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Notes -
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
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More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
The ultra feminists on hacker news are busy downvoting me after I pointed out that the way Iranian regime treat its women makes the regime the worse side compared to US and Israel. That is all one needs to know about the current situation honestly.
Wow, I did not have you pegged as someone who would judge stances on feminism as the ultimate proxy for ethics.
In the real world, anyone who wants to sell you on a world view of Good vs Evil in a war is either writing high fantasy or a partisan hack. If Norway (pretty swell country to live in, by all accounts) decides to bomb North Korea (rather terrible) tomorrow, I can not just compare their maternal death rates and conclude that Norway is the good guy. Rather, I would have to ask myself if Norway is trying to mold NK in its own image, and what their changes for succeeding at it are, and if the humanitarian gains outweigh the humanitarian costs. I would probably conclude that it is a terrible idea.
I would not want to be a woman in in Iran, but I also would not want to be a woman in Saudi Arabia. I most certainly would not want to be a woman in daesh, which popped up the last time the US liberated a ME country. Being a woman at the mercy of Israel depends a lot on your precise location, with women in Tel Aviv consistently reporting a higher satisfaction with Israel than women in Gaza City. (Sure, the women in Gaza do not get bombed for being women, but that would be little consolation for me personally.)
I don't judge stances on feminism as the ultimate proxy for ethics. I am just amused by the inability of the TDS to observe that there are worse people than Trump on this planet. And at this point some of them rule Iran. It may be good idea to leave iran alone - there are a lot of non interventionist arguments available. But in this case the Americans are not bad guys.
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What exactly do you think life is like for Iranian women? They don't have Western levels of feminism for sure, but you can watch man on the street videos from almost* any city in Iran and see an approximately even sex ratio, women walking around without male guardians, and very loose interpretations of the hijab law.
*Qom is still very conservative. It's basically the Iranian Vatican. Even so, women there wear chadors, not burqas.
I mean Iranian women are still under coverture.
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As with any country, it varies widely based on region, neighborhood, class etc. In the middle-class districts of the major cities with squishy lefty politics like all middle-class districts of all major cities? Yeah, women about, very loose interpretations of hijab etc. In the Iranian analog to Oklahoma or Alabama, not so much.
The pro-western, pro-israeli, pro-shah groups of Iranian society have always been around, their more vociferous members live in the west now. They are influential, because they are the economic middle classes, and secular elites. But they are not a majority of the country by any stretch. As with most countries, the vast majority of the population is lower and working class, more religious, more nationalistic, more bigoted against outsiders than the college professors and the accountants. And generally harder on their womenfolk.
There is a very direct comparison next door in Turkey, where the same western-oriented secular modernizers have the same political outlook, despite differences in culture and religion to Iran. It's just that Ataturk was better at it than Reza Shah, and so when the religious nationalistic backlash came, it stayed within the bounds set by his government, rather than producing a revolution.
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Probably not so bad compared to life for your average Iranian man. That's just the way of our gynocentric world.
Still, the fact that women are privileged in most parts of the world has never stopped western feminists from complaining about even the smallest (perceived) disadvantages suffered by women in comparison to men. Probably in convenience stores in Iran, they have women's disposable razors with pink handles and which cost an extra rial or so.
No, what stops western feminists from complaining is (1) they don't want to go against their allies in the progressive movement and any criticism of Iran is perceived as helping Israel, one of the big Bogeymen of the progressive movement; and (2) ultimately they care only about maximizing their goodies and gibs so it's more productive to complain about the lack of female tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
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Probably because it's transparently a bad faith argument. I'm guessing neither you nor trump care that much how $arbitrary_regime treats women and even if you did, would never advocate for starting military action on any nation that basis. if you did care about the women, starting a war is obviously not the most productive way to fix that, nor is there any guarantee that the women will be better off afterwards.
So this war is not about the women and your attempt to collapse the whole issue into "better or worse for women" is a cheap rhetorical trick to paint your adversaries as hypocrites for opposing it.
Maybe the feminist angle is not what most right wingers really hate about Islam, but for me at least it is the main thing. I’m somewhat of a western chauvinist and one of the important ways the west is culturally superior is in how we treat our women. Islam’s treatment of women is barbaric and disgusting in and of itself because women are human beings, but it’s also disgusting to me because of how alien it is to my culture. I’m a basic women-are-people equality feminist (a right wing position these days I’m afraid). Maybe I’m not the modal right winger (I’m not that right wing), but while there could be some people from whom the feminist anti Islam line is bad faith, I assure you that it is a real motivating concern for some of us.
Then I congratulate you sincerely on being principled on this matter. However I still believe that this war is not being prosecuted on women's behalf, and whether or not the women of Iran will be better or worse off is a highly uncertain question. It would not be the first time America's regime-change efforts in the middle east resulted in an even more backwards/regressive Islamic rule.
I would mostly agree. This war is over nukes, terrorism, old grudges and regional power. I do think some Iran hawks are hawks for cultural reasons though. At the object level we are jockeying to make Iran less powerful and more compliant, but how we got there is importantly related to their barbaric culture. Part of why a powerful Iran seems like such a bad thing to me is that I don’t want to live in a world where a culture like theirs can project power.
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Yeah, that's a big element for me as well, plus the weird double standard; western rurals/conservatives having slightly-old-fashioned views about women and gays that they can't really enforce = disgusting bigots, but downright medieval attitudes enshrined in law and actual gay-bashing from slightly browner people is a-okay.
I actually find some Christian conservatives pretty off putting because of their views on women as well, however, I’m way more comfortable with them than with Muslims because Christianity is a much bigger tent and as far as I can tell the most distasteful Christian attitudes come from weird low church Christians who as far as I can tell are wrong about their religion. Meanwhile, I’ve read the Quran cover to cover and as far as I can tell ISIS is just mostly right about how to interpret their religion. Of course western Muslims lie to themselves and others about how bad it is (they translate “jihad” to “struggle” when translating the Quran which is obvious dishonesty because “jihad” is a word in English too), but the theological grounding for extremism is so strong in Islam that you can’t trust that a population of moderate Muslims won’t swing to extremism at some later date. The Middle East was way more chill about their religion 200 years ago, but the Quran says what it says, and it’s the revealed word of god.
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While we're inching closer every day, I don't think there's a major constituency for bombing Alabama yet.
Did you ask in Auburn?
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Calling it a "cheap rhetorical trick" is itself a cheap rhetorical trick to try to dodge a hypocrisy killshot. The alliance between Western feminist progressives and Islamic fundamentalists was always completely psychotic under any ideological framework other than "they just hate the West and don't believe any of their own bullshit". Rubbing their noses in it and taking the opportunity to diminish the extent that anyone takes progressive feminists seriously is points fairly scored.
It isn't, it's calling a spade a spade.
I'm confident it's a cheap rhetorical trick, because if the form of the argument were used against you, you would call it out as a low grade gotcha. "If you care about X, and Y is bad for X, then you should in all cases oppose Y and support any action whatsoever that harms Y" is obvious nonsense of the highest order. Just substitute "children" for X and imagine all of the policy positions that would result.
Uncharitable at best. Failure to model your opponents at worst. I think there's definitely an aspect of hypocrisy here but characterizing the situation as psychotic is not true. There are mechanisistic reasons we see this play out. It does have its own internal logic.
Ahh. So it is just arguments as soldiers then.
Gonna have to bow out here, I don't see any further exchange between us on this topic being productive.
Which are?
I mean, I can think of a few off the top of my head - Muslims are fargroup, ingroup enemies matter more and I can hurt them more so I pick the battles I think I can win?
I don't live anywhere near brown people so I consider them a nonfactor to my immediate safety compared to white people, who are competition within the same class?
I think demographics are destiny and Muslims vote as a political bloc, I don't want to do anything that would weaken my political side?
The iconic weapon of Islamic fundamentalists are AK-47s that fire bigger bullets, and getting shot by one or blown up by an IED carries more risk than catching one from the bog standard American right-wing nutjob AR-15 derivative chambered in 5.56?
I don't think you're talking about any of those, but those seem like pretty logical reasons to me. The one thing that pretty much can't be argued is that Islamic fundamentalism is better for women than western conservatism - and if you do, please bring receipts, I'm interested to see the outcomes on a chart somewhere. It'd be really funny to find out if there's some negative correlation to be found on a chart between heart disease and hijabs.
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It's nonsense because you're going with absolutes. The widespread inability to explicitly think in terms of trade-offs and hierarchies of values is a common leftwinger/Sith mistake. What we instead see is progressive feminists almost entirely ignoring the plight of women under Islam (or British girls being mass raped in the UK) because they have no real ability to engage with the nuances of something having both good and bad qualities under a leftist intellectual framework, which pushes hard in a Manichean black/white, good/evil, oppressor/oppressed dynamic. Muslims are [oppressed category], and so dwelling on their failings is haram.
Compare that to libertarian or conservatives, who are much more comfortable talking about tradeoffs. You can't trick them into banning swimming pools because ~50 kids drown per year and THINK OF THE CHILDREN.
The underlying internal logic is "we just hate daddy, I mean the West/America/capitalism/white people". The higher level pretend logic is "Muslims are an oppressed group and we have no ability to consider, much less address, crippling and dangerous flaws in oppressed groups". The highest level is just stop thinking about it, omg
Nope. Older waves of feminism won so hard that even most conservatives genuinely think Islam's treatment of women is fucked up. Then they see progressive feminists going apeshit over white men being mildly less than perfect doormats, while refusing to even talk about Islam. Progfems get more upset about white Christians because of the Handmaid's Tale (a made-up story literally inspired by Iran) than the 10k girls raped in the UK.
This is pretty fucked up. And beyond that it is a massive, ruinous hypocrisy, and until it's addressed, it's entirely fair to dismiss surface claims and motivations from people doing it. Anyone can escape that trap just by saying that Islam is wrong about women.
Which won't happen, for the same reason those people can't bring themselves to say itt's OK to be white.
Set aside what could and should Western "progressive feminists" do about plight of women under Islam.
Would you also ask, for example, first world labor union organizers:
"Why you care about such trifle as lunch breaks and pay raises for already spoiled first world workers? Do you know that millions of workers in Africa are actual slaves? Why you do not fight against slavery in Africa?"
The same for every first world problem - the problem is much worse in third world, do you want everyone to be effective altruist concentrating all their efforts on the most dowtrodden people of the world?
This is still black and white thinking. You don't have to devote a ton of effort to a problem to acknowledge it exists. You also don't have to openly ally with people who are like a comic book villain exagerration of your hated domestic foes.
Like, if labor organizers were openly throwing protests to support the slavers, then it would be quite fair to question their commitment to the principles of workers rights. Whereas it would be much more reasonable for them to say "Yes, slavery is terrible, but it very far away and not my problem. I wish the slaves the best of luck though."
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Feminism is an instrumental criticism of fundamentalist Islam for American political conservatives. It is rightly seen as an instrumental criticism by people who disagree with American conservatism, but wrongly seen as 'not worth worrying about' by them. Women actually do have few rights under Islam.
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No, it's more like an attempt by you to satisfy yourself emotionally. To score points fairly you would have to distinguish between feminists who support fundamentalist Islam and feminists who do not, and you show no signs of wanting to do that even though I am sure you understand the distinction.
Yes, it's very emotionally satisfying to be proven correct.
Oh, I'm sorry, I must have missed that. Can you please point to the prominent progressive feminists who have been more critical of fundamentalist Islam than, say, the made-up, Iran-inspired Christian fundamentalists in the Handmaid's Tale?
Can you point to any who are showing any degree of hope for the current hostilities improving conditions for women in Iran? Or even a single progressive feminist who would rather see [women in Iran become more free plus Trump gets to count a win] than [thousands of women in Iran are massacred by their government, but Trump takes an L]?
Or if you don't like either of those framings, how would you care to distinguish those two groups? I am willing to be convinced that the latter exists. Make your case.
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So as long as I see feminists being fellow travellers for Hamas and for Iran, for Pakistani grooming gangs and Moroccan pickpockets, for shooters at the Bataclan and truck drivers at Christmas markets - it is a distinction without a difference. I have never heard a mea culpa from a feminist, about the Southport stabbings at a Taylor Swift concert. Even when girls are being killed and raped, they don't care because their overgrown mothering instinct sees brown people as babies who don't know what they're doing.
It's frankly insulting that you think that wordcel games like even matter in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary.
It's always 'but think on how it will affect the poor, innocent Muslims'. Norm Macdonald parodied this attitude thirty years ago, and your posture is exactly the thing he skewered. I don't know if you know this, but 'moderate' Islam is a spook. 'fundamentalist' Islam is just Islam, a liberal cope. We know it from the Muslims themselves that there is only one correct interpretation of the Quran and the Sunnah. The fact that feminists uncritically swallow lies about this is proof that no one should take them seriously.
Generally feminism is a class-interest movement for urban, educated, professional women in the west. That's why they don't tend to care very much about things like sexual assault in the military, third world oppression, grooming gangs, etc., but care a lot about college campuses or US men's only spaces.
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There is no world leadership of feminism, no feminist constitution. You are talking about feminism as if it is a monolith. This is simply not an accurate view of reality.
That's true, but it's not like it's impossible to broadly survey the alignment and publicly held ideological stances of feminists in general and to notice that the average feminist holds views that would put them into the center-left at least, if not further to the left. Notably, in modern times this part of the political spectrum is strongly correlated with stances on migration that directly imply that the West, particularly Europe, will become much more Muslim towards the end of the century. How e.g. 35% Muslim France is going to be compatible with the ostensibly central ideological tenets typically held by feminists is, to put it mildly, an open question.
Blaming specific negative consequences of (Muslim) migration like the rape gangs on feminists directly is unfair, in that I agree, but it's quite clear that the average feminist is pretty much all-aboard with the political program that brought those rape gangs here, is in fact quite likely to advocate for accelerating that program, and has no plausible, pragmatic & politically viable plan to ensure that it's not going to get worse as the prominence of Islam increases as the direct consequence of that program. For that, I think it is fair to blame feminists.
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Men and women are different.
Different people have different interests [and different motivating factors], and vice versa.
Thus, the null hypothesis is that people who share the same biological conditions are going to act the same way. (Feminists already make this assumption when it comes to men having different interests, and they are correct.)
The extent to which this is true, whose interests happen to dominate, and if those interests should be dominant vary due to local conditions. There are some cultures where men and women have learned to get along, there are some that define themselves by actively refusing to, and there are some where the overriding concerns are more pedestrian, like "where's my next meal coming from?". Women in the 1st tend not to be feminist because they've figured out gynosupremacy is legitimately destructive, and women in the 3rd tend not to be feminist because failing to deal means you starve.
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And yet, feminists all remain on the same page; you would be hard-pressed to find any self-described "feminist" who is as critical of fundamentalist Islam as of the West. For that matter, I stuggle to think of any willing to publicly criticize Islam at all, and would expect them to be summarily excommunicated from the broader movement, even if it has no "Moma" with the formal authority to do so. Yes, crushedoranges actually does have an accurate view of reality.
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It will be interesting to see how many sockpuppets are still around this time... as I recall, during the previous bombing, a lot of pro-palestine accounts claiming to definitely not be from Iran mysteriously went dark at the same time, although I can't find a source at the moment.
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I would definitely agree that progressives tend to be very selective in their outrage. And it's not necessarily a matter of choosing one side or the other. A lot of the time, Left-wing activists won't even open their mouths and condemn regimes such as that of Iran.
How hard would it be to say something like this:
But instead, progressives are deathly afraid that either the hated Red Tribe or Israel should get a win. Indeed, in a good demonstration of the horseshoe hypothesis, progressives tend to agree with neo-Nazis that Israel is the very worst country in the world.
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On the contrary, deciding which side is 'the worse side' is basically a side issue when forming an opinion about a military situation.
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The women of Syria / Iraq / Libya were not better off after our interventions, but substantially worse off.
You are likely correct. On the other hand, the Iranian people are a different stock compared to Syria / Iraq / Libya.
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Thankfully Trump's instincts how to do regime change seem to be better than those of the neocons.
Trump is 80 years old and easily impressionable. Jared has an outsize influence on his thoughts. I don’t see why Jared Kushner wouldn’t sacrifice millions of Americans for Israel, which is the homeland he pledges allegiance to in his prayers, and which he believes is God’s favorite place and people. Kushner runs American foreign policy according to Rex Tillerson via one FBI informant (Chuck Johnson), and there are some reasons to believe he’s telling the truth here, although he’s otherwise totally unreliable:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00090314.pdf
Trump is 80 years old and stubborn as hell. I expect he thinks "nation-building" is fucking retarded. Instead, he wants and expects clean, easy, impressive-looking wins that are over and done. There is no plausible scenario where we "sacrifice millions of Americans", and no reason to think Trump would volunteer for that sort of disaster beyond TDS or some variation of Israeli/Jewish/Epstein Derangement Syndrome.
Seems to me that what you're responding to was an attack on Kushner's character, and his loyalty and disloyalty to Israel and the US respectively, versus a claim of what Trump and the US gov't will do. In other words, he'd be willing to sacrifice millions of Americans because he's a terrible person and only cares about Israel anyway.
My rebuttal was more to the "Trump is easily impressionable" thing. Even if Kushner was willing to trade millions of American lives, he'd have to convince his father-in-law, and I think assuming that is a given is just an utter failure at any kind of theory of mind in favor of Jews/Orange Man Bad.
Fair enough and I agree with your assessment of Trump. Trump is Trump. He does things his way and that rubs lots of people the wrong way. But he's not a monster. In fact, from time to time you'll see evidence that he actually cares about the legacy he leaves. Kushner, on the other hand, just gives me the heebie-jeebies. Brilliant and sociopathic.
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Queers for Palestine levels of bizareness
It really isn't.
Wanting to genocide a population that largely consists of children because of LGBTQXYZ issues is beyond extreme.
Israel's policy of trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza and move millions of refugees to Europe isn't popular with a decent portion of the gay community in Europe.
You people love to say Israel has a policy of genocide, when it's at least ambiguous at best. But if I go through your post history, am I going to see dozens of posts about Hamas specifically, and Palestinians generally, who DEFINITELY and EXPLICITLY have a policy of genocide, and see any criticism of them?
Israel has the capability to kill every Gazan tomorrow. But they dont have the intent to do so. If the Palestinians could kill every Jew on the Earth, they would do it by yesterday.
I'm so sick of this unidirectional accountability. It's disgustingly racist, baked in a dressing of progressive ideology.
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What policy would that be ?
The policy of expanding Israel, attacking their neighbours and helping migrants get to Greece. Israel is a major refugee smuggler into Europe. Meanwhile they push millions of arabs out of their homes.
So zero ethnic cleansing ?
We can’t quibble about the word attacking here - their neighbors are the aggressors and Israel has been on the defense since its inception.
Also it’s a war - they aren’t pushing millions of Arabs out of their homes.
Their neighbors have been pushed back as Israel has stolen land and driven millions of people off it. Many of them are now in Europe.
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Who were they defending against when they bombed the King David Hotel?
British imperialism
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