Alon

I write about public transport and do research for NYU's Marron Institute. I've previously lived in Tel Aviv, Singapore, the Riviera, New York, Providence, Vancouver, Stockholm, Paris.

Location: Berlin
Website: http://pedestrianobservations.com
Pronouns: They/them
Email: [email protected]

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Last Notes

2025-12-12 19:10:42 GMT

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No typo!

2025-12-07 04:20:13 GMT

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Or the intact regular and auxiliary police forces of Metro Vancouver backed with PLA arms taken during the PLA evacuation.

2025-12-04 03:55:17 GMT

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That has not stopped the racists from using racial slurs when discussing housing policy in BC.

2025-10-30 03:54:18 GMT

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Why would a smart US (i.e. not one run by Trump) renegotiate anything? Let China be the one that pulls out of international treaties and looks like the bad guy in the eyes of swing states in Asia and Latin America.

2025-08-30 22:48:58 GMT

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It's more complicated than this. In Frankfurt's essay, bullshitting is specifically a kind of lying about one's state of mind. For example, when a tobacco company says smoking doesn't cause cancer, it's lying: its intent is to get you to smoke more. But when Nigel Farage says the same, he's bullshitting: his intent is to get you to think he's the sort of person who doesn't believe scientists, doctors, and public health experts.

2025-08-25 14:25:59 GMT

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Oh? What do the hotel reviews say?

2025-07-28 04:29:26 GMT

Pedestrian Observations: Did the Netherlands Ever Need 300 km/h Trains? https://pedestrianobservations.com/2025/07/27/did-the-netherlands-ever-need-300-km-h-trains/

2025-07-15 10:44:20 GMT

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2. The universal narrative of the Holocaust, taught across the Western world, is that it's about man's inhumanity to man. Who was inhuman to who is unimportant, because it's a universal narrative, and today's victims may be killers tomorrow. Often it's bundled with casting *Germany* as a tragic victim of Allied humiliation at Versailles, with a lesson against pushing a defeated enemy too much even if said enemy committed mass murder (in truth, Germany was far more humiliated after WW2 than WW1).

2025-07-15 10:36:36 GMT

1. 🧵 about Holocaust reception. It's loosely inspired by a line in Omer Bartov's NYT piece saying Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, but none of this is about Israel or Bartov and I ask that @-replies respect this. tl;dr: there are two separate narratives, one Jewish and one (supposedly) universal, but the Jewish one is *more* generally applicable, for example to understanding modern transphobia, whereas the universal one is so abstract and nonspecific it ends up saying nothing.

2025-07-06 01:42:18 GMT

I have questions about the Holocaust that cast doubt upon the traditional British narrative of teaming with the US and USSR to save Europe from the Axis.
Questions like "why the fuck did you guys not let adult Jewish refugees in and why the fuck are you guys proud of the Kindertransport?"

2025-06-22 10:42:51 GMT

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I mean, if you haven't heard about it in media organs that broke the secret of the Israeli nuclear weapons program, it's likely because it's bullshit by a conspiracy theorist account.

2025-05-25 13:21:01 GMT

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The ship loss rate is higher than the death rate - many of the disabled ships are not sunk but did have a chance to sail to a port, for example.

2025-05-05 13:27:54 GMT

How to Build High-Speed Rail on the Northeast Corridor
https://transitcosts.com/north-east-corridor-report/

2025-03-30 02:06:14 GMT

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_route_E38

2025-02-19 14:22:58 GMT

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Jamelle Bouie's podcast just talked about it, re the legacy of Brennan, in the Air Force One episode. It was mentioned, I forget by which caster, that Brennan was heavily idealistic whereas, in light of the textualist reaction, liberals more recently got more timid. But then, it's weird blaming liberals for this when the court has had a conservative majority since 1992.

2025-02-16 20:29:50 GMT

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7. Last year, some Twitter anti-Semite discovered the Hebrew word "fraier," denoting someone who is suckered into being the mark of a con, and posted a missive on how it proves Jews are untrustworthy because clearly they think cheating is normal in the world. This went viral; anti-Zionist Malaysians and Eastern Europeans reacted with "oh, so they're just like us!" while Western Europeans were horrified at the Jews.

2025-02-16 20:28:40 GMT

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6. It takes *low* trust to call bullshit on cherished institutions. Black Americans are good at this. Jews are, too. Both groups have low levels of political racism against other minorities. In contrast, high-trust groups don't call bullshit, and then view the fact that immigrants do (after all, we directly see the hostility of many authorities to us and our friends) as evidence that we don't integrate: to be Swedish, they essentially say, means to believe Sweden can't possibly be racist.

2025-02-16 20:26:58 GMT

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5. Swedish society links its sky-high rape rates to immigration. In reality, Sweden was Europe's rape capital already in the 1990s: see EU-wide survey through 2004 at http://www.ristretti.it/areestudio/droghe/zippati/crimine_sicurezza_europa.pdf. But the Swedish left ignores this and instead tries to argue Swedish rape rates aren't unusual. "Our society is bad" doesn't occur to any of them. Those high trust levels make it impossible to believe Swedish (or German, or Dutch, etc.) society has social problems; everything must be outsiders' fault.

2025-02-16 20:24:39 GMT

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4. What's going on here is that high Northern European, esp. Nordic, trust, makes it easy for the mainstream to be racist. Nordics trust their institutions and refuse to believe that the police or immigration authorities may be biased against immigrants; thus, they constantly share statistics of immigrant overrepresentation in arrests as evidence of immigration overrepresentation among criminals. Americans get that the criminal justice system may be racist; Nordics do not.

2025-02-16 20:22:41 GMT

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3. Far right voter percentages in the polls (or recent election) by country:
Austria: 29%
Netherlands: 28% (PVV+FvD+JA21)
Norway: 25%
Germany: 20%
Sweden: 20%
Finland: 15%
Denmark: 15% (Æ+O)
Italy: 37% (Lega+FdI)
Greece: 20% (EL+Spartans+Niki+FL)
Portugal: 17%
Spain: 14%
So low-trust Southern Europe doesn't vote for extremists any more than high-trust Northern Europe. Italy has long normalized extreme right parties, but the others haven't, except ANEL in Greece as junior parner to Syriza.

2025-02-16 20:13:24 GMT

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2. The core issue is that while there is solid correlation between voting for extremists and low trust, it doesn't really hold at societal level. Nordic states are high-trust; all four have fully normalized the extreme right as participants in center-right coalitions. The Netherlands has a far right-led coalition. In Northern Europe, only Germany (and Belgium if you count it) has maintained the firewall, for unique historical reasons.

2025-02-16 20:11:16 GMT

1. 🧵 about trust and extremism, mirrored from Bluesky. It's often said that extremist voting and behavior (like anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing) is the result of low trust; see for example https://bibliothek.wzb.eu/pdf/2024/zz24-603.pdf and https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.soscij.2019.03.004. But what's missing from this analysis is how *high*-trust societies can produce racist attitudes that are then weaponized by extremists - for example, in the Nordic countries, but also the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, etc.

2025-02-05 18:16:28 GMT

Do people want me to talk about the 20 years of mythologizing about Gaza as a potential Singapore if only the Palestinians do whatever Israel wants? It's a way more interesting topic than anything Trump says, like the Gaz-a-Lago proposal.

2025-02-05 02:47:26 GMT

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5. But the best external validation comes from the group Germans have learned to historically trust: WW2 Western Allies, chiefly the English-speaking world; Jewish validation is always good, too, which is related to the "how can you call him anti-Semitic, he visited Israel once" apologia. If someone from the Anglosphere says AfD aren't Nazis, then who is a mere Die Welt reporter to argue. /end

2025-02-05 02:46:12 GMT

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4. Normative Germans feel guilty for the Holocaust, and this has positive downstream effects like less racism than in e.g. Austria and Switzerland, contrition over colonial crimes, etc. But they don't want to feel guilty and look for various forms of validation for not feeling guilty. The validation can also be de-Judaization of the Holocaust - (some) disabled Germans end up feeling like they'd have been victims of Aktion T4, including Germans with disabilities that Aktion T4 never touched.

2025-02-05 02:45:26 GMT

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3. The normalization of AfD could not originate from within Germany. Two months ago, Merz was still promising no cooperation with AfD; Axel-Springer's line was that the racism was legitimate but the party itself wasn't. But once an American billionaire wrote in favor of it, it was legitimized. (He's lived most of his life in the US and not South Africa, but regardless, both countries would count as Anglosphere for German guilt purposes).

2025-02-05 02:44:48 GMT

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2. It's acceptable to engage in extremism, whitewashing of historic crimes, romantic nationalism, etc., if someone from the Anglosphere or maybe the Jewish world legitimizes it first. For example, the conventional non-Marxist explanation of WW1 is, the Kaiser and his inner circle made a decision to go to war as soon as there was pretext. A German could not write a book like The Sleepwalkers saying it was just a failure of diplomacy. But once an Australian did, the book became popular here.

2025-02-05 02:43:42 GMT

1. 🧵 about Germany and normalization of nationalism here. It's well-known in English-language discourse that romantic nationalism is unacceptable in the mainstream here and that there's a baseline expectation of Holocaust guilt. But what's less remarked on is that Germans crave outside affirmation, on AfD, WW1 guilt, colonialism, etc.

2025-02-01 13:08:25 GMT

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There are no algos there, and Singal was harassed out of the site.

2025-02-01 00:31:56 GMT

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What? This place is far more of a bubble than Bluesky. The issue is that there isn't enough news content, so the content that there is has too few eyeballs on it, which encourages conspiracy theories.

2025-01-26 13:33:17 GMT

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If you've been to hundreds of protests, then you're exactly the wrong person to take any advice from. The protests that actually do things other than make people who don't even vote feel good about their (fake) political activity don't draw professional protesters and don't get people arrested.

2025-01-26 12:34:16 GMT

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I don't know what riots you go to, but the anti-AfD protests here are in the clear, and the climate protests, and the Ukraine protests, etc.

2025-01-26 10:52:45 GMT

Brief guide to phone security for protesters in North America, Europe, Israel, and democratic East Asia:
Keep your phone charged before the protest so that you can take plenty of pictures of protest signs (with consent of course).
That's it. Any protest anyone has any business going to is fully legal and you don't need to fear being extremely open that you went there. To the contrary, be proud. People who tell you to hide your face at protests are terrorists and anti-regime demoralizers.

2025-01-05 14:43:33 GMT

Pedestrian Observations: Large Cars are a Positional Good https://pedestrianobservations.com/2025/01/05/large-cars-are-a-positional-good/

2025-01-04 09:44:11 GMT

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There's no attempt to move troops from Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia to the front the way there was with the United States, at least as far as Feng can see.

2024-12-25 04:15:15 GMT

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The Houthis held the last Jew in Yemen hostage because he tried to take Jewish texts out of the country with him. They engaged in piracy and prevented aid from getting to Sudan, exacerbating the famine there. You do not need to defend them as defenders of the Palestinians; like everyone else in the Arab world other than the Palestinians themselves, they don't give a shit.

2024-12-24 17:26:28 GMT

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No, eliminating, the error is in the name of the air force and not what it's doing.

2024-11-23 04:34:52 GMT

Some people treat the American belief that the population is 21% trans, 27% Muslim, 30% Jewish, 41% black, 30% New Yorker, and 30% gay as evidence of false beliefs.
I choose to treat it as a goal of immigration policy, YIMBYism, and normalization of queerness.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/americans-have-one-very-strange-cognitive

2024-11-22 16:12:31 GMT

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Twitter is kinda nationalized right now...

2024-10-31 13:26:41 GMT

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Yeah, this. Defeating in detail is a military tactic of defeating an army that's split up one piece at a time. (This is why ancient armies, before modern artillery and machineguns, huddled together to the point that a battle with 100,000 troops on each side was on a single field and lasted 1-2 days - any split meant being defeated in detail.)

2024-10-16 01:36:28 GMT

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Okay, now I'm poking around for how I can swap the corrected map in without changing the URL; Wordpress is bad at this.

2024-10-16 00:15:18 GMT

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...fuck. I didn't move them.
(It already took me half an hour longer than normal just to reconcile the lines of the European and Middle Eastern front.)

2024-10-01 18:45:27 GMT

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Likely, yes. The one disturbing part was, several missiles targeted Dimona with its active nuclear reactor. As a result, there are indications Israel will retaliate against Iranian nuclear sites (inactive, so a successful hit isn't a Chernobyl event). But yeah, the scope of the attack looks like a statement more than an intent to escalate, and unless more stuff comes out that hasn't so far, the correct Israeli response is to find a Hezbollah platoon commander to kill and call it quits.

2024-10-01 17:48:40 GMT

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A terrorist attack in Tel Aviv at a light rail station killed eight people, and it's possible (hopeful) that that is more than will turn out to have been killed by the missile attack. Consensus within Israel is that air defense did a good job and nearly all missiles were intercepted; there is so far report of a single dead, a Gazan in the West Bank who died when a fragment fell on him. The Israeli airspace is reopening and Iran is indicating that the attack is over, if Israel doesn't retaliate.

2024-10-01 17:36:23 GMT

The IDF spokesperson is saying people can leave their shelters now? Is there no third wave of missiles?
Ominously, he's saying "don't pass information to the enemy and don't publicize confirmations of hits," which worries me there are dead that the IDF is trying to hush for now (by tomorrow we'll know).

2024-09-08 11:53:31 GMT

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If these polls all come out correct and Harris wins the electoral college while losing the popular vote...

2024-09-08 09:26:56 GMT

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It's a bad poem by a bad person and people need to stop quoting it. https://mastodon.social/deck/@Alon/112770160114866875

2024-09-07 17:55:31 GMT

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In the Civil War, the loyalist side was abolitionist; the traitors were the slavers. Brown was considered a traitor by secessionists and not by the state.

2024-09-07 17:42:13 GMT

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No, but stealing things or beating people up does and it's not common to get convicted of a crime otherwise.

2024-09-07 17:39:10 GMT

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Yeah, I don't like it; "convicted criminal" is clearer.

2024-09-04 06:21:07 GMT

On Bluesky, people are mocking Fedi for its 4,200 Brazilian signups (Bluesky: 2 million), and @npub1ata…k22l complained that last time she tried posting on Fedi, she posted a selfie and some asshole in comments demanded a CW for eye contact. It's a fascinating example of how a feature interacts with culture to subtract value. By itself, the CW feature is useful, as a spoiler warning. But combined with a culture of CWs, it empowers petty assholes to *demand* CWs, making the network less usable.

2024-09-01 15:29:00 GMT

A general strike is planned tomorrow in Israel. The IDF just botched a rescue, and instead of getting six live hostages, it got their bodies, just executed by Hamas; the families of several of the dead are refusing to even take condolence calls from Netanyahu and calling on people to join the protests tomorrow. The Business Forum is in support of the strike and will join the protests.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-01/ty-article/.premium/businesses-across-israel-to-close-early-ahead-of-mass-rally-for-hostage-deal/00000191-ad7a-d95c-a5b5-ff7bc4960000
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-01/ty-article-live/idf-finds-hostages-bodies-in-gaza-family-of-hostage-hersh-goldberg-polin-announces-death/00000191-ab89-d453-ab9f-fb8ddb250000?liveBlogItemId=864954162#864954162
https://www.ynet.co.il/economy/article/rjkntjf3r#autoplay

2024-08-23 22:49:26 GMT

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Ooh, thanks for the rec, I just backed.

2024-08-23 22:24:32 GMT

The discourse on castism on Fedi bothers me:
1. I almost never see toots about castism within India. I post about it when I find some study and @npub1xdy…etvd posts about it occasionally, but that's it.
2. I have never seen any toot about castism in Pakistan, which does exist, along different lines from Hindu castism.
3. There is some coverage of castism among immigrants to the US/UK - not much but more than in India - but then nothing about white racism against Indian-Americans and -Brits.

2024-08-11 23:58:24 GMT

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TFWs are a type of immigrants and have agency to seek jobs that pay better than in their home countries. If you want to tell me there is organizing among the immigrants to give TFWs more rights then I'll happily signal-boost, but you should be centering them and not native-born Canadians, a group that is all too happy to blame immigrants for low wages and high rents.

2024-08-11 23:27:53 GMT

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Immigrants have agency, too.

2024-08-09 22:44:46 GMT

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Something that @npub1tk7…t6el pointed out here a while ago is that Chávez and Maduro never implemented the sort of social policies that democratic Latin American leftists usually do - no major expansion of the welfare state, and no liberalization of abortion or gay rights.

2024-08-09 04:41:51 GMT

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How resilient is Fedi to such blocks?

2024-08-06 17:04:55 GMT

Who should I be following here for more Bangladesh news?

2024-07-29 22:19:04 GMT

Who should I be following on here for news from Venezuela?

2024-07-28 12:37:27 GMT

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In a symmetric war perceived as existential, there's not much disobedience. We see draft-dodging in Russia today, but that's a regime that already had a lot less than 100% domestic support, and Ukraine in the EU and NATO is a threat to Russia's pride, not its existence as a state.

2024-06-17 15:18:32 GMT

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But the party itself was unpopular in Germany - the German people adored Hitler personally, but Hitler never bothered to create an enduring party hierarchy of people who the average German could relate to and think "I will happily take orders from them." It wasn't the same kind of institution as the communist party in communist states.

2024-06-04 23:39:39 GMT

It looks like 293-234-16. The NDA is relying on two regional parties for its majority, both of which are notorious alliance switchers: JD(U) by Bihar's chief minister for life, Nitish Kumar; and TDP by the corrupt N. Chandrababu Naidu. INDIA is reaching out to both, but both have said they'll attend the NDA meeting today. https://www.livemint.com/politics/news/elections-results-2024-yashwant-singh-asks-chandrababu-naidu-nitish-kumar-to-switch-to-india-bloc-nda-pm-modi-11717519502678.html https://www.thehindu.com/elections/lok-sabha/elections-results-2024-nitish-kumar-chandrababu-naidu-emerge-kingmakers/article68252063.ece