Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
On May 21st, a woman in Galway commenced a hunger strike in protest over a) food not being let into Gaza (?) and b) the Irish government's failure to pass the Occupied Territories Bill, which would "ban trade with and economic suport for illegal settlements in territories deemed occupied under international law". In other words, it's a Boycott, Divest and Sanction bill, which would criminalise economic actors from doing business with Israeli companies. Last I checked she was on day 6 of her strike - she should now be on day 9, assuming she hasn't given up or been hospitalised yet.
Now, obviously a hunger strike isn't quite as dramatic as setting yourself on fire, but same ballpark. And I have to ask - what is it about this issue that seems to attract so many histrionic, mentally ill people? If you take them at their word, the Free Palestine people believe that, if left to their own devices, Israel will exterminate the entire population of Palestine (~5.5 million people), while the Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion think that, unless we acquiesce to their demands, literally everyone on the planet will die in a matter of decades. Given the respective stakes, you would logically expect the latter group to engage in more dramatic forms of protest than the former - 1,470 times as dramatic, to be precise. But instead it's the reverse: it's the Free Palestine people who are going on hunger strike and setting themselves alight, while the worst the Extinction Rebellion people can muster is hurling soup at paintings and gluing their palms to tarmac.
The Israel/Palestine conflict is concrete and producing real deaths, whereas environmental issues are speculative and we’ve had them around for a while now.
Even for really serious environmentalists, the world has demonstrably failed to end for a while now. Whereas tens of thousands of Gazans really have died and more are being starved. It’s no wonder it inspires people to greater efforts.
(Of course, other concrete horrors happen all the time but people hear much more about Israel/Palestine for path dependency / antisemitism / whatever reasons.)
Experience shows this doesn't work on cultists. They just move the world end date further in the future without updating anything else. Can be done unlimited number of times. Also the public has very limited memory - all the failed world end predictions over the last 50 or so years are available, and make absolutely zero impression and present zero problem for anybody predicting world to end again. Same btw about hundreds of thousands of Gazans starving - no matter how many times those things turn out to be lies, every next time it is claimed people believe it instantly and uncritically.
My favorite instance of this is the Church of the SubGenius prophesizing that the X-Day was July 5, 1998. When the day arrived but without aliens, they did a facepalm and said they had it upside down! X-Day is actually in the year 8661.
They really put every other cult to shame.
The church of the subgenius was, to be fair, actual satire.
"satire" is what the Conspiracy calls truth when it’s afraid people might believe it!
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