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The remarkable predictive accuracy of Nick Fuentes on the Israel Conflict
I'm sure most here have heard of Nick Fuentes, maybe seen clips where he's said something funny or outrageous. I do not consider myself a follower of Fuentes, I have my criticisms of him and his movement, but I have to give credit to Fuentes for churning out consistently correct predictions.
When it came to the Israeli-Gaza war, Nick Fuentes registered these predictions in this short clip, in summary from just the first 60 seconds:
Nick Fuentes registered these predictions on October 8th, less than 24 hours after the Hamas attack on Israel. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say Fuentes may have registered the best predictions out of anyone in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7th (feel free to keep me honest here if you think someone else was even more on the money).
Hindsight bias being what it is, the accuracy of Fuente's predictions may seem less impressive than they actually are. But I still remember the huge amount of uncertainty leading up to the Gaza campaign, including a high degree of uncertainty over the strength of Israel's retaliation against Gaza- whether they would show restraint or even put boots on the ground in the first place, and even if they put boots on the ground would it be a relatively short and mostly symbolic campaign. Certainly at the time "Israel is going to ethnically cleans Gaza, provoke escalations from Iranian militias, and widen the conflict to try to draw the US into war with Iran" was a prediction registered by not very many people.
Fuentes drew a huge amount of criticism for vocally opposing Trump's campaign due to his belief that Israel would draw Trump into war with Iran. A lot of that criticism comes from the "Bronze Age Pervert" sphere, and BAP is a sharp critic of Fuentes for Fuente's low-IQ obsession with da Joos. But we can contrast Fuente's sober-minded and accurate predictions with BAP's own incoherent analysis of the conflict he published last week, chalking it up to some old-man syndrome while remaining baffled as to why Israel is pursuing the strategy it has engaged in since the beginning of the conflict.
Nick Fuente's live-stream on Rumble in the aftermath of the US bombing campaign against Iran had something like 66,000 live viewers, with overall viewers on that VOD now around 530k, putting his viewership on par with Ben Shapiro despite the fact Fuentes is banned from YouTube so his content is relegated to a much less mainstream platform.
One of the most remarkable parts of the Ted Cruz / Tucker Carlson debate was that Ted Cruz:
And then, just a few minutes later, Ted Cruz accused Tucker Carlson of being "obsessed with Israel" for Carlson's pointed questions on AIPAC as a foreign lobby. The turnaround of why are you so obsessed coming from someone who just said God has commanded him to support Israel is just a discredited attempt to derail the conversation.
Fuente's obsession with Israel appeared to result in what is perhaps the most accurate prediction of the series of events following Oct. 7th among anyone else.
At the risk of sounding, I dunno, petty? Did Fuentes put any money on the line, did he find someone to take the other side of his position, reduce the bet to fairly specific terms, and have someone willing to judge who won by a given deadline?
Bryan Caplan puts money on all of the bets he makes and chronicles them in a wiki he maintains. He's got a great record against some very smart people.
There's specific lose conditions, plus incentives to be accurate/not bullshit.
Fuentes also didn't put any specific confidence estimates on those bets, so he can always walk back the ones that were off base if he wants "oh that was a long shot anyway." Well you never said if you thought it was a 10% chance of a 90% chance, so I guess you can retroactively change that belief.
This is how pundits operate. Throwing a bunch of vague predictions against a wall, phrased to feel specific and of course they never let someone take up the other side of the position who can then call them out later.
Like when I was talking about how Tariffs would play out I really tried to be specific enough that I can be judged wrong and lay out a strict 'I was wrong' scenario.
Speaking of, looks like the time is ticking down for some more 'permanent' deals to be worked out in the next month or I'll have missed the mark on the most recent extension.
Edit: And I'm still confident (80% to be specific) that they get it done soon. 20% is reserved b/c we're in a time where crazy events can happen in short time frames.
EU is allegedly pretty close:
https://archive.is/WmZRp
As is India:
https://archive.is/1An8l
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These predictions are pretty damn weak, man. Fuentes isn't making any good predictions. "The terrorist attack on Israel will encourage Israel to attack back!" is not prescience. Nor is proclaiming that this is what gives us license to attack Iran's nuclear facilities; we've been dealing with their attempts to go nuclear for years and years at this point.
Predicting retaliatory violence after an attack isn't foresight.
In that case it should be easy to provide an example of others that made the same predictions.
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Not very many people predicted the extent of the destruction of Gaza, not to mention that escalation path that would ensue from that response. Many here were consistently underpredicting the Israeli response every step of the way.
The Israeli response has been quite measured -- Gaza still exists, and its population has even climbed, last I checked. They should go harder, but they seem unwilling.
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They're still not accurate. You snuck in there "enables Israel to finally solve the Gaza Question with ethnic cleansing" as a "successful" prediction. It's actually a failed prediction.
"Knowingly" and "will give Israel an excuse to" are not successful predictions either, unless you can read minds.
Yep, also Nick is a legit fed who escaped jail time during Jan 6. I see him as someone I go for viral memes, his political understandng is very juvenile as he famously never reads. Now I am not arguing for reading being the greaest virtue, plenty back then in the nacient world learnt whtout reading but this happened under very different conditions.
People should ignore him largely, anyone who has been as terminally online as he is and with the people he was with getting some things right. One of the guys who wrote ai 2027 predicted some things in a manner where he got enough right for people to take him as an auhtority.
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Both the US and Israel have at this point made it clear the Gaza population is going to be deported and not allowed to return. It hasn't happened yet but both Trump and Israel have stated this position. Gaza is completely destroyed, even if they wanted to keep the Gazans in Gaza it's hard to see how that would be possible at this point even with a good-faith effort. But the overtures from both Trump and Israel is that the population is going to be deported; sorry, "allowed to leave."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-gaza-war-not-expelling-palestinians-egypt-post-ceasefire-plan/
If nobody will take them, then they will remain in Gaza. There's an entire wall around the place.
They are going to couch it mostly as voluntary emigration, but if you blockade a region and completely level the cities and make intolerable conditions, and then set up offices to facilitate "voluntary emigration" that is an expulsion as far as I'm concerned. The extent of the destruction of Gaza doesn't point in a different direction with respect to longer-term plans.
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Of course this is going to end with Iran conducting a nuclear test. You know that, right? The ayatollah will take a break from tweeting out relationship advice and repeal the fatwa(or reinterpret it) and Iran will launch a volley of conventional missiles which get through and then conduct a nuclear test.
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Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously
When I was a kid, I discovered Harlan Ellison on Sci-Fi Buzz during his Harlan Ellison's Watching segments. They were my favorite segments, and I was crushed when an episode didn't have one. I would have been about 10 years old at this time. Luckily enough, they are all still available on Harlan's youtube. This one in particular I remember, being a comic card collector in middle school, along with most of the boys in my boy scout troop.
For me at that age, there was a lot to look up to in Harlan. He was witty, funny, charismatic, and never gave up on his childhood passions. More over he seems important and respected, his awards always preceding his name. I thought he was simply the best as a young nerdling. But I never read his stories. I can't even remember wanting to. Maybe I wasn't there yet, in terms of reading level. I honestly have no memory of what I was reading at that age. I do recall that by the time I was a freshman in highschool, I had read ample Ray Bradbury collections, and had been dabbling in Iain M Banks. For whatever reason I never circled back to Harlan until much later, picking up a ebook copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and being blown away by every story in it, especially Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.
Over the last month, I've been working through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. It's completely changed my view of the man, and not for the better. The tome really lays bare how autobiographical much of Ellison's short stories are. The barely disguised self loathing, the tireless hatred he feels for all of humanity, but seemingly goys above all others, and the immaturity disguised as worldliness. Qualities I admired as a child watching him on Sci-Fi Buzz I'm profoundly glad I did not grow up to emulate as an adult.
The facts are Harlan's father died when he was very young, he was constantly in and out of trouble, he ran away from home, he worked a smattering of tough sounding blue collar jobs, he spent 2 years in the army, he was expelled from college, he was married 5 times, divorced 4, and he had no children.
Through his fiction, you further learn that he was, imagines, or romanticizes, being the only jewish boy in a small Ohio town relentless victimized by it's shitty irredeemable goy population. He loathes goys, and it rears it's head in story after story after story. He hates their dumb kids, their dumb churches, their dumb music, their dumb bowling leagues, you name it, he hates it. And he hates that they're all bigger and stronger than him at 5'3". Does he really feel this way, deep down? Who's to say. But after 1000 pages, probably 500 of which riffed on that theme, I'm left with the impression some part of him must. Often cloaked in humor, or the virtue of the civil rights movement of his day. But in his fiction, he seems less interested in the humanity of Southern Blacks, and more interested in the inhumanity of the goy.
He returns to his childhood repeatedly in his fiction, and how much better things were then, when radio plays lit his imagination on fire and his father was still alive. This is a strain of stunted growth I too suffer from, as my grumpy rants about video games will attest. I find ample share of compatriots in this regard. But something about Harlan's inability to take on the masculine burden of supporting and raising a stable family casts a darker tint to his nostalgia.
Harlan Ellison's entire public persona was a fraud. Or at least, in many of his writings, his fear that he was a fraud came through. Stories about a 4 times divorced celebrity manufacturing a shameful charismatic and funny public persona to hide how much he hated everyone. Stories about a shameless womanizer who has worked all sorts of rough and tumble blue collar jobs... but only for a few weeks so he could say he did. In reality he (I mean his character of course) has soft hands only barely acquainted with manual labor. Which reminds you Harlan the author never draws on all the odd jobs he claims to have had in his fiction, beyond name dropping them. Lastly, multiple stories where a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want, resulting in her emotional destruction which he treats as a personal offense to himself.
Are all these details that sound curiously autobiographical true? Or angles Harlan plays up for want of something to do when seated at his typewriter? At this point, with enough dots connected, I suspect the worst.
After making it through The Essential Ellison, I'm hurt. Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man. And I mean emotionally, not physically, though I suppose there was that too. A man who for 35 years picked his wounds in public, on the page. He kept them fresh, knowing it's what put food on the table. I feel sorry for him, but I also sincerely wish I hadn't known all that. Ah well.
I’ve been a colossal fan of Jeopardy! (a long-running American trivia game show, for those unfamiliar) for most of my life. My enthusiasm for the show skyrocketed during Ken Jennings’ historic 74-game winning streak in 2004. A geeky, witty, self-deprecating guy, Jennings’ prodigious knowledge was matched by his appealing personality, making him a TV phenomenon and boosting the popularity of the show.
After returning to various Jeopardy! exhibition tournaments, cementing his legendary status, he got into the running as one of the potential candidates to replace the show’s iconic decades-long host, Alex Trebek, whose cancer diagnosis had been made public and who was nearing retirement. In 2021, Jennings was officially announced as the new official host of Jeopardy!. He has breathed new life into the show; while Trebek’s personality was aloof and almost enigmatic, Jennings is warm and jocular, frequently engaging in witty repartee with the contestants and helping to bring out their personalities. Jennings also clearly knows a lot of the answers to the questions without needing to read off the cards, allowing him to make more informed split-second judging decisions about the acceptability of contestants’ answers, and allowing him to make certain edifying clarifications and to add cool fun facts about some answers. In other words, he’s the perfect host for the show, the perfect ambassador for the brand, and the perfect steward to carry the show for decades to come.
His politics are also very obnoxiously woke. I try not to use that word very often, considering it over-used and under-defined, but I think it fairly encapsulates his public statements on politics, which can easily be found by perusing his Twitter and Bluesky accounts and, apparently, by listening to his various podcast appearances. He has the typical smug, sanctimonious approach of a guy who was the smartest person he knew for his entire youth, and who was used to winning every argument he came across due to pure cognitive processing power and verbal agility. Political dunks phrased as though they’re so self-evidently obvious that only a total dolt would fail to agree with them. A deep and abiding belief that “supporting” trans people, abolishing borders, and ending “mass incarceration” are the urgent moral responsibility of every good-thinking person.
This commitment to progressive politics has bled over into Jeopardy! itself; since Jennings took over hosting, there has been a palpable increase in the number of questions related to black writers and activists, and a Jennings has made several on-air comments (mild, but obvious to those who are attuned to them) which reveal his own politics. It’s especially disheartening to know that a man with his depth of knowledge and clearly impressive mental faculties isn’t able to see the nuance around these issues, despite the ease with which the internet allows people with even a modicum of curiosity to expose themselves to the best arguments from the other side.
Now, I do hope/plan to meet Jennings some day; I have auditioned for Jeopardy! before, making it past the initial testing phase but never getting the call. I plan to continue to audition yearly until I eventually make it on the show, where I’m confident I could make a decent showing of myself and even win some real money. It crushes me to know that someone who’s something of a minor hero of mine would, upon learning my politics, want absolutely nothing to do with me, and may even not want me to be able to appear on the show, one of my life’s dreams. I try to studiously avoid hearing anything about Jennings’ politics, not wanting to further tarnish my warm feelings toward him. My single biggest fear about being doxxed, even above the effect it’d likely have on my personal and professional relationships, is the fear that it could prevent me from having my chance to compete on the show; I try not to think about whether Jennings would want me disqualified.
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I'm not sure how much of Ellison's writings are his own faults, rather than exaggerated versions of failures he's seen and done, but there's definitely a mix and I agree that it probably doesn't favor him -- the man did end up with a bipolar diagnosis late in his life, and it pretty clearly wasn't some badge-of-accomplishment diagnosis. And he definitely has some of that 'I talked to a taxi driver' rather than 'I did this enough to grok it' going on.
Tbf, my gutcheck has some of the exaggeration in The Essential Ellison feels like self-loathing, even before I knew about the BPD... but it wouldn't, wouldn't it, whether because he actually had those flaws that bad or because he felt his minor failures were the end of the world. On the other hand, it's hard to tell how much of his hating was anti-anti-semitism rather than just being a hater in general -- the man famously loathed Star Wars and Spielberg in general, and had a number of non-Jewish cause celebres like van Vogt.
On the gripping hand, it's hard to tell how many of those cause celebres he really cared about, rather than just hating their enemies: From Alabamy With Hate is the best-known example, and particularly damning because its denouement revolves around a letter from a bigot who was 'bad as mud' but 'better' than racial minorities, without much consideration of what made Ellison good rather than just better than bigots, but it's pretty consistent everywhere from race to sexual behavior to the military to his stories to convention behavior. His enemies being idiots, or nazis, or chuds, or the teeming fandom masses, or normies, or whatever... might be better than racial resentment, but it's still not good.
I don't have a lot of room to criticize a hater for hating. I do have a lot of room to criticize a man that wrote at length about how science fiction and speculative fiction aren't the same thing, who can't do anything more himself.
On one hand, there is a point where you have to kill the buddha. Most heroes have feet of clay, few philosophers can commit to the bit to Diogenes level. Especially in media there's always going to be a temptation to present someone who's better than you can be, and whatever extent the mask molds the face, it's never going to be perfect and it can't change what's already happened. It's never pleasant to recognize the extent a writer's real positions are weaker than what they present, but Litany of Tarski -- but in turn neither does a philosophy of life become wrong merely because its proponents can't live up to it. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings, but wanting something that isn't true, or maybe even can't be true, because it's worth the progress toward it, is an acceptable tradeoff in my eyes.
On the other, I'm trying to write up an effortpost about cyberiatrogenic conditions (and, uh, come up with a better name than that), and one of the subleads is "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them", and how that's incredibly dangerous. Few heroes are carved full from in-situ marble, few philosophies can survive being used every day... except in this distant or fiction view, where every consideration comes through the camera lens, at most from wholly-artifical canned challenges built to reinforce the themes of a story. It's easy to forget that, or what it means. This is a way you'll be burned, and the stovetop hurts, and you'll be burned again. That's part and parcel of how heat works. Tech has let us forget that, for short periods and for induction cooktops, but that's an artifact of memory, not of the world.
Real people, whether Ellison or a childhood friend, will not be clones of you or homonculi of what you want or want to become. Real relationships mean friction. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings. Carrot Ironfoundersson (mostly) doesn't and can't. Beware what extent the latter has hacked your brain.
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So you mean to say, he was an artist!
The greater works are always autobiographical to some degree. In minor works, the author's own individuated personality is not strong enough to shine through ("every great philosophy hitherto has been a confession on the part of its author" [emphasis mine]).
Sometimes you won't always like the autobiographical content that is thus exposed. It won't always be admirable, it won't always speak to your own experience, etc. But you can still choose to adopt a more detached viewpoint and find what can be appreciated in it as a phenomenon for its own sake.
Of course this is not a natural and spontaneous attitude, but one that must be cultivated through diligent practice. I try to make a habit of doing mental exercises like, I imagine someone I admire, either because of their work or on a personal level or whatever, and I imagine: what if I discovered something absolutely horrifying about them? What if their own values actually turned out to be antithetical to everything I value? What if they hated free expression, what if they supported wireheading, etc. Or maybe there's something far worse than any of that, something that my conscious mind won't even let me access. And in this hypothetical I try to remind myself that, in spite of all that, there still has to be some kernel there that made me admire them in the first place, so my goal at that point would be to achieve an understanding of the phenomenon that is the person as a whole, rather than get bent out of shape about the individual things that we disagreed on.
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Your anecdote reminds me of how much H.P. Lovecraft was a xenophobic misanthrope.
But his stories wouldn't have been the same if he didn't have that deep fear and hatred.
Not justifying it. Just saying that its sometimes better to separate the art from the artist.
The details of H.P. Lovecraft's life never bothered me. Probably because I never admired him as a human being or public persona the way I admired Harlan. So I can sit back and intellectually register that the existential dread he conjures up in so many of his stories just wouldn't hit the way it hits if the man wasn't constantly terrified of the mongrelization of his nation.
Also, well, my stance on what I believe to be the future of my nation is on record here. But it's enough to say I don't even necessarily find those stances to be offensive, and perhaps even somewhat prescient after the irrefutable evidence of the failures of multiculturalism we've all been subjected to in the countries or localities tipping white minority in the western world. But that's a separate topic.
No, my heart break with Ellison is from the fact that as a kid, I didn't love him for his work, but for his public persona. I came to his work much after the fact, and if anything, it's working backwards. I've rewatched several of those Harlan Ellison's Watching bits, and instantly fell in love with this witty outspoken firebrand telling it like it is. Then I go back to the fiction and my heart sinks at another autobiographicalish story venting his spleen about how much he hates me.
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An Indian Abroad: The Actually Not-True-Scotsman Ventures Down South
I had a rather eventful weekend, and what follows is somewhere in-between a travelogue and color commentary.
The UK is, at the time of writing, experiencing a "heat wave". This is rather loosely defined as temperatures above 27° C in England, and 25° in Scotland. To my Indian sensibilities, this is somewhere between amusing and ludicrous. I've run my AC at 24° without issue back home, and 27°C is a a nice day in spring where I'm from.
Still, hoofing it as I was with a backpack laden with clothes to the nearest rail station, I had to admit that it was hotter than usual. Enough to break out a sweat. I was on my way down south to England, to visit a distant cousin of mine after he and his girlfriend had been kind enough to spend quite a few hours driving up north to see me. I'd last been in Manchester sometime in 2022, but I hadn't had much opportunity to see the sights. I'd been there to give the final half of the PLAB exam that gatekeeps medical practice in the UK (for foreign grads), and had to rush back to India shortly after with my (now) ex. Still, while I hadn't known my cousin and his girlfriend that well back then, they'd been kind enough to offer us a room in his flat, and we'd hit it off, finding out that despite being raised in very different environments, we got along quite well. Indian currency doesn't go very far in the UK, and the savings alone were significant at the time.
While I've been in the UK for almost a year now, it's been spent up in Scotland. With a weekend free, I decided that now was a good time to see what the rest of the country had to offer during the summer.
I faced no end of difficulty along the way, the British train network isn't made of the same stern stuff as its estranged Indian counterpart. These rather unremarkable temperatures had caused one of my trains to give up the ghost, after I'd boarded the first leg of the trip. I did make it eventually, albeit quite harrowed and sleep deprived.
Manchester is a lovely city. Even the little I'd seen of it 3 years back had convinced me that it was far more to my taste than London was. The latter had seemed expensive beyond reason, and the extra culture not worth the expense. I'd lost much hair in the past over my ex's demands that we eventually seek to settle down there. Manchester, in contrast, was just about rich enough for my taste.
This impression was reinforced strongly while I was there. Much more nightlife, much more local color. In contrast, Edinburgh wasn't bad, but it felt far more condensed, with everything of note restricted to the city center or thereabouts.
We tried out a tapas place, a brand new experience as far as I was concerned. I'd only heard about them while watching La La Land, and had been frankly confused about the concept. Well, small plates and suitable for quick dates? The menu felt deceptive, while each dish seemed reasonably priced, you needed three plates or more per person to have a filling meal. The weather was great for outdoor seating at the very least.
The rest of the night was spent visiting a couple of the neighborhood pubs. I'd been to my fair share up in Scotland, but I seemed to always have the bad luck of visiting those with a clientele of mostly pensioners. These ones were far more hip, and I enjoyed listening to the explanations of how the pubs that aimed to cater to students versus those that looked for the after-work crowd aimed to differentiate themselves. A combination of cheaper drinks in the former, and less policing of what went on in the bathroom stalls in the latter (cocaine, that's what went on), as well as staying open past 11 for those that catered to students free from the rigid demands of a 9 to 5.
(At one of the pubs, the yuppie one, the bouncer demanded that I demonstrate what was in the rather large and bulky backpack I was lugging about. Clothes, that's what. I'd just gotten off the train.)
Unfortunately, when we finally retreated to their apartment that night, it was roasting. The building, while modernized in many respects, still had a Victorian superstructure. It went from bitterly cold in winter, to absolutely boiling in summer. I'd previously dismissed their complaints about the heat as Soft British moaning (his girlfriend is a local, and he's grown up there). Unfortunately, as we ascended the stairs towards their top floor apartment, it became clear that we were making a pilgrimage into a reversal of Dante's Inferno. The temperature climbed what felt like a degree each step, and their place could have been rented out as a sauna. It was conjectured that this was an unfortunate consequence of most British architecture being designed to hold in heat, and because all of the warmth rising through the floorboards ended up trapped on their level by a thick roof.
Cracking open the windows was little relief. There was only one per room, which made a cross-draft a distant dream. His English girlfriend was practically prostrated by the muggy heat, and even I, accustomed to the occasional day spiking into the 50s, felt less than comfortable.
I've previously lambasted the Brits as being too poor for air conditioning, but in all fairness, they might feel the need for it about a week or two every year. It's a tough sell, but their place just wasn't built for the other alternative, ceiling-mounted fans.
The next day was pleasantly spent visiting an assortment of cafes, and later on, some pubs. The former were not much to write home about, barring one that was very clearly a holdover from 2012. A lot of exposed brickwork and faux-incandescent lighting. Very quaint, or very tired, even Indian cafes that get on the bandwagon before the last stop had moved on.
The pubs were more interesting. One of them was the grungiest I'd ever seen, walls plastered with Indie rock and Alternative posters, some kind of gig going on in the basement, some of the bass making the floor beneath us shake even as the lyrics were filtered out.
It also had the dubious distinction of having a very seedy alley right next to it, treated as an extension of the pub by the locals. Hardly unsafe, since it was decently lit and populated by plenty of yuppies and teens with more than their fair share of tattoos. Yet it still reeked of piss, and we were pissed upon by a pair of AC units discharging their condensate right next to us. At least someone has air conditioning. The walls were scribbled over with graffiti crying out: "Free Palestine", and posters for various gigs around town.
I noted quite a number of middle-aged and beyond people clinging onto memories of youth. There was a pair of people who could easily have been grandparents, with about one normal set of teeth between them. Didn't stop granny from rocking a very short skirt while gyrating her arthric hips and ass against her partner's gummy smile. Very amusing.
A gentleman I'd spotted inside eventually came on out. A lounge lizard, if I'd ever seen one. Middle aged, rocking some kind of casual-ish suit I lack the sartorial sense to describe, but one that left plenty of chest hair poking out at the top. Slicked back hair, tastefully hiding potential bald spots. Prowling about looking for someone to seduce. He hadn't had much luck at anything except polishing off several martinis by the time we left.
A girl outside looked like she'd had enough. Very pretty, but with a hang-dog expression that conveyed either severe melancholy or black out drunkenness. My cousin's girlfriend expressed her sympathies, reminiscing about her own misspent youth, and nights where she'd been far too drunk for her own good. I noted the Lounge Lizard eyeing her, but she had a boyfriend on her arm, albeit one that looked about as faded as she seemed. I presume that the nearby gaggle of youngish people were friends, and would keep them safe regardless.
I felt slightly out of place, I must admit. At some point, not quite clear to me, we'd turned into "young professionals" as opposed to college students in the springtime of our lives. I couldn't pass as one of the kiddies grudgingly showing ID, nor could I quite empathize with pensioners seeking to find out quite how much coke they could do before their heart stops. Still, it's nice to actually have money, even if not quite as much time to spend it.
The night passed, though I wasn't quite sure how. I'd stayed up later than my hosts, and eventually realized I'd forgotten how to open the suicide windows all the way. Too late to wake them up for a reminder, so I spent the night tossing and turning in my tightie-whities. I've had worse.
The next, and final day, had been organized at my behest. At some point, I'd evinced interest in visiting the Royal Armories Museum (to meet the ever-entertaining Johnathan Ferguson), but was enthusiastically informed by my cousin that we had the Imperial War Museum in town. With a name like that, how could I not go?
It was a bit of a drive, and the exterior was uninspiring. Very 1990s, all angular slopes and little decoration to break them up.
The insides were rather interesting. I was a bit confused by the currently running exhibition, organized by a Punjabi lady and celebrating her experience of growing up in the UK as an immigrant. A lot of East meets West, leaning towards the East. Not particularly exciting to me, I'd grown up there.
I was rather amused by some of the 'artifacts' on display. Random religious knickknacks, devotional calendars. Holographic wall art of various deities, cheap junk jewelry and packets full of bindis. A lot of it was rather familiar, I might not be Punjabi, but the usual pan-Hindu cultural noosphere is very conserved. It was a microcosm of simpler times, one I'd been just about old enough to catch as it faded away.
I joked to my cousin that this display was rather incongruous, the equivalent of opening a "British experience" exhibit in India with an assortment of such unique cultural touchstones as a Henry The Hoover, the kind of paperback Bibles left to rot in cheap hotels, next to a can of bovril.
I'm still not quite sure what any of this had any business doing in a War Museum, but I guess they have to fill the space somehow.
The actual meat and bones, relating to real conflict? That was far more interesting. This place seemed to restrict itself from WW2 all the way till modern day, if you excuse the fact that Great War on Terror has been past its prime for almost two decades now.
I geeked out over various exhibits, reading random journals, looking at the knives and guns. I'm more of a modern day combat fan, but there's still some charm in 13-pounder cannons (quickly found out to be obsolete at the beginning of WW1), Lee-Enfields and pilot mittens from more genteel times, when Real Men fired pistols at each other while flying at motorway speeds.
Despite the imprecations not to touch any of the exhibits, I did cop a feel of a decommissioned nuclear bomb. Very nice.
The mockup of an Engima machine was out for maintenance, so I went for the most interactive exhibit around: a WW2 tank simulator, with 3 different stations meant for multiplayer fun for the whole family.
A bunch of kids were having a great time, the youngest boy yelling at his older sisters to figure out the controls to move and fire the gun, while he was stuck with the boring old job of loading it.
When they were done, I went ahead, but found myself alone, and decided to flex my chops by single-handedly running all 3 stations by myself. I finished in record time, the mockup Tiger no match for my skills. Rather charming, but the sim had an abysmal frame rate and seemed to be based off a game engine that had been cutting edge in 1999.
Eventually, a full audiovisual presentation began, some kind of over-wrought documentary about the cost of war. I'd already finished seeing everything worth seeing by then, so I settled for shitposting to my Arma 3 buddies and apologizing for not being able to visit despite passing through York.
("They made the HMS Proteus from Arma 3 into a real thing!" I declared, while taking a snap of a model of a nuclear submarine. My player base was intimately familiar with all kinds of unholy shenanigans I'd managed to run with the model in-game, despite it being a static prop.)
There was a molten girder from the WTC on display, thankfully cleaned of residual jet fuel if not a ton of rust. A little personal, that one, I'd been atop one of the Twin Towers a mere week or so before the planes hit.
What else was there of note? Well, a Women In War section, which thankfully didn't stray entirely into "war declared, a million men dead, women and children most affected" territory. A preserved Harrier jet, you think you know how big those are until you're next to them in person, most jets rival school-buses. There was a proto-typical Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carrier from Rhodesia, looking very much like it would fit into the Dishonored franchise.
Not much else to say, really, but I had a decent time.
The rest of the day was spent visiting my cousin's parents. Had to do my duty as an Indian, after all. Lovely people, and they absolutely stuffed me with more food than I could shake a stick at, and stuffed more into my hands to help me survive the train ride home. At some point, I found out that my "cousin" and I were more distantly related than we thought. We were both very bad about keeping track of the tangled web of terminology that wrapped around our hundreds of relations, and had been under the impression that we were second cousins, with a common great-grandpa.
Nope, the line had diverged another grandpa back, making us third cousins. This caused a bit of an existential breakdown, and I dejectedly asked my cousin if he wanted me to pay him rent. He declared, referring to some online calculator, that we only had 1% of our genes in common, we were barely related!
1% of our genetic variance, I retorted, pointing out that we shared 50% of our total genetic material with bananas. He was kind enough to concede without charging me the rent, or rescinding a prior request that I be the Best Man at his upcoming wedding.
I suppose it was a rather important 1%, given that we could pass as actual cousins, barring his love for suits on all occasions and me trotting around in lovingly preserved floral print.
Stuffed, we finally drove back to his place. Along the way, I'm not quite sure how, the conversation diverged into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I think the triggering factor was his casual question about how Indians felt about the conflict, and my response that we tended to support the Israelis because of the simple fact that they weren't Muslims. I explained that despite this, in liberal upper-middle class circles back home, the trend was towards vocal support of the Palestinians. They nodded in agreement, and expressed that that's the way that they, and all folk of good character leant.
I was met with a question regarding my own stance on the matter. A rather uncomfortable question, given that I'm rather pro-Israeli and wouldn't really give a shit if Gaza was turned into a glassy parking lot. I respect them for creating an oasis of technocratic superiority in what is, by default, a sandy hellscape that proves that, despite claims on Reddit, even the "Land of Milk and Honey" has an expiry date. I've got nothing against Muslims, per se, I get along fine with them, and would even call another, slightly older, Pakistani colleague a good friend.
I knew this was the wrong answer, so I tried to hide my power level by stating that I was slightly more positive towards Israel.
This was still clearly an inappropriate response. My cousin thoughtfully declared (in the mindset of setting straight a relative Fresh off the Boeing) that in British circles, at least around our age, support for Palestine was the only option within the Overton Window. I quite truthfully said that I didn't want to misrepresent myself (more than I had to).
This still caused offense. His girlfriend declared that Israel was a genocidal bully, murdering and beheading children and starving millions. How could I not possibly condemn them? Well, I said, somewhat honestly, I'd grown up in a country where thousands of children starving or dying in conditions less humane than refugee camps was a sight I could see on a whim, or against my desires not to. This threw her for a bit of a loop, but she declared that it was the business of good people to still try and appreciate the severity of Israel's sins. I said that was easier said than done, I, likely most Third Worlders, was rather jaded by the horrors I'd seen and taken for granted. If I could see open sores and far-too-thin children on the streets where I lived, without burning the place down, why would I come to an entirely different country and make a fuss about events half a continent away?
She complained about how Israel had used the October attacks as a pre-text to engage in the "genocide" that was still ongoing. A mere six hundred Israelis had died, she said, and yet they'd killed 50,000 Palestinians without showing any inclination to stop.
I really didn't want to push the point. Real life isn't quite the Motte, and my immediate arguments, namely that Hamas was an insurgency using the civilian populace as a shield, that the average Palestinian supported them, or that it was futile to expect a "proportionate" response after kicking the bear in the nuts, weren't worth the pain.
My cousin took a more considered approach, complaining that the Brits had caused this whole mess by importing Jews into a homeland they'd ceded thousands of years back. Wasn't it only fair that they make up for their error by taking a stronger stance in condemning the ongoing atrocities?
I was comfortable claiming that this was a myopic perspective, once the Jews were there and the British gone, who exactly had attempted to massacre all of them? Who had tried to push them out from a river to the nearest body of salt-water? I found the most traction by, once again, quite honestly, throwing up my hands and declaring that both sides had blood on their hands and were locked in a cycle of violence with no obvious off-ramp. There are few more inadequate equilibria. I did point out that Jews were flagrant hypocrites by still using the Holocaust as a shield to deflect modern criticism, I'm no fan of being a partisan who doesn't judge arguments on their merits, or of naked hypocrisy (I feel somewhat ashamed about mine). This seemed to mollify them, albeit I still felt some fading radiation of disappointment at me for not seeing the Right Side of History.
Try as you might to simply see the sights and have an enjoyable weekend, the Culture War still comes for you. Even when conveyed through very friendly, kind and otherwise quite sane friends and family. Sometimes you find out that your blood ties aren't quite as close as you'd thought, sometimes it's your political views. Today, I found out it's both. C'est la vie, if you'll pardon my French.
It’s interesting to see the contrast. In Texas air conditioners don’t even come on at 78 degrees outside, except in commercial buildings. You can be pro-Israël in polite circles, you can criticize Israeli policy, you can not care who wins. But being pro-Palestine is quite strange, and understood as the domain of too-liberal for their own good ivory tower students. It might not come up, although there’s a good chance Trump would.
Grandma would stuff you and your friend with food, of course. But if you stayed at someone’s house for free it’s just insulting to offer- or ask for- money after the fact, regardless of relation. You agreed on the price, after all. You wouldn’t care much about the distinction between a second and third cousin, either- and you probably wouldn’t know there is one, second cousin just means ‘blood related but not a first cousin, aunt/uncle, niece/nephew, or in direct line’.
I was joking about paying for rent! He's a nice dude, he would never ask. I covered my stay by fighting to the front of the pub to pay for our (many) drinks.
Indians are usually far more adept at keeping track of the clan. I think I personally know just two of my third cousins, this one included. With my coaxing, he's up to four. But if I cared to ask my mom, I could probably find out about dozens of others. Even so, I'm sure some have fallen through the cracks, the average person would have ~192 third cousins, but that assumes each generation having 2-3 kids. At least until quite recently, our family had quite a few more. We guesstimated that there's 500 of them running around, with a sizeable number scattered across the globe. I think the only continents I don't have relatives in are South America and Antarctica.
I was somewhat taken aback. I thought that the UK would be similar to the US in that regard. I'm not sure if my cousins are in a relative bubble of PMC left-leaning folk, or if it really is near universal. All of the media I've noticed here seems to be at least leaning Palestinian, but it had never come up as a topic of IRL conversation until almost a year in. I presume they wouldn't have asked if they didn't feel comfortable around me.
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I find if your goal is just to change the subject, saying that the history of the Mandate means that our input is uniquely unwanted by both sides, and that we should take the hint and butt out, works brilliantly. NPCs on both sides are horrified but have no comeback because you are off-script. It's like playing the Sicilian back in the days when everyone was taught opening theory starting e4 e5.
Nah. People have been trained to see “we should do nothing” as being equivalent to “we should support the oppressors”, it’s a tactic that they’re very used to dealing with.
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I'm not sure how that would work? Wouldn't their obvious reply be that the Palestinians (and the Israelis) were begging the international community for support and aid?
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