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The TikTok Ban, Male Role Models, the New Punk, and the Right to be Cool in American Society
TLDR: We're increasingly seeing an urge to regulate media consumption, social media moderation, and public speech along the lines of an ersatz "equal time" doctrine, in which users must both view and affirm one's viewpoints. People don't just want the right to free speech, they want the right to be cool, to speak and be heard and enjoyed and honored.
A theme running through a few different recent threads on here is an urge by different societal movements to seize the mantle of “cool,” to be hip, to be fun, to be interesting.
The people trying to ban TikTok have cited over and over the differential between Israeli and Palestinian content.
The underlying assumption by Pro-Israeli voices is that it is impossible for Pro-Israeli content to simply be unpopular. It is impossible that the Israelis are simply bad at memes. There is no actual evidence of bias produced, no evidence of suppression of Israeli creators or boosting of Hamas hashtags, the assumption is that this bias must exist in order for consumers to make the choices they made.
Meanwhile the primary effort I see in the Anti-Anti-Semitism space is the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign, which is so confusingly bad I literally think it is its opposite every time I see it. I see the ads, and I read it naturally as Stand Up to Hatred (by) Jews rather than Stand Up To Hatred (of) Jews. ADL content is lame, bad, boring. Pro-Palestinian content is simply better and put together by better creators.
Just accept not being cool! Did you know: what only number one hit in the 1960s was explicitly about the Vietnam war? Ballad of the Green Berets. Go figure. You want to compete with better memes, produce your own. While we associate the 1960s music scene with the antiwar movement, there were significant patriotic songs produced too. Fighting Side of Me, Okie from Muskogee, the patriotic hits of the era were huge. You compete with memes with better memes. Banning tiktok will not save Israel.
We see the same dynamic with astroturfed “Positive” male role models. Male role models who are nothing interesting, simply because TPTB don’t like the ones that are actually current and good. We see the same dynamic with everyone claiming to be the new punk. This poem circulated on twitter as the worst poem ever written and I tend to agree, but the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater and taking antidepressants just floors me. Everyone wants to be cool and rebellious and also in power and also secretly the choice of the grill pilled normies and the proletariat and the artists and the one true source of loving families that produce children. They want to be James Dean and Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. They want to be both the enemies in the culture war at the same time.
This comes back to the debate about freedom of speech vs freedom of reach, right? How do you create the right to equal time in a world where people are picking among free choices with their eyeballs? How far does this go? If people buy books that are on one end of a conflict, must publishers and libraries fart out books for the other side? It was possible in a more centralized era for governments to force limited broadcast stations to cover sides evenly, but in the era of consumer choice, even if you force content creators to put out pro-Israel movies Netflix and Youtube customers don’t have to click on them. You can’t force eyeballs onto content anymore. To what extent is the effort to force advertising into these platforms in part an effort to force content consumers to get exposed to these messages whether they like it or not? Once people can choose their own content, they might not pick your content, and that can’t be allowed.
I don't think this is a TikTok problem per se. I think the question is, why is the strict Oppressor/Oppressed dichotomy so hip and cool? Speaking as someone who is totally against that model. Why does opposing these models make you look so....nerdy, if not outright vile? I still maintain the reason is because the strict Oppressor/Oppressed dichotomy freezes out other facets of power, privilege and bias which actually serve to build/maintain power for influencer types. It serves the tribal in-group vs. out-group thinking. In short, it feels good and it's actually of little cost, because you're not actually expected to apply it to yourself or the people around you. It's OK to just apply it to the other.
Firstly, because arguing for nuance is almost always going to come across as nerdy. Secondly, because opposition frequently takes the form of apologia for vile actions and it's difficult to avoid the attendant guilt by association even if you're making good arguments. For every person arguing that the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is reductive and harmful, there will be someone saying that actually the Kulaks/Croats/Queers/[Insert Object of Hate Here] deserved it (or at the very least that it wasn't a big deal and they should get over it).
This is true, but it's a general feature of dichotomous political thinking, whether it's oppressor/oppressed, fat cat/little guy, lowlife/upstanding citizen, or foreigner/native. It's all just a gloss on Us (people who deserve dignity and moral consideration) vs Them (people who don't). An explanation of why this in particular has cachet needs more explanation.
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It's in peoples' rational self-interest to stand up for victims because being a victim could happen to anyone and the costs for the victim are often greater than the benefits for the abuser. Same reason why torture is usually outlawed the moment democracy is implemented: the benefits of torture are small, the costs great, so people outlaw it as they themselves don't think the costs of foregoing torture outweigh the benefits of never having to be a potential recipient of it.
That this reasoning sometimes errs is because the analysis of who constitutes a victim/abuser is, like all other democratic analyses, based on outward optics and scant information. It's the satellite view of a conflict and so misses all of the nitty-gritty. So only a rough approximation of the matter is made. The roles, only vaguely educed.
And there are also perverse incentives that the average human holds. There's the Harrison Bergeron impulse on the part of the mediocre multitude to hold down and discredit the talented few. Retarded, violent populations are not as maligned as they perhaps should be following utilitarian calculations, as the average citizen to some extent identifies with them or else narcissistically considers themselves to be a savior. So populations like the Palestinians earn protected status, while their haughty superiors are brought low, but it all follows from the base self-interest of the demos, those muddled idiots who wish to protect themselves...
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I think it's the female frame. Women tend to be less aggressive and more caring. In the past men had exclusive control of politics, foreign policy and so on - and conducted things with an emphasis on aggression, violence, honour and logic. Realism/realpolitik dictates that you court the strong and use the weak as pawns. Now women are involved and try to do things their way, care for the weak and hector villains. Thus we have a huge proliferation of 'caring' diplomacy. In the past we just had realist models of international relations with an emphasis on strength and logic, now there are liberal and constructivist schools of thought focusing on institutions and vibes, respectively.
On twitter these women are getting excited about the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. There's an entire parallel universe where this treaty isn't a massive joke, where these lawyers and academics are doing real and meaningful work: https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1770863175937708279
They have a fundamentally different mindset to realists. If you skim the wikipedia page of neorealism, all the thinkers are male. Look through constructivism and there are loads of women. Conceiving of the universe as ruled by mutable ideas and social constructs is a naturally female perspective, just as men are more interested in game theory and structural, abstract rules.
Because the female frame has taken on such influence, opposing it has become unfashionable.
I don’t think that’s it. Most of these movements are punching down in a way that looks like punching up. The out groups tend to look like the powerful, but without any actual power of their own. DEI ostensibly hurts white men. But it doesn’t really affect powerful white men. The guys graduating from elite colleges, the ones whose parents run a business and can shuffle their son into the C suites aren’t harmed by DEI. Unconnected white men, men who lack the connections, generational wealth or parents business to bypass the cattle call of the job market, they are the ones losing out. So it has two groups who benefit and only one relatively unpopular group that doesn’t. The elites love DEI as a way to kneecap their competitors. Make it difficult for a white male computer programmer to move up and you don’t have to worry about him founding the next big company. Women and minorities love DEI because they get cherry positions in big companies and get their names and faces out there.
Even Israel Palestine tends to run along these lines. Jews look white enough that they can be white when the narrative calls for it. Then you can oppose the white colonialism without having to oppose the elites doing so. America has been pretty active in imposing its will on the world. We overthrow governments all the time, and have absolutely no problem with bombing the shiitake out of anyone we consider our enemies. We have absolutely no problem with imposing draconian sanctions on countries we don’t like. Israel was at least attacked by the country it’s at war with, Iraq never attacked us and got shock and awed and then occupied.
I think that dynamic— look like the powerful but be much weaker makes any group a good target for those involved in the oppression matrix line of thinking. Attacking someone obviously not like the elites invokes racism-sneers. It’s too obviously punching down to be effective. But if you punch down on someone who looks like you not only will that not look racist, but the victim cannot really defend himself. After all, to outsiders he looks like the people punching him. And so defending himself looks like privilege. How dare this guy object to black people getting the job over him? Doesn’t he know about oppression?
Yes, this is the point. The archetypical male tyrant rules with an iron fist and emphasizes his own power. He is a major douchebag and his rule is only stable through the excessive application of force to make the opposition cower in fear.
The archetypical female tyrant rules through deception and manipulation. She rules by pitting everyone against everyone else, and then playing the "neutral" arbiter who just wants everyone to get along, you know? She sets up a moralist framework that just-so happens to benefit her (ideally with some mystical source of knowledge that only she has access to), and that is vague enough so that she can switch positions whenever it suits her. She avoids formal positions of power and rules by committee, and so on. The Oppressor/Opressed framework is basically tailor-made for this purpose. The same guy can be an oppressed black body if he is on your side, or a toxic male oppressor if he isn't.
Of course, both of these are a bit too extreme to be practical, real life stable systems seem to mostly coalesce into a small elite group of men wielding the highest explicit/formal power backed up by a moralist framework that is primarily enforced through a much larger group of women, with both of these groups worst tendencies being kept in check by the other. Without that enforced moralist framework societies tend to devolve into chaos and warlordism, while societies without the men tend to simply get conquered by foreign men. But the locus of power can move between these two groups, and currently almost nobody is disputing that women are more powerful than they've ever been - the main discussion is on whether we've not gone far enough on one side or that the pendulum has swung in the other direction on the other side.
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Yeah, I think this is right, or at least it's my point. I actually think people hold on to dear life to the Oppressor/Oppressed frame so we don't break this image, lest we start questioning the connections and the generational wealth. The one thing I believe strongly, is we don't have the stomach for actual socioeconomic decline. Even the most Progressive of the Progressives will balk at this when it comes to they and theirs. It's OK when it's just "Billionaires", but when it comes down to specifics that are in the in-group? Nah. Not an option.
The big threat that comes from heterodox thinking on this, I think, is that we add connections to the DEI anti-list, I.E. things that will be counted in a negative sense. In that, it's not the unconnected white men that will lose out...it's the connected ones. You best be coming with your DEI proposal, a plan for your eventual exit. I think there's a reason why people go nuclear on heterodox thinking on these matters, things outside the Progressive vs. Reactionary binary, that all this stuff presents itself as a very real threat to not just the powers in a big sense, but your place and power in a more local sense.
I came to much the same conclusions a long time ago when I noticed that wealth, connections, and even geographical proximity to seats of power were never actually a part of any meaningful conversation on privilege. Which ultimately is nonsense — not because there’s no such things as racism and sexism, but that the oppression created by those things pales in comparison to wealth. And I think it can be pointed out quite simply by pointing to the minority or female children of rich adults. I think it’s actually easier to find success as the son of a black rich and famous person than it would be to find success as a working class white guy from Georgia.
And it really shows up in all sorts of ways. The “right” schools on your resume. The “right” sorts of clubs and experiences and volunteer opportunities. The right sorts of unpaid internships. And access to those things are almost always behind steep paywalls. Volunteering especially the kind that high end colleges seem to like (starting a charity yourself or going abroad) tend to be both time and money intensive. If you have to work as a teen for any reason, your application is not the right kind for elite schools. Likewise sports. The number of children in the pay for play college scandal who were given scholarships for obscure sports that really only the rich actually play was ridiculous. The median student has never been on a rowing team. Even after getting into school, having a good resume means study abroad programs and unpaid internships. Except those can be hard for students who cannot afford to not work while at school. So it’s like the joke about underpasses — yes it’s equally illegal for Elon Musk and a homeless guy to sleep under a bridge. But Elon musk doesn’t sleep under bridges. It’s equally important for both of us to getting into high paying jobs that we spend our time building a resume and reputation and network, but I need to work my way through school and you don’t. Well, who’s going to have an easier time making it?
Everything in America from health, to opportunities, to education and a million other things are dependent on having money. And it’s the one privilege that’s carefully rendered invisible under a deluge of talk about race, gender, and sexuality.
Don't they? I feel like they talk about it a lot. A lot of the people talking about privilege are also ardent socialists. At least in the sense of being a Limousine liberal, so maybe they don't do anything about it, but they certainly talk about the power of money.
Certainly people talk about "Billionaires" all the time. But below that? Not so much. And yeah, sometimes you'll see it targeted specifically at certain (usually outgroup) people...but generally this isn't something that's challenged, outside of an extreme minority of targets. I don't think this has always been the case, or is always the case, but I think there's a lack of awareness that the socialism different people envision might not be the same thing. Some people might truly envision a prioritizing of the working class, while others see shifting power and control to the managerial/professional classes.
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What's the poem? Twitter stopped showing any responses/in-thread posts to users who are not logged in, and I can't find a working nitter instance anymore.
There is still at least one, though I'm not sure that I want to spread it everywhere in case extra traffic kills it.
Self-hosting is pretty easy, and it can run on a single burner account if you're just using it for yourself.
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Twitter shut down the "disposable account" mechanism that Nitter instances used. Thirty days afterwards, the last Nitter account stopped working.
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there's laundry to do and a genocide to stop
Some people sure have gone big on long COVID. At this point I don't think it exists in anything more than the trivial sense that being sick makes you generally weaker for a bit.
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This is a poem? I thought poems at least had to have multiple lines, even if we've jettisoned rhyme and meter?
It looks like a random text. Or something. I don’t get it.
"""Poetic""" psuedo-stream-of-consiousness from a particular sort of progressive.
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That's only one of the cases where it's claimed they've interfered. There are others. Hong Kong. Uyghurs. Taiwan. Tiananmen. Tibet.
Granting arguendo that this one is nonsense and/or not a concern (and you might be right), TikTok as controlled by ByteDance still has to go. Don't overfocus on this detail to the point that you miss the big picture; sort-by-controversial is a thing that happens, but it's not correct in how much it prioritises things.
Also, we could be going to war with the PRC in the next couple of years. Do you really think that ByteDance wouldn't go along if the CPC told them to fill their site and app with malware in order to break the Western Internet? Hint: ByteDance is a mainland Chinese company, and in mainland China if you defy the CPC they chop you up for your organs like that scene out of Repo.
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To be clear: no one is banning tiktok. They may force ByteDance to divest from the American form of tiktok. ByteDance can then sell it to non-Chinese owners. Or take their ball and go home. Their choice.
The arguments I've heard in favor of this involve the CCP controlling Chinese companies and the American form of tiktok being a horrible antisocial negative version but the Chinese version being a prosocial positive version. Which would be the CCP messing with our youth. And the black box hand-modified algorithm promoting content is not an even-handed arbiter of memetic popularity. Neither in China nor the US.
Anecdotally my Chinese American in-laws and wife agree that the Chinese version of tiktok is superior. And they use Chinese mainland Apple accounts to load it on their phones because it is the "good" version. So when some Congressman claims that, I accept it.
To be clear, the bills that are supposed to 'ban tiktok' would also enable regulation of any other media simply by claiming that managers or owners of said media are 'rival influenced'. So you could go after Twitter e.g. because Musk posted unflattering claims about Ukrainian war and the only reason for that is that he's Russian influenced. The bill said "owned or controlled, directly or indirectly". That seems incredibly broad to be honest.
You'd only be able to challenge this law in a specific D.C. Court. Good luck!
I really doubt that is what 'rival influenced' means. "We sold it to one of our other subsidiaries or partners, so it isn't us technically doing it" has to be banned for this to be sensible.
Not to mention going after Twitter for foreign policy views is a glaring 1st Ammendment issue. I think this is a fantasy.
Haven't you been paying attention, at all, to what the state is doing? E.g. the Biden laptop suppressed using national security excuse, which turned out to be a lie.
The end run over 1st amendment by making their proxies in Brussels pass a law that'd require censorship of global networks and set the default. etc.
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Here's the whole of the relevant section of the law, so people can judge for themselves how broad it is:
And here's the relevant, referenced section from subsection 4 above:
It's all honestly really quite narrow. It could not be applied to Twitter because Elon isn't 'domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of' 'the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea...the People's Republic of China...the Russian Federation...[or] the Islamic Republic of Iran', nor is Twitter 'directly or indirectly own[ed]' by someone with 'at least a 20 percent stake' who is domiciled, headquartered, doing business in, or organized under the laws of the preceding four countries.
If, someday, we added Saudi Arabia to that list (not something I would put past the left of the Democratic party, a portion of which will never get over Khashoggi), Twitter might be in trouble. Until then, this law would not apply.
The law is quite short. It's also pretty free of the kind of cross-references and surgical edits that make reading many other bills so confusing. Just make sure to understand that most things in the law are defined somewhere.
The concerning part is that the president can make a private classified notice that someone is a foreign adversary that only congress gets to see and then FBI/CIA/Secret Service action can be taken against the corporation without anyone know that its 'legalized' by this bill and by the private notice to congress.
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Reminder that they stole $500 million from Trump for the crime of possibly exaggerating the value of his Florida club, which they valued at $18 million dubiously and then turned around and declared that the club if seized is suddenly worth hundreds of millions for the purpose of paying off the fine.
Direction and control seems extremely broad statements, so unless you can provide some legal definition for that, it's rather sinister..
It looks like 'direction or control' usually means some sort of formal relationship. So, a contract that gives voting power over a company or something like that.
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Why does this remind me of a completely other unrelated bill during 9/11 that allows for student loan forgiveness basically referring to 9/11 related stuff but 20+ years later was used for student loan forgiveness on things not like 9/11.
I don’t even want to blame congress for this because I think writing laws is hard when you want them to do one thing specifically but have some flexibility so congress doesn’t need to write a new law every time $5k is spent.
The law is much less over-reaching than no_one (and most of the bill's critics) is making it out to be.
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Interesting to hear your family's experience. Isn't it the case that Chinese tiktok is superior because the government leans heavily on them to remove dopamine sinks and encourage prosocial behaviour? If anything, perhaps we should be outsourcing moderation to China across the board.
More seriously, there is an inherent tension between wanting a "prosocial positive" tiktok, and an "even-handed arbiter of memetic popularity". That's the case for all social media whether American or Chinese-owned. Either (1) you prevent people from seeing antisocial content that they might enjoy or (2) you allow people to view that content and risk wireheading them or (3) we live in the best of all possible worlds and people naturally choose prosocial content where possible.
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I generally agree with people that describe "Do X, or else we'll do Y" as "plans/threats to do Y". In this case, I have zero problem describing "divest from the app, or else it will be banned" as "...planning to ban tiktok".
It would be like arguing "the mobster isn't threatening to break your kneecaps. You can pay back your debts, or else... It's entirely your choice."
Argument by analogy is always flawed. So of course your analogy is not relevant to the matter at hand.
No Chinese company has a right to own anything in the US. They have previously been forced to divest or blocked from purchasing things in the US. I do not accept TicTok refusing to sell a subsidiary to non-Chinese owners as a ban. If they'd rather shut it down than divest, that is entirely on them. In every way unlike a mobster giving me the choice to pay him or to have him cripple me.
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Tiktok is getting pushback because the parent company is controlled by China. That is all you need to know, and that's the only bit that matters. Anti-semitism and Gaza are excuses. 'Think of the kids' is an excuse and so are accusations of 'Tiktok killing attention'.
Don't get me wrong, Tiktok performs badly on all of those accusations. But, it is just the latest in a long line of social media companies that all transformed the youth along similar lines.
The US will go to any length to control the global narrative of 'freedom'. Tiktok is the greatest deepest invasion on American soil since communisms capture of academia, and the US is woefully underequipped to push it back. The US uses Israel to complain about Tiktok, because if they revealed the real reason, then it would correctly show the US for the paper tiger it has now become. The US is still the most powerful country in the world. But Pax-Americana is over.
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Freddie deBoer referred to the strange phenomenon of self-professed anarchists protesting in favour of mask mandates as "definitional collapse". See also all the stick that Rage Against the Machine got for requiring proof of vaccination to attend their shows. "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" indeed.
That’s because anarchism is a collectivist economic system. If the anarchist commune votes to make masks mandatory, that isn’t really a contradiction of anarchism.
These were self-identified anarchists protesting in favour of a public mask mandate enforced by the state, not a commune.
True, but as long as they believe the people would vote for it it’s no more of a contradiction than any policy by the bourgeois capitalist state is. For example they probably support gender self-ID or trans bathroom laws because they believe firmly that these would be policy in the revolutionary anarchist commune, even if the laws are implemented and enforced by the hated bourgeois neoliberal capitalist state.
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Anarchism seems to have about as consistently applied of a definition as old-school fascism did. Whatever is deemed "good for the people" can be anarchism according to anarchists, with that whim changing on a dime. There are many fewer principled, anti-authoritarian anarchists than there are leftist fantasists with oppositional defiant disorder a la Zack de la Rocha.
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Isn't deboer a "Marxist of an old-school variety"?" https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/about He is sort of right about the anarchists but doesn't the same apply to him?
My view is that the claimed utopian intentions of anarchocommunists is less relevant than their behavior while in power, or what they support politically. It is still ironic for an old school marxist to be a critic of anarchists for supporting state repression, when the same contradiction exists in old school marxism.
DeBoer is a strange bird. Yes, he calls himself a Marxist, and has become rather defensive when people ask him to explain the contradictions (in fairness, because he's probably sick of hearing the same questions over and over). But his role as "anti-woke leftist who's a bonafide Marxist but has a ton of right-wing readers" puts him in a weird niche.
My take on him has always been that he's an anarcho-socialist who understands the dangers of the managerial state. There is a theoretical model to thread that needle. I've always said I like anarcho-socialists, but I don't see how you actually thread that needle, how you bring that into practice. How do you defang the managerial state, and how you deal with people who are simply not "wired" for living with the necessary personal aesthetics for anarcho-socialism? (I.E. very concerned with relative status and power games)
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He describes himself as such. Other people have referred to him as "post-Marxist" or similar. I don't know enough about Marxism or socialism to know which characterisation is accurate.
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I do remember people in the ratsphere saying during the Trump years that a realignment in both political parties was underway, so perhaps the definitional collapse is a necessary ingredient of that.
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I suppose the evidence would be that we have strong evidence that TikTok is willing to censor/promote/bury certain topics, as that's far more plausible than TikTokkers just not caring about Hong Kong compared to other platforms and causes. We also know that TikTokkers are more antisemitic than other platforms. Correlation does not equal causation (it's possible that anti-semites just prefer TikTok over Instagram for other reasons), hence why I said weak evidence.
To quote Nate Silver,
But does China care about that patch of middle eastern desert and who controls it, like at all?
Oh they do, and they care a LOT.
Here are the countries that explicitly avoided signing up for any Belt-and-road deals. That list of QUAD countries (US-Aus-Japan-India) and Israel.
Israel and Israel-Saudi relations are the center of how the next generation of trade routes to the west pan out. On one hand you have the West-Israel-Saudi-India corridor. West friendly nations with a poor endpoint in India, but all of Israelis, Saudis & Indians are economically ascendant. On the other hand, you have the Belt-and-road initiative that goes China-Pakistan-Iran-Iraq-Turkey-West.
The Iran-Iraq-Turkey corridor looks comically unrealistic, but if Israel becomes a no-go zone and Saudis pull out then the competitor wins by default. If the Houthis can keep the Suez Canal unstable, then China suddenly finds itself in control of how the next generation of trade routes pan out. If Hamas loses, then Saudi-Israel relations normalize, Houthis become irrelevant and now China is left holding the worst option with B&R.
Is Iran-Iraq-Turkey corridor having any chance to win with sea route around Africa?
The sea route around Africa is already being used because of Suez instability.....and it is already a massive pain in the ass. Shipping companies to the US are preferring to go through the Pacific and Panama rather than go through Africa. Africa is a lot bigger than the maps indicate, and re-entering the mediterrainean from the south-west for European shipping is prohibilively expensive.
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To be fair, Victoria (the reddest state in Australia, and around here that still means "leftist" as a holdover from the Cold War) did actually try to get in on that sweet Chinese cash until the federal government said "WTF are you doing, you don't get to negotiate agreements with hostile foreign powers".
I'll say that I don't actually think Labour's in Beijing's pocket. Yeah, they've had a Senator get outed as being bought and paid for, and yeah they're notably soft on China because military's a RW issue, but I don't think it's a full-blown party of traitors, just a bit naïve and/or pandering to their naïve base.
I think that Labour is absolutely in Beijing's pocket, but the coalition is also in Beijing's pocket. Australian politics are shockingly corrupt, but the nation itself is so small that keeping our politicians bribed and compliant would be a rounding error on the Chinese diplomacy budget. The bigger restraining factor is the influence of the US - we're still effectively a US vassal state (see the blatantly forced submarine deal), so the major political parties being in the bag for Beijing doesn't mean as much as it would elsewhere.
Bribed or not, they're sure not very compliant. What, are you saying the 14 demands were a fake-out? Beijing is not very good at subtlety and WEIRD politics; people that are doing their bidding tend to act like Sam Dastyari, and most of our politicians don't.
It's not like the USA could actually force us into AUKUS without our agreement; more relevant IMO is our voting public which likes the USA and doesn't like the PRC. And yeah, sure, if the populace did like the PRC I'm sure a lot more politicians would start dancing to Beijing's tune, but that's a counterfactual.
I can't really think of much else that Beijing could really get from them that they aren't already. Political leaders being corrupt doesn't mean they'll do things which get them voted out of office or thrown in jail unless they're not smart enough to see that as the most likely consequence.
The last time the voting public wanted to have a look at our relationship with the US, they elected Gough Whitlam. The message that got sent there was pretty clear to anyone paying attention. Kevin Rudd went through the same thing when he tried to pivot to China - something that the media didn't pay much attention to was the fact that the major players in his leadership spill were all US informants, and we only know that thanks to Julian Assange.
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They're mildly pro-Palestinian politically/rhetorically, China is the country that invented thirdworldism after all. But that won't stop them trading with Israel on weapons technology.
See Russia and China's veto of the recent US ceasefire proposal and the US veto of other ceasefire proposals.
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The popularity of pro-Palestine content on TikTok is primarily due to the fact that Anglo media is increasingly internationalized. Previous generations of social media content saw very little overlap between culturally distinct communities; sometimes American memes would filter down, but memes from the periphery almost never flowed up to the Anglo metropole. With the third generation of social media and TikTok/Reels that has changed, core Anglo users now often see algorithmically successful content from the Spanish, continental European, Arab and South and Southeast Asian spheres if it goes very viral. Some domains like beauty and fashion (where content is primarily visual) are even more diverse.
The Muslim world is almost a quarter of the world’s population. It’s increasingly middle or upper income, increasingly online, increasingly Anglophone. Many influencers who do well in the West are partly or wholly or Arab descent. Major nations like Indonesia and Malaysia are now pretty much full on social media, and their most viral content often makes it to the West, it’s not siloed. The only thing that unites plebs across the entire Muslim world is contempt for Israel. The degree of hostility usually varies, but because many global Muslims have a simp complex around Arabs (eg replacing local dress with hijab and niqab, or thawb for scholars) there is a special race to prove just how pro-Palestinian you are for peripheral (eg. Malay, black African, Bangladeshi) Muslims groups far from the Arabian peninsula. Witness that Malaysia is for example much more anti-Zionist than Saudi Arabia or the UAE, even though Israel and Palestine are on the other side of the world and are inhabited by people ethnically and culturally very distinct from Southeast Asia(ns). But if you speak to Muslim Malays, they see it as their big and noble duty to the Muslim world to be anti-Israel, serving in this sense a function like a crusade.
Helped along by a rapidly growing and ever more powerful Muslim population in the West, plus some good memes, the Palestine complex seamlessly inserted itself into the generic DEI memeplex that already dominates on these apps. This has been a long time coming and has been obviously on its way since at least 2009, maybe earlier. 18 million Jews, as funny as they may be, can’t out-meme two billion Muslims, especially in the current DEI climate in the Anglosphere. The cultural and commercial energy is with them.
It’s interesting to look at this in the wider context of Zionism, because of course the greatest mistake the Zionists made was believing that the Holy Land could be held by the Jews easily and forever onward. But you have to understand that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many bourgeois Jews and gentiles in Europe considered the Muslim world to be a largely passive, defeated people. By the end of World War 1 pretty much every single Muslim country in the entire world was subordinate - whether under colonial rule or indirect suzerainty - to a European empire of one kind or another (the UK, France, Soviet Union) all led by non-Muslims. The young elite of the Muslim world were secularizing, Europeanizing, going to private schools run by French missionaries, urbanization seemed to see declines in religiosity. Many early Zionists, especially on the Anglo-French side, expected that Europeans would rule over the Arab world, including the Levant, forever. After all, the Ottoman Empire was over, the region was largely scarcely populated, local rulers were most fine with serving European foreign policy. Revolts were regular but mostly easily put down by modest European forces. Neither Arab nationalism nor Islamism were yet major forces to threaten Israeli dominance of Judea and Samaria. Israel had a bright future as an informal outpost of empire surrounded by the statelets of various other client peoples.
They did not predict how much the world would change, and now it seems hopelessly naive to imagine it would not. In hindsight it was very stupid to pick a fight with that many people.
It would not surprise me if proximity makes a huge difference here.
It's not exactly true that all Muslims coo over Arab culture and Arab states - ask some Iranians how they feel about Arabs one day - but at any rate, it also strikes me as noticeably the case that neighbouring Arab states are quite cool on the Palestinians. They tend to hate Israel (though are periodically willing to do deals with it for advantage), and in that regard are happy to use the Palestinians as a club against Israel, but they don't seem to care about the Palestinians as such. If you look at Egyptian or Jordanian or Lebanese policy towards the Palestinians, sure, none of them like Israel, but none of them like the Palestinians very much either, and they tend to be extremely opposed to letting Palestinians in to their countries or giving them aid. This is not helped by the fact that when they have let Palestinians in it has gone very badly - people still remember Black September.
If you're Malaysian, you are never going to have to deal with Palestinians yourself. Pragmatism doesn't come into it, since neither Israel nor Palestine matter much or you in material terms. So you're free to adopt this worldview where Palestinians are a nation of martyrs for Islam and Israelis are merely monsters. You can support Palestine-as-symbol in isolation from any real people.
I think that the average Egyptian is probably very strongly pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, but Egypt is a military/security forces dictatorship and the leadership views Palestinians as a threat for the same reason as why they view the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat. They don't like large groups of angry, militant people, like Palestinians, whose politics are likely to shake up the status quo and endanger the dictatorship's ability to just peacefully steal public resources and live in luxury. And anyway, Egypt is in no position to help the Palestinians even if the government wanted to. Its economy is doing poorly right now. There is also the related factor that the pro-Palestinian Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea are cutting into Egypt's Suez Canal transit revenues.
Supporting Palestine and hating Palestinians aren't mutually exclusive positions. If I was Egypt and I hated Palestinians I would very much be pro Palestine because that means the Palestinians stay the fuck away and you have somewhere to expel palestinians in your land to.
This is correct. Supporting Palestine is a separate question to that of one's affection for Palestinian people.
And I would also try to distinguish between support for Palestine as a symbol and support for Palestine in the sense of actually wanting to help Palestinian people in concrete terms. In the Arab world there is very high symbolic support for Palestine, but relatively little practical support for materially aiding them. If you ask the average Egyptian on the street whether the government should do something to help Palestinians, they will probably say yes - but I think the Egyptian people overall are unlikely to put much pressure on the government to that effect, and the government certainly doesn't want to.
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To be fair, at the time nearly everywhere on earth was under the thumb of a European empire(or the USA or Japan). South Africa made the same mistake because the continued dominance of Europeans over the black and brown masses seemed as obvious as day and night to everyone at the time.
Except Jews have a local majority, and, significantly, are winning. Perhaps not in the court of public opinion, but Israel is essentially getting what it wants.
I'm still trying to figure out what changed.
In South Africa specifically, it was a numbers game. A South Africa which banned contraception among the white population in the 70s might still be under minority rule.
Globally, that’s part of it, but part of it is also catch up growth. Europeans are generally better at things which actually matter than Africans and Indians, but not by a factor of 25 or so. Just because Britain got there before India doesn’t mean India won’t eventually get a lot closer- and there’s a lot more Indians than britons. Add to that that European countries are very, very tired.
In terms of the main empires, Britain and Russia lost theirs due to debt related structural problems(Russia’s being caused by structural issues with their economy, Britain’s by war). Germany lost a war. The US decided it preferred economic domination. That leaves France, which had some insurgencies to deal with but largely withdrew of its own accord.
The South Africa birthrates situation is interesting but I doubt this would be the case. Even when whites had relatively high birthrates (3+ tfr), the black population were at 6+ tfr. Today they’re converging and both white and black South Africans have pretty low birthrates, but without mass immigration from Europe the Boers would have had to have Amish-tier tfr to maintain their demographic position. I think the main issue for them was that they largely opposed non-Boer European immigration pretty much from the 1880s onward and - certainly after home rule was substantially granted in 1910 - acted consistently to block the settlement of other Europeans in South Africa to preserve the Afrikaner position. If they had allowed millions of poor Europeans to settle in SA in the early 20th century, the situation there would be very different today.
Romania managed to double it's TFR through decree 770. It's not totally implausible that white South Africans could have had a 5+ birthrate with similar policies- it was higher than Romania's in the mid 60's, which is probably high enough to make the bantustan plan work.
Of course the South African white population weren't going to undergo decree 770, Romania did it because it was a dictatorship. But sudden very large increases in TFR are what happens when you ban contraceptives. Wiki says that the white South African fertility rate was 3.1 in 1970, which if banning contraception had the same effect as decree 770 would give a fertility rate above 6. Of course contraception was probably somewhat less prevalent to begin with because of an already high fertility rate, so the effect would probably be more mild, but even a tfr of 4-5 would give a lot of breathing room for the Boers to figure out how to adjust their population to increase the white percentage.
As an aside, it's interesting how the apartheid government never even tried to adjust population. Not through white immigration, not through population control programs for blacks, not through attempts to boost the native white fertility rate. Obviously it's a hard problem, but it's interesting that they didn't even try.
It seems like governments mostly focus on solving acute problems rather than long-term progressive ones. The payoff for fixing birthrates wouldn't come for at least twenty years after the fact, only once the added batches of children begin reaching maturity, while the costs would begin immediately. Governments are typically run by people who only expect to be in power for short durations, so for them it's better to deal with staving off coups and electoral defeats. That means focusing on who gets the $$$ and making the right noises.
There's also a weird tendency for normies to deny all matters pertaining to biology in pretty much any context. Possibly, this due to narcisism. Or maybe it's about optimizing for personal social advancement over coordinating against civilization threats. It is as though they sit at the very precipice of oblivion maintaining attitudes of perfect nonchalance. As long as they do not fall in, they are content; and those who do fall in do not have the luxury of further action. That's essentially what happened to the white South Africans, and probably all other fallen societies.
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The apartheid government did try to limit birthrates through population planning policy from 1974. But attempts were mainly messaging; my suspicion is that many Afrikaner leaders were deeply religious Protestants and would have resisted more radical methods to limit black fertility. Promoting white fertility would have also been tough, because the country had pretty porous borders and contraception would also presumably still be available to the black population, who could obviously sell it.
I’m also very skeptical of the decree 770 approach, birth rates began falling again soon after as people began circumventing restrictions and altering behavior. Also I think incentives are very different in a communist society, if the state strongly recommends you do something it’s the singular route to professional/social advancement. The threats the state can levy are typically weaker in a capitalist society.
In terms of big mistakes for the Boers, first place is not being in favor of more European immigration even if it meant diluting Afrikaner power and second place is probably not retreating to the Western Cape en masse from the late 1960s. What white South Africans needed to pursue was a two state solution on non-bantustan terms. Hand over the majority of the country, retreat to Western cape, sign single market and economic integration. This would probably have been internationally acceptable until the mid/late-1970s. I agree that by the time the serious anti-apartheid movement reached its height in the late 1980s there was pretty much no alternative course. The problem was they were an agrarian people and didn’t want to leave all that good land in the rest of the country.
Well yes, I don’t think decree 770 would have worked as well in South Africa as it did in Romania, but given that apartheid fell apart when it did due to a demographic time bomb for a regime that did, at the end of the day, have moral scruples, a rise in birthrate could have bought the Afrikaners enough time to find a third option between ‘let the kafirs in charge’ and ‘cartoonishly evil enough to make us blanch’. And banning contraception probably would raise the birthrate enough to make a difference. Ultimately communist Romania is our only datapoint for direct comparison, and that’s unfortunate because it’s apples to oranges for a variety of reasons. But the large birthrate decline over the course of the seventies among SA whites is probably due almost entirely to contraception becoming more widely available, and IIRC the example of similarly-low-state-capacity Latin America shows that legal restrictions on contraception really affect how quickly it penetrates the population, so I think at the very least a South African decree 770 for whites would have kept Afrikaner birthrates above 3 for much longer, and in a best case scenario for continued boer dominance results in a baby boom over the seventies that allows apartheid to find a third option when it becomes clear it’s not a tenable long term system in the eighties.
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Some possibilities:
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