The red lines are imaginary

Prior to the election, I think we were all aware that Joe Biden was an ineffectual waffler on Middle East issues. He would wag his finger and then do nothing but wobble along the status quo line. I had this wishful hope that Harris was just going along out of loyalty to her president — unfortunately, we’ll never find out if she would have changed the country’s course if she’d gotten out from under Joe’s feeble thumb. All we can know for sure was that Biden stood by doing nothing while children were murdered in Palestine.

Now ProPublica lists all the cowardice behind the Biden administration’s Israel policy. He kept saying one thing, and doing nothing.

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

“Don’t you dare bomb that Palestinian town!” Israel, without hesitation, bombs the town. “Oh, OK, here’s a billion dollars worth of bombs to replenish your supply.” Over and over again. The article talks a lot about all these “red lines” the US was drawing in the conflict, and how US credibility was constantly diminished because Israel didn’t care and knew they’d get all the money they wanted, no matter how far over the line they crossed.

The article doesn’t end on an optimistic note.

On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

Who in the world cares what red line the US draws anymore?

Biden was a weak president, but don’t expect Trump will be any better. He’s going to bluster and lie louder is all.

If we say the obvious often enough, will people figure it out?

I know the community here doesn’t need to hear this, but…


TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN

My one reservation about the video is that he focuses on intersex conditions with known biological markers. Most trans people do not have those markers; instead, the determination and differentiation of sex are so complicated and tangled that even in typical patterns of expression you get non-binary outcomes.

But yes, those ‘scientists’ who are now actively promoting bad science to benefit conservative, religious positions need to be called out more, and shamed.

I knew a few people at Bryn Mawr

It always seemed like a most excellent liberal arts college, and in particular I enjoyed visiting with the late Jane Oppenheimer, a developmental biologist and historian of science. I was doing a quick refresher on Nettie Stevens, the cytologist working on chromosomes at the dawning of the age of genetics, while preparing my introductory talk on chromosomes and learned something new. I knew that Nettie Stevens studied there and was offered a position on their faculty, and I knew that Bryn Mawr was and is an all-women school, but I just learned an interesting fact about Bryn Mawr:

On February 9, 2015, the college’s board of trustees announced approval of a working group recommendation to expand the undergraduate applicant pool allowing transgender women and intersex individuals identifying as women to apply for admission. This decision made Bryn Mawr the fourth women’s college in the United States to accept trans women. Bryn Mawr “recognizes that gender is fluid and that traditional notions of gender identity and expression can be limiting”, and has the official policy of accepting nonbinary students who were assigned female at birth as well. All current, past, and future students are fully recognized as members of the Bryn Mawr community, regardless of current gender identity.

Well, now I respect that college even more.

Plastic shall rule over all!

I wasted more time than you know pursuing that city park proposal which was less a proposal and more a fait accompli. I had prepared a brief statement which I did not present and would have been inappropriate if I had — this city council meeting was more about where they should implement their expanded park proposal, not how. One of the things I wish the many, many people who spoke at that meeting had learned was to be brief and on point, and I wasn’t going to bring up an issue that was not under consideration.

I had my own petty concerns.

I’m going to speak for the bugs, as unpopular as they usually are.

If you get down on your hands and knees with a handlens in the park and look carefully in the grass, you’ll find a flourishing population of springtails and ants and isopods and beetles, all tending to the soil and bothering no humans at all. The soil is alive, and the biological elements are working to maintain it to our benefit — new grass is always pushing up and the detritovores are actively cleaning up any dead material. The natural surface is a familiar and safe substrate for children, too, with dirt and grass providing a comfortable cushion for play.

Landscape Structures Inc. intends to replace that living surface with dead asphalt and dead poured-in-place synthetic rubber sheets. I had to look up this stuff: it’s called EPDM (Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer), made from processed recycled plastics and rubber. It’s mostly safe — you can read the material safety data sheet . There is a very small cancer hazard which can be regarded as negligible, since the polymer is so stable that the dangerous compounds are unlikely to be released. It is however toxic to aquatic organisms, since water runoff can carry the material into the groundwater. So maybe not as stable as we’d like to imagine?

I don’t think toxicity is a serious concern. I’m more concerned that we’d be replacing a living surface with dead , sterile plastic that will gradually decay, and need regular maintenance and eventual replacement. In the world we’d be making with this playground, falling leaves and twigs are a damaging contaminant rather than an aspect of a healthy environment.

Do we need to pave over more of the park? Don’t we have enough plastic in our environment?

As it turns out, that was all totally irrelevant anyway, since the city had already signed contracts with Landscape Structures, Inc.

The theme of this park is supposed to be a celebration of agriculture. Perhaps our farmers will start raising a rich crop of ethylene propylene diene monomer? It’s the future, you know.

Neil Gaiman responds

He’s denying the worst of the claims, while admitting that he did have sexual relationships with his accusers. They were all consensual, he says.

As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen. I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.

I went back to read the messages I exchanged with the women around and following the occasions that have subsequently been reported as being abusive. These messages read now as they did when I received them – of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships and wanting to see one another again. At the time I was in those relationships, they seemed positive and happy on both sides.

This is the “bitchez be lyin'” defense written in the gentle romantic style of Neil Gaiman. It doesn’t add up. So he was in a happy, positive, respectful, consensual relationship with women who have all mysteriously changed their minds and started misrepresenting his sensitive style of making love as brutal sadomasochistic assaults? Why? What changed “positive and happy” to tears and trauma? There’s a massive plot hole in his fantasy.

His real sin was not being open and feminist enough.

And I also realise, looking through them, years later, that I could have and should have done so much better. I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could or should have been. I was obviously careless with people’s hearts and feelings, and that’s something that I really, deeply regret. It was selfish of me. I was caught up in my own story and I ignored other people’s.

I’ve spent some months now taking a long, hard look at who I have been and how I have made people feel.

Like most of us, I’m learning, and I’m trying to do the work needed, and I know that that’s not an overnight process. I hope that with the help of good people, I’ll continue to grow. I understand that not everyone will believe me or even care what I say but I’ll be doing the work anyway, for myself, my family and the people I love. I will be doing my very best to deserve their trust, as well as the trust of my readers.

This is a dim acknowledgment that gosh, he did something wrong in his past relationships. He’s not sure what, but maybe he wasn’t as emotionally available as he ought to have been. Yeah, demanding that he be called “Master” is a sign of his clumsiness in relationships. But he’s learning! He’s a better person now!

At the same time, as I reflect on my past – and as I re-review everything that actually happened as opposed to what is being alleged – I don’t accept there was any abuse. To repeat, I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.

Some of the horrible stories now being told simply never happened, while others have been so distorted from what actually took place that they bear no relationship to reality. I am prepared to take responsibility for any missteps I made. I’m not willing to turn my back on the truth, and I can’t accept being described as someone I am not, and cannot and will not admit to doing things I didn’t do.

Something sordid went on. We don’t know all the details, fortunately (the Vulture story had more than I could stomach as it is), but “Yes, I had sex with the babysitter, but it wasn’t as rough as she claims, and besides, she wanted it” isn’t the strong defense he thinks it is.

I did my civic duty

I spent the last several hours at the city council meeting for Morris, Minnesota, along with a huge mob of other Morris residents. The object of our political activism was a park, Morris’s East Side Park, which is kind of like the Central Park of our small town. It’s only 2 acres, containing a band shell, lots of trees, grass, picnic tables, and in one corner, some playground equipment. It’s a pleasant little place where lots of families play and where one citizen likes to look for spiders.

A local business, Superior Industries and West-Mor, enthusiastically and generously made plans to invest $2 million into turning Eastside Park into a destination park, paving over one bit of it to make a parking lot, building a massive and rather garish child’s playground paved over with poured-in-place rubbery polymer, and chopping down about 16 of the trees. One problem: they didn’t bother to tell us residents until about a month ago, although city council knew about it before we did.

Many of us descended on the council meeting tonight, talking for hours, the overwhelming majority of us presenting objections. We weren’t given enough time to review the proposal, it had been rushed through the council without going through the usual protocols, this was going to change the character of the park, there were other locations that would be more suitable, the location was far too small, etc.

One weird thing is that the proponents of the park were now emphasizing that it was going to be an inclusive park with handicap access. No one is against inclusion, and I failed to see what was particularly inclusive about a climbing structure and swing sets and slides, and they didn’t say what was more inclusive about it than the existing park, but OK.

The arguments didn’t matter. The council had already made up their minds. They ignored the will of the people and voted to approved the plastic monstrosity that will replace the grass and trees in the park.

I shouldn’t have bothered.