SoonToBeBanned
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User ID: 2653
SoonToBeBanned
5d ago
Hispanic obviously means mestizo as a race. Which should be a racial category if we're going to have them. It's just the government is piss scared to engage in official racial phrenology in the modern day, so we get old calcified classifications from when everyone knew asians, whites, and blacks were a thing. I'm surprised they had the balls to change it.
I don't think as many people know this as should, but there used to be very few mestizos/hispanics in the USA. So few no one thought to count them in census regularly. By the time the "hispanic" category was cooked up there was already millions of racially ambiguous people living in the USA.
SoonToBeBanned
5d ago
This whole "red-blue tribe" obsession and talk is utterly useless, imo. It's long turned into an excuse to vigorously engage in naked tribalist politics while hypocritically professing to speak about and above such.
Getting that off my chest, of course the heads of industry "lean right." They "lean right" everywhere. What pro-union socialist heads of industry can you name? Honestly, trying to do away with simplistic political memology, what do you think California is? Some Communist monolith? The is the state of Nixon and Reagan, "right to work" laws, and prop 13. There's millions of people of every political stripe.
SoonToBeBanned
3mo ago
It's rare that we can come up with something that is both legitimately more efficient than what evolution has come up with and sustainable in time.
If your standard is life by any measure goes on, then ok. But it's not like mass extinction has never happened, and given enough time, will not happen again. The Permian–Triassic extinction event knocked out something like 81% of all marine species, according to wiki. Some things lived on or recovered over the course of millions of years, but plenty of creatures got perma-wiped. I don't see why humans could never ever be like the trilobites.
SoonToBeBanned
3mo ago
I've often felt engineered disease is underrated as a human apocalypse scenario. Largely, I think, because they didn't exist when nuclear mass annihilation first came into concept.
In WWII it seems, to my non-expert contrarian eye, that the "good guys" had started to descend into a philosophy where mass murdering "enemy" civilian populations to simply brute force attrite the rival society into nothing was taken to be valid. It's probably a good thing the war ended when it did. Since winners write the history books, and people like to justify "their side," everyone just kind of ignores this, or says it wasn't a big deal, or even tries to justify it. Also mostly fortunately, nuclear MAD means the taste of it has never since been realized again in a protracted war between two fully developed industrial powers where leaders would again descend into (mass) murderous impatience. But if that did happen I feel like it would be a countdown until some idiot sociopath in the top brass started suggesting that maybe a strategic disease could be controlled, and if it could then it would end the conflict with ease that no bomb could. Disease is such a more efficient killer than bombs, and cost effective too. The longer a protracted war goes, the more likely people will start listening to the idiot.
I don't think that's very likely for normal orthodox war these days because of old fashioned nuclear deterrence. But what about a civil war? Some gambler in an American civil war gets ahold of the disease library in Atlanta. The CPC loses legitimacy and China descends into power struggle chaos.
With overwhelming power superiority Israel has, if they wanted to massacre a million people in Gaza, or West Bank, that would have already happened.
Israel isn't going full auschwitz solely, by what I can see, because of goy morality and power. Without that all non-Jews would be either killed or cleansed into outside borders - whichever is more pragmatic. Any honest assessment of sympathy for goy/Palestinian civilian life in the greater Jewish/Israeli public results in basically nothing. They want these people gone and have zero interest in cohabitation. But even with Jewish subversion of the American government, a hostile USA and/or "West" would be an apocalyptic disaster. So PR still matters. Getting the South Africa treatment alone (even though they are objectively worse) would be catastrophic. If they only had nuclear arms alone to make an argument against Turkey curb stomping them, or even worse, a total unified middle east, it could be all over. Right now is a balancing game in how far they can go without critical consequences, with a heavy experimental lean towards killing as many men, women, and children as possible, while maximizing destabilization.
Now personally, I find the word "genocide" tiresome. It's overly political (in a bad way) and basically amounts to a modern version of what excommunication was in the middle ages. With all the subsequent pointless theology and dishonest motivated reasoning that comes with such.
That said, if we call the Armenian Genocide a genocide I don't see what is so different about Gaza. Only time and, again, the morality/power of the non-Jewish side of the USA is preventing it from even greater realization of the logical conclusion of their deliberate actions. Will they take responisbitly for a food/disease crisis they have created? Will they allow the rebuilding of hospitals? And if they drag their feet to x degree exactly how many statistical deaths will that result in? Time, and power politics within the USA will tell.
Given the source I'm suspicious. Even more so it's weird to me how he goes on and on about "Iranian propaganda" in true "omg Russian bots!" fashion as if the Iranian deep state has arms in every American university and anti-Zionists need Iran of all places to tell them Israel is a violent apartheid state. Given the source, again, it seems very complimentary to Iran. On the other hand, if it's a fake it's good in its organic American dialog - no awkwardness or weird translations here.
But assuming it's true. The the thing that jumps out to me is the line: "The number of young people who think Hamas's massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly high".
To me this indicates he drinks his own kool-aid. One of the more annoying things about Israel apologists and Zionists to me is how they constantly attack this weird strawman of anyone that disagrees with them is pro-Hamas. How they repeat Hamas Hamas Hamas like it's a brain virus. It's hilarious to think it's a relatively recent post 2006 phenomenon in Israel-Palestine. The way some people speak it's as if Hamas Hamas Hamas was the singular bad force ruining everything and if it weren't for these ultra-monsters, well shucks, good ol boy Israel wouldn't have to act so bad.
I always assumed it's a talking points memo for public propaganda. It's clearly from the "when did you stop beating your wife" school of distraction & attack. Focus on Hamas and mention it as much as possible. No one wants to defend them, and any talk about them is not talking about all the people Israel is killing while creating a constant negative mental association. Anyway, I have literally never seen this mythical Western pro-Palestinian pro-Hamas "liberal".
Here we see Greenblatt privately believing this psycho BS that the only way anyone could be anti-Zionist is that they are totally fans of Hamas and pro-massacre of civilians. It would never occur to a principled person to notice Zionism's evil actions without being crypto Islamic theocrats. Absurd and wildly detached from the mind of your average Zionist critical secular university aged student. The Zionist equivalent of believing all Trump supporters are literal Nazis.
I see the motivations for a Jewish homeland in the Levant to be sound and understandable.
Why? Why do Jews have a right to invade someone else’s land and ethnically cleanse the native populace? Why aren’t jews obligated to live in humanitarian multiculturalism like ever other western nation on the planet, and instead get violent ethnonationalism that inherently can not cohabitate with the non-Jewish natives of the land they are (violently) immigrating to? Why do the Palestinian people not have a right to resist this?
The area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration.
“Arab” is not a real racial category. It’s a cultural one for speakers of Arabic. I see this a lot with people that are Israel apologists. Basically an attempt to delegitimize and dehumanize the Palestinians as a faceless and vaguely threatening barbaric mass. And an attempt to bring back the terra nullius justification argument for colonialism. Are you sure you were neutral and not… faking? Because you don’t sound it. You sound like a typical agenda’d and hardened culture warrior with all the same boilerplate.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Palestinians are not all Muslim, and it’s very interesting that pro-Israels keep talking about them like they are. There have been Christian Palestinians since about as long as there’s been Christianity. You haven’t outright said it, but this also seems to come with a completely ignorant but political motivated historical belief that the Palestinians are all foreign “Muslim” barbarians that come in at the 600s and took over the joint or something. That’s not how these things work. Egypt turning Muslim (also not all Muslim) did not replace the Egyptians.
There’s no reason to believe the canaanites and yes, Jews, of the area didn’t just convert - like everywhere else.
The Arabs too have a historical claim to the area and also benefited from being last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds.
Historical claim is putting it mildly and quite curiously. Yes, the Poles have a historical claim to their land in a conflict with Germans invading too. The Palestinians are natives of the land. The Zionists are not. Again, they are probably in no small part descendants of the Hasmonean kingdom that converted to Christianity and then Islam. Just as the English are descendants of ancient Celts that converted to Christianity and latin/germanized. There’s no reason to believe otherwise.
Next door to Israel, the ongoing Syrian Civil War has a death toll (500k-600k dead) nearing that of the Nakba's displacement figure, alongside a global refugee crisis.
The thing is though in the end Syria will still be Syria no matter what shitty dictator or not reigns in the future. Just as Russia weathered an Ivan the Terrible or 2. A war to straight steal land and displace the natives is a whole other kettle of fish. That preeminently changes the geography of the planet and destroys a people in an area forever. The Taino will never come back to the world after the Spanish colonial conquest of the Caribbean. Some things can’t be reversed or 2 things at once.
Being OK with this means accepting on the world scale permanent malevolent wars of conquest as a valid tactic (see Russia right now for why that’s a problem) without any real defensive casus belli. The nature of Zionism means the invaders fundamentally won’t and can’t cohabitate with the natives whose lands they are “moving” to. Their gain comes from the flesh of the other. On the ground, this makes it totally zero sum. That’s not that usual for war actually.
There's no guidance system to speak of, and the most precise aim Hamas could hope for is [waves vaguely over the distance]. … I see either excuses about how we outsiders shouldn't cast judgement upon the anguished and desperate actions of an oppressed populace, or affirmative declarations that "resistance" is justified through "any means necessary".
There’s value to what you say. But let’s consider the opposite. What value is there in passivity? Look to the West Bank and see what a more passive stance has achieved. Nothing but further expansion of Jewish colonies and a tightening noose around the Palestinians’ neck. That’s pretty damning. I think it’s objective at this point that “just be more peaceful” is an utter failure and an invitation to personal destruction.
Let’s go there and consider a case of a Jew in Auschwitz. He somehow finds himself in a position to kill a guard’s, who is an avid assistant in mass killing, wife and child. Is it moral and right to do so? If I were in that situation I don’t know what I would do. Per your own arguments, there’s a very, very strong case to be made that innocent should not be hurt. But oh how it stings. At the same time, what good does such moralism do? If the Jew passively lays down and lets the Auschwitz system do its thing without any karmic vengeance, however unfairly undirected, what good does it do? It only assists and convenience an evil act without any consequences.
A key here is that Zionists jews and the proverbial guard put themselves and the “innocent” into a position of aggression and violence. They woke up and chose to wrong another every day. And they could stop at any point if they really cared. They are betting on power saving them from any blowback for their actions. Weakness, only reifies this into being and, from a certain point of view, enables evil into the world. It’s not the same thing as walking up to a random baby and stabbing it for some vague incoherent goals. They could always choose peace.
This is why I suspect the myth of Israel ever giving a damn about the “peace process” (puke) is so popular with Israel apologists. People desperately need to believe Zionists are something other than what they are to apologize for them in normie morality. Like they just tripped, fell, and accidentally violently invaded another people’s land and constantly expanded - to this day. They could always choose not to do this. They could always go back to the 1967 lines and respect the Palestinians. They won’t. Ever.
Your analogy to a self justifying spousal abuser is apt and good food for thought. But are you not by your own admission a person on Israel’s side? Are you not really just asking for the Palestinian’s to conveniently to “let it happen”? What good does moral passive acceptance do? It only make Israel’s job of destruction of the Palestinian people easier. The Zionists do not want the Palestinian’s to exists in “their” territory, which includes all the homeland of the Palestinian people. They, again, by nature can not cohabitate or play nice. This is an existential war of total destruction.
In the end we are all dead. It’s highly questionable to kill the proverbial guard baby in a vague attempt to hurt the guard. But if you are a moral person and do nothing you die anyways. How much better is that than if you became an evil person that died and gave the forces of evil some karmic consequences for their actions that in the end also amounted to nothing?
I am a proponent of 100% open borders
This is an old post that was questionable to reply to but this is laugh and half. No you aren’t. No apologist for Zionism is. It’s logically impossible.
I have no idea what the alternative solution is supposed to be here.
One state solution? Again, like every western nation is expected. An immediate reversal of “settlements” (colonies) would be a start.
Given the constant sloganeering about "Apartheid" and given that Israel was founded to be an ethnostate intended to prioritize the interests of a Jewish population, I was surprised to learn about the conditions of Arab-Israelis.
You seem to heavily hinting without stating here that Israel doesn’t really want to be a racially pure Jewish ethnostate. That it took in Palestinian “Arabs” out of multicultural acceptance and not grudging forced calculation.
Did you know Israel has anti-miscegenation laws? There are probably others on the planet but Israel is literally the only one I know of that exists in the modern day. Other examples would be pre civil rights USA and Nazi Germany. It’s not legally possible for for a Jew to marry a non-Jew such as an “Arab.” If Israel did not want to be a racially pure as possible ethnostate the right of return would be a non-issue and the highly demonstrative contrast of Birthright/Taglit free travel tours and citizenship for vaguely Jewish diaspora would not be a thing.
But to be clear, the apartheid charge is for the occupation and treatment of Palestinians outside of Israel proper. At least to me.
One of the first red pilling experiences I had was a family member visiting the West Bank, for non-polticidal reasons, and learning multiple things (they were the often politically erased Palestinian Christians). First how normal and civilized they were. But second that there were checkpoint guards everywhere even in “Palestinian” territory. Palestinians encounter Jews all the time. Jews that absolutely will give your brother a hard time for being a non-Jewish male, and absolutely deeply racially hate you to the very core for being different from them - the enemy. And against popular news implication, they actually don’t all blow up everyday in spastic violence despite constant encounters and humiliation. It blew my mind that you could be Christian and live couple kilometers from the birth and death places of Jesus and just have to decide it’s not worth it to visit holy sites for Easter or Christmas. The Jewish checkpoint guards that sit between your home in Ramallah and “East” Jerusalem will absolutely give your family a hard time and maybe imprison someone for some imagined offense of just shoot. Who’s going to stop or punish them? I instantly understood where the 14 year old rock throwers came from ,where before I was always confused and thought them such savage retards. The West Bank is the Jim Crow South on steroids, but you’ll never see it presented that way to the dipshit BLM libs that watch CNN.
What’s more, Israel blockades Gaza. This would be an illegal act of war if it was a sovereign nation, which the MSM acts like it is for propaganda convenience currently. But it’s not. Nor is it annexed and given equal human rights like it should be, if it’s not a foreign entity. The ever fake “peace process” (spits) acts as a shield to keep the situation in a convenient limbo. This is the apartheid.
The "colonization" narrative is facile and misleading
It’s objective fact. I always don’t know if people arguing against this are simply historically confused or outright cynically lying. A meandering linked article isn’t going to change anything.
The early Zionists secured land through legal purchases, though the transactions were often made with absentee landlords and came as a surprise to the occupants.
Okay yeah, here we go. +1 point for the not really confused category. There is no such thing as legal valid permanent exclusionary “purchases” of land/people in a society that has no democratic representation. Let’s be clear about something, this was all done with non-voluntary coercive state violence. That’s why it’s a conflict. No one asked the Palestinians until the situation got really, really bad.
Palestine is unique in that it was colonization on behalf of another party. Ethnic replacement colonization is actually pretty rare (e.g. the British left India as India). But normally it would be the colonizers ethnically cleansing the natives. Here the colonized received the action at the barrel of a gun, but for Jews. Probably because the British just didn’t give shit. But that doesn’t change the experience for them.
If the Palestinians had a self-determined state with their own laws and army Zionism NEVER would have happened. That’s pretty clear and absolutely key. No nation concedes to letting foreigners slow invade their land by “purchasing” land with an intent to never again ethnically cohabitate with the native people effectively zero-sum removing it from the former nation. Hell, Americans can’t even purchase own Mexican land at all, let alone create gringo only enclaves with the full intent to create a white only state in Mexico.
If you object to Zionism, specify what kind and why.
I said it before but I’ll say it again. Why did Zionist Jews have a right to violently invade a people against their consent and expel them from their lands. Why are they owed land/flesh at other’s expense? Why is resistance against this a terminal wrong?
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
While using civilians as human shields is certainly morally dubious
Can you provide a falsifiable definition of what a "human shield" is? I've never seen one. What is the objective scientific difference between a legitimate tragic human shield and an aggressor killing a civilian without mercy ostensibly to get at a "valid" target, and just invoking the phrase "human shield" to abrogate moral consequences for their actions? How many people or what methods are used when one shifts from the other?
If a bomb is dropped and kills 10 people to get at one that operated much of his guerilla field planning from home is that human shields? 100? 2? If a cop shoots through a hostage to kill a fugitive killer is that a human shields (blameless and free from personal responsibility for their actions)? What if it's a drugee and not a killer?
Palestinians are the ones who are murdering civilians whenever they can
Israeli dead: 1,400
Palestinian: 8,000
And rising for the Palestinians. Scuttlebutt is the only thing keeping the Israelis from murdering much greater amounts is the U.S. and maybe some saner military officials fighting the government in backrooms.
I've said it before appealing to dead bodies is such a weird strategy for Israeli apologists. Anything you can say about the Palestinians you can say about the Israelis. The killed more people ratio has always been in favor of Israel, before current events.
And again I say, Israel did start this. Their demands of: "let us come in, steal your land, and ethnically cleanse you for our ethnostate" have never been reasonable or would lead to anything but conflict. It's just they won. But peaceful good boys who dindu nuffin? Never.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
The former, almost assuredly. Doesn't change any of the truth of what I said.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
The south was arguing for their right of self determination?
The South didn't want self determination. It wanted slavery. This is indicated by the fact that there's no meaningful concept of self-determination for southern states once slavery becomes moot in politics. Without the slavery before or after there is no state "nationalism." That's not the same and it's not sympathetic.
Likewise, the Palestinians claim the right of self determination but their stated intention is to kill the Israelis (from the river to the sea has a meaning).
I don't know what to say to this. It's such a bizarre straight face statement of propagandized narrative as fact. First of all let's be clear about something, Israel invaded the Palestinian's lands. And they're the ones that have a ethnostate based around preserving and expanding their ethno-purity at the expense of the natives. Israel is also the one violently expanding. I don't know if people are just not aware of this or they elide over it for propaganda reasons. It's Israel forcing violence into the situation.
There's no reason to project some certainty that anyone saying free Palestine or whatever wants to kill all Israelis. Least of all on to "progressives." I'm not aware of a single person that believes that. At the most extreme you'll get people suggesting Israelis should leave and go back from where they came from (Europe), or rather their forefathers at this point (this would be very difficult for Mizrahi).
There isn't any real similarity here.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
"If he dies, he dies."
- Ivan Drago
I don't really consume news media these days, on account of it being such propagandist shit. Only occasionally encounter it when something is linked in an online politics discussion. I still get annoyed when I see a paywall and, yes, I do feel entitled to read it for free. To speak to the implied bluff calling here that wouldn't I deal with the ads if I had to? Shouldn't I appreciate the hard work that goes into the service? No. I wouldn't be sad at all if all news and journalists died due to lack ad money. It's already effectively dead to me. The world might have a hard time functioning without literally any journalism, but then I don't think that's a real threat right now, nor is it a me problem. There's very few ad supported "services" that I truly could not live without if push came to shove.
People need to get paid,
Do they though? Again to keep with the news example, I would say a fairly worthless bullshit job is massively oversaturated. Do we really need BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, etc., etc. all reporting on the same news bite thing happening? Yet they all want an individual slice. Maybe there should be a culling and some people don't deserve to be paid. And right now things are holding on due to cattle like normies and people willing to put up with the bullshit because of adblock. I might be willing to throw down some money to fund actual quality (which doesn't exist in journalism) if there were only a handful of real journalists informing the world and my contribution was genuinely needed, but that's not the real status quo.
server fees need to be paid
Youtube, or rather the concept of video sharing/hosting, is one of the few ad supported things I genuinely want around for sure. But on this though I don't think it's as true as you say. Somehow they operated for years off normies without problem. MEGA and other services run without this ad aggression.
I also take issue with the sudden unexamined and selective Marxism that always shows its face in these arguments. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" Money isn't JUST going to pay to server hosting. It's going to Yachts, to DEI officers living in SF, to office yoga sessions. People always make this appeal about resources needing to go to core real labor or machine costs, but it's never the reality of funding. And if that were the true concern there would be more efficient ways to do it without all the dead weight.
Bandwidth is a semi-solved problem. Pirating operates with 0 ad revenue decentralized sharing, or standard ads with shifty websites. I pay for all the basic necessities to make it work (and more) with the my bills already.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
Come on. It's pretty clear that black people are perceived as the anti-white canceler by the culture war generals involved here. Take for example the frequency of blacks in UK advertisement despite being only 4% of the UK population (though 2.9% mixed/multiple ethnicity).
And why shouldn't they? Black admixture is the most dramatic to "white" populations. Black people fit the profile of sentimentality for globalist multiculturalism/immigration the most. When future mass migration happens, if it does, it will predominantly come from Africa which is one of the only places in the world still rapidly growing in population.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
And definitely not today, when Dems are in charge, it seems.
What are you talking about? A recent symbolic Senate resolution:
H.Res.771 - Standing with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists.
Passed 97-0. Passed the House 412-10 (6 voted present).
And also meanwhile: "President Biden has asked lawmakers for almost $106 billion in funding for Israel, Ukraine, countering China in the Indo-Pacific, and operations on the southern U.S. border."
Israel: $14.3 billion. In Tel Aviv, Biden promised an "unprecedented" package of aid to support Israel after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. The request includes funding for air and missile defense, military financing and embassy support
Humanitarian aid: $9.15 billion. This includes support for Israel, Gaza and Ukraine. The breakdown of this funding is "flexible," White House budget director Shalanda Young told reporters, depending on where the need is greatest.
The mainstream Democrats and the American deep state are ridiculously in the tank for Israel.
If you're surrounded by people who would gladly see you dead, it would be a fatal mistake to broadcast to them that they can kill you without fear of retribution.
It's interesting you don't seem to even think to apply this same mode of thought to Palestinians.
Also I strongly doubt the reason the Gaza attack happened was because Hamas was mistaken in believing they could GTA it and dodge any sort of counter attack. If one is to believe the conspiracy theory that this is related to closening Israeli-Saudi relations one might think they were even counting on it.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
For capitalism, I see leftists and socialists blame everything on capitalism.
If you lived in North Korea or the USSR why would "Communism" or The Party and the society it created not touch nearly everything politically wrong? Capitalism is responsible for the life we live. If it's not the best of all possible worlds, a society of angels, then yes some level of blame should be left at its feet.
This is especially true for the Marxist and therefore often socialist conception of Capitalism and society. Where everything flows downstream of economics as a first mover, including things like religion, romance, and local custom.
[citation needed] that what Israel government is doing is worse than what Hamas doing, and more deserving sanctions/invasion.
I'm not that person but as of writing:
Palestinian dead: 3,785
Israeli dead: 1,300
So by that objective measure Israel has killed more and is therefore "worse," if killing is a problem worth condemning. And that ratio is sure to get worse. Surely some of those Palestinian dead are children and attractive under 40 women, if that helps. To put it more provocative (honest) and bluntly, Israelis/Jews are the more prolific merciless baby killers. They just objectively are.
I personally always keep that stat in mind whenever I see someone try to pull the "omg atrocities" sympathy card by counting bodies. A bizarre play for Israeli siders because the Palestinians will always have the Israelis beat in an oppression and body count olympics. It only really makes sense for Jewish chauvinists that genuinely believe a Jewish life is more valuable than a goy, but most that pull said card aren't so it remains bizarre to me.
A noticing things side note (another post like this, for me).
Mia Shem pleaded for her release in the first hostage video released by Hamas's armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades
Noticing this, and the fact she's hot, I immediately fired up youtube to see what the hostage video. But I couldn't find a single untainted pure source. All early results give mainstream news organizations that start with some jackass news anchor ready to tell me what to think. Every single one. I then go to twitter and search "Mia Shem video" and get exactly what I want with no difficulty.
I'm not sure I understand the implications of this or what to make of it. I've long entertained the idea that basically all mainstream media is biased and trash. Especially post 2016 where Trump derangement syndrome seemed to drive even respectable outfits off the deep end. I don't even watch or read the news anymore. Has anyone else noticed how news media won't give straight information even when it would be helpful in lieu of writing things out long form with possible interpretation? E.g. if they are quoting "someone said something" they won't just straight link or archive the direct twitter post but describe it, possibly piecemeal. Nor will they use graphs or direct quote stats with the possible exception of pew polls. I have, and it both annoys and weirds me out. But this is extra and really got my nogging jogging. What sort of institutional values does this indicate where they absolutely refuse to just report and let me decide? Why is Twitter and telegram so superior?
Other side note. For a long time I wasn't even sure males had been kidnapped. Everyone just wanted to talk about Shani Louk. Eventually I looked it up and found some indication that they had. Looking at a list there does seem bias towards women (wonder why), but still the men are there. I think the total domination of hot women in the dialog of hostages says something. Dontcha think?
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
This happens to bring up one of the more interesting things I've seen in this conflict that I've never had an opportunity to talk about anywhere. The convenient erasure of Palestinian Christians.
The political motivations for pro-Israeli apologists and their "red tribe" coding should be obvious. To hear people talk there are nothing but Muslims. Israel (Jews, let's be honest) discriminates against Christians, and atheists, just as much as Muslims. All would ideally be purged from the "Holy Land." I always wonder if the ostensibly Christian Israel fanboys have just successfully purged this from their mind or if they are genuinely unaware.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
Did you know there's a big aquifer for the Levant that unfortunately, for Israel, heavily falls into West Bank territory? What Israel does is just station wells and military in the West Bank to suck it up anyway. In return they provide what is needed by the Palestinian Authority in good faith, supposedly.
Now I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of every single peace deal and have no desire to learn. But water rights is one example of something I don't think Israel has every budged much on that doesn't get talked about much in public. Why would they give sovereign rights to water in the Middle East to their sworn racial enemies? I wouldn't take any deal that had the Israelis feeding and watering me if I were Palestinian, in turn.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
You are asking a disingenuous question based on a highly dishonest and propagandized conception of the situation. Thought in short, yes, kind of.
You are speaking as if Gaza and Israel are two sovereign states. Gaza, the state, attacked a bunch of civilians in an act of war against the other state, and Israel provides electricity, water, food out of humanitarian kindness despite all this antagonism. Talk about stupid and evil, huh? Really biting the hand that feeds.
Israel has been economically sieging Gaza well before any of this started. They don't easily allow in concrete, medical supplies, whatever into a one of the most densely populated areas in the world that's about half the size of New York City. They violently refuse to allow Gaza/Palestine right to self determination and occasionally bomb the place in flower wars. Gaza has never been allowed to have their own power generation, water, economy for trade, food, etc. Pragmatically, Israel has had to be involved with Gaza's infrastructure if they are not committing to full public ethnic cleansing/genocide. It's a bit amazing they have functional infrastructure as it is, and anyway this makes it a unique situation since there's not a lot of world places I can think of like this. West Berlin during the Cold War is one of the only things I can think of.
An analogy would be more like a bank robber that took control of food, water, and potty breaks for the hostages. And then the bank robber expects praise for "providing" like he's doing a favor. He's not killing, probably, because the police outside will get angry - not out of altruism. Now the robber is denying food unless the hostages complies with the heist.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
but they were regularly forced out, resettled, exiled
Got a historical source? Because to me this sounds like the popular myth that Jews were exiled by the Romans which caused The Diaspora. No such thing actually happened, as far as I know. Hadrian did declare Jerusalem, what was left of it, a "pagan city" (whatever that means. I've not been able to figure out) in vengeance after the Bar Kokhba revolt/war. But that's not a mass exodus from everywhere in the Levant.
Probably the majority of locals converted to Christianity then Islam successively over the centuries, but I don't know that for sure. It does lead to the question why "diaspora" Jews were so much more vibrant in resisting conversion and building a unique Jewish identity, but that's an edgy taboo question for another time.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
Not really though. The Jewish population of Palestine/Israel prior to Zionist immigration starting in the 1880s is irrelevantly small. Jews basically don't exist as a people in the area before then - at least in contrast. If you want a solid number, 15,000 is a census of Jews from the Ottoman period before Zionism. Compare with the 7 million Jews there today.
Wiki (which I wouldn't completely trust) has a line apparently that nicely sums it up:
In the late 19th century, 99.7% of the world's Jews lived outside the region, with Jews representing 2–5% of the population of the Palestine region.
Israeli Jews are fundamentally an immigrant people. Good luck finding a single one that has ancestry in Israel before 1880. The conflict is a colonial conflict of an outside people ethnically displacing the local natives. If you don't understand that you are not really understanding major keys to the whole thing.
SoonToBeBanned
6mo ago
I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis. Yet these people are more or less saying Israel deserved this and the real victims of this will be Palestine.
Israel does deserve it. They started it, which despite what legions of corrupt teachers have tried to say to the contrary, actually matters a lot. As of writing and last checking Israeli dead 700-1,000 / Palestinian dead 900. And that's just recently. By objective measure Israelis have killed more Palestinian women & children (tm) than vice versa. Soon the Gazan dead will eclipse the Israelis without argument and there is sure to be some hot young Wonderful Women in the bundle to boot. I'm mildly and darkly curious how the narrative will 180 when that happens. I don't know what's going through the heads of vaguely self aware people when they resort to counting bodies for sob story moral victory points.
I guess this is the inevitable outcome of the oppressor/oppressed decolonize framework so many of them have adopted.
Okay, I don't know quite where to start with this. This looks like the spectre of the warmed over "Cultural Marxism" myth/conspiracy theory. Certain reactionary conservative types can't seem to let this meme go. Not only is it wrong (that's not what Marxism is and the dastardly Frankfurt School did not even the concept of oppressors), it doesn't make sense. This idea is ridiculously simple and generic yet some people keep speaking of it like they've discovered some secret.
Is Lord of the Rings a Marxist and/or oppressor/oppressed story and liberal brain virus? Sauron is clearly an oppressor. No, it's a universal human value. What is the number one whine about the USSR? That it was mean and oppressive. Are anti-Communist Conservatives Marxist?
It makes no sense to tolerate evil if you have equal or greater power. However evil that has superior power is a problem. Aka an oppressor/oppressed dynamic. It's just common logic. If someone invaded your house to steal/rape and you have a gun whatever. If they have a gun and you don't, now the oppressed are sympathetic.
Also Israel is a colonial oppressor. That's just facts. Do the native Palestinians have power/freedom do get Israeli invaders out of their homeland and stop making them miserable? No.
I haven't read this book. And I don't have certainty on the origins of woke or even what its definition is. I would classify myself as coming from a old "left wing" background, but I detest "I know it when I see it" woke and have somehow missed the call that affects so many other "left wingers."
With that said, what I vaguely think I've seen and know.
In orthodox Marxism everything is the economy stupid and changing the economic superstructure of capitalism is the only sure way to change negative social mores. Even Engels himself was writing how discrimination of women has its origins in capitalism and industrialism. The project of personal liberation, for a woman, and being a socialist is one and the same. In a post Identity Politics split, such a person would just be a feminist and maybe also a socialist.
The importance of socialism here is that the previous project of universal rights, enshrined in the founding ethos of the USA itself, was old school Liberalism. But the liberals won completely and already wrote all the laws. The old left-right divide in the French revolutions was between republican liberals and monarchists. But you don't see any monarchists around and the Church as a power estate is near nonexistent. There's a point after the fall of monarchies and therefore true ancien regime Rightwing-ism (I'm going to say around 1848) where those that still had the mentality of "let's keep challenging the system but now with say... women" started calling themselves Socialist instead of Republican or pro-democracy. Like you can clearly see the Jacobins are partly proto-socialist, but they're just too early. This is why you don't see, unlike a Paradox game, revolutionaries in South East Asia quoting Thomas Paine and waving yellow don't tread on me flags. Either they're with the status quo or they are Red. Anyone that didn't like this was an anti socialist (liberal) "Conservative."
And so it mostly was until 1960s when Identity Politics happened. And it's easy to see why. Gulag Archipelago happened. The Revolution was not happening. In general "left wing people," synonymous with the global project of socialism, were starting to suffer under constant judgment on the value of the USSR. And here comes MLK to offer actual immediate "we're doing something" change with positive results not bolted to the fucking USSR and making you a domestic terrorist in the Cold War. The "progressives" that went with Identity Politics curb stomped old left universal project socialist in popularity and mainstream political power. None of this is woke.
Africa I think is especially illustrative of this. If you were a radical in the 60s you were no doubt psyched that colonialism was finally ending in Africa. And then, constant disappointment and at times utter hell. When you look at the capstone failure of South Africa post apartheid some people no doubt have the thought worm into their head "do black people just suck? Were they really the white man's burden?" And I suspect thoughts such of these has engendered a more anti-rational, authoritarian, purity obsessed, and debilitated but highly performative defensive ethos. To shake off such intrusive thoughts.
It's not all that. I'm sure. But this turned out way too long.
P.S. I guess I kind of wanted to comment in general but used one post. Apologies if this wall of text in an inbox shocks you and seems inappropriate.
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