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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   12677 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #3

This is a refreshed 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.

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Regarding Western liberal narratives on the Gaza war, I’m noticing something I find somewhat odd. I see mainstream liberals arguing that clueless college students are indoctrinated by loony leftist propagandists to be rabid enemies of Israel, our greatest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East etc. And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency. Now that the true extent of anti-Zionist agitation on Western college campuses is revealed on prime TV for the first time in almost a decade (the last major Israeli military operation in Gaza was in 2014, I reckon, not counting the mass shootings at the border in 2018 or so), targeted at a nation and a people they actually care about, suddenly it’s a real problem, a real concern to be tackled.

Now I understand that one can come up with all sorts of cynical and mundane interpretations as to why this is, how it’s unsurprising and so on, and I get that. But then I remember that there were violent anti-police protests in the summer of 2020, the campaign to remove Confederate monuments, the various protests against Trump’s rallies, and in these cases the tone of the protests were, as far as I can tell, pretty much set by the same leftist college agitators who initiate the current anti-Zionist protests, the ones who call themselves anticolonialists, social justice advocates, antiracists and so on. And the big difference was that they weren’t criticized by mainstream liberals the way they are now, even though all their agitation and messaging stems from the same ideological tenets.

And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency.

I've previously commented on this pattern where even relatively moderate left-wing commentators will refuse to acknowledge when conservatives have been right about something even while they agree with them. It's strange. I don't know how to describe being so overwhelmingly certain in your own beliefs that you refuse to consider the possibility you were wrong about conservatives on a topic even as you simultaneously switch to agreeing with them. The only guess I have is that young, politically active progressives have a uniformity of political views that simply doesn't exist in any other large political group within society, which there is some weak evidence for in the UK.

God, I hate to play the “both sides” card, but…who actually does this? Are there center-right Fox News hosts or Shapiro types saying “wow, that thing the libs said five years ago was totally right! Guess we didn’t own them after all.”?

I don’t think so. In most situations, there’s no alpha in public apology. This isn’t partisan; it’s bog-standard tribalism. Few groups want to signal accuracy so badly that they let the outgroup score free points.

It's not necessarily about a public apology, but rather admitting where the 'new' idea you are bringing in comes from. Something akin to "This is an idea that's been popular in right wing circles for a long time, and I think there's something we can learn from those ideas." There's a difference to suddenly saying you believe that college students have been indoctrinated to hate Israel as if it's an idea that came out of the void, and saying while also noting that some right-wing commentators have been banging that drum for years.

The right wing seems much more willing to take ideas from the left while acknowledging the origin of them, whereas left wing will take the ideas sometimes but without acknowledging the origin of them. Not that I have stats on it, of course.

From my own political experience, this topic does cut across partisan lines. Seeing antisemitism firsthand when I went to university was a moment of "mugging by reality" that made me pull out of the reflexively in, hip, progressive left-wing whatever you want to call it that most people of that age group in higher education automatically gravitated towards. It's one of the three major experiences that formulated my political beliefs.

That sort of admission does strike me as more plausible, but it’s still not something I expect to see. Not outside of Gray Tribe weirdos trying to calibrate their predictions.

Maybe as countersignaling, or an attempt to claim horseshoe theory? I could imagine Moldbug saying “the Cathedral is so wrong, they’re right about such-and-such.” But I don’t really know if that counts, since reaction is pretty open about looting the reasonable stuff from mainstream society.

Do you have any anecdotes in mind, where the right wing made such an acknowledgment?

I think you can find examples of Trump supporters saying Bernie and the far left in general were "right" about certain topics, like tariffs and economic protectionism, that used to be extremely unpopular among Republicans.

Also the isolationist right will say similar about left-wing anti-war positions.

But for many of them, the "new" idea wouldn't come from conservatives but from the previous generations and iterations of moderate/pro-Israel liberalism, which have historically been a notable institution, and still are, and many of whom have also bashed the anti-Israel movement many times before.

The mirror here would be mainstream conservatives saying that KKK/Neo-Nazi types are a negligible % of the right. If you're a mainstream conservative, you find these people embarrassing and don't want to be associated with them. It's psychologically easier to pretend they just don't exist rather than acknowledging that a troubling group that votes the same way you do.

A problem here is the disparate treatment in mainstream culture. After Charlottesville, nobody on the right defended the tiki torch people. Media falsely attributed the Fine People quote to Neo-Nazis in an effort to tie them into the broader political right. Contrast that with rediscovered staunch free speech principles and special support groups set up for people literally celebrating terrorism and cheering on Hamas. "Stupid college kids" are a very important group when it comes to mobilization, so in theory it should be easier to albatross the political left with their existence.

The mirror here would be mainstream conservatives saying that KKK/Neo-Nazi types are a negligible % of the right.

If some large percentage of the prestigious right was, in fact, those things. Harvard is basically elite left incarnate. The right has a problem when people notice its outliers. The left has a problem when people are able to see their leaders.

it's why the crazies in the right are found dumpster diving while the ones on the left are in yachts.

Nobody? I remember there being an awful lot of people insisting that tiki torches were completely innocent and/or very protected expression. Perhaps that was only around here?

Saying that it's protected expression is correct in both cases. This is different than celebrating the guy who ran over Heather Heyer, which is the equivalent of what many on the pro-Hamas side ("this is what decolonization looks like" sentiments) did the day after the 10/7 attacks. I'm sure you can find people who supported the Charlottesville driver, and I agree they shouldn't get jobs at big law firms and should be deplatformed from social media.

After Charlottesville, nobody on the right defended the tiki torch people.

Yeah, I know it’s weird and unsettling to have people defending the driver equivalents. I was talking about the people defending those defenders.

I thought there was a decent argument his actions were self defense. Someone hit his car moments before. I don’t know anyone who defended him if he ran over an innocent civilian for no reason.

We'll never know, because he was systematically denied representation in order to spare the Virginia legal system the embarrassment of not convicting a "Nazi" of murder.

I think it's important to remember that while conservatives and the right have complained about college campuses for a long time, they really didn't do anything to address it until the past few years. Liberals were still in the coping stage of they'll grow up and become more reasonable once they get a job and a family that conservatives had for a very long time. Plus that kind of activism was useful to them. However, now they are in the stage where they are realizing that this is a real problem and are freaking out, but they can't admit the right was right because the Trump threat is looming. Politicians are in the habit of letting things get so bad and continually kicking them down the road until it gets so bad they can't ignore it. I think this is one of those moments for them. I don't think there's much they can do though because this has been a problem since the 1960's. Nobody has the stones to do what would actually need to be done to root this out of our institutions.

what would actually need to be done

That would be to bring back loco parentis. And in turn that would entail cracking down on the idea of universities as 1-star resorts that also have classes which everyone is entitled to go to for four years.

Not going to happen.

No, the only way to deal with "this" would be to completely replace the entire teaching staff, most of the curriculums, and vast swathes of left-wing political theory. Opposition to Israel is the logical and inevitable outcome of taking left-wing politics seriously - left-wingers don't actually like ethnostates in general, and ones that that murder brown people even less so. This isn't some weird bug in education, but the logical outcome of the political ideas and doctrines which motivate the left.

If you want to stop the left from being anti-Israel, you're going to have to completely rework their entire belief system. Israel is a white supremacist ethnostate that was founded with the help of a brutal terrorist campaign (ever read what Irgun and Lehi got up to?) and continues to enact racist, conservative and nationalist policies. The current leader of Israel was famously a huge fan of Donald Trump(who is not particularly well-liked in left-wing politics) and support for Israel is a famously republican priority. Even if you got rid of every single muslim on the left, every single person who had a direct, personal and nonpolitical reason to hate Israel, the left would oppose Israel anyway due to their own political values.

What is loco parentis? Why would it help?

The legal principle(now abolished) that colleges have some parental rights and responsibilities over their students(and even in the west parents usually have some added rights of control over very young adult children).

College kids do not jump at these extreme ideologies because the adults not supervising them push it, they do it because they're unsupervised teenagers being catered to in a compound full of unsupervised teenagers who are following peer pressure. And fixing that requires going back to the prior legal regime granting universities wide latitude in regulating student's personal lives.

You should never hand someone a gun unless you're sure where they'll point it. While in this one highly-specific case universities would probably act as you want, out of fear of the Zionist lobby getting their donations pulled, outside of that they have no real interest in stopping SJ lunacy and a huge amount of interest in purging themselves of rightists.

And the academy didn’t used to be so left. In fact the lurch to the left came when in loco parentis became illegal.

This is because it is much more appealing for unsupervised leisure class teenagers(which is what college kids are) to join up with the ideology that lets them fornicate and experiment with substances. The lurch to the left is entirely predictable on that basis when you add peer pressure and signaling dynamics. Even in Greece and Rome the conservative elites of the day complained about the unsupervised leisure class teens of the day shifting in ways that are certainly reminiscent of university leftism even if they don’t match 100%.

And the academy didn’t used to be so left. In fact the lurch to the left came when in loco parentis became illegal.

That doesn't mean that reinstating ILP will cause a reversal of the academy's politics!

This is a loaded analogy, but I can't think of a better one, so: if there are rabbits in the east and no rabbits in the west due to a fence, you tear the fence down, and then you put it back up fifty years later, that won't disintegrate the rabbits that are now in the west.

No, it does not, but in order to make your eradication of rabbits in the west stick you need that fence- as NZ's quixotic obsession with getting rid of invasive species has found. ILP is the fence; not sufficient in itself, but very definitely the precondition for making any of your efforts work.

In loco parentis.

What is loco parentis?

It means that their parents are just as crazy?

If you don't know, Duck Duck Go is just an https call away. It's a legal phrase that means that the schools have broader authority and act in place of the parents since the parents aren't there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis

It's a legal phrase that means that the schools have broader authority and act in place of the parents since the parents aren't there.

This means no authority at all, students over 18 are adults and their parents have no longer any (legal) power over them.

The implication is that irresponsible parents are offloading parenting to institutions which aren’t up for the task. If only they’d chosen traditional marriage instead of (dual-income/single parenthood/homosexuality/etc.), we wouldn’t be in this mess.

I think there are some obvious holes in the theory, starting perhaps with the Beat generation. But it has a certain appeal.

Colleges have always been super anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be a Ben Shapiro weirdo to know that.

The only thing that seems different now is that the Nikki Haleys of the world are explicitly saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, so the activist college students are saying “ok guess I’m anti-Semitic too.”

It’s the same phenomenon that people talk about here re: racism. You call everything racist and eventually people start saying “ok guess I’m racist.”

Or the right calling everything to the left of Ayn Rand 'socialist/communist' and people on the left reacting similarly.

Everything to the left of Ayn Rand is socialist, none of you are free of sin socialism. Government intervention in economy create distortions which create demand for further interventions to adress (thesis of "Road to serfdom").

In modern times, anti-Zionism has always been some flavor of anti-Semitism. At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.

As for the colleges, it appears this time people on the left are finding out that "it's just a few kids on college campuses" is not really reassuring in the slightest. As when the conservative-leaning normies found out, it's likely too late for them.

At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.

The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)

I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).

popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)

The zionists are right. I don’t see any solution to this that doesn’t eventually look like a Zionism transposed to some other location. The historic record here is pretty clear — a stateless Jewish minority is going to be the target of either states looking for a scapegoat or angry mobs taking matters into their own hands. In most Muslim countries, non Muslims are second class citizens at best. So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere. If that’s the case, you need to create a continuous land area in which Jews are given complete control. And you’re now displacing whoever lives there now. It ends up looking almost exactly like Israel except now we’re building in South America or Montana or Wales or something. There aren’t really good answers.

So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere.

I feel like it is important to point out that however valid this argument may be, making it forever forecloses your ability to criticise Trump, the alt-right and white nationalists. Once you cross this line you lose the ethical and moral ground which allows you to say that white nationalism/ethnonationalism is bad at all. There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy (that would sound something like "The Jews get to have their own nation because they're God's chosen people and above all others").

And while this is the motte and hence nobody cares that a pseudonymous Zensunni wanderer can't exactly condemn Trump anymore, these concerns become much bigger in the real world where people make political statements tied to their identity. All these public arguments, discussions and comments about what's happening are going to be remembered, and the left is famous for digging into people's past comments in order to discredit them in arguments so this isn't exactly a purely academic concern.

There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy

That's not true. E.g. whites are much more numerous. It's not realistic to imagine that whites in the USA could suffer the same fate as Jews in Germany - there's too many of them.

E.g. whites are much more numerous.

White people are vanishingly small as a percentage of the total population on Earth, so all you're saying is that we just have to wait a bit longer before they can have their own ethnostate? Would you also support Israel ceasing to be an ethnostate once the jewish diaspora population gets a bit bigger? How you slice the salami matters a lot too - do the Boers get to have their own ethnostate, given that they are a tiny minority on the verge of being wiped out and far smaller in population than the jews? I'm struggling to see the actual principle here - "you only get an ethnostate if you could plausibly be wiped out" is a contradictory and self-defeating argument anyway because it means that the moment you have the ethnostate you're protected and hence no longer deserve it... and if the ethnostate DOESN'T protect you, then there's no point tying it to numbers like that.

I think each people group is well served to have at least one country where they are a majority. Whether or not a country exists for the explicit purpose of giving them a majority is pretty much immaterial. E.g. Egypt is not a country formed for the purpose of giving Arabs a state of their own, but it nonetheless functions perfectly well as an Arab-majority country, such that the establishment of an Arab ethnostate is unnecessary. Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.

And yes, this does mean I would like the Boers to have their own land - ideally they would have beaten the British and the Orange Free State would have survived. Alas.

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Jews get to have an ethnostate because they’ve been genocided several times. I don’t think that’s identical to other arguments. I’m not worried about other states wanting to have an ethnostate if they want one.

White people have also been genocided several times through history as well (European history is surprisingly brutal). They're still around, but if that's an argument against them getting an ethnostate then it also applies to the jews.

Honestly when you saw the riots in Paris and the marches and London maybe it isn’t unreasonable to keep France for the French or England for the English.

Personally I thought the Rotherham case was a far greater argument for keeping England for the English. I'm not even going to feign a lack of disgust at people who think protests in favour of Hamas are where the line was crossed as opposed to Rotherham (though to clarify I'm not accusing you of this right now).

Agreed. Rotherham is disgusting. Basically “sure we let them rape white girls because we don’t want to be called racist”

There is no actual reason to suppose that if every Israeli Jew were granted the right to live in the US or Australia or the Netherlands or someplace, they would be vulnerable to scapegoating or pogroms. Sure, in Saudi they would, but granting Jews the right of return to Australia would not actually make them vulnerable to discrimination- they just wouldn't have their own country.

Australia is an immigration friendly place, but even so 7 million people all at once would be stretching the friendship a bit.

Edit: Also, we did just have a big crowd in Sydney chanting "gas the jews". Such people are an extreme fringe, but can anyone guarantee they will remain a fringe?

That was just an example, you know. No doubt a 1-state solution where the Palestinians are full citizens, backstopped by the CANZUK nations pledging to accept any Israeli Jewish immigrant who applies, would not result in a Jewish genocide(although it might well result in far fewer Jews in a generation as some of the conditions leading to a high Israeli-Jewish birthrate are probably unique to Israel).

which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).

Interestingly, Arab Christians do, despite evidence of discrimination. Arab Muslims do not.

Probably a lesson in there somewhere.

The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return.

Yes, but anti-zionists get no credit for obvious impossibilities. "Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel with right of return and the Israeli Jews don't end up in a very bad place in a very short time" is such an impossibility.

It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe. Saying they want to ethnically cleanse the jews just gets denial because it's not true, arguing that a one-state solution would inevitably result in ethnic cleansing might result in an actual conversation.

Furthermore unthinkingly dismissing "obvious impossibilities" is lazy thinking that tends to just make people slaves to their local overton window. There are plenty of people to whom it is obvious that historical opponents of racial integration were just racist villains with no motive besides hate, while simultaneously dismissing palestinian citizenship as an impossibility and never even considering that those historical figures might have had their own well-thought-out reasons. Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others...

The point isn't that the situation with the palestinians is necessarily the same as those historical analogues. It is that actually considering the matter leads to understanding and perspective based on something better than what your social environment considers "obvious". If the anti-zionists win and Israel becomes yet another failed post-colonial state but doesn't have actual ethnic cleansing besides largely voluntary "jewish flight", "the zionists were right" could easily become the unthinkable opinion even as events validate some of their concerns.

For an unrelated example, take the following question. Which of the following exist as "real" distinct and inborn traits and which are just social phenomenon: transgender, non-binary, demisexual, otherkin, plurality? (And of the ones that exist, are the "real" cases currently outnumbered by the social ones?) It can be very frustrating to watch someone act like the answer is obvious based on an overton window popularized in their community a handful of years ago when I saw how the sausage got made.

It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe.

If they believe in the "one non-Jewish state where Jews will not be persecuted" thing, they are incorrigibly naive and not worth engaging with. If, as is more likely, they realize their desired policies will lead to expulsion or killing of the Israeli Jews and they use the impossible position as a way of avoiding responsibility for advocating that, then they don't believe what they say.

Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:

I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right. The whites may have (mostly) dropped their prejudices, but blacks have retained the recollections of the injuries and there indeed have been "new provocations". Certainly the convulsions have not ended, though extermination seems at least far away.

I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right.

Yes, I remembered that passage because it seemed prophetic. But of course both denying citizenship based on race and his later discussion of the black-white intelligence gap are now outside the mainstream overton window, something to be cited as proof of generic racism and justification for tearing down statues but not actually engaged with. Including by those who simultaneously find it obvious that Israel can't give palestinians citizenship. The point is that resorting to the "obvious" lets incongruous views pass by completely unexamined. The intent of anti-zionists in comparing Israel to other ethno-nationalist projects is that Israel should be opposed, but other outcomes of taking that idea seriously would include becoming more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism in general or thinking more rigorously about what you think separates Israel from the others. It's not that those views can't be reconciled, it's that people should have to at least realize they're doing so. And perhaps become more understanding of the views that they currently view as cartoon villainy, whether those views are "racism" or the people who think there is a moral mandate for Israel to give up on being a jewish state and give citizenship to the palestinians in the hope that this will result in living together in peace.

It was funny citing TJ as if he was wrong. I would think both the whites and blacks would’ve been better off with a clean divorce (with blacks provided sufficient supplies etc to survive for a number of years until they could be fully established).

That’s really a wild assertion about what anti-zionists want especially considering how many of them are liberal Jews. Having spent an unusually high amount of time on college campuses, 99% of anti-Zionism there falls somewhere between “the Israeli state should stop allowing settlements in the West Bank” and “Israel shouldn’t be an explicitly ethno-religious Jewish state.” If you want to call things on that spectrum “anti-semitism,” fine, but it means you’re going to dramatically over-worry about the number of “anti-semites.”

I think there's a strong parallel between "woke" allegations of racism and white supremacy, and pro-Israel allegations of anti-Semitism.

In both cases there is a real phenomenon, but because it's such a good rhetorical weapon it gets significantly over-diagnosed.

There's even a parallel of the anti-SJW term "Kafka-trapping" - for instance, see how leftist Nathan Robinson complains that Jeremy Corbyn was forced out as UK Labour leader not because of any anti-Semitic comments on his behalf, but because he believed that claims that Labour had an anti-Semitism problem were exaggerated.

If all you want to say is that the Palestinian attack, and the following protests are worse, that's fine by me. I think BLM actually still managed to deal out more damage, and result in more deaths, but whatever, it's normal for people to have different reactions to ordered vs disordered violence.

But if you think the difference is big enough to justify not having noticed how radical the social justice activism was, or worse that all of it was fine until this specific issue... well, have fun standing against it on your own.

and result in more deaths

?? The estimates I've seen were something like an extra 1600 homicides per year across certain cities. You think that is more deaths than we are going to see out of this war?

Emphasis on "per year". Don't know what's going to be the score when this round of Israel vs. Palestine is over, but a single year of BLM killed more people than Hamas killed Israelis so far, and I'd say there are good chances Israeli casualties are not going to go above 2 years of BLM.

I'm having trouble finding exact numbers but the Guardian had an article saying 5,000 extra murders in 2020 and the FBI stats seem to back that up. From what I've seen since then the increased murder rate is the new normal so roughly an extra 5k per year indefinitely. It's arguable what percentage of that is attributable to BLM and related movements, personally I would guess that almost all of it is, but there's no way to prove that conclusively.

From what I've seen since then the increased murder rate is the new normal so roughly an extra 5k per year indefinitely.

The murder rate dropped in 2022 and is slated to drop more in 2023.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2023-10-20/killings-in-the-u-s-are-dropping-at-an-historic-rate-will-anyone-notice-essential-politics

That is good news, I was having trouble finding numbers past 2021. Looks like it was 5.1/100k in 2019, then shot up to 6.8/100k in 2021 and in 2022 it was 6.3 so declining but still much higher than 2019. In 2014, before the Ferguson Effect kicked in, we were at 4.4. I guess we'll see in coming years if it declines back to 2019 levels or settles below the peak but at a still elevated rate.

Of course there is also the possibility that BLM will have another resurgence and drive murder levels higher again. That's roughly where we were in 2019, murder levels had declined slightly from their peak in 2016 and looked to be leveling off until the 2020 riots and defund the police movements kicked into gear.

Eh. My cynical view is that BLM's attitude towards black deaths is pretty similar to Hamas's attitude towards Palestinian deaths - they're a rhetorical weapon to be wielded more than a problem to be solved.

One thing you arguably haven’t considered is that the US ‘Lib’ reaction to what Israel is doing in Gaza might have been very different if this was October 2020 instead of October 2023.

In the last three years violent crime has surged upward in major cities, some ‘restorative justice’ prosecutors like Chesa have been removed or have had impeachment proceedings start against them, Adams won as the ‘tough on crime’ Democrat in New York, many bail reform laws have been adjusted or reversed, a lot of ‘defund the police’ stuff faded away or was cancelled, stuff like the Smollett thing and the BLM corruption filtered through to mainstream NYT liberals, ordinary urban American PMC progressives now hate the homeless drug addicts in their cities with a fury they certainly couldn’t muster in 2020 in the days of the CHAZ etc. In 2020, the hard left ran roughshod over the ‘center’ because Trump was in power and this was ‘the resistance’ and centrists had zero message other than total acquiescence to the activist fringe plan.

In 2023 there’s a much more firm divide between the ‘center left’ and the activist left. That’s because of higher crime rates, illegal immigration now affecting liberal cities like NYC in a more major way, homeless crime spirally out of control and - of course - the fact that Biden is in power. It’s in this climate that we see the divide between ‘center left’ and ‘far left’ (or activist left) on Israel and Gaza. The more conservative wing of the Democratic aligned movement has reasserted itself - Biden celebrating Columbus Day (cancelled by activists in 2020) is one example. By contrast the more radical student/activist fringe doesn’t seem to have moderated its message and is similarly zealous on Palestine as it was on BLM.

Thanks for the detailed reply. Actually I did consider all that; that's what I was referring to when mentioning "cynical and mundane interpretations". No offense meant, but that's what they are.

I'll only nitpick on two issues. As far as I know, it's indeed true that 'in the last three years violent crime has surged upward in major cities', but this trend didn't start in 2020 (although it did escalate after that) but much earlier, before the Trump presidency, in fact, around 2012-15. And the same applies to the problems with the mentally ill homeless, I'm sure.

What makes you say it started pre-Trump?

I’m having some trouble with their tool, but the BJS data gives me the impression we still haven’t gotten back to 2012 levels.

The U.S. murder rate reached a low in 2014 and has increased by 75% since (as of 2021 - probably higher now).

Any other crime data is a joke. Do you think crime-ridden cities like San Francisco and Baltimore are accurately tallying anything that's not murder? And even if they did, crime reporting tools like the ones offered by the FBI have been gimped since Biden took over.

Given what we know about murder, and how people who commit murders tend to have also committed a litany of other violent crimes, the murder rate is best proxy for the overall crime rate we have. If anything, it undersells the problem as advances in medical care turn would-be murder victims into attempted murder victims.

The homicide rate in ‘shithole’ cities rose since 2014, but in NYC (America’s first city) declined to 2018/2019 before shooting up.

crime-ridden cities like San Francisco and Baltimore

SF's murder rate is about 1/9 that of Baltimore and lower than that of Dallas, Houston, Cincinnati and most other major cities other than NYC.

Thanks, that’s exactly what I was looking for. I was really frustrated by the BJS toolset, which I am sure contains that information. It’s also supposed to have the FBI’s murder data, but really didn’t want to display it to me.

As for the accuracy of non-murder crimes, I don’t know why we should expect a bias to change in any particular year. I could rationalize a dip, but it’d be post-hoc.

If you have X murder and Y petty thefts, an increase in X will likely reduce policing re petty thefts. So assuming resources are constant increased murders would likely lead to less reporting of petty thefts.

The murder rate has actually decreased since 2021.

I remember that Trump brought up the rising violent crime rate as an issue during the campaign, and liberals were denying it out of hand. Earlier, in 2014 and 2015, I've seen articles on the issue, and there were people debating whether it can be indeed explained by the Ferguson effect or not.

Sure, but was he right?

As far as i know, yes.

I'll only nitpick on two issues. As far as I know, it's indeed true that 'in the last three years violent crime has surged upward in major cities', but this trend didn't start in 2020 (although it did escalate after that) but much earlier, before the Trump presidency, in fact, around 2012-15.

At least where I’m from in New York, it really was 2020 when violent crime rose after a very long, mostly steady decline.

That may very well be true. I'm talking about the national rate of violent crime.

Do you have any hard numbers to back that claim?

No, because I don't have the habit of saving the URL of articles I read in a database in case someone asks me for the source on an online form 8 years later.

Murder rate reached a local minimum in 2014. Increased 75% since.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=US

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