FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1d ago
Clearly, the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again
Do what again? Award a group a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people were killed? Which group has seen 6 million of their people killed recently?
Compare Northern Ireland with Israel and the difference is massive. Northern Ireland is safe while Israel is still at war.
I don't think you're comparing apples with apples.
- Read the mission statements for the IRA, the UVF, the UDA and every other paramilitary organisation in the North. Conspicuous by its absence will be any explicit declaration of intent to completely exterminate the opposing ethnic group. The same cannot be said of Hamas's founding charter. It's extremely difficult to do business with a rival ethnic group who simply want your entire ethnic group dead. How do you come to a compromise? ("Okay – you can have your own state and only kill half of us"?)
- There were moderate leaders on both sides (e.g. John Hume and David Trimble) of the Troubles who were willing and able to work together to find a compromise. Every would-be moderate Palestinian leader has good reason to believe he'll be assassinated by one of his own side if he ever dilutes his maximal hatred and distrust of Jews one iota. (In the interest of fairness, this was probably also true about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.)
- The inability to compromise inevitably results in Palestinian leaders turning down offers far more generous than any offered to Northern Irish Catholics. At no point in the Troubles was complete ceding of territory from the UK to Ireland ever even considered never mind offered, and John Hume and Gerry Adams knew this going into negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement. Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders have been offered their own state at least three times in the last fifty years and turned it down every time. These would strike me as a transparent example of cutting one's nose to spite one's face if you accept the Palestinian leaders' claims at face value that they only want their own state and a "right of return" or similar.
- As odious as some of the IRA's tactics were, they pale in comparison to Hamas's. It's not easy to ask someone to swallow their pride and bury the hatchet with someone who killed your cousin, but it can and has been done. Asking someone to bury the hatchet with someone who murdered your cousin and violated her corpse is a much harder ask.
I also question the way you're laying 100% of the blame for the sad state of affairs at Israel's fault. I mean, when you include bangers like
an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group
Like, even if I concede that this description applies to the Jews in Israel – surely you must concede that, at the minimum, it also applies to the Palestinian Arabs? If nothing else, Jews in Israel can peacefully co-exist with each other (Israel is a significant outlier in the middle East for having experienced zero civil wars since 1948). Palestinian Arabs are such basket cases that they don't even get along with other Arabs, and inevitably end up starting civil wars whenever they're admitted into neighbouring Arab countries. If you want to say that peace in Israel and Palestine is impossible because there are two competing ethnic groups who both follow "an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group", I could understand where you were coming from. But the idea that this description only applies to the Jews and not to the Muslim Palestinians is just laughable on its face.
FtttG
1d ago
How about not occupying more and more territory.
Funny how this one always gets trotted out, and yet all the occasions Israel offered territory back to their Arab neighbours are overlooked.
FtttG
1d ago
But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving.
I would still love to see evidence for these hundreds of thousands of Gazan children who starved. Most pro-Palestine people seemed to quietly drop that specific claim after the UN were forced to walk back the most explosive framing of it.
FtttG
1d ago
Nowhere is the continued existence of Europeans demanded.
To push back on this point: depending on how you define it, there are two orders of magnitude more white Europeans in the world then there are Jews, and the global population of white Europeans has not declined at any point in the last century. Jews are not mistaken to perceive themselves as a vulnerable population in a way that white Europeans are not.
FtttG
1d ago
People began criticising Israel's "genocide" in Gaza before Israel had even militarily responded to the Hamas attack.
FtttG
1d ago
or indeed Gaza
The dead giveaway is that the people ostensibly most concerned about Palestinian welfare (most of whom tend to present themselves as opposed to Hamas) tend to be the quietest when Palestinians are oppressed or victimised by anyone who isn't an Israeli, including Hamas themselves. "No Jews, no news", as the saying goes.
That being said, epistemic bubbles are absolutely a thing:
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
To the extent that I think Israel's military goals in Gaza were defensible, this is probably a criticism which applies to me.
In the last three years I have seen plenty of people discussing in complete seriousness how all of the banks and financial institutions are controlled by Jews and that this is bad.
FtttG
1d ago
I sort of feel that the best solution would be for Jews to just all live in America.
Freddie deBoer argued that, if the purpose of Israel is to be a country where Jews will be safe forever, the US already fits the bill. If I recall correctly, he posted this article before that couple were shot dead in DC and that Egyptian guy threw Molotovs at a group of Jews, one of whom died from her injuries. I'm curious if he's revised his position any.
FtttG
1d ago
I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack.
Funny you bring that up, given I never claimed they did.
and the key point ISRAEL did kill a bunch of his family in Lebanon
But this is that exact absurd collective guilt framing the article was decrying!
A few years ago, Liam Neeson told an anecdote about how, when he was younger, a close friend of his was raped by a black man, which drove him into such a rage that he stalked the streets of London carrying a cosh, looking for a black man to beat up in retribution (thankfully he didn't go through with it in the end). He told this anecdote essentially as a cautionary tale about how ugly, prejudiced attitudes can sneak up even on well-meaning people, and how one must actively resist the urge to submit to one's darkest base impulses – and even with this context he was still excoriated as a racist.
Meanwhile, a Lebanese man shoots up a synagogue in Canada, and people say "well, several of his family members were killed by people who share ethnic heritage with the people in that synagogue, so he was justified in trying to kill them".
Would an American who lost family on 9/11 be justified in shooting up a mosque? Would an Englishman who lost family in an IRA bombing be justified in shooting up a Catholic church in Clapham?
My point (made more eloquently in the linked article; I'm drunkenly paraphrasing) is that there are a lot of people who would never dream of suggesting that a hate crime targeting e.g. black people might be justified because of how a group of black people behaved in a different country. But when a hate crime targets Jews minding their own business in a country other than Israel, these same people will outright state that such violence is "only to be expected" in light of the actions of Israel (even if the targeted Jews don't hold Israeli citizenship, have never set foot in the country and have personally expressed discomfort with IDF military tactics).
A person who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but who harbours no ill will towards Jews would presumably condemn anti-Semitic violence outside of Israel just as loudly as they condemn anti-black hate crimes, gay bashing etc. The fact that they tend not to do this, but rather will excuse or justify the violence in question, rather suggests that their motivating impulse is something other than a philosophical opposition to the existence of the Jewish state.
FtttG
2d ago
The basic rule is that whenever something is considered bad, it won't be long before the Jews are accused of it.
And even worse: things which were once considered bad when Jews did them may later come to be considered good, but new infractions will be discovered or invented to pin on Jews so that their perceived moral value among gentiles never improves.
For many centuries, Christians were forbidden to lend money, so if a Christian wanted to borrow money, he had to borrow from a Jewish moneylender (cue centuries of stereotypes about greedy Jews). Over time, Christian countries liberalised and secularised, and now there are just as many gentile moneylenders as Jewish ones, if not more so. But has this resulted in a rehabilitation of Jews in the gentile imagination, or an acknowledgement that it was wrong to stereotype Jews as greedy when in many cases they were completely shut out of many lines of work other than finance? Has it fuck. Gentiles are allowed to engage in the behaviours that resulted in the "greedy Jew" stereotype without incurring any of the associated negative status.
It's such transparently rigged, unfair bullshit.
Sort of related: I recently read an article called "On Collective Jewish Guilt".
I understand that anti-Zionism is not intrinsically reducible to antisemitism, and that, in theory, one could oppose the existence of Israel while harbouring no ill will towards Jews and wanting them to be safe. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that, in many cases, anti-Zionism is the motte and antisemitism is the bailey. This article argues that you can tell a lot of anti-Zionists don't really mean what they say based on how they react to antisemitic terror attacks and hate crimes that take place outside of Israel (e.g. the recent Hanukkah mass shooting on Bondi Beach). After all, if anti-Zionists were really only opposed to the state of Israel, you would logically expect them to be the first to condemn attacks on the Jewish diaspora, and in the loudest possible terms: after all, if they believe that a dedicated Jewish state is not necessary to ensure the safety of Jews, they should be the ones most opposed to attacks on Jews outside of Israel. That is, to put it charitably, not what would we see. Every time there has been an antisemitic terror attack or hate crime in the last two and a half years, I have seen one or more of the following:
- sympathetic framing of the perpetrator ("his family were killed in an airstrike in Lebanon")
- claims that such attacks are bound to be expected as a consequence of the war in Gaza i.e. victim-blaming (as if a handful of Australian Jews, many of whom had presumably never set foot in Israel, have the slightest say in Israeli politics or IDF tactics)
- outright suggestions that the attack was staged by Mossad as a false flag attack
I am sure there is someone out there who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but legitimately harbours no animosity towards Jews on an interpersonal level and sincerely wishes them no harm. (This is the person Freddie deBoer claims to be; I don't believe him.) But in my experience, nine times out of ten a Gentile who calls himself anti-Zionist will eventually be revealed to be antisemitic, and I'm sick of trying to pretend otherwise.
"So I know the group our people are targeting for harassment and abuse now is the same group our people have been targeting for harassment and abuse for centuries. And I know that our justifications for harassing and abusing them (they murder children, they control the banks, they control the media, they're sexual degenerates) are literally word-for-word the same as the justifications we used for centuries before now. But our harassment and abuse is totally justified now because of anti-colonialism, guys."
FtttG
2d ago
My proposed title for a Walt Whitman porn parody featuring gangbang scenes.
FtttG
2d ago
Embarrassed to admit how little progress I've made on A Canticle for Leibowitz since this time last week.
FtttG
2d ago
See also the 41% suicide rate of transitioners
I will have to push back on this one. My understanding is that this figure originated in an informal survey in which they asked trans people if they had ever attempted suicide (a heterogeneous category which includes hanging oneself and being interrupted, to overdosing on sleeping pills but fully expecting to be found i.e. "cries for help"). I don't think the survey separated out people who had medically transitioned from those who had not.
My understanding is that the suicide rate among trans people is not hugely different from the general population.
FtttG
2d ago
violence against women has been trending down over the years.
And the demographic to which the protagonist of Adolescence belongs is one of those least likely to commit it.
If it can be clearly established that the perpetrator of a mass shooting or similar spent a great deal of time in incel/manosphere spaces which pushed him to do something heinous, then that mass shooting should be attributed to the perpetrator being an incel or manosphere adherent. I have zero problem characterising e.g the Isla Vista incident as an example of incel-motivated violence.
But I think there's a clear double standard in which attacks get attributed to which ideologies/communities in the progressive media: that a terror attack is Islamist must be proved beyond reasonable doubt, while preponderance of evidence (if even that) is all that is required to "prove" that a given mass shooting is incel/manosphere/far-right. If a mass shooter is known to have watched one Andrew Tate video, that will go in the lede, while the years of mental illness will be glossed over if mentioned at all. Meanwhile, it's a cliché for progressive journalists to announce that "no motive could be established" for a mass stabbing incident even when the perpetrator was heard bellowing "Allahu Akbar" during the attack. I believe this double standard also extends to mass shootings committed by trans people: progressive journalists seem alarmingly reluctant to acknowledge that the pattern even exists, still less to ask hard questions about the kinds of content the perpetrators may have consumed prior to their attacks and whether there's any causal relationship.
I've spent plenty of time in trans spaces and I haven't seen any of that.
Well, lucky you, but I will admit I have a bit of a hard time believing this. "Die Cis Scum" was a meme over a decade ago. Trans Day of Vengeance? The avalanche of death and rape threats directed towards JK Rowling or Kellie-Jay Keen (the latter of whom was actually physically assaulted in public)? Assorted macabre, threatening protest placards like "The only good TERF is a ____ TERF"? SNP members photographed standing next to a placard reading "decapitate TERFs"? None of this ringing a bell?
Well, yeah, believing your political opponents are backward is par for the course, is it not?
Sometimes, not always. Communists usually strike me as either resentful or naïve, but not "backward" as such.
"My political opponents are being uncharitable, so I'll be uncharitable back!" Many such cases. But isn't that against the rules on this website? And, you know, a bad thing in general?
This was, ironically, a profoundly uncharitable reading of what I said. All I'm advocating is consistency. If we must trawl through the entire digital footprint of every trans mass shooter to determine exactly what it is that drove them to commit their horrific misdeeds, we should do the same with every mass shooter and resist the urge to buy into a simplistic narrative of their having been radicalised by Andrew Tate or whoever. I'm not advocating for trans criminals to be treated especially uncharitably, but rather for consistency in how criminals are treated regardless of their identity characteristics.
If the other side is being uncharitable or plain dishonest, point it out and ask them to be charitable and honest. Don't stoop to their level.
I, for one, am not stooping to their level. The claim that there is an epidemic of incel-motivated violence in the UK is simply untrue. I am unaware of even a single case of a young man in the UK murdering someone after being radicalised by incel/manosphere content. While there has been incel-motivated violence outside of the UK, the scale of it has been greatly exaggerated. Contrary to PM Keir Starmer's claims, Adolescence was not a documentary, nor even based, however loosely, on a true story. I did not describe the content of a fictional Turkish miniseries as if it had anything to say about the real world. I rather resent your implication that there is no moral difference between a) reading too much into a real case that actually happened and b) producing a fictional miniseries about a problem that does not exist and using it as a cudgel with which to beat an entirely blameless demographic.
It is not untrue for me to assert that there have been at least three mass shootings committed by trans people so far this year. It is not untrue for me to assert that there have been at least eight mass shootings or killing sprees committed by trans people so far this decade. It hardly seems unreasonable for me to infer that a pattern seems to be emerging here, nor that it might be worth investigating what commonalities the perpetrators might have besides their gender identities.
While trans-motivated violence has claimed more lives this decade (and probably this century) than incel-motivated violence, in the linked post I went out of my way to point out that the former is still small in absolute terms, and a drop in the bucket compared to e.g. Islamist terrorism – this is, to my mind, exactly the opposite of the hysterical scaremongering seen in the incel debate. I am not demanding that Netflix produce an arty miniseries about a trans person who commits a mass shooting, nor that every British teenager be made to watch it. While I have my disagreements with trans activists, I don't recall ever urging people to beat them up or decapitate them. I am not stooping to my opponents' level, and it's repugnant of you to suggest that I am.
FtttG
3d ago
And a society which tries to integrate them, to find a place where they can live well, even if it is not always successful, will get better results than one which continually signals to them that they are not wanted and that it would prefer that they quietly disappear.
I find it interesting that this society of yours resides solely in your imagination: mass shootings have been observed in just about every society you care to mention. I wonder why that might be.
I am not advocating for such retaliation, merely pointing out that the most effective strategy for preventing it is to practise the same universal benevolence you ought to have been practising all along.
What is your evidence for your claim that this is the most effective strategy for preventing it?
Below are a list of things that Western societies generally believe that minor children are too immature to engage in with informed consent:
- Getting tattoos
- Drinking alcohol
- Smoking cigarettes
- Smoking weed
- Enlisting in the military
- Signing up for employment without the express permission (and, in some cases, supervision) of their parent or guardian (esp. dangerous jobs)
- Place bets on the outcomes of sporting events
- Undergoing elective medical procedures without the express permission of their parent or guardian
- Participating in contact sports without the express permission of their parent or guardian
- Having sex with adults
- Creating pornographic images of themselves
Obviously there is enormous heterogeneity between jurisdictions (in some jurisdictions it's illegal for anyone to smoke weed regardless of age) and the age of consent varies a great deal just within Europe. Nonetheless, you will be hard-pressed to find an example of a Western jurisdiction in which prepubescent children are legally free to practise all or most of the above.
I'm legitimately curious which of the above you think minor children (esp. prepubescent children) should be legally permitted to practise.
it has not been demonstrated that this relationship is so direct as to make the peddlers of violent rhetoric legally responsible for the shootings to a degree that nullifies their First Amendment rights.
I'm quite explicitly not demanding the arrest of anyone posting violent, hateful rhetoric in trans subreddits, nor claiming that anyone posting such content could be found criminally liable for incitement to violence. Innumerable subreddits have been banned over the years without any of the moderators or posters facing legal action. If Reddit decides to ban a subreddit which consists of nothing but people ranting about how much they despise "femoids" (or black people, or homosexuals, or Jews etc.) and openly fantasising about how much they'd like to assault and torture them, they should adopt the same standard when it comes to subreddits consisting of people ranting about how much they despise TERFs, "cis scum" or similar. Or we can do the modus ponens and say that if trans-identified males are allowed to share their creepy fantasies about murdering TERFs on Reddit, then incels, racists and homophobes should be allowed to as well.
I think you're constructing a strawman in an effort to make me sound like an authoritarian and an opponent of free speech (particularly laughable when I've racked up multiple QCs for loudly condemning the censorious approach adopted by several Western governments). I don't appreciate it.
I made this point at greater length in the linked post: if you think I'm getting too worked up about trans-inspired violence, that logically implies that Western governments are getting far too worked up about incel-inspired violence. Can't have it both ways.
You're referring to the Holocaust, I get that. When you said "the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again" I interpreted that to mean "the pro-Palestine people are asking the EU to award them a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people have been killed". But 6 million of their people haven't been killed. Or did I misinterpret you?
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