not envy, sorry to say, but conviction that drives people to take a stand for what they believe in. And it will never be good enough for you unless it is out of sight and out of mind. And it’s neither.

    To me, it’s personal and a core component of my faith. In my dad’s final months of life, he was reading Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, and he believed that one day there would be an answer to the decades of suffering there. I am doing my best to uphold his expectations, and given that you can clearly see that I am suffering from loss, as I just clearly stated, and you choose now to attack me when you think I am weak, what kind of friend are you to me? Who are you to call me a terrorist when I wish to bring an end to needless suffering? When I clearly condemn Hamas and their genocide committed on 10/7? When in detail I express empathy for the suffering of everyone being killed in stupid wars, especially innocent kids and newborns? Where is your empathy for that, for the status quo you seem to be okay with? With friends like you, eh?

  33. @37. So no, you can’t answer for you. You’re dodging the question, and no less than three or four times have I called 10/7 a genocide, an act of genocide, and clear and present terrorism and evil. But that was one attack and the Israeli administration has been responding for the last 6 months with de facto genocide, backed up by their genocidal rhetoric for which they are investigation in the Hague for. It’s not just my opinion, there is due process underway with clear evidence of such acts. You are misrepresenting me and claiming I never said what I did or vice versa. You only ever argue in bad faith, and I actually give your claims merit. And once again you cannot bear to face the dead children or anything but your own narcissist self assurance. All you do is pollute these forums with the same talking points like an android but never give credence to other points of view.

    I acknowledged why I was banned and I have changed my behavior by posting with dignity and respect, but I owe you no contrition nor is any expected by Commitatus. The best apology is changed behavior, and that’s why I’m still here now.

  34. “You’ve actually defined ‘genocide’ as ‘I know it when I see it,’ and now you ‘challenge’ me to answer your questions? Really? So what? Are you a schoolyard bully now?”

    Is this real life? Is this seriously tensorna? The same poster who for the last 100 SLOG AMs has challenged kristo to SAY IT! SAY 10/7 was Genocide! Why can’t you say it? WHY NOT?

    I mean, dude. Go look in a mirror. All I did was challenge you to entertain other points of view, I’m not demanding it. Not that you are capable of such introspection, but what can ya do.

  36. @39: “…and no less than three or four times have I called 10/7 a genocide,”

    Quotes and URLs, please. Either or both of your accounts will do.

    “Why can’t you say it? WHY NOT?”

    Because, as already mentioned, you ‘defined’ the word “genocide” as, “I know it when I see it.” I am not you, so I cannot apply your ‘definition.’ That is WHY NOT. Please feel free to castigate yourself and your ‘definition’ for your problem with me here.

    (Also, in case you somehow missed it, kristo’, like you, has claimed to have his own, very personal definition of “genocide,” which, like you, he throws at Israel every chance he takes. However, he differs from you in that he will not state his very own very personal definition of “genocide,” so I have asked him if Hamas was guilty of his definition of “genocide” in Israel on 10/7. He has yet to answer.)

  37. @21: “And why am I not surprised that you, tensorna are an inflexible Likudnik?”

    Your accusation does not surprise me at all. Here’s a comment where you accuse some unidentified, undefined number of “people” (presumably voters in Seattle) of racism, for daring to criticize a candidate you’d liked: https://www.thestranger.com/politics/2017/08/24/25375520/qanda-nikkita-oliver-on-cary-moon-jenny-durkan-and-the-future-of-the-peoples-party/comments/39

    If you can so easily throw an accusation of racism at Seattle’s voters, then you can accuse me of being a hard-rightie, too.

  39. Speaking of the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you would accept this treatment for your children if a rogue terrorist government’s attack on your neighbor resulted in the mass bomboardment and starvation of your own kids ten fold, then be aware of what you would wish upon your neighbor, your enemy who you would love as yourself.

    This goes without saying, but I do not support any protests that are not peaceful, especially those that result in antisemitism and a hostile campus or working environment for Jewish people or those of any race, creed, or religon for who they are. That is fundamentally against our founding values as a nation and what we were established in principle to be free of.

    I am equally against peaceful protestors being scapegoated for the actions of extremists and collectively punished and silenced by militant riot police who are assaulting people holding up posterboards and sitting on campus in place, students, teachers, and journalists. All should be held to high standards of conduct and not let their righteous fervor degrade into hate speech. But those that misconstrue the crowds and their message are equally guilty of oppression and hostility against all of our rights as Americans which no one should tolerate, for those are attacks on us all.

    So damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead with the righteous and clean house with the wicked and malovelent.

    Tensor, since you can clearly do a google search for terms and people, as well as browse other users’ accounts for non sequitur gotchas, you can do your own fact checking. I believe in you.

  40. @47: That last paragraph was a lot of words, just for you to admit, “I have not ever described Hamas’ actions on 10/7 as ‘genocide’.”

    “…browse other users’ accounts…”

    If you follow the URL, you can read I was among the “people” he accused of racism. (You can also read his subsequent non-retraction of his unsupported accusation.)

  42. RepubliKKKans, RWNJs, and their enablers down to the most clueless of MAGAts are shitty excuses for people.

    Jesus fucking WEPT I miss what was so good about the 20th century!

  43. 45: I wasn’t saying anything about the voters of Seattle. I was talking solely about you. And on this issue, on the pointless, unwinnable war Netanyahu is waging in Gaza- nobody outside of the Hamas membership are responsible for what happened on October 7th- you sound exactly like Scoop Jackson talking about what we were doing to Vietnam.

  44. 45: I wasn’t saying anything about the voters of Seattle. I was talking solely about you. And on this issue, on the pointless, unwinnable war Netanyahu is waging in Gaza- nobody outside of the Hamas membership are responsible for what happened on October 7th- you sound exactly like Scoop Jackson talking about what we were doing to Vietnam.

  45. 45: I wasn’t saying anything about the voters of Seattle. I was talking solely about you. And on this issue, on the pointless, unwinnable war Netanyahu is waging in Gaza- nobody outside of the Hamas membership are responsible for what happened on October 7th- you sound exactly like Scoop Jackson talking about what we were doing to Vietnam.

  46. Mods- please delete my posts #53 and #54. They were duplicates and I’d delete them myself if the system would let me.

  47. @52: You were indeed referring to me, but not only to me. From my link @45, your comment begins with this phrase:

    “What people are really pissed at Nikkita about(other than her daring to run at all for a job they thought should be reserved for a passionless, technocratic white millionaire)…”

    So, other than saying I was one of these (racist) “people,” you didn’t identify them at all.

  48. @51: I will when the fossil fueled GOP crime syndicate and their enablers are fully and finally obliterated by their corruption and insatiable greed. They’re the RWNJs with the guns, not I.

    Now go eat your paste before it hardens, raindrop dear.

    Don’t blame me when all life on Earth gets nuked on high because the Orange Turd insists on being Darth Vader no matter how illegally it reseizes control of first the White House and then the world.

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