From the intro:

For most of the last century, Russia was governed by a non-elected government with policies that cost the lives of many millions of people. They died of starvation or in cruel prison camps. That was the price Russia had to pay to be a superpower equipped with nuclear weapons and home to the largest army in the world. Despite its great achevements in space exploration, the communist system failed to build an efficient economy. In the 1980s Russia finally lost its competetion with the Western world. The Soviet Union was dismantled after the last communist leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, opened the way to reform and democratcy.

From the history section:

"When Lenin died in 1924, Russia's new leader, Joseph Stalin, tried to industrialize Russia, but his methods were brutal. Tens of millions of people starved when Stalin's plans for agriculture failed to produce enough food. Others were executed for opposing him. Millions more were sent to prison camps in Siberia, where many died."

"in the early years of World War II (1939 - 1945), the Soviets invaded the Baltic states. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania became part of the USSR. Stalin had agreed to share territory in eastern Europe with Nazi Germany. However, in 1941 the German leader Adolf Hitler turned on his ally and invaded the Sovet Union. German troops reached Moscow, but were driven back by the Red Army. Losses were huge on both sides. The soviet Union lost 9 million soldiers and 18 million civilians.

A war in Afghanistan in the 1980s put even more pressure on the Soviet economy. The country began to collapse. In 1986 an explosion at a nuclear plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, released a radioactive cloud so large it could be seen from space. The soviets could no longer hide their problems.

So Long, Soviets

The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to modernize the country, although he meant it to stay communist. He remained in control of the Sovet Union, but he allowed Russia and the other republics to hold elections. In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin won the first free election since 1917, and became president of Russia.

Russian communists tried to seize power in August 1991. They failed, but their attempted coup weakened Gorbachev, who could no longer hold the Soviet Union together. It broke apart. Russia was once more a sperate country--known as the Russian Federation--and a democracy.

You can find a copy of the book on Anna's Archive using its ISBN: 978-1-4263-0259-6

Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying

A record number of student loan borrowers are in delinquency and default. Some are making the drastic decision to leave the country and abandon their loans.

Listen - 9:10 min

Amanda Lynn Tully, 37, moved to Prague and defaulted on her student loans. She hasn't made a payment in over seven years.Credit...Milan Bures for The New York Times

By Laura O'Connor

April 4, 2026

Leer en español

See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Times on Google

Amanda Lynn Tully spent her teenage years as a ward of the State of Colorado and believed a college degree was her ticket to a better life.

So, when she graduated in 2017 with a master's degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field, she felt misled.

"I was never financially stable because I was never taught to be financially stable," Ms. Tully, 37, said.

Less than a year after graduating, Ms. Tully made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn't made a payment in over seven years.

More than 40 million borrowers are saddled with federal student debt, and a record number

7.7 million

have defaulted on their loans, according to recently released data from the Education Department.

For some borrowers, moving abroad and out of reach of debt collectors can be tempting. In interviews, people who made this decision cited relieving the psychological burden of student debt as a motivator, as well as having a higher quality of life, even on a lower salary, outside the United States. Many who fled abroad, including Ms. Tully, said they had no plans of ever returning.

Figures on the number of borrowers who abandon their loans in this manner are unknown, but many debtors have shared their experiences on forums like Reddit. Credit reporting agencies like Experian, aware of the issue, have advised borrowers who have moved abroad to "resist the temptation to stop making payments." Borrowers in delinquency and default will likely see their credit scores plummet, raising their borrowing costs and making it difficult for them to access credit.

Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.

"The payments weren't even paying off the interest, so it was frustrating," Ms. Tully said.

Stanley Tate, a Baltimore lawyer specializing in student debt, warns against this approach. "Federal student loans are contractual debts," he said, meaning the obligation to repay does not go away, regardless of citizenship or residency. Moreover, the foreign earned income exclusion often allows federal student loan borrowers who live abroad and earn less than $130,000 (for the 2025 tax year) to pay $0 per month under an income-driven repayment plan, he said, recommending this path over defaulting.

But affordable payments haven't stopped borrowers on such plans from defaulting

abroad or at home.

Michele Zampini, associate vice president of federal policy and advocacy at the Institute for College Access and Success, or TICAS, has seen borrowers in a situation similar to Ms. Tully's, with seemingly manageable payments, default because of a combination of low earnings and a sense of hopelessness.

Image

"The payments weren't even paying off the interest, so it was frustrating," Ms. Tully said.Credit...Milan Bures for The New York Times

"The psychological weight of carrying debt is a really widespread issue, even if it seems financially manageable," she said. "It's not necessarily 'I can't afford it.' It's sometimes 'It feels like I had no other choice but to go to college and I had to take out loans to go, and now I'm going to be stuck with this,' which can define people's lives in a way that feels very unfair and harmful."

In 2016, Eric Cooper graduated from a state school in Georgia with a degree in logistics. He received good grades and found a job as a logistics manager earning $52,000 a year almost immediately. But he had $80,000 of student debt, most of it consisting of parent PLUS loans through his mother.

"I did what everyone says to do

go to college, sign up for the loans," said Mr. Cooper, now 31. "My concern when I was 18 was that it was a lot of money, but everyone tells you that you'll get a good job and pay it back, no problem."

Mr. Cooper's payments were over $600 a month, and he was living paycheck to paycheck. He considered his options and planned to default not long after graduating, realizing his debt would take decades to pay off.

"I thought about it one day and was like, 'Am I really going to be doing this until I'm 50 or 60?'"

His primary concern was the parent PLUS loan. "If I left and didn't pay it, they would be forced to," he said of his family. After working for three years and making timely payments, he refinanced the loan into his name with a private lender. Within months, he moved to Southeast Asia to teach English and continued making minimum payments while applying for citizenship in his new country. He stopped paying when it was secured.

Mr. Cooper defaulted on his loans in 2019, changing his email and phone number, never alerting debtors to his new address.

"I think there were a few letters sent to my parents, but after the first year, I just never heard anything from anyone," he said.

For Enrique Zúñiga, debt wasn't on his mind when he began his studies. He received a full scholarship to Princeton and was grateful to avoid having student debt

until he received a $16,000 tax bill.

Mr. Zúñiga, 25, comes from a working-class family in Tiltil, Chile. In his final year of high school, EducationUSA, a State Department initiative to recruit international students to the United States, came to his class and handed him pamphlets for Princeton, where he applied to study chemistry and later switched to majoring in Spanish and Portuguese.

Mr. Zúñiga was living in university accommodations while dishwashing part time, with his scholarship covering both his tuition and his living expenses. But Mr. Zúñiga didn't realize that all funding exceeding his academic costs represented "nonqualified" funding, meaning that it was taxable.

Princeton states on its website that most nonacademic funding (including for international students) is taxable, but Mr. Zúñiga did not recall being told this. When he received his first tax bill from the university at the beginning of his second year of studies, he panicked.

"I walked into the financial aid office, and I told them: 'I don't have this money, so what do I do? I need to enroll in my classes,'" he recalled. Princeton offered him a private loan to cover the tax bill. Mr. Zúñiga had hoped to stay in the United States after graduating and find a good job with his Ivy League degree. With these plans in mind, he took on additional private loans to cover his tax bills until graduation.

TICAS has advocated for all scholarship funding to be nontaxable to prevent students from taking on tax-related debts. However, Ms. Zampini said she had never seen a situation like Mr. Zúñiga's, where the university provided loans to cover the taxes. The student newspaper has also published an opinion article highlighting the issue.

In July 2022, Mr. Zúñiga graduated with $16,736 in loans to Princeton. He received letters and emails demanding payment almost immediately. After months of unemployment and couch-surfing, Mr. Zúñiga found work as a legal assistant and interpreter at a legal charity in Philadelphia, but he was still unable to afford payments.

By November 2023, Mr. Zúñiga had paid back less than $1,500, and loan servicers began demanding he make more payments. He was then offered a job in Shanghai as a college admissions counselor.

"I thought to myself: 'Well, they can't enforce any judgments against my debts. I might as well go,'" he said. Before moving to China, he tried to negotiate with the loan servicers, but he said they were unwilling to budge.

Even in Shanghai, a Chinese loan recovery organization began contacting Mr. Zúñiga almost daily throughout 2024, urging him to pay his debt to Princeton.

"I was depressed," he said, describing a cycle of receiving daily phone calls and blocking numbers. Today, Mr. Zúñiga still receives emails about his debt, which has grown to $28,196.13, but he has no plans to pay it back.

Besides the emails, debt plays virtually no role in Mr. Zúñiga's life in Shanghai. Ms. Tully and Mr. Cooper also lead seemingly debt-free lives. They largely rely on local jobs and freelance work, still living comfortably despite earning far less than their American peers. Both have visited the United States without encountering issues and said they rarely thought about their debt.

Ms. Zampini said she was concerned about the narrative that defaulted borrowers living abroad were "gaming the system," or being such a small minority of borrowers that their experiences shouldn't motivate policy change.

"This is one piece of the bigger puzzle of how borrowers are managing," she said. "The fact that someone would need to make such a drastic life change driven by student debt is, itself, an indictment of a broken system."

Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying

A record number of student loan borrowers are in delinquency and default. Some are making the drastic decision to leave the country and abandon their loans.

Listen - 9:10 min

Amanda Lynn Tully, 37, moved to Prague and defaulted on her student loans. She hasn't made a payment in over seven years.Credit...Milan Bures for The New York Times

By Laura O'Connor

April 4, 2026

Leer en español

See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Times on Google

Amanda Lynn Tully spent her teenage years as a ward of the State of Colorado and believed a college degree was her ticket to a better life.

So, when she graduated in 2017 with a master's degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field, she felt misled.

"I was never financially stable because I was never taught to be financially stable," Ms. Tully, 37, said.

Less than a year after graduating, Ms. Tully made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn't made a payment in over seven years.

More than 40 million borrowers are saddled with federal student debt, and a record number

7.7 million

have defaulted on their loans, according to recently released data from the Education Department.

For some borrowers, moving abroad and out of reach of debt collectors can be tempting. In interviews, people who made this decision cited relieving the psychological burden of student debt as a motivator, as well as having a higher quality of life, even on a lower salary, outside the United States. Many who fled abroad, including Ms. Tully, said they had no plans of ever returning.

Figures on the number of borrowers who abandon their loans in this manner are unknown, but many debtors have shared their experiences on forums like Reddit. Credit reporting agencies like Experian, aware of the issue, have advised borrowers who have moved abroad to "resist the temptation to stop making payments." Borrowers in delinquency and default will likely see their credit scores plummet, raising their borrowing costs and making it difficult for them to access credit.

Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.

"The payments weren't even paying off the interest, so it was frustrating," Ms. Tully said.

Stanley Tate, a Baltimore lawyer specializing in student debt, warns against this approach. "Federal student loans are contractual debts," he said, meaning the obligation to repay does not go away, regardless of citizenship or residency. Moreover, the foreign earned income exclusion often allows federal student loan borrowers who live abroad and earn less than $130,000 (for the 2025 tax year) to pay $0 per month under an income-driven repayment plan, he said, recommending this path over defaulting.

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But affordable payments haven't stopped borrowers on such plans from defaulting

abroad or at home.

Michele Zampini, associate vice president of federal policy and advocacy at the Institute for College Access and Success, or TICAS, has seen borrowers in a situation similar to Ms. Tully's, with seemingly manageable payments, default because of a combination of low earnings and a sense of hopelessness.

Image

"The payments weren't even paying off the interest, so it was frustrating," Ms. Tully said.Credit...Milan Bures for The New York Times

"The psychological weight of carrying debt is a really widespread issue, even if it seems financially manageable," she said. "It's not necessarily 'I can't afford it.' It's sometimes 'It feels like I had no other choice but to go to college and I had to take out loans to go, and now I'm going to be stuck with this,' which can define people's lives in a way that feels very unfair and harmful."

In 2016, Eric Cooper graduated from a state school in Georgia with a degree in logistics. He received good grades and found a job as a logistics manager earning $52,000 a year almost immediately. But he had $80,000 of student debt, most of it consisting of parent PLUS loans through his mother.

"I did what everyone says to do

go to college, sign up for the loans," said Mr. Cooper, now 31. "My concern when I was 18 was that it was a lot of money, but everyone tells you that you'll get a good job and pay it back, no problem."

Mr. Cooper's payments were over $600 a month, and he was living paycheck to paycheck. He considered his options and planned to default not long after graduating, realizing his debt would take decades to pay off.

"I thought about it one day and was like, 'Am I really going to be doing this until I'm 50 or 60?'"

His primary concern was the parent PLUS loan. "If I left and didn't pay it, they would be forced to," he said of his family. After working for three years and making timely payments, he refinanced the loan into his name with a private lender. Within months, he moved to Southeast Asia to teach English and continued making minimum payments while applying for citizenship in his new country. He stopped paying when it was secured.

Mr. Cooper defaulted on his loans in 2019, changing his email and phone number, never alerting debtors to his new address.

"I think there were a few letters sent to my parents, but after the first year, I just never heard anything from anyone," he said.

For Enrique Zúñiga, debt wasn't on his mind when he began his studies. He received a full scholarship to Princeton and was grateful to avoid having student debt

until he received a $16,000 tax bill.

Mr. Zúñiga, 25, comes from a working-class family in Tiltil, Chile. In his final year of high school, EducationUSA, a State Department initiative to recruit international students to the United States, came to his class and handed him pamphlets for Princeton, where he applied to study chemistry and later switched to majoring in Spanish and Portuguese.

Mr. Zúñiga was living in university accommodations while dishwashing part time, with his scholarship covering both his tuition and his living expenses. But Mr. Zúñiga didn't realize that all funding exceeding his academic costs represented "nonqualified" funding, meaning that it was taxable.

Princeton states on its website that most nonacademic funding (including for international students) is taxable, but Mr. Zúñiga did not recall being told this. When he received his first tax bill from the university at the beginning of his second year of studies, he panicked.

"I walked into the financial aid office, and I told them: 'I don't have this money, so what do I do? I need to enroll in my classes,'" he recalled. Princeton offered him a private loan to cover the tax bill. Mr. Zúñiga had hoped to stay in the United States after graduating and find a good job with his Ivy League degree. With these plans in mind, he took on additional private loans to cover his tax bills until graduation.

TICAS has advocated for all scholarship funding to be nontaxable to prevent students from taking on tax-related debts. However, Ms. Zampini said she had never seen a situation like Mr. Zúñiga's, where the university provided loans to cover the taxes. The student newspaper has also published an opinion article highlighting the issue.

In July 2022, Mr. Zúñiga graduated with $16,736 in loans to Princeton. He received letters and emails demanding payment almost immediately. After months of unemployment and couch-surfing, Mr. Zúñiga found work as a legal assistant and interpreter at a legal charity in Philadelphia, but he was still unable to afford payments.

By November 2023, Mr. Zúñiga had paid back less than $1,500, and loan servicers began demanding he make more payments. He was then offered a job in Shanghai as a college admissions counselor.

"I thought to myself: 'Well, they can't enforce any judgments against my debts. I might as well go,'" he said. Before moving to China, he tried to negotiate with the loan servicers, but he said they were unwilling to budge.

Even in Shanghai, a Chinese loan recovery organization began contacting Mr. Zúñiga almost daily throughout 2024, urging him to pay his debt to Princeton.

"I was depressed," he said, describing a cycle of receiving daily phone calls and blocking numbers. Today, Mr. Zúñiga still receives emails about his debt, which has grown to $28,196.13, but he has no plans to pay it back.

Besides the emails, debt plays virtually no role in Mr. Zúñiga's life in Shanghai. Ms. Tully and Mr. Cooper also lead seemingly debt-free lives. They largely rely on local jobs and freelance work, still living comfortably despite earning far less than their American peers. Both have visited the United States without encountering issues and said they rarely thought about their debt.

Ms. Zampini said she was concerned about the narrative that defaulted borrowers living abroad were "gaming the system," or being such a small minority of borrowers that their experiences shouldn't motivate policy change.

"This is one piece of the bigger puzzle of how borrowers are managing," she said. "The fact that someone would need to make such a drastic life change driven by student debt is, itself, an indictment of a broken system."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/62565685

Does that mean gas prices will go down now?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/45946938

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8246456

Ah yeah more money than I will make in a lifetime, ez to start a family nowadays!

Key findings

• The 18-year cost of raising a child grew to $303,418 after tax exemptions and credits, according to a LendingTree analysis, even though the cost of the first five years dipped slightly. That's an average of $16,857 annually over 18 years, up 1.9% from a year ago. However, annual costs in the first five years decreased slightly from $29,419 to $29,325 (or 0.3%), driven primarily by a dip in day care costs.
• Hawaii is the most expensive state to raise a small child, with annual costs for the first five years reaching $40,342. Maryland and Massachusetts follow at $36,419 and $34,247. Conversely, annual costs are lowest in Mississippi ($17,148), Alabama ($18,019) and South Dakota ($18,622). All three states have infant day care costs below $10,000 annually, helping them rank among the cheapest states to raise a small child.
• Fourteen states saw the annual cost of raising a small child rise at least 10.0%, including four with growth of 20.0% or more. Annual costs rose in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Nebraska (27.4%), Montana (24.5%), Maine (24.4%) and Wisconsin (23.3%) all saw significant year-over-year growth in the annual cost of raising a small kid.  - Families in six states are projected to spend more than $300,000 raising a child over 18 years, with Hawaii leading at $412,661, followed by Alaska ($365,047) and Maryland ($326,360). By contrast, projected costs are lowest in New Hampshire ($201,963), the District of Columbia ($202,115) and South Carolina ($204,213). Kansas and Alaska saw the largest increases in projected 18-year child-rearing costs, each rising 23.5% from last year's report.
• Families spend an average of 21.9% of their income on the basic annual expenses to raise a small child, down from 22.6% in our 2025 analysis. The percentage is lowest in the District of Columbia (13.9%) and highest in Hawaii (27.4%).

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/41854

A Chinese artificial intelligence framework has autonomously resolved an open problem proposed more than a decade ago by a US mathematician, according to the Peking University-led team that developed it. The dual-agent framework solved the problem posed in 2014 by former University of Iowa professor Dan Anderson – who died in 2022 at the age of 73 – the researchers said in a preprint paper published on April 4. By synthesising decades of mathematical literature, the Chinese team’s AI framework...

From China - South China Morning Post via This RSS Feed.

After the 2024 elections, there was a panic among Democrats about the absence of a liberal Joe Rogan. Could one be found? Could one be created? It was an epic exercise in missing the point. You cannot have a liberal Joe Rogan because Rogan is not particularly political. His audience cohered around conversations with comedians, M.M.A. fighters, bodybuilders and psychonauts. That's what made him politically influential: He could reach millions of people who were not otherwise interested in politics.

The problem Democrats actually had

one of them, anyway

was that they didn't like Rogan and criticized others for going on his show. They tried, repeatedly, to cancel him for his comments about trans people and his skepticism of Covid vaccines. To the extent that he is now a right-coded figure, it's not because he started that way. Rogan's political views are mixed. He backed Bernie Sanders in 2020. He supports universal health care and abortion rights; he dislikes vaccine mandates and lax border control. But it shouldn't have been a surprise when, after years of being attacked by the left, he endorsed Donald Trump in 2024. The simplest way to tell people which side they're on is to tell them how much your side hates them.

That brings me to a more-important-than-it-might-look controversy that has burst out over the leftist streamer Hasan Piker. He had a breakout moment over the past year, as Democrats began obsessing over the absence of a liberal Joe Rogan and Piker, who mixes leftist politics with a bro-ish aesthetic, was proffered as a possible answer (a category error because, again, the whole point of Rogan's political power is that his show mostly avoids politics). But pick over Piker's years of streaming, and you can find offensive things he's said. Among them: That America "deserved 9/11," that his favorite flag is Hezbollah's, that a liberal Zionist is akin to a "liberal Nazi."

"Streamer has said offensive things" isn't really a news story. But then Abdul El-Sayed, the more D.S.A.-ish candidate in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, began rallying with Piker. That led Third Way, a centrist group that previously demanded that Democrats "draw a line in the sand" and shun "Hasan Piker and his fellow Jew-haters," to send a letter to El-Sayed demanding details about "how closely you align with his most abhorrent views." Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said Piker reflected "the dangerous normalization of antisemitism in our politics." Politico then asked a number of possible 2028 Democratic hopefuls whether they would appear on Piker's show: Gov. Gavin Newsom and Rahm Emanuel said they would. Representatives Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez already had. Senators Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego and Elissa Slotkin said they wouldn't.

I think there's rather a lot wrapped up in this controversy, so let's take it piece by piece.

Is Piker a "Jew hater," as Third Way alleges? In an interview with the writer Aaron Regunberg, Piker addressed some of his worst comments. I find some of his answers compelling and others less so. The comparison of liberal Zionists to Nazis, for instance, is repugnant and not much improved by Piker clarifying that he opposes ethnostates. What made the Nazis notable wasn't their support for an ethnostate. Ethnostates are common. What made the Nazis notable was their effort to exterminate the Jewish people. And Piker's assertion that his opposition is to all "reactionary ideology" is hard to square with his admiration for Hezbollah.

But to focus only on those comments is to miss much else that Piker has said and believes. He has also said: "From pogroms to the Holocaust, Jews have always been singled out by those in power as a scapegoat for the instability and economic volatility that people in power caused. A resilient, nascent antisemitism is a constant threat." He has called antisemitism "gross," "immoral" and "a hate crime." He has promoted Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia who is Jewish, as a 2028 presidential possibility. In previous presidential primaries, Piker supported Bernie Sanders, who is also Jewish. It is an unusual form of Jew hatred that calls out antisemitism and promotes Jewish Americans for the presidency.

I have deep disagreements with Piker, but he isn't a "Jew hater." He's an anti-Zionist. And here, I think, the real stakes of this fight come into view. We are living through a rupture in both the meaning and the reality of Israel. A Gallup poll from February found, for the first time, that more Americans sympathized with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. Among Democrats, the gap was overwhelming, with 65 percent who sympathized more with the Palestinians and 17 percent with the Israelis. The difference, as I have argued, is largely generational: Older Americans still view the Israelis more sympathetically, but among Americans ages 18 to 34, 53 percent sided with the Palestinians and 23 percent with the Israelis. This is new. Before 2023, young people and Democrats were more likely to side with the Israelis.

This is not the result of an international psy-op or a profusion of memes. The Israel that young people know is not the Israel that older people remember. It responded to the savagery of Oct. 7 by flattening Gaza in a brutal campaign that killed at least 70,000 Gazans, taking control of more than half of the territory and herding Gazans

more than two million people

into the remainder. Life there remains hellish. Israel has made hopes for a two-state solution fanciful by slicing the West Bank up into Israeli settlements and abetting constant settler violence and keeping a boot on the throat of the Palestinian Authority. It has used the Iran war as an opportunity to launch an invasion of Lebanon, displacing more than a million people and announcing that as many as 600,000 won't be allowed to return to their homes until Israel decides otherwise. The Knesset just voted to legalize hanging as a punishment for Palestinians who are convicted of killing Israelis in terrorist attacks.

Third Way suggests you can identify "Jew haters" by their use of "loaded words taught in social justice seminars ('apartheid,' 'genocide,' 'settler colonialism)." If that is the test, then a large number of American Jews now fail it. Israel, as it is behaving today, and as it is constructing itself for tomorrow, is incompatible with any normal understanding of liberal values.

"There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River," Benjamin Netanyahu has said. "For years I have prevented the creation of that terror state, against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad. We have done this with determination, and with astute statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, and we will continue on this path."

Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing. It will simply not be possible to treat it as a marginal viewpoint that can be shamed or shunned into invisibility. Yes, antisemitism often cloaks itself in anti-Zionism. So don't do the antisemites' work for them. If you keep telling people that if they oppose the Jewish state then they must hate the Jewish people, eventually, they will believe you.

The impulse to cut off those with whom we disagree reaches far beyond Piker or the Israel-Palestinian debate. It sits at the heart of cancellation as a political tactic. It relies on a belief in the power of gatekeepers that might have been true in an earlier age but no longer reflects the way attention is earned and held. Tucker Carlson was ejected from Fox News and grew stronger on X and YouTube. Nick Fuentes was banned from major social media platforms and gathered strength in the shadows. Trump went from being banned by every major social media platform to retaking the presidency.

But it's not just that cancellation has failed to silence those it targeted; it also weakened those who used it. The Democratic Party

and the progressive movement

was ill served by the belief that it could decide the boundaries of acceptable debate. In narrowing who it could talk to, it limited what it could hear and whom it could be heard by.

I haven't been on Rogan's show, but I've been on some of the shows in that broader universe, like Andrew Schulz's "Flagrant" and Lex Fridman's podcast. I was surprised by how frustrated the hosts were about their inability to book Democrats in 2024. They had said things that the broader progressive universe disliked or had conversations with people who were anathema to the left. And so Democrats largely avoided these podcasts, ceding them to the Trump campaign.

This was not only bad politics but also bad democratic practice. These shows had come from nowhere and had gained millions of loyal listeners. They had earned their viewerships by voicing something that made millions of Americans feel seen, heard or at least interested. In avoiding those spaces, Democrats avoided contact with the kinds of voters they otherwise claimed to represent. This is the mistake Democrats often make when they talk about what they did wrong in 2024. They realize, now, that they should try to talk to the people who listen to these shows; they are less likely to realize that they should listen to the people who talk on these shows.

Beneath this is an important principle: Conversation is not a reward to be bestowed on those with whom we agree; it's a necessary habit in a democracy. The point is not to find agreement so much as to deepen understanding. To talk with others is to believe in the possibility of change

theirs and your own. Whether you like everything that someone has said should be severed from the question of whether that person is worth talking to.

The space for such conversations was once wider. In 1968, William F. Buckley Jr., the archconservative founder of National Review, hosted Eldridge Cleaver, the minister of information for the Black Panthers, on "Firing Line." Neither man was there to endorse the other's politics.

"I should like to begin by asking Mr. Cleaver whether he finds it consistent with his ideology to encourage the assassination of Mr. Richard Nixon," Buckley said.

Cleaver's answer: "I would say that if Richard Nixon was assassinated, it would only result in having another pig in line who possibly would need to be assassinated."

Buckley later hosted Cleaver at his home. It was a different time, but it created a lasting artifact. The interview has hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and remains riveting to watch.

Are there people I won't have on my show or shows I won't go on? Sure. But those judgments, for me, are more about what I think will be productive rather than who I think can be included. Similarly, I wouldn't judge Booker or Gallego or Slotkin for avoiding Piker's show. They're busy people, and it may not be how they want to spend their time. But there's something strange about aspiring to lead the country's left-wing coalition and elevating the avoidance of prominent leftists to a matter of principle. That's all the more true now, as attention isn't bestowed on the chosen few by television networks and newspaper editors; it's won or lost in a ferocious marketplace that rewards outrage and controversy.

The winners of the attention wars today are typically people who said some outrageous things in the past

or are still saying them in the present. When you're dealing with podcasters or streamers who talk, unstructured and unrehearsed, for hours each week, if not every day, there's going to be so much said that it's almost inevitable that a dossier of dumb statements can be compiled. To write those people out of acceptable political discourse is to back yourself into a shrinking, sanitized corner of the public sphere.

Booker admitted on "Pod Save America" that when he had said he would never go on Piker's show, he had never heard of Piker. His communications director had read him a list of the four or five worst things Piker had said, and Booker used that as the basis for his response. Booker got piled on for that admission, but I appreciated the honesty. That is, in practice, a version of how many of us make our judgments.

Algorithmic media is an engine of motivated decontextualization. We see other people in snippets that serve the agendas of those who cut them. We are fed 30-second clips shorn from multihour streams, two-sentence quotes ripped from long conversations, old comments that obscure subsequent change. We have to be careful about being lulled into believing these shards represent anyone's whole person. We should not be afraid of finding out who those people are, of seeking to change them or of allowing ourselves to be changed by them.

Tagline material.