Also don’t ask how how the Arab population is actually treated in Israel.

I haven’t read her myself yet, but Ursula K Le Guin is of note. Lathe of Heaven, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and The Word for World is Forest are worth looking at.

Terry Pratchetts work is very good. Lots of humour and light parody of fantasy tropes, and some occasional commentary. You could probably pick almost anything from the Discworld series and find something enjoyable.

October By China Mieville is an account of the Russian revolution of 1917. It’s not written as a perhaps more dry, academic account, but still decently researched and a good introduction that’s easy to read almost as if it was fiction. Apparently his science-fiction is good too, but I have no idea.

Gabriel Rockhill for example just came out with a book talking about how the CIA and capitalist institutions monopolize mainstream “radical” theory, twisting it into something that coexists with imperialism, such as the work of Slavoj Zizek.

That’s funny, because the book is objectively bad and full of awful readings of the Frankfurt school.

What he meant to say was “No war with Venezuela…without me”, as he’s still hasn’t finished his application for Blackwater Constellis.

Very odd, divorced from reality response. TNR has regularly criticised Democrats, including on Gaza and Palestinian genocide.

https://newrepublic.com/post/198630/senate-democrats-vote-keep-arming-israel-bernie-sanders-resolutions

https://newrepublic.com/article/199769/america-gaza-policy-bipartisan-catastrophe

https://newrepublic.com/article/197994/centrist-democrats-cuomo-jeffries-traitors-party

https://newrepublic.com/article/179841/uncommitted-michigan-gaza-biden

They’re still a liberal outlet, but they’re not “committed to covering for establishment dems”. The article is merely specifically about the report they’re burying, they’re not personally trying to cover up Dems position on Gaza.

The quote from the TNR review is genuinely insane. Validating my intense dislike of Yasha Levine that they genuinely think a license to use the internet is some sort of reasonable response.

I wish there were better critics.

Second, Valve argues that the plausibility of Consumer Plaintiffs’ claims hinge on allegations that Valve acquired Sierra’s World Opponent Network (“WON”), which Valve contests with a single affidavit. That argument fails for multiple reasons. The Court must reject Valve’s extrinsic evidence, which is contrary to its public admissions, at this stage. Regardless, the Complaint does not turn on these allegations. Valve’s relationship with WON, whether by acquisition or otherwise, helps explain how Valve has had monopoly power in digital PC game distribution since the beginning. But it is not the only relevant fact. Independent of WON, Valve leveraged its enormous installed user base and popular PC game franchises to force gamers onto Steam, such that when Valve began selling third-party games in 2005, it already held a monopolist position.

From the document you linked.

As part of “Steam Play”, videos are re-encoded and downloaded to allow playback via proton in certain cases. On subsequent runs of the game, the video will likely work fine.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/guides/view/why-some-games-on-linux-steamos-steam-deck-have-broken-videos-and-what-you-can-do/

And the far right will get what they want anyway:

First, after the October 29 vote, the core trio of far-right parties — PVV, JA21 (Conservative Liberals), and Forum for Democracy — hold forty-two of hundred fifty seats. In 2023, they held forty-one. Wilders’s party lost eleven, yet JA21 jumped from one to nine and Forum rose from three to seven. In total, they control nearly one-third of the 150-seat parliament. This reshuffle is mainly tactical: once every mainstream party said it would refuse to govern with Wilders, many hard-right voters simply parked their ballot with JA21 or Forum, instead of abandoning this kind of politics altogether.

[…]

The historically more radical-left Socialist Party adopted the opposite pose as the GreenLeft-Labor alliance. It tried to copy the playbook of Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance: talk tough on borders while hankering after a lost social democracy. This may have seemed a viable strategy, since the far right predictably failed to deliver on its pro-welfare promises. But voters are used to governments of all stripes failing to deliver on bread-and-butter economic issues. So those attracted to the anti-immigration message stuck with the familiar far-right narrative — which the Socialist Party helped legitimize. Progressives and voters with a migration background just turned away.

D66, the Dutch left-liberal party, has made a sharp turn on asylum migration, demanding that asylum applications are made from outside Europe’s borders.

Party leader Rob Jetten said he wanted a change of international treaties and pushed forward what he called “the Canadian model” as an alternative to the current policies.

He said “the parties of the middle should take a step forward” to prevent, he said, the subject taking national politics hostage again.

“The current migration system is broken,” said Jetten. “From migration that happens to us, we will have to move to migration that we control ourselves.”

Under the Canadian model, all asylum applications would have to be requested outside the borders of the European Union, meaning asylum seekers who applied in the Netherlands would not be allowed in.

https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/06/dutch-d66-party-calls-for-stricter-asylum-policies/

Same fucking bullshit everywhere: Centrist parties winning after scandal and failure by right wing or far right party in government celebrates as if it’s some return to normalcy, when actually they increasingly adopt far right policy, rhetoric and framing, especially on immigration. At best they try to soft sell it through triangulation and borrowing vaguely progressive sounding buzzwords.

Meanwhile, no actual meaningful decline in the far rights share of the vote and party representation, and the perfect stage for a one term centrist government as people swap between far right parties and liberals continue to flounder and take for granted their own voters as having “nowhere to go” as they shift right.

It happened with Biden, it’s happening with Keir, and it’s the perfect setup to happen in the Netherlands.

You just defended claiming objections should be taken seriously from “serious” (lmao) countries in the specific context of someone trying to get the article rewritten to downplay claims of genocide by invoking the claims of interested governments that are the ones doing the downplaying for their own cynical reasons.

You’re an idiot who can’t follow the topic and context of conversation. Goodbye.

If you are not able to extrapolate, I’m not going to give an opinion on all ~200 governments in the world, or any significant fraction of them.

Only that there’s apparently enough “serious” ones to be OK to deny genocide in an encyclopedia.

Fundamental error. Wales and the wikipedia ethos is not about “not offending” people; it’s about creating a resource that can be trusted by as many people as possible.

And how you get trust is by denying inconvenient facts that are only controversial to morons and complicit governments and politicians according to you, because they’re “serious” in your stupid, shallow and meaningless criteria. Moron.

So if you’re just repeating the claim, there is no point. Say something new?

So if you’re not going to say anything of substance, there is no point. Say something that doesn’t waste peoples time?

So the statements of the Israeli government would not have much weight in this, as they have obvious incentive to lie. The government of Russia should not have much weight, because it wants to whitewash its war crimes in Ukraine. The government of the US should not have much weight, because it has been eviscerated of everyone of any intellectual capacity.

Good to know we’ve dealt with all 3 governments.

They are not neutral observers, but (some of them) make serious statements and are capable of responding to facts even when it concerns an ally. We don’t see that with the US. We do see it with the UK, so even though it is not neutral, it forms part of the lack of consensus.

Going on the basis of consensus means that sometimes Wikipedia will not state as fact something that is a fact. And that’s fine. It’s better than the alternative.

Somehow you’ve managed to be both inane and absurd. We can’t state facts because there’s no consensus, there’s no consensus because there are material and idealogical incentives to deny facts, so therefore liars and and co-conspirators get to pre-empt statements of fact, and this is better than the alternative to stating facts, because it might offend those who want to deny them. And the basis of this allowance of self censorship for alignment with the guilty is that some are “serious”, and they are “serious” entirely because they are “capable of responding to facts even when it concerns an ally”. This is despite the UK (a “serious” country) being directly complicit, having hidden its own legal advice on the sale of arms to Israel, having been in near lockstep with the US on policy, having declared Israel “does have that right” to deny power and water to Palestinians as collective punishment, having cracked down on domestic protests and made Palestine Action a proscribed organisation for mere trespassing and maybe criminal damage (of spraying paint on a plane), I could go on.

That’s just repeating the claim that they’re ideologically motivated.

Because they are, as well as materially motivated.

Western governments, sans the US, are serious governments.

As opposed to every government that is non-western, which are by definition non-serious???

What denotes serious vs non-serious government worthy of weight? Why would you not merely look at the evidence, and make determinations independent of the will of any particular government? Why would being “serious” mean they’re not materially or ideologically motivated? Why would the US under Biden be more serious when Biden repeated the false claim of beheaded babies? Why would Starmer, who declared Israel had the right to withhold power and water, be any more serious? Why would any of these countries that have smeared Palestinian advocates as anti-semites and introduced laws to crack down on even peaceful protests be “serious” and worth weighing in their view of what constitutes genocide as if they are neutral observers, not guilty co-conspirators?

No actual care or interest in Palestinians and the victims, only about the damage to “Israels image” and the “propaganda blow”.

An opinion prompted by a awkward question in an interview and where he is abusing his position to insist the article needs to change to meet his arbitrary standard of not being considerate of governments that deny genocide.

There are serious governments and academics and commentators who disagree.

No there isn’t. All the arguments rely on genocide denial and ignoring repeated, clear statements of intent by Israeli government officials, soldiers, MP’s and citizens, whilst clearly having a clear bias towards exaggeration when it concerns claims about acts committed by Palestinians.

I just figured he was trying to save Wikipedia from getting axed by those in power in some countries who are pushing back very hard against anything that has sentences containing both “Israel” and “genocide” in it.

This is not the case.

But I am pro-Israel. That doesn’t mean I’m anti-Palestine. This is not a controversial position. My views actually aren’t in any way shocking or unusual. 9:30 AM · Apr 16, 2019

https://x.com/jimmy_wales/status/1118069048493740032

You can search his profile and find the last time he mentioned anything regarding Israel, Palestine or Gaza was 2 years ago, besides a post referring to the ADL discussing how wikipedia banned editors for antisemitism.

What you can find, however, is many, many, many posts over a number of years claiming Jeremy Corbyn was antisemitic and had made the Labour party antisemitic during his tenure as leader, something which happened largely due to Corbyn being pro-Palestinian and was used as a smear campaign against him.

And now out of the blue he declares this article not up to standards, and the only argument he consistently formulates is that some governments disagree and they have to be given equal weight.

Gee whiz, I wonder why.

It’s so obvious that the dog was trained with a shock collar that the people pushing the idea have just spent the last few days using a clip with one of Hasans streamer/podcast friends popping his chewing gum into the mic as “proof” he’s clicking a button to shock the dog…

For a guy who streams 6+ hours 6 days a week and has done for the entire time he’s had the dog.

Almost like the entire thing is hysteria driven by weirdo freaks who have even weirder hate boners and will make things up based on literally nothing other than circumstance.

Unironically this

Imagine thinking you did anything with this response besides shit your pants then trip landing head first in the toilet bowl.