4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18hr ago
· Edited 18hr ago
Well to start with, I disagree that my "caricatures" are any such thing. I personally know a great many young women who really have learned everything they know about the conflict from extremely selectively composed Instagram infographics, including many now known to contain false information. This was obviously true during the BLM craze of 2020, so I don't know why you're acting so shocked that it's true now.
...and I don't think I was disputing that. I just think it's uncharitable in the simple sense that it is luring the reader into dismissing the position as flimsy or based on incorrect information, when it is neither (not flimsy in the sense that it would be easy to flip, nor based on incorrect information in the but-for causal sense of based on), using the hypothetical example of making a similar sort of assertion about the pro-Israel side. The majority of them can probably be accounted for by one of "Jewish with unapologetic ingroup preference", "actually hates brown people" and "have learned everything they know about the conflict from crazy posts on FB/Twitter", and I think for my lived-experience intersection of "American" and "pro-Israel" this is actually basically exhaustive (I can't comment on the Irish, because the last time I knowingly talked to an Irishman in the flesh was over a decade ago during undergrad); but I don't think that taxonomy would be appropriate either, because the crazy post people implicitly anchor their worldview in community leaders who do have a more interesting position and likewise would not be swayed from their position if you forced them to read some proper objective reporting.
Likewise, when a person who explicitly supports Hamas, thinks the October 7th attack was a good thing, explicitly states that they no longer feel any sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust etc. – I think it's reasonable to conclude that such a person fundamentally supports Hamas's stated mission of exterminating all Jews,
I disagree about Hamas/Oct 7th. The "no longer feel any sympathy" thing is a bit more complicated, though I have to say I have not heard that in the wild from leftists (even those who fall into the former two categories) at all. If you do see it that way, are you willing to bite the bullet and say that the Russian depiction of Ukraine and supportive Westerners as russophobic and genocidal is likewise accurate, given the abundance of similar rhetoric about every Ukrainian hit on Russia? (If yes, well, props for consistency, although I still disagree; if no, I will argue that you seem to be treating Jews as a special category where ill-wishes upon some members and emotive expressions of hostility are treated as uniquely more serious than for any other)
(And, seriously – you're getting so defensive about how I characterised the pro-Palestinian movement. "How dare you say we want to kill all Jews – we just want to forcibly ethnically cleanse them from the nation-state they've lived in for the better part of a century!" Is that seriously the moderate option? Is this what a "reasonable" pro-Palestinian person looks like?)
I don't recall ever claiming that it is "moderate" or "reasonable"; I was defending it only against your implicit charges of being non-serious (or, to be precise, either non-serious or significantly more immoderate/unreasonable than this still), as I explained above. I believe that on this forum, at least, we ought to be more careful about pegging movements precisely, rather than doing the normie thing and throwing everything outside a fixed window in the "literally Hitler" (literally so, in this case!) pit.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18hr ago
I'm a bit confused as to the "what is a woman" connection, but also my brain is somewhat more mushy than usual right now, and you are not making it easy with the slightly sloppy/casual grammar. I'll try to reread it when I am more lucid.
My guess is you don’t like men labeling be pro-Palestine as being anti-might makes right
(assuming men -> me) I do think "anti-might makes right" is a common motivating value among those who hold the pro-Palestine position, though by no means universally present.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
19hr ago
I'm confused as to what you are confused about.
Correct me if you disagree with anything in this summary: You gave two caricatures of pro-Palestinians, which seem to broadly be glossable as "naive person whose views are attributable to tragic pictures on Instagram" and "actually wants all Jews to die". I disputed that this is a charitable or reasonable taxonomy. You counter-objected that the people you encountered in real life are asserting unhinged/implausible things ("they rigged the Eurovision!!!" - is that actually so unhinged? I thought it was common sense that Eurovision results are always 100% inside baseball astroturf theatre) and that they are cheering on Hamas. I didn't address the latter (though I think it's at most consistent with "expel them from the Levant" which falls well short of "kill them all" - no evidence that they wish death, even indirectly, upon any Jew outside of the Levant), but asserted that the former is not evidence of being fairly described by either of your two caricatures.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20hr ago
· Edited 20hr ago
I don't think seething hatred of Israel and its supporters as you describe it is particularly incompatible with neither being pro-uncle-Adolf nor being low-information. "Expel all non-Muslims", the one position I suggested you didn't quote, is surely a pretty uncompromising position (and not exactly peaceful or sober-minded, if you try to imagine how this would have to play out in practice). The problem I had with your Instagram dig is that it suggests Instagram was instrumental (and hence that the position would fall apart with a "better" source), but I don't believe that and your description of your "lived experience" is not really giving evidence of it either.
(Perhaps you are making the mistake of thinking the conspiracism is upstream of the hatred, rather than downstream. For most people, once they find someone repellent, attributing additional evils large and small to them is just the natural course of pro-social action.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20hr ago
Was this supposed to be in response to some other post?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20hr ago
· Edited 20hr ago
The Dispensationalist view that (1) the Apocalypse of John was a coded prophecy about events in the near future and (2) the advent of events therein can be hastened by facilitating the events that are described therein was mainstream in American Protestantism since the early days of the Cold War, significantly carried support for Israel (under the idea that the events of the prophecy are set off by the reascendancy of Israel in its original location, followed by two nations called "Gog and Magog" waging a war of annihilation against it) and in particular re-peaked under the Bush administration. During the latter, the Left Behind series of books, which combined this theology with du jour political concerns of the US Right like opposition to the UN/international governance and socialism, was immensely popular, and random samplings of online protestant commentary from the era made it clear that plot points from the book (in particular, the ascendancy of a Romanian UN One World Government leader who is actually the antichrist) significantly coloured how pedestrian believers imagined the biblical apocalypse would play out in practice.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20hr ago
On the balance this is a good post, but I am rather disappointed that you failed to represent the "pro-Palestinian" position charitably in the end. For example, is the categorisation you offer in
you're almost equally likely to encounter a well-meaning young person who's simply upset by gory war footage in her Instagram feed, and a nutcase who thinks that Hamas are nobly trying to finish the job dear old Adolf started
really the best you can imagine? Do you not find it conceivable that someone could have gotten an accurate picture of the toll of the war in Gaza from a multitude of reasonably objective sources, and then from that drawn the conclusion (perhaps informed by other values they hold, however much you may disagree with those) that they ought to oppose the Israeli position with all that entails? I don't know what percentage of protesters nowadays get all their news from Instagram, but this is as immaterial as the question what percentage of Israel supporters get all their news from grandmas reposting AI slop on Facebook groups. In either case, their conclusions would most likely not change if you were to put them on a forced diet of Pulitzer-class fact-checked highbrow journalism instead.
I imagine some protesters, with perfect information about what transpired until now, would be happy with an outcome that involves every non-Muslim being expelled from the Levant. Others might not be happy with this, but have the delusion, as progressives are wont to do, that with sufficient reparations and contrition the Muslims will actually flip to running a pluralistic rainbow-coloured paradise in no time (delusional, perhaps, but not definitionally misinformed; information usually is not taken to include inductive reasoning). Yet others may just believe that the Israelis, using their considerable advantage in brains and brawns and wealth, can surely grit their teeth and figure out a way to make everyone there coexist more equitably, if the US just forces them at gunpoint to abandon their preferred strategy of whatever they are doing now (this, to me, seems plausible). Neither of these exactly implies support for "finishing the job dear old Adolf started", and each of them is a considerably more interesting category to engage with than the putative feel-good Instagram pollyannas you choose as the other representative.
To begin with, I don't know if you really want to be playing the "look at the sort of dumb people that exist on the other side" game, considering how much your side depends on the support of people who principally want Israel to exist so it can troll everyone and trigger a sequence of predetermined events that involves Jesus beaming them up into heaven before the UN institutes a one-world government under a Romanian dictator.
Realising I missed a nuance on first readthrough, you seem to assume that the 30-year-old guy script has to involve concrete things that you can confront them over, which they could fix to get accepted into the group. The more interesting question there, though, is what you would do with a 30-year-old guy where there is no such thing. I've seen plenty of instances where some guy is just unlikeable, through no fault of their own; nobody can do anything about it, but having to be around him actively causes the other members negative utility, to the point that if they are not forced to stay they would sooner just leave the group. How would you deal with that situation?
More options
Context Copy link