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Every morning countless well-paid, well-educated foot soldiers in the employ of the Democratic Party wake up and decide on the day's talking points. Every morning a small army of spokespeople step to the lecterns and deliver statements about how much the president cares for innocent lives, or the immense effort the United States makes to minimize unnecessary suffering. or whatever it is that needs to be said that day so as to launder the evil done between the last press conference and this one. A growing number of people ask a different question; the world asks a different question. The world, full of people who factor not one iota in the calculus of those morning meetings, looks upon this and asks, simply: Beyond self-interest, what do you believe in? And every morning the answer, dressed up in anesthetic euphemism and dependent on our collective capacity for resignation to the lesser of two evils, is: Nothing

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate) (Page 84)

It is an admirable thing, in a politics possessed of a moral floor, to believe one can change the system from the inside, that with enough respectful prodding the establishment can be made to bend, like that famous arc, toward justice. But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent acceptance of genocide, is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you?

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate) (Page 82)

Writing is a precarious profession. We are broke, for the most part. We work jobs we often don't enjoy to keep the lights on: Faulkner at the post office, Vonnegut and his disastrous car dealership, every writer you know and their faculty gig. The average author doesn't make enough from their royalties to clear the poverty line. Most books don't even make back their advance, meaning they earn no royalties for the author at all. When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize, she thanked her food bank. Our work is stolen to train the software of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence companies run by people who believe art is a problem to be solved.

And so we come to rely on the graces of grants and fellowships and residencies and awards. We play nice because, well, why not? It's exhausting, being difficult all the time. So what if that debut novel prize is paid for by a company actively destroying independent bookstores? So what if the fellowship is named after a marauding captain of industry?

When you really think about it, what isn't named after one of those guys? If by not playing nice, one misses out on the resources needed to do the writing in the first place, is the trade-off really worth it? The Renaissance artists had their many-castled benefactors, why can't we have ours?

Because sometimes the powerful commit or condone or bankroll acts of unspeakable evil, and any institution that prioritizes cashing the checks over calling out the evil is no longer an arts organization. It's a reputation-laundering firm with a well-read board.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate) (Page 74 - 75)

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate) (Page 64)

Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication are labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate) (Page 55)

There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher. It is a reminder that the Democratic Party's relationship with progressivism so often ends at the lawn sign: Proclaim support for this minority group or that. Hang a rainbow flag one month a year from some White House window. Most important, remind everyone at every turn of how much worse the alternative would be.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate) (Page 45)

In the context of self-interest—and maybe there never was any other context—it is utter madness to risk one's own prospects standing up for people who can offer nothing in return. Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that's what those people do, they die. Just for a moment, cease to believe that this particular group of people are human.

For millions of Westerners this will always prove true. But for millions more it will not. In moments such as these, when the lies are so glaring and the bodies so many, millions will come to understand that there is no such thing as "those people." Instinctively this will be known to those who have seen it before, who have seen their land or labor stolen, their people killed, and know the voracity of violent taking. Those who learned not to forget the Latin American death squads, the Vietnamese and Cambodian and Laotian villages turned to ash, the Congolese rubber then and Congolese coltan now

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate) (Page 44 - 45)

A deranged Republican talking point presented with at best mild rebuke because there are only two major political parties in America and one of them just happens to be populated with the sort of people who muse about whether wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate) (Page 36)

Now, once more, an essential truth of calamity journalism is made clear: In the earliest days, in the chaos that precedes systemic annihilation, it is not what the party deemed most malicious has actually done that matters, but rather what it is believed capable of doing.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate) (Page 32 - 33)

If the scam economy can flourish, it is because of a confluence of factors unique to this late stage of capitalism we currently find ourselves in. Our increasingly online existence and the rapid emergence of increasingly sophisticated new technologies, in-cluding artificial intelligence, that have been deployed for scamming purposes are undoubtedly an important part of the story. So is the entrenchment of corrupt elites and the globalisation of criminal groups, both perpetually on the lookout for new markets and sources of profit.

— Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds by Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li, Mark Bo (53%)