FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
2mo ago
Does the existence and behaviour of Israel/Mossad etc. push more people further towards such behaviour? Also yes.
How exactly does one Irish Jew minding his own business on a Dublin bus bear any responsibility for the actions of Netanyahu and Mossad? The implication that all Jews are collectively responsible for the actions of any individual Jew is about as close to a textbook definition of "racism" as I can envision.
About a year ago, in a discussion of Ireland's rabid support for the Palestinian cause, I argued that it's primarily caused by misguided post-colonial solidarity and that "I've never gotten the feeling that Ireland is an antisemitic country".
That's a position I'm now revisiting:
A Jewish man was hit by a stranger shouting antisemitic insults on a Dublin city bus on Friday [the 18th of July], according to a video circulating on social media. The assailant shouted “genocidal Jews” and other slurs at the man.
He also said he recognized that the man was a Jew “because of his face.” The Jewish man – who recorded the incident – can be heard saying, “I get used to it; they are all like this.”...
The assailant then slapped the Jewish man in the face and tried to take his phone.
Comments on social media said the driver called the police and that the man was arrested.
An officer told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that it does not comment on material circulated online by third parties but confirmed that “shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday, 18 July 2025, [police officers] from Rathmines responded to reports of a disturbance on a bus in Rathgar, Dublin.”
For reference, Rathgar is a very posh suburb, with houses going for €1 million at the minimum.
A few weeks ago, my dad quoted some Israeli politician (whose name escapes me) at me who supposedly claimed that his proudest achievement was drawing an equivocation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the public consciousness. I accept that the two are not strictly equivalent, but I don't think anyone can dispute anymore (in Ireland or anywhere else) that the former can often serve as a cover for the latter. I am quite confident that the assailant made no effort to ascertain his victim's political affiliation (i.e. whether or not he was one of the "good Jews") before harassing and assaulting him.
As an aside, I can't help but marvel at how self-defeating this behaviour is. Whenever you assault someone because they look like they might be Jewish, you are precisely demonstrating Israel's entire raison d'être, the moral necessity of its existence.
Free by Lea Ypi, a memoir of the author's childhood in Albania as it transitioned out of the USSR out of socialism and into a liberal democracy. Unsurprisingly, it presents living in a socialist country in a very negative light. Comparisons with My Brilliant Friend are apt (Albania in the late 80s/early 90s seems about as economically deprived as Naples in the 60s), even though this one is marketed as non-fiction. Very readable, and I'm glad the focus is mainly on the politics and the disruptions the author's parents had to cope with, rather than endless trite anecdotes about the author's interactions with her primary school classmates or whatever.
Otherwise, we kind of move towards a world where everyone dons a disguise out in public just to maintain some semblance of anonymity.
Perhaps the political valence of wearing a facemask in public spaces will do a complete 180. Or better yet, burqas for everyone, not just women.
For the most part the only anime I watch are movies, rather than TV shows. The one exception was Paranoia Agent, which I adored (helps that it was created by a director, Satoshi Kon, whose cinematic work I'd previously loved - Perfect Blue which was the inspiration for Aronofsky's Black Swan, and Tokyo Godfathers which might be my favourite Christmas movie). A bizarre and blackly comic mashup of police procedural, psychological thriller, fantasy and social satire which I cannot recommend highly enough.
FtttG
2mo ago
The US courts are surprisingly willing to accept that defence
It's been successfully deployed by both Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson, also.
FtttG
2mo ago
and with a country that is attacking all its neighbours?
As I've already pointed out in this thread, such a description applies to a significant chunk of Middle Eastern nations, which hasn't stopped them from signing peace agreements with each other in the recent past.
FtttG
2mo ago
go into Gaza with the goal of occupying it for a few decades (in the knowledge that they will get a lot of their soldiers killed in the process)
Isn't that pretty much what they're doing now?
FtttG
2mo ago
That's all true, but doesn't change the fact that routine acts of military aggression against your neighbours or your own people have been the norm in pretty much the entirety of the Middle East for the last century. It's also plainly obvious that many of the acts of aggression you cite were defensive in nature.
FtttG
2mo ago
created a functioning society in which many protestants live
The way this is framed suggests to me that you didn't realise the Protestants were the ones holding the whip at the outset of the insurgency.
Subjegating Palestinians is never going to work as the conflict isn't going to end if there is no deal for the Palestinians to accept.
On at least three occasions, the Palestinians have been offered deals significantly more generous than that offered to Northern Irish Catholics in 1998. They have refused all of them because they refuse to compromise, to their own detriment more than to that of the Israelis.
Let's have a look. In the last hundred years, and excluding the second world war (for the reason illustrated by its title), by my count:
- Bahrain has been involved in 2 conflicts, one involving Saudi Arabia.
- Egypt has been involved in 6 conflicts (including several civil wars) variously involving Israel, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
- Iran has been involved in 16 conflicts (including several civil wars/revolutions) variously involving Azerbaijan, the no-longer extant Kurdish republic, Kuwait, Iraq, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
- Iraq has been involved in 22 conflicts (including several civil wars, insurgencies etc.) variously involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait and Israel.
- Jordan has been involved in 3 conflicts variously involving both Israel and Palestine.
- Kuwait has been involved in 2 conflicts variously involving Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
- Lebanon has been involved in 11 conflicts (including numerous civil wars) variously involving Syria, Israel and Palestine.
- Saudi Arabia has been involved in 11 conflicts variously involving Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Bahrain, Iran and the UAE.
- Syria has been involved in 14 conflicts (including numerous civil wars) variously involving Lebanon, Israel and the no-longer extant United Arab Republic.
- Turkey has been involved in 5 conflicts (including civil wars, revolutions etc.), one involving the Iraqi Kurds.
- Yemen has been involved in 17 conflicts (including numerous civil wars) variously involving Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Israel.
"A state that is in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them" seems to describe the modal Middle Eastern country pretty well. Given the base rate of conflict and strife in the region, Israel really doesn't strike me as much of an outlier. It's almost unique in the region in having underwent zero civil wars or violent revolutions (attempted or successful) in the last hundred years i.e. since its founding. Contrary to the claim that responsibility for Middle Eastern instability ultimately rests with the Great Satan Israel, the majority of the conflicts listed above didn't directly involve Israel in any capacity.
As an aside, can I just say that "Arab solidarity" is like "military intelligence": a contradiction in terms.
FtttG
2mo ago
Israel is a... state that is going to be in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them.
I note that this is a description which applies equally well to literally every country in the Middle East, and yet for some reason you're only calling for the Israelis to find a new home.
FtttG
2mo ago
The British counter insurgency in Northern Ireland was far more effective.
By what metrics are you basing this assertion on? I believe this is not the first time you've made this comparison. The counter-insurgency concluded with a power-sharing agreement between Protestants and Catholics, the unconditional release of all imprisoned IRA members, a recognition of the right of Northern Ireland to secede from the UK if a plurality of its residents approved, and the dissolution of the Northern Irish police force in favour of a new police force which was required to employ Protestants and Catholics in equal numbers. Is that what an effective counter-insurgency looks like to you?
FtttG
2mo ago
My second draft is well underway. So far I've cut out 18% of the first draft, representing over 15k words - more, actually, as while cutting I've been adding in some details as I go. Would love to have the second draft ready by the end of the month, but it may not be until the end of the first week of August.
FtttG
2mo ago
Hutton was embroiled in drama from a twitter post (what else could cause so much drama) made over a year ago, which led to him being labelled a trans-phobe
What did he say?
FtttG
2mo ago
I'm strawberry blonde with 20/20 vision, otherwise right on the money. I'm impressed that you got my age correct: people who see a photo of me or meet me in person often place me a few years younger than I am, whereas people who only read what I've written without seeing what I look like often assume I'm older. I'm something of a young fogey, it seems.
I phrased it poorly. What I mean is, if Alice is accused of having done something bad, and then it's conclusively demonstrated that she didn't do it, the fact that Bob thinks the accusation against her was "plausible" is irrelevant.
But honestly, the fact that such a story is even believable speaks volumes about the situation on the ground
Please put this juvenile argument to bed, permanently. If something didn't happen, the fact that it could have is irrelevant.
FtttG
2mo ago
Back in the old subreddit, I recall some contemporaneous discussion about whether or not George Floyd would go viral, and some speculating (possibly myself included, I don't remember) that it wouldn't specifically because it failed the toxoplasma criterion: in the first few weeks, it seemed that more or less everyone agreed he'd been the victim of excessive force at the hands of Chauvin et al. Perhaps the subsequent revelations about the drugs in his system allowed it to circle back around to being controversial, as for a time it seemed there was some legitimate ambiguity about whether he'd died because of Chauvin compressing his chest or because of an overdose (my understanding is the autopsy confirmed the former).
FtttG
2mo ago
After finishing The Secret of My Success I wanted something light, so I devoured The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in three days. Even though the ending had been inadvertently spoiled for me years ago, I couldn't put it down, and enjoyed spotting all the little clues about the killer's identity which I would have presumably overlooked if I hadn't known. After Ten Little
This morning I started reading a book my mother recommended, Free by Lea Ypi, a memoir of the author's growing up in Albania in the nineties.
Yes, but it's a social realist drama where a big part of what makes it engaging is getting to know the low-rent ghetto drug dealers really well and understanding their quirks and motivations. Per @WandererintheWilderness's point, I don't think an episodic murder mystery series set in the same milieu would be engaging: in a murder mystery, the killer has to be someone unsuspected, and solving the mystery has to be at least something of an intellectual challenge. "Low-rent ghetto drug dealer murders rival drug dealer by shooting him in the back of the head" is prime fodder for a crime drama, but probably not for a self-contained episodic murder mystery: there is no mystery, about the identity of the perpetrator, their motive or their method.
I wonder if it's a region-locked thing. Annoyingly, Internet Archive doesn't have it. Here's the full text anyway.
Yeah, I'd be curious about that myself. I would be surprised if the assailant turns out to be a white Irishman, but I can't say it's wholly outside the realm of possibility.
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