Friday, April 26, 2024
Good morning. I'm back from my vacation and all out of excuses, so I have a reasonably complete newsletter for you this week. Let's start with everyone's favorite topic: man's inhumanity to man.
Item 1: a link
Everyone knows that Magneto's time as a Jewish child in a Nazi concentration camp turned him into the definitive uncompromising mutant radical. This Defector piece (gift link) by Asher Elbein traces the barely-attenuated connection between a goofy evil mutant and the Israeli state, and their respective journeys over the years as they reckoned with a brutal history of oppression and dehumanization by doing everything they could to ensure that any future atrocities would be committed by them, not to them.
The story dutifully acknowledges the sick irony of a victim of a fascist, violent ideology responding by turning itself into a fascist, violent ideologue, not that defenders of Israel's recent behavior seem to find anything objectionable about it. As Elbein suggests, perhaps it's just not ironic (or hypocritical) in their eyes. Their objection to Nazism is not that it happened at all, but simply that Jews were the victims, not the perpetrators.
Item 2: a list
Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” tracks, ranked:
- Tusk
- Storms
- Never Forget
- Over & Over
- Sara
- Walk a Thin Line
- Honey Hi
- Think About Me
- Sisters of the Moon
- Not That Funny
- What Makes You Think You’re the One
- Beautiful Child
- Angel
- Brown Eyes
- That’s Enough for Me
- I Know I’m Not Wrong
- That’s All for Everyone
- Save Me a Place
- The Ledge
Item 3: a media recommendation
The New Deal - Exciting New Direction
Item 4: word of the week
Febrile
The febrile tortoise lay on its belly, with its legs splayed and its stubby tail quivering pathetically. Should not have eaten that Kinder Egg.
Item 5: a photograph
See ya!
Kind of a dark issue this week. At least Donald Trump's trial for inciting an insurrection is going ahead on sched- oh, hmm. Well let's hope for better news next week. See you then.
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