FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
anti-Zionist Jews are welcomed in anti-Zionist spaces
until they aren't. And there's always an "until".
He says things like “Islam is right about women” in an attempt to put progressives between a rock and a hard place. Is he an antisemite?
I understand this is a callback to an older post of mine, but I'm really not seeing the connection between the two sentences. Why would facetiously asserting that "Islam is right about women" imply that one is antisemitic? Even sincerely asserting "Islam is right about women" (something no Western conservative influencer has ever done) doesn't imply antisemitism: "Islam is right about women, but wrong about Jews" is a perfectly coherent stance to take, even if it's not one anyone actually adopts.
I don’t think you can draw a line from Hamas to CUAD to Macklemore and keep the ideology intact.
I don't think Macklemore believes 100% of the same things that Hamas believes. (There's no question that he doesn't share their attitudes to homosexuality, for instance.) But I think the fact that he went out of his way to name-check a fairly minor group like CUAD is strong evidence that he endorses most if not all of their ideology: namely, that Israel is an illegitimate settler-colonial apartheid state, the validity of violent "resistance" against Israeli "occupation", and the belief that all Israeli citizens (and the entire Jewish diaspora, by extension) are complicit in Israel's "occupation", thereby rendering all of them legitimate targets. The belief that every Jew is a legitimate target for violent assault (in other words, the belief that it's okay to murder Jews) is about as pithy a definition of antisemitism as I can think of.
As @The_Nybbler notes below me, the essence of a "dog whistle" is that it's a turn of phrase that sounds innocuous to most people, but which has a special secret meaning to those in the know. Like the verbal equivalent of a secret handshake.
"Zionist" is the opposite. While its literal meaning is simply "one who supports the existence of a Jewish nation-state in the middle east, regardless of their religious beliefs or ethnic background" – in practice, nine times out of ten when people use it, they simply mean "one of those people with a surname like Coen or Katz". (I dare say that many of the people using it as a term of abuse would literally not know the former meaning.) Everyone understands this, especially all of the people with surnames like Coen or Katz: "Zionist" simply offers merely the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability. When people hang up posters around Athens saying "Zionists out", every Jew (regardless of their opinion of Israel, and the right of it to exist or lack thereof) understands that they're not welcome. When Palestine Action splatters red paint on Jewish-owned businesses around London under the pretext of intimidating "Zionists" – I mean, come on, you don't really think they asked the owners what they thought about the war in Gaza, and only targeted those with the "wrong" opinions, do you? When two Irish women approached an Israeli man in a restaurant, spat on him and yelled at him that "Zionists" aren't welcome in Ireland – likewise.
Yes, a Zionist is just someone who supports the existence of a Jewish nation-state in the middle east, regardless of their religious beliefs or ethnic background. Just like "urban youth" refers to white college students who live in New York City.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
Richard Hanania made a similar argument years ago: the conflict will only end permanently when most Palestinians understand that militarily defeating Israel is impossible.
Why does opposition to genocide require a "hippy-dippy peace-and-love" attitude?
It doesn't. But I think that's how Macklemore is trying to present himself: as an ordinary well-meaning guy who believes in equality and civil rights, who's appalled by the footage he sees coming out of Gaza and thinks something should be done to stop it. As controversial as his speech was, he never explicitly dedicated his set to "the brave Mujahedeen fighters of Hamas", or called upon the audience to stone the Jew wherever he lies: he's smart enough to know that doing so would make him look like a nutcase. Instead, he does the savvier (and more dishonest) thing of presenting himself like an ordinary well-meaning dude, while explicitly endorsing groups who've been much more open in their extremism then he has, and banking on most people listening not knowing the specifics of what those groups believe. This seems like the constant two-step with the "moderate" pro-Palestinians in the West (and the "moderate" left more broadly). They generally claim that they want to bring about a two-state solution via peaceful means like BDI or other kinds of economic sanctions – and yet you notice that they never offer any criticism of Hamas or the other violent pro-Palestinian groups whose ideology and methods they claim to decry, they amplify their propaganda at every turn, and seem exuberant when they achieve tactical wins (however brief and temporary).
Indeed, I'd respect Mackle- a great deal More if he actually came out and said "there's a genocide going on right now that's just as bad as the Holocaust, so we have to stop it the same way we stopped the Holocaust – by waging total war on the people committing it". The fact that he felt the need to equivocate, hedge and delegate his opinions suggests to me that either a) he doesn't consider stopping the genocide worth torpedoing his career over or b) he doesn't believe it's a genocide either. The only thing more contemptible than a Jew-hater is a Jew-hater who can't even commit to the bit.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
I personally find it hard to imagine that many teenage American fans of Doctor Who or Good Omens would have even heard of either Little Britain or The League of Gentlemen, never mind watched any of the episodes featuring blackface.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
I mean, Macklemore explicitly doesn't want Israel to exist. Per the lyrics of the song he performed immediately after that speech, he thinks history has been repeating for the last seventy-five years i.e. since the date of Israel's founding. Hard to square that with the belief that Israel has a right to exist as a nation.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
13hr ago
A rabbi, a Zionist Jew and an anti-Zionist Jew walk into a bar.
The barman says "we don't serve Jews here."
Even if I accept your claim that "Zionist" was not being used as a codeword for "Jew", this rather clearly demonstrates that Macklemore is lying when he presents himself as a hippy-dippy peace-and-love dude who is simply innocently horrified by "genocide" and "apartheid". He explicitly supports (by name) groups that support violent resistance against Israel i.e. he is a crypto-Hamas supporter.
Jeff Maurer expresses more or less my thoughts on this whole thing more eloquently than I could ever hope to:
Before I get to the controversial parts of the statement, I want to address the funny part. Free Sudan? From who? The fighting in Sudan is an internal conflict. As for the Democratic Republic of Congo, the fighting there is not like the war that tore the country apart in the ‘90s/’2000s, and I’m guessing that most Congolese would rather be known for their historic World Cup run than as a people who need to be freed from…well I don’t know…Botswana, maybe? What I think happened is that once Macklemore listed Palestine, Lebanon, and Cuba, something in his brain went “Whuh-oh, this is getting hot,” so he threw in some other countries as rhetorical bodyguards, guessing that the violence in those countries probably means that the people there need to be “freed” from somebody. He probably could have said “Free Uruguay! Free Saim!” and gotten the same response, because he was really coasting on vibes at that point.
He notes that Macklemore claiming not to be antisemitic is nonsense when he specifically name-checked CUAD and Students for Justice in Palestine, two organisations who openly support Hamas (among other things, the former group defended a member who stated "Zionists don't deserve to live", while the latter has praised the Hamas "martyrs").
I don’t like this. Macklemore is very obviously an idiot — I listened to the song [ed: "Hind's Hall", lyrics here] that follows the controversial intro, and it’s basically dumbass Rage Against the Machine lyrics without the music that made RATM good. The song also puts the “occupation” at 75 years, and I’m not convinced that a person’s problem is with “apartheid” or “genocide” when they see the very founding of Israel as illegitimate. But I’m also not comfortable with powerful venue owners throwing their weight around because they don’t like a guy’s politics. It’s one thing for someone to decide that Macklemore is too big of a douchebag to support — you don’t need to twist my arm to get me to not buy a ticket to this concert! And Kraft can book or not book anyone for any reason — his stadium, his rules. But I’ve long felt that we’re better off letting people say just about any intensely stupid thing that they believe. I didn’t like it when social media companies were aggressively in declaring things “hate speech”, and I don’t like Robert Kraft doing it now.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
18hr ago
Students for Justice in Palestine
For reference, one of this organisation's internal documents characterised the October 7th attacks as an "historic win for the Palestinian resistance".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Can you imagine if he'd gone in blackface? His career would have been finished before he got home that evening.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
For clarity: the antisemitic costume he wore (and that's unambiguously what it is) is from a gig in 2014.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I watched that movie for the first time recently, and I was wondering if Cruise was awarded some proxy J-word privileges during production. After all, the film was directed by Ben Stiller and co-written by Stiller and Etan Coen.
Yes, the happy merchant getup was from many years ago. I don't believe he ever gave an actual apology, more of an "I'm sorry if any offense was caused" thing, and I don't find his explanation remotely credible. Yeah, you didn't want people to recognise you, so you just so happened to dress up as an antisemitic caricature. The wig and fake beard wouldn't have sufficed on their own: you just had to have a big drooping hook-nose too. Sure dude.
While I have mixed feelings about cancelling someone on the basis of their political opinions, I'd just like to point out that Macklemore's claimed stance of "criticism of Israel is not the same as antisemitism", even if true in principle, is not true of him in particular. No one who used to perform dressed like this gets to play the "I'm an anti-Zionist, not an anti-Semite" card.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I have, and found it revolting. And I like a pint of real Guinness. But interestingly, the recipe for Guinness was designed with Dublin water in mind. Whatever the "real Guinness" you've had probably tastes very different from what I would call Guinness.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Congrats on the gf!
NA Guinnesses
🤮🤮🤮 Fair play for staying off the drink though. I recommend N/A Baltica if you can find it.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Dead by Daylight skill checks are purely timing-based, and at night it feels like they move at least double as quickly (half as much time to respond) as in the morning for me.
I assume you mean because you're more sleepy at night compared to the morning?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Posted my twenty-first blog post of the year yesterday, a review of Penance adapted from comments I posted here.
- Went to the gym three times last week. I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.82x. I'm on holiday this week so won't get to the gym.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I know the phenomenon I'm describing isn't actually caused by the Doppler effect, I was just using that as an example of changes to perceived pitch.
Medical/neuroscience question for those of you with domain expertise.
It's well-established that the "clock speed" of a person's brain runs very quickly in their youth and slows down as they get older. This is why children's perceived sense of time is so much longer than adults': I'm sure you remember sitting in the back of class in primary school willing the clock to tick just a little faster, but nowadays you sit down at your desk at 9 a.m. and before you know it it's already lunchtime. Many people independently report a sensation of perceived "slow motion" when they find themselves in intense life-or-death situations, which is likely due to the same effect: your body produces massive amounts of adrenaline which temporarily jacks up your brain's clock speed.
Years ago I noticed a potentially related phenomenon. Back when I was a much more avid listener than I used to be, I would often listen to music first thing after waking up, before I'd even finished drinking a cup of tea. I noticed that songs I listened to at this time of day would sound like they were being played at a higher tempo, compared to listening to the same song later on when I'd woken up fully. My theory is that, as my brain hasn't fully woken up yet, its clock speed is marginally reduced (compare an old computer which runs a little slowly for a few minutes after a reboot), causing my perceived sense of time to temporarily speed up until I've fully woken up. The effect is subtle enough that I wouldn't really notice it unless being exposed to a stimulus whose perceived duration I'm already familiar with (i.e. a song I've already heard). And sometimes I get the opposite effect, where a song I've heard before sounds slower than I expect it to. Maybe this is a product of my brain's clock speed having increased, if I'm exerting myself physically?
Is this theory in any way neurologically plausible?
I've noticed a different one recently. The Doppler effect is caused when a moving object emits waves, and the position of the object (and hence the changing position of the source of those waves over time) causes the wave's perceived frequency to change over time. The pitch of a motorcycle engine appears to rise as it drives towards you, then falls as it drives away from you; the light of stars moving away from the earth exhibit a redshift.
On Saturday morning I woke up at 8 a.m. to run a half-marathon. I was tired and hungover, and listening to a favourite album I'd listened to several dozens of times before. In addition to changes in perceived tempo I described above, I noticed certain points in the album where the music actually sounded out of tune. (For reference, I have perfect pitch and can reliably identify the pitch of an individual note, play a song by ear or identify the key of a piece of music.) This definitely wasn't an error on the part of the artist, nor an encoding artefact (it's the same set of FLAC files I've been listening to this album on for nearly a decade, and I've never noticed anything sounding out of tune before). Any disruptions to perceived tonality had dissipated by the time I got to the halfway mark and began my return journey. This suggests it's a psychoacoustic effect caused by fatigue or being hungover.
The "changes to perceived tempo" thing is straightforward: reduced neural clock speed -> time seems to pass faster (and vice versa). But this change in perceived tonality is much odder. Why would a reduced clock speed affect the perceived pitch of a note, in addition to its duration? A computer that's running slowly takes longer to carry out computations (up to and including the display's frame and refresh rate), but it doesn't systematically make every pixel a few shades darker. And it isn't even happening globally: it's not as though the song was recorded in E major, but subjectively sounds as if it was recorded in E-flat until I've woken up fully. It sounds out of tune, meaning my brain is misinterpreting the pitches of certain notes but not others.
Any ideas?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Hmm. I suppose the difference is that women are generally not that interested in casual sex, while men are. It's easy for people of either sex to say something that the other person interprets as indicative of incompatibility for a committed romantic relationship. The sex difference emerges in that, if a man says something like this, the woman he's with probably won't have much interest in having sex with him; whereas if a woman says something like this, that won't necessarily stop a man from having sex with her if the opportunity presents itself. When I was single and horny, a woman whom I found physically attractive would have to come out with some really crazy unhinged shit before I move her to the "don't smash" category.
The difference in this case is that you're not looking for casual sex, but for a committed romantic partner, and you don't want to settle for fucking someone who you find annoying. And you know what? Good for you. I really respect that.
Stop lying:
Another:
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