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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Apparently some left wing organizations are revealing themselves. Here is an X account claiming to represent “BLM Chicago” implicitly (but very nearly explicitly) declaring their support for the terrorist attacks: https://x.com/BLMChi/status/1711793142742073573?s=20
My questions are:
Who actually runs this account?
Have they tried to articulate what they actually mean by this?
I’ll be honest that my opinion of BLM, especially after the 2020 riots, is quite low. This seems to fit a little too well into the right wing hatred of them.
Ok the other hand: are there any stories in Jewish folklore about creating a monster and then having it turn on you?
“Revealing themselves”? What do you mean by that? Revealing their power level?
I think most of The Discourse on this event, as with others, has an easier explanation. It looks like what one might expect from handing 15 minutes of fame to the edgiest and most extreme takes. Survival of the fittest, except for scissor statements.
I don't think Twitter is the issue, here. If Twitter had exploded as predicted by All The Tech Writers the day after Musk moved a server, we'd still have had portions of the Harvard student community writing that they "hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence"; we just wouldn't have known about it.
Would you say that Twitter and its ilk are the issue?
On one hand, I have to agree that even without anything remotely similar to modern social media, there would still be people making such extreme takes. At least judging by the 70s.
On the other, the very fact that you and I wouldn’t hear about it is of some value. Not just in letting us feel better, but by limiting its reach.
I’m torn on how much this is really worth. Instinctively, half our modern CW issues are predicated on the importance of platforming, speech, the Overton window. The arc of the 20th century was that broadcasting to millions can matter. It feels like social media should have a similar effect, and that injecting feedback directly into Tweeter’s veins should only accelerate any trends. Especially regarding the formation of consensus. And yet, to some extent, it kind of sucks? The firehose of content means that everyone gets to pick and choose what they consume, which may well not be what you intend. Dunk and counterdunk proceeded at the speed of light. Every scissor statement that riles the base is fueling your enemies, too.
The only reason I’m this sanguine complaining about Twitter is because I don’t think there’s much to be done. Not sure how this sort of high-velocity, incredibly competitive speech could be restricted, and not sure if I’ll bite the bullet and say that it even should be.
Would you say that Twitter and its ilk are the issue?
I don't think so.
Trivially, I'm not sure how much the 1970s actually restrained 'reach' for a lot of the crazy activists. Hradzka's Days of Rage recaps give a lot of examples of absolutely nutty leftists who were praised and cause celebres across their fields, but it's not like the Birchers were any more restrained. It had a lower velocity, and that mattered a bit when trying to avoid grifters (though there still were a lot of those, too!), but there was absolutely a ton of consensus that established from the behavior of a small handful of absolute nutjobs. And that's, if anything, more present for the people today: Harvardites are pretty much selected to be the sort of people who can coordinate backstage communications well amongst themselves, we have a Washington Post writer who's devolved to saying that the pictures of decapitated babies could have come from /anywhere/, and the National Lawyer's Guild has shown its ass with exactly the same level of coordination as in the 1970s. Somehow.
At a deeper level, I've seen a lot of groups who either operated before social media, or now operate in exclusion from it, or both, and they're as or more prone to disappearing up their own asses; it's just not visible to outsiders until everything explodes. Indeed, even with social-media dependent groups, a lot of the real crazy positions and behaviors are still being coordinated by e-mail or face-to-face discussions.
More broadly, I'm generally pretty skeptical of Overton Window and related concepts: while they probably real in some cases, my objections to deplatforming are more about free speech and what happens when people don't understand each other's positions. And a lot of the 'success' stories are pretty transparently results of the Texas sharpshooter's fallacies (deplatforming took out Milo twelve times, donchaknow).
I remember once commenting on the thesis of NRx, to the effect that «Cthulhu swims left and left, until He crashes into the shore of New York to be slaughtered» (@2rafa later recalled it in a context vaguely similar to today's). But now, this seems to be happening in earnest. I've observed a few ordinarily peaceful, very liberal Jewish academics who openly threaten they'll remember leftists who've been cheering for Hamas in the wake of this catastrophe. Unsurprisingly, many Jews who've been on board with the identity-driven, anti-white/male progressive rhetorics and policies so long as they did not cross the line of cheering for gleeful murders of their own people now have began to «truly see». It all has happened before, of course – multiple times even, from the «wow Stalin a psycho actually!» in 1937 to neoconservatism to the stuff that Sailer pedantically documents; but I think the demography is currently ripe for a permanent phase transition of Diaspora Jews to a more conservative platform, in following with the younger, more virile and now morally redeemed Israelis.
I might be wrong but that seems to be what the excellent Crémieux hints at, too:
An interesting detail of this war was that Japan probably would have lost were it not for the efforts of a single American banker.
Jacob Schiff was an important proponent of American railroads and he ran numerous major corporations, like Wells Fargo, Union Pacific, and Equitable Life Assurance. He was also Jewish.
Schiff's advocacy on the part of Jews was renowned. He actively fought to combat anti-Semitism at home and abroad, while bankrolling Zionist efforts. One instance that drew particular ire from him was the April 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which 49 Jews were killed, 92 were gravely injured, and more than 500 suffered other injuries, including the destruction of more than 1,500 homes.
…Or in other words, Jews were being scapegoated for economic downturns. In the town itself, there's evidence that public officials also cooperated with the rioters, enabling this tragedy.…
Schiff had developed a hatred for Russia due to this and several other incidents, so when he saw the Japanese and Russians engaging one another, he offered his help. And help he did!
Schiff floated $200 million in bonds to provide Japan with the modern equivalent of more than $7 billion in war backing. This was equal to about half of Japan's total expenditures during the war and, accordingly, when Japan won, Schiff was lauded. He would go on to receive the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from the Emperor Meiji himself.
If the Jews committed an incredible moral and cultural sin and deserted en masse to the GOP, exactly how would the Democratic Party ever win an election again?
Jews contribute two-thirds of the money and probably provide 80% of the political energy in the Democratic Party. So you can’t eliminate them, but you can subordinate them. And I think that’s what’s going on here.
The Jews will continue to support progressive policies, but they’ll be subordinated. Some of their places will be given away in the name of justice. The majority of Jews who remain will be made to feel insecure and therefore work really hard, really, really hard to prove that they are adequately woke and not Zios—which is a word David Duke invented and that progressives have now picked up.
Because, even those Jews who say they really don’t like Israel might be crypto Zios. They might be practicing their Zionism in secret. So they have to work really hard to denounce Israel and even to abandon traditional forms of Jewish belief and practice.
In fact, they have to abandon reality entirely, so that LBGTQ Jewish organizations can affirm that Saudi Arabia is friendlier to gay people than Israel.
Well I think that's a pretty bogus forecast. Democrats will continue to win elections. They'll just have to jettison this whole pro-Hamas wing, because after all this graphic stuff, acting in a sufficiently anti-Zionist manner will become a bit too much for any Jew with a modicum of self-respect, and doing politics in the US on the platform «We hate Jews, Jews hate us» is not exactly a winning proposition.
One can hope that, as with Stalinism, some loathsome policies concerning gentiles might be abolished as well.
But the bloodthirst pouring out from leftists in the streets and on the internet suggests that there’s a deep sickness in the Western leftist movement. It’s one thing to believe that Israel is an apartheid regime and that war against it is justified; it’s another to believe that massacring random festival goers is an acceptable way to prosecute that war. And even if you do think that our modern definition of “war crime” is too restrictive, and that killing large numbers of enemy civilians is an acceptable way to force a belligerent to throw in the towel, it’s still repugnant to joyfully cheer that slaughter, and to march side by side with those who advocate genocide.
… In any case, don’t let my analytical tone hide my moral disgust here. People always have a choice whether to cheer for atrocities or to refuse to cheer for them. When your rallies end up with swastikas and “Gas the Jews” and people making fun of dead innocents, well, you made the wrong choice. This episode is going to show a lot of Americans that the leftist movement contains, at the grassroots level, a lot of very inhumane, bloodthirsty people. Ultimately that revelation will hurt the movement in the eyes of progressive Americans, draining some of the goodwill it built up over the last decade.
Muslims make up 1.3% of the US population. Even if you assumed that the Democrats completely disenfranchised the Muslims, they simply aren't a big enough voting bloc to make a difference. Now, Muslims can't exactly swing Republican. Also, we're talking about specifically targeting Hamas, and the global Muslim ego getting hurt as proxy. This isn't some targeted disenfranchisement of Muslim.
From a political calculus perspective, going full pro-Israel + anti-Hamas is not disastrous for democrats. I know that there are more emotional and ideological factors at play here. But it would be unbelievably stupid for the democrats to keep digging their grave here. There simply aren't enough Muslims for being Pro-palestine to be worth it.
I think Tablet’s output over the last few years reflects to some extent a growing neoconservative acceptance, though not embrace, of Donald Trump. Clearly, he wasn’t as much of a Nazi™️ as feared, there weren’t any state-sanctioned pogroms, and it seems now again that the right supports Israel more than the left, plus isn’t his faction being falsely persecuted, and isn’t that bad? DeSantis may have been preferable, but provided Trump has a few Good People in charge, all the nasty election business can be quietly forgotten.
Jewish politics often alternates spastically between neuroticism and pragmatism, sometimes both simultaneously (occasionally warranted). Sectarianism is simply too ingrained for blue haired Berkeley or Columbia Jews to switch to the right (their gentile white peers are the same, of course). But, then again, old men like Howard Schultz, or Reid Hoffmann Silicon Valley types and so on aren’t blue haired Berkeley activists, and it is the former rather than the latter that pays the bills for the DNC. For now, Gavin Newsom is still preferable to the vulgarity of Trump (and is stupid enough to be easily led anyway). In ten years, the logic may differ.
Doesn't all of this apply equivalently to non-Jewish White Democrat voters, though? Jewish group identity might be stronger than general White Americans, but... the exact same things written from a broad White POV would take on some pretty heavy censure.
I suppose non-insane White Democrats will also be repelled by all the Hamas butchery apologia. But the core reason for this is that Jews, who (accurately) perceive normalization of such shit as a personal existential threat in the long run, will make it into a Big Issue and a topic for edifying National Conversation that cannot be just brushed aside and dropped from the news cycle like some embarrassing but non-representative freak accident.
Otherwise, rabid anti-white rhetoric would also have sufficed to discredit leftism.
I don’t think the left will drop Palestine so quickly at all. The invasion will be brutal, in a week or two (maybe less) rhetoric will start to turn again. Maybe not to Chuck Schumer’s level, but certainly in big swathes of the American left. The rapidly growing Muslim American population will continue to elect representatives that align with it, and they won’t drop the Palestinian cause either. Black Americans tend not to care and often have high rates of belief in casual antisemitism anyway.
Certainly over time Jewish support for the Democrats will wane, but that just mirrors what has happened in the UK and elsewhere and reflects the changing demography of the Jewish population as much as it does the public rhetoric of politicians.
The invasion will be brutal, in a week or two (maybe less) rhetoric will start to turn again
I doubt it. Israel will probably keep Gaza under siege for a month or so, then flatten it completely and launch a ground invasion. Yes, they’ll probably kill 500,000 plus civilians through the whole thing, but the news will be supporting them the whole way.
Sure, weird far leftists will have more of a leg to stand on, but nobody listens to them.
you are ignoring the videos that will be shared in social media about that invasion, doubtful it will be pretty and not all faces stomped by a boot will be male.
The rapidly growing Muslim American population will continue to elect representatives that align with it, and they won’t drop the Palestinian cause either.
Ilhan Omar is not a Hamas representative, though, even if some people would like to present her this way.
Schiff had developed a hatred for Russia due to this and several other incidents, so when he saw the Japanese and Russians engaging one another, he offered his help. And help he did!
Japan then, Ukraine today, the more things change, the more they stay the same, uh.
The post below seems correct that you can always find a person in a group with wrong opinions to smear.
That being said I never once wavered on BLM is not good even when that was a heretic position. The group always lacked numeracy. There just isn’t enough unarmed black man dying. It’s a small issue compared with more important things like figuring out how to reduce prison populations. Besides they always had vibes of trying to use racism for back door Marxism. Which has always been apparent in their writings. They would always take the Palestinian side because they are the side Russia took under Marxism.
I've got a long memory on a lot of posters, and point out that he was far from the only user to have a different opinion on that topic. And, uh, the previous poster was asking about things that happened three years ago; by necessity any honest discussion will necessarily be about people saying things years ago.
That wasn't universal, and there were rare times where he could make decent arguments and I'd point out that out well before his actual permaban. But given that one of his biggest 'contributions' ever was slamming people over not commenting on the Smollett hate crime, it's hard to comment about BLM support without mentioning him, and also not fair to the BLM supporters here to use him as the first example.
You're not the problem Gatt, you're a quality and civil contributor. But neither is this isolated - just the previous week I saw you call out someone for being the lone poster to defend Ibram Kendi's book. I genuinely don't think this kind of pubic shaming of people who dared to buck the majority even years ago is conducive to having non-echo chamber debates here.
But like I said to FC, my parent comment to yours was lighthearted, not a declaration of conflict. I don't care all that much or I would have left.
Support for BLM as a movement in general while either carefully ignoring the violence or at least saying it was bad was far broader, even at the Motte.
The post below seems correct that you can always find a person in a group with wrong opinions to smear.
But one side getting smeared will result in them getting fired, and the other side getting smeared will result in 'ho hum, that's pretty bad, I don't support that, but what can you do?'
Revealing themselves to who? This seemed totally expected to me, and the people who will see it will already have expected it on the right, or will figure out a way to ignore it on the left.
You're permabanned, effective immediately. Why? Because you posted a large number of sometimes questionable posts as a "new" user, and then deleted them all. This is your first new post since your last spree. I don't know what you're up to or who you are, but the mods talked about it and agreed that it smells fishy and also that posting a bunch of stuff and then deleting it is annoying. Several people have done this recently, and we've been asked to start cracking down on it, so we are.
This does not mean that deleting posts will automatically get you a ban. There are legitimate reasons to delete posts (you thought better of it, your were drunk-posting, you decided you revealed too much personal info, whatever). But do not dive into a bunch of threads and then decide you're going to erase history, leaving holes in conversations for anyone coming by to read later.
I saw this right before reading @Stefferi claiming that "the right (apart from the explicit Nazis, of course) and at least parts of the center-left immediately smells blood in the water and starts trawling the social medias for any far-left comments that either are pro-Hamas or can be presented that way"
Not really sure what else to say. Just seems like whatever happens someone will be playing the "deflect, minimize, Republicans Pounce" game to get people to ignore it.
Yes, there are far-left comments that are pro-Hamas. However, from what I've seen in online discussions, they also get a large amount of pushback, including from fellow leftists, in ways that violent "decolonization" rhetoric would have not received, previously. It feels like a vibe shift; of course the thing about vibe shifts is that they're very hard to quantify.
I've also observed, for a long time, that there exists a right-wing tendency to use Israel/Palestine conflict and related accusations of antisemism for tit-for-tat attacks on the Left for avenging left-wing attacks on right (justified or not) for racism. This includes a tendency to vastly exaggerate the reach and importance of anti-semitic attitudes on the Left, including implying that any and all condemnations of Israel, the occupation etc. are antisemism. Again, this is not something that is limited to this conflict but a longer observation. If that's something I've noticed, that's something I'm going to say, "Republicans pounce" memery notwithstanding. Weakmanning, guilt by association etc. are basic rhetorical tactics used by all sides, after all.
As I linked elsewhere, probably the most high-profile example of pushback was this. Your particular linked example noted that the person in question had been placed on administrative leave.
The vibe shift is currently harder to quantify due to the extraordinary harshness of the Israeli response balancing the scales, but I'd still say that "decolonization" rhetoric has taken a hit (see eg this), that an Israeli campaign against Gaza of this magnitude would have left to considerably bigger left-wing counter-reaction if it hadn't been for 10/7, and that, yes, the right has smelled blood in the water and is painting with a wide brush to tar a much larger crowd with the "pro-Hamas", antisemitic image than the actual pro-Hamas anti-semitic fraction.
I really don't know why it would be so controversial to say that the Right does that. It's a faction in the culture war! That's what factions in the culture war do! Am I supposed to go with the assumption that the Right is just too damn gentlemanly to not use such a tactic when an opportunity arises?
I'm slightly agreed with you there seems to be a vibeshift among the academic left. It's coming at the same time as a lot of emboldened explicit antisemitism from non-institutional actors of course, and it remains to be seen if it sticks. But e.g. our local Greens party put out a statement that was a lot more equivocal and both-sides-ist than I would normally expect from them (they have long championed BDS and routinely call Israel an apartheid state, for example).
it is a problem because you can always find someone who is associated with cause X but also has unsavory opinion Y. of course it seems like its fine to use these tactics to smear other causes.
Nick Reimer, president of the faculty union at the University of Sydney in Australia,
The union representing teaching assistants and part-time instructors at McMaster University, CUPE local 3906
I have no qualms about tarring that entire university and all of CUPE with the same brush. If they didn't want those people speaking for them, they shouldn't have made them leaders.
Is the article supposed to go against the claim that right-wingers will trawl the social media for any and all pro-Hamas far left comments in situations like this? Because that's certainly the impression you get when you include operators like "Sarah Shahid, freelancer for Now Toronto and Spring magazine" and "At Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, assistant professor of social work Dr. Jessica Hutchison".
No, it's supposed to go against the implication that it's (only) unfairly highlighting crazies. When you're representing thousands of staff at an organization with an endowment in the billions of dollars, you're a genuine public figure and your actions are newsworthy.
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Notes -
Apparently some left wing organizations are revealing themselves. Here is an X account claiming to represent “BLM Chicago” implicitly (but very nearly explicitly) declaring their support for the terrorist attacks: https://x.com/BLMChi/status/1711793142742073573?s=20
My questions are:
Who actually runs this account?
Have they tried to articulate what they actually mean by this?
I’ll be honest that my opinion of BLM, especially after the 2020 riots, is quite low. This seems to fit a little too well into the right wing hatred of them.
Ok the other hand: are there any stories in Jewish folklore about creating a monster and then having it turn on you?
“Revealing themselves”? What do you mean by that? Revealing their power level?
I think most of The Discourse on this event, as with others, has an easier explanation. It looks like what one might expect from handing 15 minutes of fame to the edgiest and most extreme takes. Survival of the fittest, except for scissor statements.
Twitter delenda est.
I don't think Twitter is the issue, here. If Twitter had exploded as predicted by All The Tech Writers the day after Musk moved a server, we'd still have had portions of the Harvard student community writing that they "hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence"; we just wouldn't have known about it.
Would you say that Twitter and its ilk are the issue?
On one hand, I have to agree that even without anything remotely similar to modern social media, there would still be people making such extreme takes. At least judging by the 70s.
On the other, the very fact that you and I wouldn’t hear about it is of some value. Not just in letting us feel better, but by limiting its reach.
I’m torn on how much this is really worth. Instinctively, half our modern CW issues are predicated on the importance of platforming, speech, the Overton window. The arc of the 20th century was that broadcasting to millions can matter. It feels like social media should have a similar effect, and that injecting feedback directly into Tweeter’s veins should only accelerate any trends. Especially regarding the formation of consensus. And yet, to some extent, it kind of sucks? The firehose of content means that everyone gets to pick and choose what they consume, which may well not be what you intend. Dunk and counterdunk proceeded at the speed of light. Every scissor statement that riles the base is fueling your enemies, too.
The only reason I’m this sanguine complaining about Twitter is because I don’t think there’s much to be done. Not sure how this sort of high-velocity, incredibly competitive speech could be restricted, and not sure if I’ll bite the bullet and say that it even should be.
I don't think so.
Trivially, I'm not sure how much the 1970s actually restrained 'reach' for a lot of the crazy activists. Hradzka's Days of Rage recaps give a lot of examples of absolutely nutty leftists who were praised and cause celebres across their fields, but it's not like the Birchers were any more restrained. It had a lower velocity, and that mattered a bit when trying to avoid grifters (though there still were a lot of those, too!), but there was absolutely a ton of consensus that established from the behavior of a small handful of absolute nutjobs. And that's, if anything, more present for the people today: Harvardites are pretty much selected to be the sort of people who can coordinate backstage communications well amongst themselves, we have a Washington Post writer who's devolved to saying that the pictures of decapitated babies could have come from /anywhere/, and the National Lawyer's Guild has shown its ass with exactly the same level of coordination as in the 1970s. Somehow.
At a deeper level, I've seen a lot of groups who either operated before social media, or now operate in exclusion from it, or both, and they're as or more prone to disappearing up their own asses; it's just not visible to outsiders until everything explodes. Indeed, even with social-media dependent groups, a lot of the real crazy positions and behaviors are still being coordinated by e-mail or face-to-face discussions.
More broadly, I'm generally pretty skeptical of Overton Window and related concepts: while they probably real in some cases, my objections to deplatforming are more about free speech and what happens when people don't understand each other's positions. And a lot of the 'success' stories are pretty transparently results of the Texas sharpshooter's fallacies (deplatforming took out Milo twelve times, donchaknow).
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The golem joke is of course starting to show its age; I think David Cole did it best 2019.
I remember once commenting on the thesis of NRx, to the effect that «Cthulhu swims left and left, until He crashes into the shore of New York to be slaughtered» (@2rafa later recalled it in a context vaguely similar to today's). But now, this seems to be happening in earnest. I've observed a few ordinarily peaceful, very liberal Jewish academics who openly threaten they'll remember leftists who've been cheering for Hamas in the wake of this catastrophe. Unsurprisingly, many Jews who've been on board with the identity-driven, anti-white/male progressive rhetorics and policies so long as they did not cross the line of cheering for gleeful murders of their own people now have began to «truly see». It all has happened before, of course – multiple times even, from the «wow Stalin a psycho actually!» in 1937 to neoconservatism to the stuff that Sailer pedantically documents; but I think the demography is currently ripe for a permanent phase transition of Diaspora Jews to a more conservative platform, in following with the younger, more virile and now morally redeemed Israelis.
I might be wrong but that seems to be what the excellent Crémieux hints at, too:
Or as the TabletMag has suggested some time ago:
Well I think that's a pretty bogus forecast. Democrats will continue to win elections. They'll just have to jettison this whole pro-Hamas wing, because after all this graphic stuff, acting in a sufficiently anti-Zionist manner will become a bit too much for any Jew with a modicum of self-respect, and doing politics in the US on the platform «We hate Jews, Jews hate us» is not exactly a winning proposition.
One can hope that, as with Stalinism, some loathsome policies concerning gentiles might be abolished as well.
EDIT: here's Noah conveniently spelling out that Stalin after 1937 bad
Muslims make up 1.3% of the US population. Even if you assumed that the Democrats completely disenfranchised the Muslims, they simply aren't a big enough voting bloc to make a difference. Now, Muslims can't exactly swing Republican. Also, we're talking about specifically targeting Hamas, and the global Muslim ego getting hurt as proxy. This isn't some targeted disenfranchisement of Muslim.
From a political calculus perspective, going full pro-Israel + anti-Hamas is not disastrous for democrats. I know that there are more emotional and ideological factors at play here. But it would be unbelievably stupid for the democrats to keep digging their grave here. There simply aren't enough Muslims for being Pro-palestine to be worth it.
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I think Tablet’s output over the last few years reflects to some extent a growing neoconservative acceptance, though not embrace, of Donald Trump. Clearly, he wasn’t as much of a Nazi™️ as feared, there weren’t any state-sanctioned pogroms, and it seems now again that the right supports Israel more than the left, plus isn’t his faction being falsely persecuted, and isn’t that bad? DeSantis may have been preferable, but provided Trump has a few Good People in charge, all the nasty election business can be quietly forgotten.
Jewish politics often alternates spastically between neuroticism and pragmatism, sometimes both simultaneously (occasionally warranted). Sectarianism is simply too ingrained for blue haired Berkeley or Columbia Jews to switch to the right (their gentile white peers are the same, of course). But, then again, old men like Howard Schultz, or Reid Hoffmann Silicon Valley types and so on aren’t blue haired Berkeley activists, and it is the former rather than the latter that pays the bills for the DNC. For now, Gavin Newsom is still preferable to the vulgarity of Trump (and is stupid enough to be easily led anyway). In ten years, the logic may differ.
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Doesn't all of this apply equivalently to non-Jewish White Democrat voters, though? Jewish group identity might be stronger than general White Americans, but... the exact same things written from a broad White POV would take on some pretty heavy censure.
I suppose non-insane White Democrats will also be repelled by all the Hamas butchery apologia. But the core reason for this is that Jews, who (accurately) perceive normalization of such shit as a personal existential threat in the long run, will make it into a Big Issue and a topic for edifying National Conversation that cannot be just brushed aside and dropped from the news cycle like some embarrassing but non-representative freak accident.
Otherwise, rabid anti-white rhetoric would also have sufficed to discredit leftism.
I don’t think the left will drop Palestine so quickly at all. The invasion will be brutal, in a week or two (maybe less) rhetoric will start to turn again. Maybe not to Chuck Schumer’s level, but certainly in big swathes of the American left. The rapidly growing Muslim American population will continue to elect representatives that align with it, and they won’t drop the Palestinian cause either. Black Americans tend not to care and often have high rates of belief in casual antisemitism anyway.
Certainly over time Jewish support for the Democrats will wane, but that just mirrors what has happened in the UK and elsewhere and reflects the changing demography of the Jewish population as much as it does the public rhetoric of politicians.
I doubt it. Israel will probably keep Gaza under siege for a month or so, then flatten it completely and launch a ground invasion. Yes, they’ll probably kill 500,000 plus civilians through the whole thing, but the news will be supporting them the whole way.
Sure, weird far leftists will have more of a leg to stand on, but nobody listens to them.
you are ignoring the videos that will be shared in social media about that invasion, doubtful it will be pretty and not all faces stomped by a boot will be male.
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Ilhan Omar is not a Hamas representative, though, even if some people would like to present her this way.
She isn’t, but one sees across Europe that as Muslim populations grow, their representatives also become more bold.
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Japan then, Ukraine today, the more things change, the more they stay the same, uh.
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The post below seems correct that you can always find a person in a group with wrong opinions to smear.
That being said I never once wavered on BLM is not good even when that was a heretic position. The group always lacked numeracy. There just isn’t enough unarmed black man dying. It’s a small issue compared with more important things like figuring out how to reduce prison populations. Besides they always had vibes of trying to use racism for back door Marxism. Which has always been apparent in their writings. They would always take the Palestinian side because they are the side Russia took under Marxism.
I mean, BLM being bad was never not the only real opinion on this board.
Other than the BLM supporters? Even ignoring Darwin's absolutely embarrassing showing, there were more than a couple honest advocates.
The dark old days when we still had users who actually had different opinions.
And they're free to post here and now. Unless they feel such unbearable mental pain from seeing other posters' contrary opinions that they ragequit.
This is perhaps ironic on a thread where the OP is still frustrated years later by hearing a single user disagree with the dominant narrative here.
I've got a long memory on a lot of posters, and point out that he was far from the only user to have a different opinion on that topic. And, uh, the previous poster was asking about things that happened three years ago; by necessity any honest discussion will necessarily be about people saying things years ago.
My frustration with Darwin wasn't that I disagreed with him. In no small number of cases, I actually don't -- and almost all of those made it tempting to respond "stop helping me". Whether I agreed or disagreed with his object-level position, he'd argued it primarily and sometimes solely through strawmen, insults, insistence that clear facts weren't proven or unknown matters must have happened in the most convenient way, standards of behavior or evidence evolved and deployed and denied and recreated within the context of single arguments, outright falsehoods, so on and so forth. He'd call basic legal terms deceptive rhetoric, could not imagine what Jim Crow looked like, and made random claims that couldn't fit a basic timeline.
That wasn't universal, and there were rare times where he could make decent arguments and I'd point out that out well before his actual permaban. But given that one of his biggest 'contributions' ever was slamming people over not commenting on the Smollett hate crime, it's hard to comment about BLM support without mentioning him, and also not fair to the BLM supporters here to use him as the first example.
You're not the problem Gatt, you're a quality and civil contributor. But neither is this isolated - just the previous week I saw you call out someone for being the lone poster to defend Ibram Kendi's book. I genuinely don't think this kind of pubic shaming of people who dared to buck the majority even years ago is conducive to having non-echo chamber debates here.
But like I said to FC, my parent comment to yours was lighthearted, not a declaration of conflict. I don't care all that much or I would have left.
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Reading through the thread, I have no idea which post you are attempting to reference.
The comment mine is responding to, gattsuru’s on darwin
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My recollection is that even the few progressives we had at that time were ambivalent at best about them.
... I've had a discussion on The Old Site where a moderator put out the challenge to find a half-dozen posters who "(a) are "regulars" here (b) leftists, and (c) have celebrated or turned a blind eye to violence", and I got either four-and-a-half or five depending on who you ask just by looking at BLM-related ones.
Support for BLM as a movement in general while either carefully ignoring the violence or at least saying it was bad was far broader, even at the Motte.
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But one side getting smeared will result in them getting fired, and the other side getting smeared will result in 'ho hum, that's pretty bad, I don't support that, but what can you do?'
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The difference is that on the right (by Marxist parlance) Nazis don't get tenure at our most prestigious universities. Marxists do.
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Revealing themselves to who? This seemed totally expected to me, and the people who will see it will already have expected it on the right, or will figure out a way to ignore it on the left.
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This is as good a place as any to drop this:
You're permabanned, effective immediately. Why? Because you posted a large number of sometimes questionable posts as a "new" user, and then deleted them all. This is your first new post since your last spree. I don't know what you're up to or who you are, but the mods talked about it and agreed that it smells fishy and also that posting a bunch of stuff and then deleting it is annoying. Several people have done this recently, and we've been asked to start cracking down on it, so we are.
This does not mean that deleting posts will automatically get you a ban. There are legitimate reasons to delete posts (you thought better of it, your were drunk-posting, you decided you revealed too much personal info, whatever). But do not dive into a bunch of threads and then decide you're going to erase history, leaving holes in conversations for anyone coming by to read later.
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I saw this right before reading @Stefferi claiming that "the right (apart from the explicit Nazis, of course) and at least parts of the center-left immediately smells blood in the water and starts trawling the social medias for any far-left comments that either are pro-Hamas or can be presented that way"
Not really sure what else to say. Just seems like whatever happens someone will be playing the "deflect, minimize, Republicans Pounce" game to get people to ignore it.
Well, how am I supposed to respond?
Yes, there are far-left comments that are pro-Hamas. However, from what I've seen in online discussions, they also get a large amount of pushback, including from fellow leftists, in ways that violent "decolonization" rhetoric would have not received, previously. It feels like a vibe shift; of course the thing about vibe shifts is that they're very hard to quantify.
I've also observed, for a long time, that there exists a right-wing tendency to use Israel/Palestine conflict and related accusations of antisemism for tit-for-tat attacks on the Left for avenging left-wing attacks on right (justified or not) for racism. This includes a tendency to vastly exaggerate the reach and importance of anti-semitic attitudes on the Left, including implying that any and all condemnations of Israel, the occupation etc. are antisemism. Again, this is not something that is limited to this conflict but a longer observation. If that's something I've noticed, that's something I'm going to say, "Republicans pounce" memery notwithstanding. Weakmanning, guilt by association etc. are basic rhetorical tactics used by all sides, after all.
Hi, curious if you have further thoughts about this given the events of the last few weeks, especially things like this: https://twitter.com/RachelJessWolff/status/1719901617305084373
Have you seen any pushback from fellow leftists? Can you link examples of any?
As I linked elsewhere, probably the most high-profile example of pushback was this. Your particular linked example noted that the person in question had been placed on administrative leave.
The vibe shift is currently harder to quantify due to the extraordinary harshness of the Israeli response balancing the scales, but I'd still say that "decolonization" rhetoric has taken a hit (see eg this), that an Israeli campaign against Gaza of this magnitude would have left to considerably bigger left-wing counter-reaction if it hadn't been for 10/7, and that, yes, the right has smelled blood in the water and is painting with a wide brush to tar a much larger crowd with the "pro-Hamas", antisemitic image than the actual pro-Hamas anti-semitic fraction.
I really don't know why it would be so controversial to say that the Right does that. It's a faction in the culture war! That's what factions in the culture war do! Am I supposed to go with the assumption that the Right is just too damn gentlemanly to not use such a tactic when an opportunity arises?
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No one needs only look at major population centers where large amounts of people support genocide (eg Sydney, Chicago, London) of the Israelis.
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I'm slightly agreed with you there seems to be a vibeshift among the academic left. It's coming at the same time as a lot of emboldened explicit antisemitism from non-institutional actors of course, and it remains to be seen if it sticks. But e.g. our local Greens party put out a statement that was a lot more equivocal and both-sides-ist than I would normally expect from them (they have long championed BDS and routinely call Israel an apartheid state, for example).
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it is a problem because you can always find someone who is associated with cause X but also has unsavory opinion Y. of course it seems like its fine to use these tactics to smear other causes.
There's a difference between finding "someone", and finding leaders in large and prestigious organizations.
From here:
I have no qualms about tarring that entire university and all of CUPE with the same brush. If they didn't want those people speaking for them, they shouldn't have made them leaders.
Well I didn't vote for them.
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Is the article supposed to go against the claim that right-wingers will trawl the social media for any and all pro-Hamas far left comments in situations like this? Because that's certainly the impression you get when you include operators like "Sarah Shahid, freelancer for Now Toronto and Spring magazine" and "At Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, assistant professor of social work Dr. Jessica Hutchison".
No, it's supposed to go against the implication that it's (only) unfairly highlighting crazies. When you're representing thousands of staff at an organization with an endowment in the billions of dollars, you're a genuine public figure and your actions are newsworthy.
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