ymeskhout
2yr ago
Sure, the couple I know best has been engaged for almost 2 years now and have been together for about 4 years now. AFAIK they've always been poly. The girl is one of my best friends and tells me a lot about her encounters. She's bi & I've set her up with some attractive female friends of mine. The guy is also bi and so they regularly have orgies/threesomes and have what seems like an equivalent roster of secondaries. No kids but they intend to. Both are conventionally attractive, and though they're affiliated with rats they're of the rare variety who are socially outgoing. They're definitely an exceptional example.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
Yup. I also don't understand the efficacy of saying something deliberately dumb in the hopes that someone significantly more obscure pipes up about it. If the goal is attention, she already has direct access to a bountiful trough that doesn't require deliberately saying dumb things.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
No, I cut off all contact and explicitly asked my friends that knew her not to update me on her life. The situation was more complicated than I alluded to. She had a history of severe manic episodes and part of the problem at the time was I couldn't tell whether this new desire of hers was a genuine expression or just a symptom (among others) of imminent mania.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
In my estimation, then, if poly practitioners don't feel jealousy, it's not because they have evolved to an enlightened phase, it's because they simply don't value any of their partners enough to particularly care if they lose them to someone else. There are always more, right? Perfectly interchangeable.
Damn this stings. You might be on to something.
You can think of costly trust signals as ritualistic sacrifices of resources to prove devotion. I don't think social pressure particularly comes into it. Who shames divorces anymore, anyways?
I don't disagree at all. The part about social pressure was only one aspect of enforcement, and really only applicable to commitment rituals.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
I also have lots of poly friends (maybe 30% of my peer group) and most of them are in long term stable relationships. I can't claim that my sample is representative but generally they seem very happy and mature about their decision.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
Consider the answers to your questions rephrased: Who wants to join an existing polycule? Y-poly does, but A-poly doesn't care except through their partner. Ditto for who wants to form a complex polycule.
I'm ok with the definition that heralds both axes in tandem, and I'm fine with the argument that the A-poly dimension is vital to ensure that a polycule ecosystem can function without devolving into harem fiefdoms. Ultimately what I care about is whether the word accurately communicates the idea to the listener.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
Maybe I just was not built for it. I've had several periods where I was casually dating two or three women at the same time and after a week or so (I know, I know, it's a stupid complaint) I was genuinely physically exhausted from the amount of sex. I couldn't wait to just play video games by myself.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
MonoPoly Restricted Trust
Two months ago (an eternity in podcasting, I know) I was on the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast to discuss polyamory with Aella and Eneasz, both of whom are hella fucking poly.[1] I favor monogamy without moral objection to polyamory, yet its appeal eludes me. Given the caliber of my interlocutors, I walked away feeling uncharacteristically frustrated with our conversation, largely because I think we lack a shared understanding of each other's vocabulary.
This post is a belated attempt to remedy the miscommunication, and not one that necessarily requires listening to the episode first (though it helps of course). I address the definition of polyamory, how we talk about 'restrictions' in relationships, and where trust comes from.
Return of the Antipodes
We started by rehashing my ongoing disagreement with Aella and her idiosyncratic definition of 'polyamory'. While this definition offers a new perspective, it's important to consider how it aligns with the broader understanding of polyamory and its impact on communication:
The definition of 'polyamorous' that I find cleanest, for me, is not forbidding your partner from having extra-relationship intimacy. It doesn't matter if they're acting on it or not, it doesn't matter if you don't feel like banging anybody else, as long as your partner could go have sex/love someone else if they wanted, then to me, that's polyamory.
I previously addressed why I really don't like this 'antipodal' re-definition, in contrast to the straightforward and commonly-accepted "the practice of or desire for multiple concurrent romantic/sexual relationships" understanding.[2] Aella has subsequently stated that her position is best expressed as a 2D chart, which nullifies a lot of my criticism. If you had to compress the spectrum down to just one, Aella favors the 'restriction' axis as more fitting while also acknowledging that some information is lost in the process. I agree that a chart allows for more nuance, but disagree with re-defining polyamory to focus away from the 'interested in many' axis for multiple reasons:
-
The risk of confusion by the re-definition is very high
-
The information conveyed by the re-definition is very low
-
The 'restrictions-on-partner' framing can get incoherent
It's totally fine to use words with semantic ambiguity (e.g. light, right, match) when their meaning is clear enough in context (e.g. "You made the right choice by striking a match in the dim light"); and it's totally fine for Aella to want to express a perspective that doesn't align with mainstream understanding of polyamory. But it's really confusing to use a word with an obscure interpretation that forks away from its pre-existing common understanding. Consider the outrage if a politician ran on a platform of "green infrastructure" only to deliver oil refineries painted green. Sure, the election promise wasn't technically false, but the confusion is significant and foreseeable enough to deem it intentional.
The re-definition could be justified if it had compelling benefits, yet it ends up conveying less information. If someone said "I'm a vegetarian" everyone would interpret this as describing their personal abstention from eating meat. But if this person privately redefined 'vegetarian' to mean they're okay with others not eating meat, it shifts the emphasis from a direct expression of one's own attributes to an indirect reactive stance regarding others' choices, leading to a conversation that feels needlessly convoluted. It certainly can be relevant to know what the vegetarian will tolerate, but that's rarely ever the most relevant information. Similarly, if someone hitting on me tells me they're poly, my first thought would be "they have a desire for multiple relationships" and definitely not "if we were in a relationship, and if I had a desire for multiple relationships, this person is willing to tolerate me pursuing these relationships". What purpose could this circuitousness possibly serve?
It's trivial to conjure examples of how the 'restrictions-on-partner' framing devolves into incoherency. One man has a harem relationship with 50 women who he forbids them from seeing anyone else, while they're fine with him sleeping with whomever (If you're following along on the chart, he would be on the top left while they would be on the bottom right). The women are all considered "poly" according to Aella's 'restrictions' re-definition, but the man is not. If he wanted to expand the harem, seeking out "poly" women to add to the roster would be unnecessarily frustrating for everyone involved, because it's just not how people use the term.
One of Aella's objections to focusing on the traditional 'wanting multiple relationships' axis is that it isn't distinctive enough, since almost everyone has some semblance of that desire. This is true but flattens far too much. Her survey data is the gold standard here, and it does show mild interest in banging others among the monogamous.
There's a meaningful difference between an errant desire to bend the barista over the counter, and playing calendar tetris with a dozen of your secondaries, such that it doesn't make sense to cleave "want to pursue extracurricular intimacy" into a neat yes/no binary. There's no dividing line under the classic mono/poly definition, it's a gradient spectrum ranging from "fleeting thought" to "overriding purpose in life". Aella has written about how the 'restrictions' axis also falls along a spectrum (poly couples often have rules on condom use, emotional boundaries, or not fucking your partner's dad) which means it's not immune from her own criticism.
Overall I have a very high opinion of Aella's integrity and have no reason to believe she's intentionally duplicitous, but the re-definition appears motivated by propaganda purposes. She's very transparent about believing polyamory to be the more virtuous path in contrast to monogamy (as is her right!), and it's often useful to use language to influence social dictate, but no one has to agree with accepting terminology with baked-in beliefs. Remember how protestors against the Dakota Access Pipeline insisted they be referred to as 'water protectors'? Given the negative connotations attached to promiscuity (which, as a former slut myself, I neither share nor endorse) there appears to be an aversion to advertising 'polyamory' too much under the "wanting multiple partners" framing. Instead, it's marketed under the much more palatable "not wanting to restrict others" framing.
However, the same accusations of wielding definitions as an ideological cudgel could be fairly levied against me. She rightly pointed out that our primary concern should be the accuracy of the definition, rather than focusing excessively on avoiding ideologically charged framing.[3] When I was asked if polyamory did indeed place fewer "restrictions" on people, I said yes but as I'll expand upon in the next section, I'm retracting my answer because I don't believe we have the same understanding of the term "restriction". Otherwise I agree with prioritizing accuracy; I don't care what specific words we use so long as they're useful at conveying information to others.
The ultimate question for vocabulary choices should always be "Am I reasonably certain that my listener has the same understanding of this word that I do?" Based on the multiple reasons I outlined, the focus on 'restrictions' is too confusing and too ambiguous to pass this test.
I Want You to Want Me
Let's marinate into whether 'restrictions' is the best way to cleave the mono/poly dichotomy. Consider two scenarios:
-
You are cordially invited to contribute to a vegetarian-only potluck.
-
You are subject to criminal penalties under the Peter Singer world regime if you consume any sustenance of animal progeny.
The two pictures are not the same. Both, technically, describe 'restrictions', but this again flattens far too much under a single banner. The aforementioned "don't fuck my dad" rule used by poly couples is also a 'restriction', but it would be absurd if that's enough to void their polyamorous certification.
When Jonah Hill asked his then-girlfriend surfer Sarah Brady not to post bathing suit photos, he framed it as expressing his relationship "boundaries". Oh but isn't that just what a controlling abuser would say to whitewash his yoke? There's no bright line rule here, you can't delineate between "boundaries" and "abusive control" without having to conjure up an array of debatable and interpretative factors.
I was once in a monogamous relationship where my partner then expressed a strong desire to date other people. I had no desire to get in her way or otherwise be a hindrance, so I said "Ok!" and promptly broke up with her. I didn't tell her what she wasn't allowed to do, instead I unambiguously expressed my own interest in not wanting to be in a relationship with someone who has an active desire to fuck other people. Would skipping out on a vegetarian-only potluck because you're tired of quinoa count as a 'restriction' imposed upon the host? Under a very strict literal reading, sort-of-yes, but it's an incoherent use of the term that confuses more than clarifies.
The poly brigade's retort about how everyone wants to fuck other people doesn't fly. Granting that this desire widely exists, it does so on a spectrum of intensity. I've often found myself swept up by the nascent intoxication of a new situationship where the thought of pausing for a define-the-relationship talk seemed almost alien. My Tinder matches would be left fallow and rotting on the vine, because why bother? I want my partner to have the same overriding desire for me; not for them to reluctantly forgo others because of my say so. If I had to utter that kind of proclamation, it's probably too coercive.
When the county clerk stamped my marriage license recently, my touch neurons did not suddenly get cryptographically locked to only respond to my wife's DNA. I'm not pursuing hot people not because I somehow lost the ability to notice them, and I'm not fucking anyone else not because my wife forbids me, but because I just don't care to. My wife certainly could double-explicitly prohibit me from doing so, but that would be the equivalent of her forbidding me from taking up fly-fishing.
I wonder if there's a lack of imagination from both camps. I've had several casual dating periods, so I have some insight into the thrill and excitement of rotating through flings like a flipbook. But when I see my poly friends juggling a stable cadre of full-blown secondary relationships in addition to their primary, I feel vicarious exhaustion. I admit it, the energy devoted seems so excessive that I wonder how much of it is performative, motivated by the desire to showcase their apparent enlightenment,[4] or maybe it's to ensure they have enough board game partners. On the flip side, I wonder if they believe my assertions that I'm not interested in pursuing others to be genuine, or whether they assume I've been browbeaten by the dominating cultural narrative into accepting my imaginary handcuffs.
To be fair, the prevalence of cheating is very strong evidence that monos (especially men) are indeed dishonest about their desires for extra-relationship fucking, either because they're lying to themselves, or because they're willing to abandon this desire as a practical concession to finding a partner in a monogamy-dominated landscape. Honesty is good, and so I would heartily recommend polyamory to anyone who (for whatever reason) is irresistibly drawn towards breaking their exclusivity pledges. All this is also a strong indicator that polyamory is socially disfavored, so this potentially justifies using deliberate vocabulary re-framing as a balancing counter-force.
What is Trust? Baby Don't Hurt Me
Moving from the semantics of polyamory to its practical implications, let's delve into the pivotal roles of trust and jealousy in these relationships. The foundational problem we have to deal with here is humans' persistent proclivity towards lying, which remains because of how often it's personally advantageous to do so. Naturally, humans also developed a countervailing proclivity for detecting and dissuading dishonesty as a safeguard. It's impractical to live ensconced within an intractable and perpetual barrier of suspicion, so we have measures to let our guard down selectively.
Ideally we build trust over time through shared experiences and history, but there's also potential "trust shortcuts" such as costly signals and commitment rituals.[5] Basically, any actions that someone is unlikely to undertake unless they were genuinely committed count. In the context of romantic relationships, these can range from the extravagant (atrociously expensive weddings) to the mundane (introducing a new girlfriend to your friends). Though far from infallible, shortcuts retain some usefulness because the traditional method of building trust can be unreasonably and agonizingly slow.[6]
This nicely segues into the role of jealousy. It's considered a negative and disdainful emotion, and fair to say that the polyamorous are particularly proud of the cultural technology they've developed for dealing with it, but I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing here. If Alice sees her boyfriend Bob talking to Cindy and feels [negative emotion] in response, it could be a result of pure resentment (Alice hates seeing Bob receive attention from other women) or it could be a reasonable response to a lack of security and assurance (read: lack of trust). The problem is both variants (call them resentful vs rational) get shoved into the same "jealousy" laundry hamper without efforts to distinguish the two, and what would otherwise be a reasonable emotional response gets dirtied by proximity.
Consider another example with polyamorous couple Doug and Emma. They've been each other's primary partners for years and have mutually disclosed social security numbers. One day Emma jets off to Europe with a new fling without telling Doug, who only finds out about this through her LinkedIn updates. Upon her return she continues exhibiting increasingly detached behavior, spending less time with Doug and cancelling plans at the last minute with irreverent excuses, all while reassuring him he remains her top priority in life. Doug is no spring chicken and deploys an arsenal of polyamory tools as remedy (open communication, compersion seances, and even a meticulous line chart of their decreasing time together) but nothing works. Emma continues to reaffirm how important he is to her via garbled late-night texts, and Doug continues to feel [negative emotion].
Would anyone dispute Doug has valid reasons for trusting Emma less? Yes, she says he's a priority, but her actions indicate otherwise. He has ample reasons to believe Emma is gasp lying. Maybe she's not, perhaps this is all just a misunderstanding with an imminent denouement. But if Emma was indeed lying, what can be done to maintain the relationship? After such a grievous betrayal, it wouldn't be tenable for Doug to carry on as usual, nor would it be practical to proactively commit to the uncertainty of rebuilding trust via the traditional slow-burn accumulation. Only trust shortcuts --- within the grand lineage of romantic serenades perhaps --- are likely to be viable options here, if anything.
I never expected any of the above to be a point of contention, but it was! Again, humans routinely lie, especially about sex and relationships. Emma could have been lying to Doug about her commitment to their relationship just to stall for time until she meets an upgraded Doug replacement. Poly relationships commonly organize around having a primary partner, and even relationship anarchists necessarily express a hierarchy through the inescapable constraints of the attention economy, all of which are potential opportunities for trust to erode. Around 25 mins mark, I asked my poly interlocutors how to ensure someone isn't lying to you, their responses were a variant of "just trust them bro". Ok, but how? The point here is that trust cannot appear out of thin air, it has to come from somewhere,and this is true regardless if it's a polyamorous or monogamous relationship!
This is another area in particular where I worry that a polyamorous framing saturated with righteousness could lead one astray. If you've inculcated your lifestyle as inherently virtuous because "jealousy" is either non-existent or adequately contained, there's a risk of aligning all suspicion (not matter how reasonable) as inherently sinful or indicative of moral failing. Sometimes it's good to distrust.
We should use words that other people know the meaning of. We should avoid creating unnecessary ambiguity by flattening distinct phenomena under the same banner. Prioritizing clarity is particular important when dealing with something as complex as human relationships, whether polyamorous or monogamous.
Now, let's play some board games.
[1] Throwback to 2020 where I also discussed polyamory with Aella on episode 12 of The Bailey podcast.
[2] If you only trust our future robot overlord, here's also what chatGPT said: "It's fair to say that the definition of polyamory you provided is not widely accepted in its entirety. Polyamory, as commonly understood, involves more than just not forbidding extra-relationship intimacy. It typically includes aspects of ethical, open, and consensual engagement in romantic or sexual relationships with multiple partners. The definition you've provided focuses primarily on the aspect of non-restriction, which is a part of polyamory but doesn't encompass its full scope."
[3] At the 16mins mark, Aella said "I think the question should not be 'Are we trying to avoid virtuous framing?' but rather 'Is this accurate? Are poly people in fact placing fewer restrictions on their partners?'"
[4] I've also previously written in Cuckoldry as Status Jockeying about concerns with the way polyamory is framed socially, and how that might discourage transparency about one's desires.
[5] I take responsibility for contributing to the confusion with how I discussed 'costly signals' in relationships. The classic example of a costly signal is the peacock's extravagant tail, a reliable indicator of overall fitness precisely because it's so gratuitously expensive to maintain. When I described 'commitment rituals' as 'costly' on the podcast, I meant it in the sense that they impose social costs. Public declarations like pledge ceremonies and weddings "work" not because they physically prevent the oath-takers from subsequently breaking their commitments, rather the aspiration here is the pomp and circumstance of the ritual comes laden with sufficient social pressure to encourage ongoing compliance.
[6] The galaxy-brain take here is to tally up all the "trust shortcuts" we grudgingly rely upon on a daily basis and imagine how you'd cope without them: online product reviews, uniformed police officers, food safety inspection grades on restaurant windows, bank logos on ATMs, and on and on. The point is not that these shortcuts are infallible, they can and are indeed frequently exploited, but that's not enough to throw them all away.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
Investigating potential war crimes and court martialing the soldiers that commit them or commanders that order them would send a strong signal that Israel actually does care about prosecuting the war in as humanitarian a way as possible.
You're absolutely right, and I don't know why I didn't connect those dots myself.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
Yes, that's all true, but notice that the Arab countries still try to play this delicate dance of paying homage to the righteousness of the Palestinian cause even as they engage in repression.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
Follow-Up On That Jewish Conspiracy
My post on the Israel-Palestine affair was the most widely-read thing I ever wrote; not something I anticipated from what was originally intended to be a learning exercise for myself. I've been meaning to address some of the thoughtful feedback I received but I've been busy. There were (alhamdulillah) no factual errors to correct and my overall thesis has not materially changed, but some connective context was missing and some of my points were badly articulated. I'll try to keep this post self-contained but you'll likely miss some context if you hadn't read the first part.
Why the Discourse™ is so Fucked
Before we get into specifics, it's important to first sketch out the discourse battlelines on this issue. Special shout-out again to Inverse Florida who wrote Denial by a thousand cuts barely a week after Hamas's attacks regarding the unusually prevalent campaign of factual denial by the Left/Progressives/"Woke" [1] on the pro-Palestinian side. Their essay helped me understand the dynamics more than any other piece of writing, and it was thoroughly depressing because Inverse makes an airtight argument I don't want to be true.
Woke ideology overwhelmingly spawned out of American left-of-center spaces and its core tenet is the Manichean worldview that neatly divides everyone into stark binary categories of oppressor versus oppressed. Because of its origins, the splits generally reflect only the tensions prevalent within U.S. culture wars (cis vs trans, white vs black, colonizer vs indigenous, and so on) and so the parody/reality for how it's applied to foreign conflicts is to ask: who is the white person in this dispute? Whoever that may be is automatically and permanently adjudicated as the malefactor, and so for the Israel-Palestine conflict, Jews are the 'white person' not because of their genetics but because they're shoehorned as fitting into the white/oppressor archetype (colonizers, imperialists, Western-aligned, successful, rich, etc).
Because of the oppression binary, Inverse Florida points out that another core tenet for Leftists is they see themselves as perpetually powerless, no matter how untrue that might be. Taken altogether, the typical defense mechanisms against Leftist criticism tends to boil down to "Maybe this Leftist did a bad thing, but you the observer are worse for noticing and drawing attention to something so insignificant." If significance swells past the point of viable dismissal, then the only option remaining is to deny, deny, deny. Whatever accusation is levied cannot be true and therefore is not true, all to protect the worldview from falling apart.
This translates into serious ire against anything whatsoever that deigns to complicate the cleanly-drawn villain/victim narrative. Because Oppressed = Virtuous, and because Hamas = Oppressed, condemning their rampage is impossible without severe cognitive malaise. Similarly, because Israel = Villain, any atrocities against Israelis must by definition be justified, and if you haven't found a reason it's because you need to keep looking. Any potential threat to this binary framework is a pestering gnat that must be immediately crushed in order to keep the gnawing cognitive dissonance at bay.
Again, I do not want to be right about this, but I have encountered no other plausible explanation why for example posters of kidnapped Israelis has whipped up so many into a frothy rage. This confrontation with two poster rippers is four tedious minutes long and not once are either of them able to articulate a modicum of justification for their actions. Only the 'pestering gnat' theory makes sense.
I've also experienced exactly the same dynamic recently with close friends I had known for years. I maintain an iron curtain between my writing and my personal social media accounts, but about two months ago I posted what I believed to have been a tepidly-worded condemnation of anti-Jewish elements among the pro-Palestinian movement. The vitriolic response was painfully predictable. I set alerts and within minutes a friend I had known for 13 years blocked me without explanation, an acquaintance excoriated me for bringing attention to something so insignificant, and another claimed ignorance about whether the bigotry I described even existed. Another close friend I've known for a decade to her credit tried to have a conversation about the topic, but then blocked me. Her final straw appears to have been when I pointed out the serious inaccuracies with the map she sent me. Dismiss, deny, and if those fail, disavow.
It's disturbing seeing so many folks on the pro-Palestinian side (to be clear, not all) robotically Beep Boop Beep into this position.[2] I have long viewed Woke ideology with some measure of guarded concern, but because of its blatant recurring incoherence, I figured it would eventually burn itself out into irrelevance after it has generated enough podcasting material. But it's clear I have severely underestimated the enduring influence of this ideology.
Pestering Gnats Everywhere
Once you have the 'pestering gnat' theory in mind, previously inexplicable behavior neatly falls into place. I mentioned the problem of media outlets blatantly lying by omission on this topic, but it's far worse than just one Vox video about Gaza. Amnesty International is a widely respected international human rights advocacy organization that issued a fucking 280-page novel in 2022 lamenting the injustices of Israel's security barriers. They outline scores of legitimate concerns (which I'll get to later) but across those hundreds of pages, not once does the report say anything about the rash of suicide bombings that prompted construction of the barriers and checkpoints. The only reference I could find was near the end on page 263 where they obliquely mention Israel justifies its policies on unspecified "security grounds". Amnesty International can't pretend to be ignorant here, as they already condemned the practice of Palestinian child suicide bombers in 2005.
It's perfectly reasonable to argue that Israel's security barrier is unjustified because it's too ineffective, or too costly, or too onerous, or too abusive --- and I definitely would love to hear those arguments --- but playing ostrich is anti-persuasive as I assume you're hiding something for a reason. Anyone who reads only this report (all 280 pages!) to educate themselves about the topic would be left with the bizarre and misleading impression that Israel chose to dedicate immense resources into building up an elaborate security apparatus because...they're mean I guess?
Similarly, the sanewashing is absolutely egregious. I was shocked to find out that everyone's favorite geographic chant has a completely different meaning in the original Arabic, conveniently transmogrifying "Palestine will be free" from the far less palatable "Palestine is Arab" in the original. It's so well known that throngs of protestors in front of the White House, far away from the region, know it well enough to repeat it.
This is plainly what a cognitive dissonance defense mechanism looks like. Anyone who exhibits this level of aversion towards tackling issues head-on in a transparent and honest manner is openly incriminating themselves. They're revealing lack of confidence in their advocacy, demonstrating a belief their position is indefensible without obfuscation.[3]
Maybe they're internally conflicted yet psychologically unwilling to directly confront the dissonance, or maybe they're consciously choosing to deceive. Regardless of the reason, it's an extremely worrisome development to see take hold on any topic.
Now, back to addressing some of my claims in the original post.
Apartheid: Same but Different
Given the scores of readers who misunderstood my point on this topic, I have to take responsibility for doing a terrible job articulating it. Under the section titled "Apartheid State", I discussed the economic status of Arab-Israelisbut in doing so I painted an unintentionally misleading picture of the Apartheid condemnation levied against Israel.
Some demographic clarification is necessary here. Before the founding of Israel, the common trait among the overwhelming majority of Mandatory Palestine's population is that they spoke Arabic. Hence, Arabs. After Israel was founded some of those Arabs remained within Israel's borders, were granted Israeli citizenship, and are colloquially referred to as 48-Arabs. While the other Arabs, the ones displaced from Israel's borders are referred to as Palestinians. After the 1967 Six Day war, Israel has fully occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and all of its Palestinian residents. The point here is the two Arab groups were virtually indistinguishable genetically/culturally/religiously before the schism, and any differences today is the result of cultural and political forks. Besides a limited family reunification program, Israel never made a meaningful attempt to offer Palestinians citizenship or otherwise integrate them. Instead, Palestinians have remained mired in a legal purgatory within isolated enclaves.
When we talk about "Apartheid" we're conjuring up South Africa's system of institutionalized racial segregation that began in 1948[4] and served as a humiliating stain on the country's reputation until widespread diplomatic condemnation forced its end in the early 1990s. So when Israel is described as an Apartheid state --- as a state with institutionalized racial segregation --- this denunciation can be understood as a reference to the Arabs (read: Palestinians) under Israeli military occupation, but it's incoherent when applied to Arabs who are full Israeli citizens. So is the dividing line actually based on race, or something else entirely?
I'm generally agnostic about vocabulary choices and what matters far more than which lexical denominator to affix is describing Palestinian conditions straightforwardly. Sam Kriss (whose writing I highly recommend) chimed in the comments with lurid details about the "calculated unfreedom" Palestinians live under. There is no denying that Palestinians endure abject poverty that is made even worse by the intrusive security apparatus and the passively-tolerated spate of settler violence. The occupation's legal system is explicitly bifurcated not along territorial boundaries, but along individual legal status. Jewish settlers in the West Bank fall under the jurisdiction of a civil justice system, while Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military tribunals staffed entirely by Israeli soldiers (including the prosecutors, judges, and translators), with far lower evidentiary standards and an expanded scope of what counts as a criminal offense.
The comparison I aimed to draw with Arab-Israelis was a means of contemplating reasons why a hypothetical full Israeli annexation of the Palestinian territories and its people would be seen as anathema, at least from a material standpoint. If Arab citizens of Israel suffered a horrendous quality of life under Israeli sovereignty now, I could begin to understand some of the intense resistance to Israeli governance from Palestinian Arabs. But as I noted, Arab-Israelis enjoy far higher quality of life than almost anywhere else in the Arab world, so that potential explanation was a total dead-end to me.
However, it is worthwhile to examine whether the Arab-Israeli living arrangement, who are only 21% of all Israelis, can scale.
Ethnostate but Democratic
It's worth pointing out that the 48-Arabs did not always enjoy the legal equality they have today. The Zionists didn't really have a plan for how to integrate Arabs into Israel, and though they were granted 'citizenship' they were subject to martial law until 1966. This means that throughout Israel's existence, the only period when Israel did not have a bifurcated legal system split along ethnic lines was a brief window of time between 1966 and the beginning of its Palestinian occupation in 1967.
It's also worth pointing out that the hypothetical full Israeli annexation (including full citizenship to Palestinians) I mentioned would be supported by virtually nobody, least of all by Israel. The Muslim world would be howling with rage at what would be seen as the extinction of the Palestinian Cause, while worldwide condemnation would focus on the baseline disdain against territorial acquisition. Israel meanwhile, as a country explicitly founded as a refuge for Jews from across the world, would be unwilling to absorb the voter demographic shock.
Israel rightfully prides itself as a democratic enterprise, but there is no question that this adherence to democratic principles is at least in part conditional on not having too many of the wrong kind of voters. As Freddie DeBoer pointed out, the objective of an ethnostate will always be in tension with expanding the voter franchise. Arab-Israelis have full voting rights, but they're also only 21% of the population and therefore not a threat to Jewish voting supremacy on policy issues that fall along religious/ethnic lines. That calculus changes completely if the 4.9 million Palestinians living in occupied territories are added to Israel's 9.7 million population and its voter rolls. To the extent that ethnicity and religion can predict political stability within this region of the world, it's also reasonable to be concerned whether a one-state solution would repeat the same downward spiral neighboring Lebanon charted.
I notice a pointed discomfort among Israeli supporters in the West when I describe Israel as an ethnostate. It is! An ethnostate is any country organized along ethnic lines, and undeniably that's what Israel is! The label may have distasteful connotations, but that doesn't make it inaccurate! You may argue that an ethnostate is justified on this narrow exception because of the persistent history of Jewish oppression et cetera yadda yadda, and I'm sympathetic to those arguments but I have no patience for reality denial.
My preferred policy palette is basically libertarian, though I refer to myself as an anarchist because my overriding priority would be to see an archipelago of diverse systems of customized governance. You can call this the "Voltairean" vision of government in that I may disagree with someone's preferred form of government, but I will defend their right to establish it. "Let a hundred flowers of distinct governance systems bloom" as Mao famously said. I have severe disagreements with any government that cleaves along racial or ethnic lines, but I support anyone's right to found one.
I'm at peace with my position, but supporters of Israel who feel conflicted about the ethnostate/democracy tension are responsible for undergoing their own soul-searching to figure out what to prioritize at the margins. How much national Jewish identity is worth potentially sacrificing at the altar of expanding the democratic franchise? I can't answer that for you.
Violence for Thee, but not for Me
I'm not a pacifist and I transparently outlined the principles I rely upon to evaluate whether any application of violence is justified. It depends on how much the violence is oriented towards a specific goal, proportional to the objective, and carried out with humility. I applied these principles to denounce the depressingly common Palestinian practice of indiscriminate attacks against orthogonal civilian targets. Some of the pointed criticism I received in response to my essay carried the implication that I would be unwilling to denounce Israeli violence which fails to satisfy these principles, but I hold no such aversion.
1. A History of Jewish Violence
In fairness, I can understand the basis for such a suspicion. When I decried Israel's history of lying to cover up its war crimes, I cited only two examples from the IDF. There were illustrative examples, never intended to serve as a comprehensive list of all Zionist atrocities. Faceless Craven pointed out several omissions of atrocities by the Jewish side from across the history of the conflict, many I admittedly was not aware of at the time. Some notable examples I did not mention include the 1946 King David Hotel bombing by the Irgun which killed 91 people, the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre which was directly perpetrated by Christian Lebanese militias but with the support of the IDF and resulted in 460 to 3,500 dead civilians, or the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre where one far-right Zionist killed 29 people and injured 125.
Beyond specific acts, it's perfectly relevant to examine how much the Israeli government tacitly encourages a culture of indemnity for gratuitous violence perpetrated by its own. In 1991, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Iman Darweesh Al Hams was shot and killed by an IDF commander who emptied his machine gun into her. The commander expressed no regrets, saying he would've done the same had she been 3-years-old, and was cleared of any wrongdoing by a military court. The same issue can be examined regarding broader Israeli culture as reflected by who gets elected to its highest office. Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun and the guy responsible for the King David Hotel bombing, was elected Prime Minister in 1977. Yitzhak Shamir, the leader of the Stern Gang, a Zionist terrorist group that splintered from the Irgun because they weren't radical enough was elected Prime Minister in 1986. As did Ariel Sharon in 2001, despite his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacre and a list of antics way too insane and numerous to get into here. One of the dominant political entity in Israel today is the right-wing Likud party, and it was founded by Sharon and Begin.
Evidently in the realm of Israeli politics a history of egregious violence against non-Jews is not a drawback, but potentially a sought-after qualification for a significant portion of the electorate. You could be charitable and maybe argue this simply reflects a legitimate desire for leaders who have a demonstrated commitment to national security, and with direct experience in armed conflict. But just as I denounced homicidal bloodthirst within Palestinian culture, I must do the same for Israeli culture. I would be betraying my principles otherwise.
2. Ceasefire When?
Relatedly, my post was published as Israel's pulverization of Gaza was ramping up but it was quiet on that specific issue. That was not obfuscation, I just do not have the information or expertise to play armchair commander. I can't fully trust casualty numbers from Hamas but even halving their claims leaves you with at least 10,000 Gazans killed by Israel, a number far beyond my capacity to comprehend. The IDF already admitted their proportionality calculus accepts the obliteration of 50 civilians in exchange for a chance to kill one Hamas commander. The IDF may claim to care about minimizing civilian casualties, but if 3 Israeli hostages waving white flags can get mistakenly killed by the IDF, we have plenty of reasons to question that commitment's veracity. Israel may be pursuing a perfectly justifiable objective (destroying Hamas), and the preceding examples are all absolutely damning indicators against sufficient proportionality and humility, but it's not conclusive without answering the question: compared to what?
I admit without any hesitation that Israel's actions in Gaza have been immensely destructive. But as noted by the highly recommended Trembling Mad, raw numbers alone are insufficient for adjudicating moral culpability, no matter how far off-the-charts they might be. The falsifiability argument would be to imagine a hypothetical Israel that is pursuing the exact same military objectives, but whose commitment towards minimizing collateral destruction is earnest and unimpeachable. I fully expect the civilian death toll accumulated by this hypothetical Israel to be lower than it is in reality, but it cannot be zero. This is purely a result of the baseline challenges of confronting a surreptitious belligerent within a dense urban environment. And yet, unless we have viable alternatives to contrast Israel's behavior against, it's difficult to accurately evaluate Israel's level of misconduct (and again, I already said there are ample reasons for suspicion).
The calls for an Israeli ceasefire are directly implicated by this question. I've repeatedly asked and desperately searched for any suggestions for how Israel should conduct its war differently, and it's near-impossible to get a straight answer because so many ceasefire advocates outright reject the premise that Israel has any justifiable objectives whatsoever. Watch AOC's serious discomfort in reaction to this very simple question. To his credit, Cenk Uygur is the only pro-Palestinian advocate I've come across willing to articulate an alternative, but his idea that Israel should just send special forces into Hamas's tunnels is advertising serious ignorance about the subject matter. If you've come across any other viable alternatives, I'm desperate to see them.
I anticipate perplexity for how it's possible for me to express support for Israel in spite of what I wrote above, and the simple answer is my support should be understood as a comparative ranking relative to the alternatives within this conflict. Nobody is under any obligation to pick any side --- and more power to you if you choose to abstain --- but I picked to avoid the simplistic nihilism that comes along with decrying everyone's hands as equally dirty. I disagree that they are, and I stake my position from a place of clear-eyed transparency, fully acknowledging Israel's sins. Because it would be another betrayal of my principles for me to engage in the same dismissal and denial I condemn in others.
In Which I Solve Everything
There's no reason for anyone to listen to what I have to say here regarding any potential solutions --- Wikipedia binging hasn't deluded me to that extreme --- but I'll offer more scattered thoughts.
Popular Israeli support for Likud and its hardline focus on security has historically risen in response to heightened Palestinian violence. Right now Netanyahu and Likud appear to be reviled by most Israelis for their massive fuck-up on October 7th, but it seems highly unlikely to expect appetite for a two-state solution (which necessarily requires accepting increasing Palestinian autonomy) to do anything but continue to crash among the Israeli public.
An argument I've regularly encountered from more honest advocates on the pro-Palestinian side is they first acknowledge the concerns over Palestinian violence as legitimate, but then they claim that Israeli's intrusive security measures are ultimately counterproductive because they provoke further radicalization and thus further violence. This strikes me as a naive argument, but I admit I have no way of falsifying it except through hypotheticals. Imagine Israel suddenly announcing a complete policy shift: every military checkpoint and every concrete barrier will be completely dismantled, and every Palestinian will have full autonomy to move about wherever they please within Israel, free of any security screening of any kind...how many Jews do you expect to be murdered the next day? I can't give an exact number beyond "a fucking fuckton".
I don't see how any mutual de-escalation can be viable given the fanatical devotion commanded by Palestinian militancy. Richard Hanania is correct to argue that Palestinians are maxed out on hatred, with Hamas's military wing (al-Qassam Brigades) garnering the highest approval rating among Palestinians, polling at 89%. If you want to draw an equivalency between al-Qassam and the terrorizing violence doled out by extreme Zionist settlers, that's fair! But the comparison cannot hold regarding overall societal sentiment, as Israelis demonstrably express far more disagreement on the application of military deterrence and other issues. As recently as July 2023, 15% of Israelis were willing to negotiate on a resolution with Hamas, despite the group's penchant for rocket barrages.
When I cite the insanity of Palestinian militancy, I wonder how many think I'm exaggerating. If you didn't learn about Farfour the Mouse last time, here's another chance to see the level of fanatical indoctrination aimed at Palestinian children. I can't stress how illuminating it is to see footage from the Hamas TV show Tomorrow's Pioneers. I cannot claim that this show is representative of Palestinian opinion (and the linked video highlights many who expressed public disagreement) but the detail I found most unsettling were the number of young callers to the show readily naming and singing from a disturbingly long roster of songs all about genocidal martyrdom.
I would hope it's apparent how much of an outlier this level of unbridled animosity is, inculcated from a very young age. For everyone's sake, Palestinians are in urgent need of severe deradicalization, but I cannot fathom what that process could look like.
And finally, where should Palestinians live? I'm writing this from the comfort of my home as someone who has never known displacement, and my immigration story involved a cushy plane seat, so discount what I have to say accordingly. In my previous post, I did not but should have addressed the issue of displaced Palestinians' right of return. Matt Yglesias examined this issue in greater detail, and his article highlights one of the core tensions I already touched upon though. Let's assume the worst case displacement scenario (a scenario I am explicitly not endorsing and bringing up solely to analyze its ramifications) where Israel rounds up and forcibly deports all 4.9 million Palestinians currently living under Israeli occupation. What happens next?
If we consider all the major Arab countries who claim to be ardent supporters of the Palestinian people (e.g. Egypt population 100 million, Saudi Arabia 35M, Algeria 43M, Iran 83M, etc.), what would prevent any of them from opening their borders to the survivors of a second Nakba? Countries all over the world regularly accomodate refugees and mass migrations. Over the course of the ongoing Syrian civil war, Turkey (population 85 million) already has accepted 3.3 million Syrian refugees in what is functionally a permanent arrangement. If Turkey managed this influx on its own (to be clear, not without strife or hardship) I don't see what would prevent the aforementioned countries from enacting a similar endeavor.
The answer is while there may not be practical barriers towards accommodating millions of Palestinian refugees, there are serious political hurdles. Remember that from 1948 to 1967, Gaza was partof Egypt and the West Bank was part of Jordan. When Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1978, Egypt was offered Gaza back but they declined and instead renounced any territorial claims over it. Jordan pulled a similar move and relinquished its claims over the West Bank in 1988 and eventually stripped West Bank Palestinians of the Jordanian citizenship they had.
To recap my main thesis again, none of this makes any sense unless you incorporate the ideological component that needs Palestinians to remain stuck where they are, playing their role as the downtrodden in this grand theatrical production, all to ensure the jihadi casus belli against the Jews is maintained. This is what makes this conflict so perverse, so many people are just fucking pawns. Had Gaza been re-absorbed and became assimilated as just another governorate of Egypt, or had the share of Jordanians with Palestinian descent continued to increase beyond the estimated 50% it already is today, what remaining grievances would be worth the self-immolation remedy?
The key takeaway in understanding the intractability of this conflict is that much is deliberately constructed to remain that way. While I can't claim to offer any viable solutions, its perpetuity will remain partly a result of the aversion towards transparent acknowledgements of reality, and a result of the persistent unwillingness to critically examine the actual motivations of those involved.
[1] Words are very fuzzy beasts and I'm normally very reluctant to use terms like 'Woke' because of its charged ambiguity, but unfortunately there are scant other alternatives available to uncontroversially describe an undeniably real phenomenon.
[2] What I'm describing is simply a particularly intense variant of cognitive dissonance, and it's not at all exclusive to just Western Leftists. Anyone else who ever experiences the serious mental discomfort upon realizing their closely-held beliefs could be in jeopardy of being contradicted by reality is susceptible to similarly severe reactions.
[3] Just because an advocate believes dishonesty is necessary to advance their cause does not mean they're correct!
[4] Quelle coïncidence.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
I agree with this analysis. States have plenary power about how to portion out electoral college votes, so it's really difficult for me to imagine what a SCOTUS intervention could look like.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
It's quite affirming to see that a beat I haphazardly stumbled into generate this kind of positive feedback, so thank you for that.
I echo what @2rafa said, whether or not the 2020 election should be considered legitimate depends on the standards used. Some people unironically denounce any election where their preferred candidate does not win as illegitimate. But walking away from that extreme position, I would use prior elections as the baseline. I did affirmatively claim before that the 2020 election is one of the most secure slash "legitimate" we've ever had. That's not because I think it was conducted in a special way, but rather because it was by far the most scrutinized election we've ever had.
Prior election didn't get anywhere near as much attention, so I think agnosticism about their legitimacy would be more warranted given the relative lack of scrutiny they endured. For 2020 hold the position that there wasn't anything materially different that would warrant extra suspicion. I understand that lots of people would point to the various "covid rule changes" as reasons to be suspicious but for that to be true all three of these factors need to be established:
- The rule changes increased possibility of fraud
- The fraud favored one political party over the other
- The enforcement apparatus that would normally root out the fraud abdicated its duty
I've seen attempts to justify individual aspects of the above, but I haven't come across coherent explanations that address all three. After lots of opportunity, fair to say the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
(this is written under my first covid fog so please excuse any potential incoherence)
ymeskhout
2yr ago
The "split-invoicing" you're describing would indeed be money laundering, but I don't see how wedding suppliers are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this tactic. It would immediately raise red flags if a florist is depositing tens of thousands of dollars in cash since weddings are not known to be a cash-intensive industry. Generally you'd want a service business which has little to no variable costs (like flower inventory) to keep track of. That's why Breaking Bad used a car wash, and Ozark used a strip club. Both are perfect money-laundering operations.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
How would that even work? The point of laundering money is to fabricate a plausible legal source for illegally-obtained cash, and I don't see how an extravagant wedding accomplishes that.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
Seriously. We saw photos of a wedding our friend went to that no joke cost $160k (flowers alone were $15k) bankrolled by the bride's rich family. Within the opulent displays of wealth genre, it seems weddings remain the least socially offensive.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
The only place we differed is that we did go with 4 guests, just our parents. That line was easy enough to draw that we didn't think it would offend anyone too terribly.
That's what my friend did with their elopement. That would've made sense if our parents were in town, but if they were going to fly in then naturally others would also want to be there and then...
ymeskhout
2yr ago
Haha what a bizarre topic to have a Bollywood song on, but hey at least he did visit India on his way to China
ymeskhout
2yr ago
This is a good question to ponder. We talked a lot about friends of ours who were in miserable marriages and how important it was to avoid a similar fate. So though we didn't agree on a specific set of years, we did agree that this will work only so long as it makes sense, and for us to avoid sweeping any issues under the rug. Who knows how effective such an oath will be but I figure it's better than nothing, and serves at least to reminds ourselves of each other's expectations.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
Thanks! Both of us wanted to avoid the stress of combining the rote legal filing with the social ceremony, so eloping was our way of "getting it over with". We didn't do this correctly though, because rule #1 of eloping is to shut the fuck up, but we told people about it and naturally they wanted to attend. We thought about maybe opening it up to 4-6 people, but then other people heard about that and understandably got pissed. So we resorted back to zero guests. Our plan is indeed to have follow-up parties to make sure everyone is included, but at a much more leisurely pace.
The profile pic is a random portrait of Ibn Battuta the Maghrebi explorer. I didn't think we looked very similar, but it was close and fitting enough for a PFP.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
I got married a month ago, in a barebones courthouse elopement. Click through for some pictures of our adorable ring-bearer.
ymeskhout
2yr ago
Yup, very common problem. As much as it compromises my independence in the eyes of some of my clients, this is one big reason I like getting paid by the state for my work. There's something that feels so distasteful about taking money from someone asking for help with their very shitty situation.
If you consider those to be failure indicators then a ton of monogamous couples would also fit the bill. Neither lack of kids nor a long engagement period would stand out as remarkable among my mono friends.
More options
Context Copy link