naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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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.
How many Jews feel like this now? Glad you all are feeling how I’ve felt for a few years that your just an ethnic white now and hopefully we can ally. Eisman from the Big Short (funny how Jews pop up in any event) says all his family went to UPenn and UPenn is dead to them now.
I said a week or two ago if the Jews picked some random school like Eastern Kentucky it would be a top 5-10 school in a generation.
Well I made the comment on purpose. Because Jews really do pop up everywhere despite their small numbers. I do it because they are an important people who contribute to civilization.
Are they having enough kids, and willing to spend enough money, that their influence can be applied to another school?
Why isn't yeshiva university considered a top school then, when it's mostly Jewish? Is it because they get the third tier, orthodox Jews, and not the first tier IQ ashkanazi secular Jews?
Prestige comes from rankings ie research ie faculty. In many STEM (and other) fields top departments are already substantially Jewish. Jewish parents sending their kids to Yeshiva University instead of Harvard won’t affect rankings, if any YU grad wants to go into academia at the top level they’ll go to Princeton or MIT or whatever for postgrad (if they can), and then if they’re good they’ll stay or move to a similar university. Very few YU grads go into academia.
For Jewish schools to poach the best Jewish faculty from the Ivies you’d need an overt, explicit purge of Jewish faculty from Harvard etc which just isn’t likely.
The list of top universities in 1960 is substantially the same as it is today.
Lots of places have tried to improve their rankings but it doesn't seem to work. Back in ancient times, I'm pretty sure Nebraska or some random school offered me a full ride based on my PSAT score. This strategy to recruit high-IQ students clearly didn't move the needle for them.
It’s because HYPS and the tier below schools always make sure to take the absolute best even as they also make sure to take donors’/board members’ kids and the requisite diversity intake.
So if normally the top 0.3% of graduating high schoolers would go to that tier of college under a purely meritocratic system, now only the top 0.1% go (math and physics olympiad winners etc) and so do those other groups. But because IQ has a very long tail, skimming off only the top 0.1% instead of 0.3% still means they get most of the best people - even if the system isn’t ‘fair’.
That would work if their product was education. I don't think a Harvard education is worth 200K more than free education. Now the signaling value (even if you get fired from every job you subsequently get for incompetence) and "I went to Harvard" card that you have for the rest of your life, 200K is probably a deal for that.
So he's angry that a certain number of protestors held up signs stating, "Free Palestine from the river to the sea," and now he wants to take his ball and go home?
I always thought it was ultra cringe to have these rando finance guys’ names plastered over everything in academia, which should be above that. Hopefully schools learn their lesson and stop bothering with these clowns.
IDF arrived to the center of Gaza city. Both sides are surprised in a kind of mirror image. Hamas from how relatively Hamas defense lines were penetrated snd collapsed IDF because the advance was relatively fast and not too many casualties, which are in Gaza around 30.
I don’t think it is super significant that some Jews in Academia are anti-Zionist if the whole infrastructure of the religion is Zionist. If you consider yourself a practicing Jew and are not a Karaite, the odds are that you participate in and pay a membership to a synagogue which promotes Zionism, and the wealthier Jews of that synagogue spend money on various Zionist associations like the World Zionist Organization. Even the liberal Reform Judaism “views a Jewish, Zionist, democratic and secure State of Israel to be the expression of the common responsibility of the Jewish people for its continuity and future.” Zionism is entrenched in non-Haredi Judaism. The idea that Judaism is merely a religious community and does not have nationalistic or political aspirations a la Zionism is actually criticized by major Jewish publications,
Initially, Reform Jewry rejected peoplehood and Palestine. America’s Reform rabbis distorted Jewish history and ideology — anticipating today’s ultra-ultra-Orthodox Jews — in their 1885 Pittsburgh Platform when they declared: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.”
Obviously, Jews as a whole are not “complicit” in Zionism in the sense that they bear moral responsibility and/or blame. Just like not every American in the South was complicit in slavery, not every Catholic complicit in Vatican scandals, not every German complicit in WWII. But the relationship between mainstream institutional Judaism and Zionism is still a little troubling IMO and it can’t be ameliorated with a simple “there are anti-Zionist Jews in academia”.
I don’t see it as anything other than a truth of the religion. You cannot read very far into the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible without hitting a verse (and it doesn’t matter much which book you read) that’s talking about Jews and “the land”. It’s simply part of how Judaism works, and you’d have to twist things quite a bit to create a Judaism that doesn’t have some version of Zionism in it. Judaism is an unusual religion in the modern world because of it being an ethnic religion tied to the land of Israel or Palestine. Outside of some very odd survivals of Native American religions (Lakota and the Black Hills for example) there just aren’t that many religious land claims out there.
Most of the rest of the world religions are faith based and missionary. Christian and Muslim are what they are not because of ethnic ancestry or connection to a place, but because they share a creed. Buddhism is a practice. Hinduism is a practice more or less. I think it’s hard for outsiders to understand the Zionist idea simply because it’s alien to what most of the rest of us have as a religious experience.
Going to my other example, the Lakota aren’t actively trying to retake the black hills because they’re not realistically able to. Until Palestine became part of the British Empire, there was no chance of retaking it.
True, but the project wasn’t a continuation of some ancient or medieval movement. I’m not an expert, but I believe the established view was that they would return to the promised land under the leadership of the messiah, conceived in religious and eschatological rather than practical terms. The Zionist movement that eventually produced the state of Israel arose in the same post-French revolution context as other European nationalisms of the era (e.g., Croatian, Bulgarian, Greek, Polish (based on all of what we would now call Poles considered as a whole people rather than on the political ‘nation’ of Poles in the medieval/early modern sense (which only referred to the nobility)). Having a pre-existing holy book that promised them a specific territory certainly has had its effects, but the movement was a break from the traditional Jewish religion rather than a linear development.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
jewdefender 6mo ago
Gonna drop a note here for transparency. This is not an official warning to @jewdefender, since you aren't really breaking any rules here (yet), but I want you (and your friends) to understand something:
I see you.
What do I mean by that? You got reported as follows: "hey fellow kids those white nationalists (which I'm totally not) are so wrong, aren't they?"
Which I found amusing and insightful because it is exactly what I thought the moment this new "jewdefender" alt started posting.
Dude. I am not fooled. I was never fooled. We let you do this because, well, Zorba doesn't want us witch-hunting and considers false positives worse than false negatives, and I mostly agree, and even a transparent alt can post interesting content. So fine, we'll let you keep wearing the mask until it slips. And probably even then, because as we keep pointing out, it's not being "outside the Overton Window" that gets people in trouble, it's being obnoxious, disingenuous, or belligerent about it. (Right now you're only one of those.)
But for all the people who report and DM me asking why we let an obvious troll troll, well, because. But just because we don't play whack-a-mole doesn't mean we're stupid. Just wanted you to know this.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
jewdefender 6mo ago
I'll concede there is a small chance I'm wrong. I doubt it, but as I said, you aren't going to be banned for pretending to be a "jewdefender" while repeatedly posting white nationalist links and arguments supposedly for the purposes of refuting them. If you are who you claim to be, then no harm, no foul.
You are comically well informed about Nazi's and anti-Jewish groups. It is not typical to be very well informed about people you disagree with. It happens only in a few circumstances. If the people you disagree with have saturated the media, and you can't help but know their positions, faces, and strongholds. Almost anyone that is politically aware knows the standard positions of the Republican and Democratic parties. But to know the names, articles, and websites of the Greens, Libertarians, or Communists, it usually means you are one of them.
You pattern match the behavior of people with forbidden views. You delete all your old posts. You have an isolated account that only deals on this single topic and you never say anything personally identifiable. That is not the behavior of someone unafraid to have their posts connected with a real identity. And I don't buy the "I'm afraid I will be targetted by violent Nazis for the things I say." You barely say anything controversial against them, at most you basically say "I disagree with them". But nearly everyone does. So if they wanted to go violently kill people who disagree with them, they could just walk into any public place. If they wanted to go after a powerful target, it wouldn't be you, it would be an actual politician or business person.
You platform Nazi positions. You go and read their stuff and then share it here. I can't describe how much of a disconnect that is with most "anti-nazis". As a forum and formerly a subreddit, our main complaint from people has always been that we provide a platform for real Nazis. The best way to describe how weird this is: we find it far more plausible that you are an actual Nazi, then you are an anti-nazi that wants to platform their views. Nazis are rare enough to begin with, the fact that we have two here is probably mostly a result of them being bounced off of just about every other online non-nazi forum out there.
To other readers this might beg the question 'why are you telling them all the signs that they are a troll'. In short, I'd like better quality trolls. To expand on that, this is a discussion forum that benefits from unique viewpoints. Its a place for people to work through ideas and sometimes current events with those that they strongly disagree. A good user brings good discussion and has interesting views. A perfectly disguised troll brings good discussion and has interesting views. The only difference in the amount of good they bring is that the good user might actually be enjoying their experience, a perfectly disguised troll is ... well they might be enjoying their time too, so maybe there is no difference. At worst they are just wasting their own time.
An imperfect troll that sits in the uncanny valley of belief systems, as you do, kinda breaks the illusion for everyone. They think "maybe this user is just uniquely bad at disguising their true viewpoints, and all the weird people I thought I was talking to are all fakes".
Oh for fuck’s sake, he’s still deleting his posts? Why do you keep tolerating this? Aside from the damage to the readability of the sub, it leaves no doubt as to who he is, there is no meaningful chance of a false positive here.
Do new users know not to delete posts? I had assumed JewDefender was someone financially / personally invested in, well, defending Jews on online forums, much like we had that one user who coincidentally would post whenever a certain Eastern European nation came up. In this case, deleting old irrelevant posts hardens their identity. I assume this happens not infrequently in online discourse. For some reason themotte comes in really high on google search results when you plug in a phrase of someone’s post. If this is case, which is mere conjecture and not accusation, I’m personally fine with it provided they make good arguments and don’t spam.
I’m not going to waste my time presenting the false flag case again. I’ve done it enough previous times, the mods have done it in this very thread. It’s absolutely beyond doubt, but it doesn’t matter. Just ban him for deleting. Whatever he is, he will then make another alt, and at least this one won’t delete. Small mercies.
While I am not an anti-Semite and could reasonably be described as mildly philo-Semitic, goddamn this kind of thing looks terrible from the perspective of anyone that isn't particularly Islam-friendly. To be blunt about it, I don't like Islam and wish there had never been any Muslim immigrants to Western nations. To the extent that Muslim immigration to Western nations is tolerable, it's the extent to which those Muslims practice a liberalized, watered-down form of Islam that is barely recognizable as anything other than generic monotheism with a couple idiosyncrasies of diet thrown in. Having places with women in beekeeper outfits everywhere sucks and I think most Americans and Brits that are being bluntly honest about the matter agree.
Of course, saying that out loud plays terribly, because somehow we decided that "Islamophobia" is a sin. Unless, apparently, you're Jewish, in which case you're able to write things like the above. Saying, "how are Brits supposed to live with this?" is off the table, but catering to the tiny segment of British Jews, that is an important consideration when it comes to whether having a bunch of jihad enthusiasts in London is a bad idea. If someone like me that likes Jews, likes Israel, and basically agrees with the claim in the Tweet finds this style of thinking grating, I'd wager that the anti-Semites would be just about apoplectic.
My world-renowned and extremely rigorous vibe analysis says he is literally one of the woke even now, and this entire ordeal has barely shaken his faith in the SocJus movement that I am retarded and fell for an obvious troll.
Whether it's his fault or not is orthogonal to the point that it sucks that saying, "this sucks for Jews" is fine, but saying, "this sucks for Brits" isn't.
You only found out now that the identity of the victim or of the speaker matters more to the woke than the facts or the content of the speech? Why is it grating or apoplexy-inducing to have people agree with you?
I quickly went through his twitter (my god, is this woke/girlbossy style tiresome).
But aside from the usual profession of faith
I am a gay Jew. I am a Zionist. I am progressive. I believe in fighting with & for other oppressed groups. But... I feel betrayed by the progressive world’s antisemitism & I am furious. But still... I won’t stop believing in progressive values. I won’t stop fighting.
2:27 PM · Dec 31, 2019
He seems very very focused on antisemitism, especially from other progressives. I didn’t see any condamnation of ‘white’ islamophobia.
Almost all of my experiences with antisemitism have been from the left. My first relationship was ruined by it. My university career was ruined by it. Friendships have been ruined by it. I have been traumatised & scarred by it. Do not tell me it isn't real.
You're right, I should have explicitly stated that I was referring to "Islamophobia" being unacceptable in liberal circles and coding as a hard-right sentiment. The JP columnist I linked to is very much on the broader left, and I suppose I still think of that set as my ingroup.
And every single one of those people was blasted as racist, and throttled by Big Tech. How exactly do you expect your list to prove that what they were saying was widely seen as acceptable by the establishment?
Nigel Farage is a frequent guest on a major television network, Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh reached tens of millions of people per year with no interruption, Trump, irrespective of Big Tech "throttling", is given non-stop coverage by every news agency in the world.
The fact that they're popular doesn't change the fact that what they're saying is seen as outside the bounds of acceptable discourse by the establishment. If they are within said bounds, then Big Tech trying to limit their reach should be a national, or international scandal.
I don't know what you mean by the "establishment", but whatever that means, it has nothing to do with my argument, which is that collectively these people are able to reach huge audiences with very little to impede them.
The fact that they're able to reach their audience has nothing to do with the argument that what they're saying is seen as unacceptable in polite discourse, as opposed to a Jewish person saying literally the same thing.
Sure, anyone is free to call them racist. I think some of them might be. What's that got to do with anything?
If the cries of "racist" were limited to nobodies on the internet, no one would care. The problem is that they come from every respectable institution that claims to be neutral, only explicitly right-wing institutions don't do it. It is then a bit rich to hear the exact same complaint they were making from people calling them racist all this time.
I didn't investigate, I assume it'll be the mixed bag that a lot of these protests are, with some combination of people that would say they're just pro-Palestinian and others being more hardcore.
To steelman, the Jerusalem Post columnist is less responding to "pro-Palestine marches", but what he sees as specifically pro-Hamas and often pro-October 7th protests. It's a little less easy to provide examples in the United Kingdom, given the officially-steep punishments for support of Hamas or violence, but to everyone's non-surprise enforcement is a more complex matter and explicit support of Hamas, intifada, or generally "from river to sea" style not-very-deniable stuff were supposedly pretty common. And the head of police decided that the police shouldn't be making charges for hate crimes acts where it's political or anything.
To break that steelman, even that has been a sin to other alliances and allegiances. Reacting to "KillAllMen" or "EndWhiteness" or Solanas fangirling or the like hasn't been acceptable in mainstream discourse for literally a decade, if not longer. For whatever these laws and rules and norms that the Post author wants to bring down might have claimed equal protection and equal restriction to all, in practice they exist to protect 'the powerless', where this is defined in some coincidentally very political directions.
So in many ways, it's 'just' that Freeman is surprised to find that groups he likes are on the other side of that scale for once. And there's certainly people for whom that's a cutting criticism, not just of their current arguments but their entire philosophy -- Chemerinsky is the punching-bag du jour, as he's provided long and significant philosophical support and institutional inaction -- but it's not clear Freeman, specifically, is a particularly central example of that set. He's no universalist hero who complained when other people's ox were getting gored, don't get me wrong, but neither was he waiting until this moment to notice that his group was often pushed to the outside.
Think they may do a couple more big raids like this and then call it a day. Saves a tiny amount of face for the government saying they were going to go in and destroy Hamas but isn’t an actual occupation which “ex-IDF” and “ex-Mossad” types are now openly briefing the Israeli and Western press as a suicidal move.
Ex-PM Bennett recently suggested that the IDF should cut off northern Gaza and then just keep it under siege until Hamas runs out of supplies in its tunnels, which would take months to years.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
2rafa 6mo ago
Man Israel was the last country I'd have expected to wuss out under globohomo pressure. Just go in, take control and make it known to the Palestinians that there is nothing they can ever do which would make the Israelis leave, so they better get used to a life with the Jews in charge (this is equivalent to removing your steering wheel and throwing it away in a game of Chicken) where any violence will get you branded as a hooligan/lout in the eyes of the state and treated appropriately. Give it 2 generations of this + a generous dose of the alkahest of modernity and what remains of the palestinians will be little different to low human capital occidentals, still a burden on society but by and large placated like your average domesticated westerner.
Some ritual humbling may be a more humane solution than just violence. Forbid the building and repairing of mosques and any religious noise, special tax, obligatory bowing when they pass a jew on the street...
I'd have expected to wuss out under globohomo pressure
The end of the end of history may have been greatly exaggerated. Even the one militarist ethonationalist state Westerners can vicariously live through is getting cucked.
and make it known to the Palestinians that there is nothing they can ever do which would make the Israelis leave, so they better get used to a life with the Jews in charge
If Israel cannot easily go into Gaza after Jews were murdered and raped on live TV, they're not going to be able to do what it takes to "convince" Palestinians (or at least Hamas) to "get over it".
But I can see an occupation quickly convincing Israel it isn't worth it, while convincing (more) Muslims that it is very much is to fight Israel.
Even the one militarist ethonationalist state Westerners can vicariously live through is getting cucked.
I think most westerners who are ethnonationalists don't really have a positive view of Israel. It isn't hard to understand why, because the existence of organisations like AIPAC and the actions of people like Frank Lowy are the sort of thing they're violently and diametrically opposed to. I don't spend much time in those circles, but a quick glance at the ethnonationalist right at the moment reveals a lot of responses to the conflict in the vein of "Alex_Jones_sipping_champagne.gif"
This would be a really effective strategy if Israel existed in an orbiting space colony or a wizard-created demiplane. Unfortunately we don't live in a world with DnD wizards, which means Israel has to exist in the real world, and this means that it has to exist with a bunch of neighbours as well. Israel absolutely has a lot of ways to permanently solve the Palestinian "problem" (even phrasing it like that feels uncomfortable to me), but there aren't many solutions that won't immediately create a larger problem (the reaction from the broader international community).
There are only couple of ways to deal with tunnels with acceptable casualties.
Flood them. Gas them. Blow their entrances. Start sending a shitload of automated roombas that carry grenades inside. All while you forfeit the hostages and hope hamas are honorable enough to give them a quick and clean death and not go pro streamed flayings, impalements and crucifixions.
You don't raelly need the roombas though, just knowing what's out there is usually good enough.
Israel is supposedly throwing smoke charges inside, sealing them, and then bombing all places where the smoke starts coming out.
They don't seem to care at all about going down there, killing people inside is sufficient for them.
How practical are these things for navigating tunnels? I imagine you'd need a pretty good operator not to crash into walls in such an unfamiliar and cramped setting, and who knows how many of those they have, along with the crews required to maintain the equipment and protect the operator so he doesn't get attacked (I imagine the ping, the unreliable infrastructure during battle, and the blocking nature of tunnels makes it so that drone operators need to be somewhat close to the drones). And logistically, even if they cost just $500 each, do they have sheer shipping ability to keep replenishing them as quickly as they get destroyed?
The previous round of Hamas atrocities haven't reduced the membership of Hamas's university fan clubs, so why would a new round of atrocities be any different?
We're talking about justification for killing more innocents to get at Hamas, not justification for a fictional surgical operation that kills only Hamas. After the initial Hamas raid, people clearly thought that the number of Palestinian civilians that can be killed and cityscapes that can be devastated in the process of exacting revenge is not zero; only recently has public opinion started turning towards "that was too much". Yet, we clearly haven't hit the absolute ceiling of how much collateral damage the public thinks could ever be acceptable; see WW2 or even ISIS in Mosul. Presumably if Hamas got closer to ISIS or Hitler in terms of total volume of achievements that piss off the Western public, there would be room for the public to tolerate more destruction of Gaza in return, up to the point of accepting literal glassing.
There's been some combat, mass arrests, and rocket strikes/counterstrikes, but Arabic Wikipedia -- which I will caution I trust not in the slightest (if you think American wikipedia is shameless propaganda...), and only provide as higher-end estimate -- lists an estimated 100 West Bank Palestinian fatalities since October 7th. Al-Jazeera (ditto!) says 110ish and highlights a lot of Palestine Islamic Jihad and a Hamas fighters in a randomly-selected instance.
Fatah's claimed official support for a general uprising and specifically to provide Gaza Palestinians medical aid, but the text is weirdly less bloodthirsty (repeat above disclaimer, but going the other valiance) than a lot of college campuses, damning with faint praise as that might be; whether this reflects translators rephrasing matters for public consumption, the organization not wanting to tall poppy themselves, or a result Fatah's long-lasting tension with Hamas (Hamas has gone out of its way to kill Fatah officials, Abbas keeps fucking with Presidential election dates), or some other thing, I dunno. On the other direction, Abbas has a pretty explicit disavowal of attacks focusing on civilians on Twitter... in English... for a couple days... which limits how much that could be read as intended for internal read.
What's going on in the West Bank right now? I haven't seen much coverage of it.
Settlers going on rampage - destroying crops, burning houses, evicting whole Palestinian villages at gunpoint (yes, unlike Israelis in Israel proper, these hilltop guys are heavily armed and unlike Gaza, Palestinians in West Bank are thoroughly disarmed).
Lots of coverage, but you have to dig up into Arabic sources to find it.
Are their guns legal? Are they formed into officially sanctioned militias or does the government just tacitly encourage it while looking the other way?
The latter. "It's not technically Israeli land, it's some no-man's land, so we won't police what our citizens do there, but we will protect them from harm".
If true, that really sucks for the people in the West Bank.
It sounds like true anarcho-tyranny. "People can harm you with impunity, but if you fight back, the government will punish you".
The limited examples of anarcho-tyranny which happen in progressive U.S. cities make my blood boil. I can't imagine how bad it would be in Palestine, where the Palestinians have no leafy suburbs to retreat to.
Damn. Brutal if true, and it feels plausible, given the incentives. Still, I’d like to see something more conclusive than a tweet about “dear friends” who are totally getting rounded up by the gestapo.
At least some settler and IDF bad action is moderately well-supported by the evidence (and shouldn't be very surprising; Price Taggers tend to be assholes). I think Susiya and Masafer Yatta (note: both these pieces are pre-Oct 7th) are more about the broader Area C clusterfuck, but there's a lot of Well-Respected Reporters giving pretty strong claims of Area C places doing variants of a commanded evacuation followed by invasive search, and I could absolutely believe the IDF and/or COGAT is doing it to fuck with them.
Some of this fuckery has escalated to death (contrast, with the caveat that I expect neither of these is giving a good factual analysis, though the jpost one seems like it's damning enough with faint praise that you don't need to by the AJZ version).
It's just an escalation of existing problems, rather than a change in type.
It seems like common sense but we’ve now both in the Ukraine War, Armenian-Azerbaijan War and now in Israel, militaries seem to be convinced that tanks are fine by themselves and as a result are sitting ducks for infantry with anti-tanks weapons.
What’s going on? Why do militaries make such a dumb mistake again and again? Is there something I’m missing?
Israeli tanks have APS like Trophy that in theory mitigates a lot of the risk from RPGs.
Their vehicles are also designed to ensure crew safety above all else, even after a disabling hit.
Combining this with their low appetite for loss of human life, it might make sense to minimize the inevitable infantry casualties from dismounts accompanying vehicles by sending them in solo. Might, I have no specific insight into the outcomes of their doctrine, but for all the footage Hamas releases of close quarters RPG hits on such vehicles, footage of the burning wreckage in the aftermath seems lacking.
At the end of the day, there's no good way of clearing an urban hellhole, short of nuking it.
Because infantry can't run this fast and mechanized infantry is vulnerable to the same anti-tank weapons. Combined arms are hard. Even the US will struggle if you take away its CAS and artillery support.
You need to send your infantry forward so they can take out anti-tank weapons, but your tanks must be close enough behind that they can take out anti-infantry weapons that your infantry will encounter. Or your infantry has to have artillery support on call, which is vulnerable to counter-battery fire.
I'm talking about regular land warfare, sending tanks into cities that haven't been completely levelled is just wasting them.
So, this might belong in the CWR, but realistically- how much of the heightened red tribe support for Israel is wish fulfillment and how much of it is from other factors(Islamophobia, superstitious fear of opposing Israel, dislike of the people siding with Palestinians, lack of concern over settler colonialism and a general principle granting states the right of self defense, genuine pro-democracy sentiment, etc).
Let's get the elephant in the living room out of the way first- at least some portion of evangelicals really do believe we have a duty to support Israel(the state) out of something something biblical end times prophecy. Red tribers in general are likely to see actual-religious evangelicals as moral exemplars even if they don't intend on waking up that early on Sundays, but IME the way that filters down, even to the ones that go to church, is usually more "God will punish us for not intervening if Israel falls" and less actual love of Israel. This tends to be compounded by Israel's winning record; if you're looking for confirmation that there's some kind of curse inherent in opposing the state of Israel, well...
Islamophobia is probably also a factor. Yes, Christians in the region are usually not pro-Israel partisans, but the vast majority of Israel's active opponents are Muslim, and the Palestinian authority doesn't treat Christians very well(certainly not as well as Israel does). Also lots of them don't know about the opinions of middle eastern Christians, or that these are longstanding groups of locals as opposed to one or two converts from American or British missionaries.
But all that being said, the red tribe just doesn't understand why settler colonialism is supposed to be so evil, most of them don't know what a nakba is and see it as "Jews bought the land from its rightful owners, fair and square. Then the Muslims didn't like that, started a civil war, they lost and got kicked out." which is not a story that makes the red tribe think of Israel as illegitimate, and from the perspective of "Israel is legitimately established", there might have been some excesses but self defense describes most of what it did and has done. There is a difference between "we support them because they're morally justified" and "we support them because we wish we could do what they do".
Plus, Israel is a US ally. They certainly put their own interests first, but that's to be expected. Israel certainly keeps a lid on, say, Syrian and Iranian influence in a way that's very convenient for the GAE and probably worth the USS Liberty.
how much of the heightened red tribe support for Israel
Is there heightened red tribe support? If anything it seems a little less with Tucker pulling some to America First. As you note evangelicals have been very pro Israel for decades.
Also, not to put too fine a point on it: Israel is huhWight.
Even if most Israelis aren't white racially, it is a white post colonial European state culturally. Ingroup loyalty puts it's finger on the balance, so if you aren't sure what's going on/ don't care that much, the default position is to support team most-like-you.
's why absent any knowledge about the region, most Americans and Europeans feel better about Singapore than eg New Guinee: Even if Singapore isn't western, it's close enough for horseshoes and international diplomacy.
I think there's a lot of weight in just the fact that most internationally-visible Israelis (officials, reporters, etc) are fluent English speakers and often give press conferences in (pretty good) English. I expect the trifecta of "fluent in English", "white-appearing" and "culturally western/European-coded" is enough on its own to make the average American red-triber (maybe the average American in general?) start off somewhat sympathetic to you.
Incidentally, I learned just now (while double-checking my kneejerk "it seems like most Israelis speak decent English" assumption) that 20% of Israelis are fluent in Russian, and Russian is by a good margin the most popular non-official language spoken in Israel, not English. (Arabic and Hebrew are official.) Apparently that's entirely because of Jewish exodus from the USSR from the 1970s to the late 90s. Not being familiar with that demographic history, I don't even think I would've expected Russian to be in the top 10.
other factors(Islamophobia, superstitious fear of opposing Israel, dislike of the people siding with Palestinians, lack of concern over settler colonialism and a general principle granting states the right of self defense, genuine pro-democracy sentiment, etc).
Boy, this summary sure makes me think that you've given a particularly charitable analysis of motivations. Let's go get a big drink of water and:
Red tribers in general are likely to see actual-religious evangelicals as moral exemplars even if they don't intend on waking up that early on Sundays, but IME the way that filters down, even to the ones that go to church, is usually more "God will punish us for not intervening if Israel falls" and less actual love of Israel.
most of them don't know what a nakba
Would you actually find it useful to see a steelman, or is that not really the point, here?
I will note that at least two dozen people in my life have gotten in touch with me to let me know that I need to get right with God because this conflict in Israel is a direct sign of the end times. I'm never sure how to feel about that, prophecy and free will being complicated concepts to square together. What's the value of supporting Israel if the net outcome is already preordained?
So based off my own unscientific sample, it seems that evangelicals think things go a little deeper than that.
It seems like most Israel supporters have told me that Israel falling would mean bad times for the countries that opposed it, but the reasons varied from ‘bring about the end times directly’ to ‘divine punishment’.
A number of Evangelicals consider Genesis 12:3 to be significant guidance on the issue. Option A = blessed by God. Option B = cursed by God. Make your own choices as you see fit, but do consider the remarkable lack of subtlety in the options presented.
Reality may certainly be described by a variety of interpretations, but I think most would agree that many Palestinians do not like Israel very much, and frequently act on that opinion. Also, Gaza seems like a poor place to live, given most alternatives. Genesis 12:3 is one way of connecting those observations.
I've been reading a lot about "humanitarian aid" sent into Gaza (by now hundreds of trucks). Does anybody know any source that lists what exactly is being sent? Like this amount of flour, this amount of insulin, this amount of water, etc.? The corporate press is being its usual useless self, resorting to facts only when they absolutely have no other choice, but maybe somebody knows some more obscure, but useful publication, that track what and how many is being sent?
International news organisation Reuters denied on Thursday any suggestion it had prior knowledge of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians and soldiers, in a statement responding to a report by media advocacy group HonestReporting.
"We are aware of a report by HonestReporting and accusations made against two freelance photographers who contributed to Reuters coverage of the Oct. 7 attack," Reuters said. "Reuters categorically denies that it had prior knowledge of the attack or that we embedded journalists with Hamas on Oct 7.
"Reuters acquired photographs from two Gaza-based freelance photographers who were at the border on the morning of Oct. 7, with whom it did not have a prior relationship. The photographs published by Reuters were taken two hours after Hamas fired rockets across southern Israel and more than 45 minutes after Israel said gunmen had crossed the border. "Reuters staff journalists were not on the ground at the locations referred to in the HonestReporting article."
In case you're thinking that 'My staff reporters were not involved in planning or executing a mass murder of civilians' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt", you're not alone. The HonestReporting summary if anything manages to undersell it, which is quite an accomplishment for a news story that involves the phrase 'lynch mob': people have since found on a photographer's facebook page a video of the man on a motorbike where the camera-holder or one of the other riders waves a grenade in-hand.
Journalistic ethics are a hard problem, and a harder one during wartime. It's typical for wartime embeds with conventional military forces to submit to often-onerous restrictions, sometimes to the point of requiring all releases to undergo pre-publication review (which should raise a number of Constitutional questions in the United States but mostly doesn't). There was a pretty major controversy in the mid-2000s after a Paris Match reporting team was on-scene at a missile strike targeting a mail carrier aircraft (Vernier-Palliez claimed that the militants had "set them up" and had no idea that they were going to commit a violent attack... though I think her claimed surprise is more than a little self-serving). And 'journalism' that's really just repackaged press releases from active members of a particular side are common enough outside of combat; the rewards are, if anything, simply greater for politics-by-other-means.
On the other hand, if your war reporting is little more than repackaged press releases from a group that slaughtered and raped civilians, while the reporting papers over all of that, this raises more than a few questions for that reporting's accuracy, as critics of journalists embedded with the IDF have long held. And that doesn't seem to be sinking in, here:
That'd be the guy with the grenade and cheerful embrace from Hamas leadership; CNN remains certain, among other things, that this summary is tots accurate and that the photographer's ties to Hamas' military arm tots don't leave any room for suspicion. Mahmud's main remaining photos on the AP database have at least been corrected to note that the dead 'Israeli soldier' was in fact a pacifist Israeli-German dual-citizen.
Okay, but these people weren't exactly weekly bylines. Indeed, they're just one of countless on-the-ground randos that various press agencies sent money and lent legitimacy. They're also just the ones dumb enough and unlucky enough to get caught, but let's leave that aside for now. One bit of that legitimacy is people believing the repackaged press releases, but a deeper one is the ability to wear and mark press credentials, a matter that has historically been considered worth protecting. There's even been clear cases where the IDF has wrongly killed journalists, and been criticized at length for it.
That just became far more difficult to maintain as a norm.
So, there was some talk in this thread (or the previous one) about why the Israel/Palestine issue is such a big one in progressive circles, as opposed to country x, y, or z. Well, there were some decent historical and cultural explanations, I think one reason that really didn't get brought up is because there's actual disagreement within the wider left-leaning coalition is why there's more fire, on both sides.
So, as an actual progressive Democratic partisan, let me explain a bit.
Putting aside actual tankies or the 11 Lieberman Democrats left, if you put the median Bernie & the median Biden primary voter in 2020, and had them talk foreign policy, there would be wide agreement - Iraq was a mistake, we were in Afghanistan too long, Russia is bad and Ukraine needs our defense, but American foreign policy has been too hawkish in general, and so on. So, there's no spice, outside of the occasional Twitter dunk of somebody who had a bad take on Iraq in 2004, but even that's kind of hackish and old news to most Democratic voters at this point.
But, there would be actual disagreement on Israel & Palestine, especially if both sides were intelligent median voters because it's an actual complicated issue. At the moment, polling shows the median Democratic voter view is along the lines of, "the Israeli government are a-holes, Hamas is terrible, and the hostages need to be released, but Jesus, the IDF seems to be going overboard on this, and oh yeah, the surrounding governments are full of instigators."
Now, the more progressive voter would be more harsh on the Israeli government, more friendly to the Palestinian population, and so on, but the polling that showed 50/50 support for Israel vs Hamas among younger voters, was likely bad polling. The reason why Democratic views used to be more pro-Israel, is because the Israeli population used to reflect a more liberal view of the conflict, and now it really doesn't, plus wider changes in the makeup of the Democratic coalition.
Finally, the "but Palestinians have bad views on x, why do you support them," is a bad argument, because as progressives, we believe even terrible have the right to vote, and self-government. Only letting people with the right views (or the right amount of land ownership) is the reactionary view. Now, if said Palestinian government passes anti-LGBT laws or whatever, then we'll treat them like we do other countries with no leverage on us - sanctions and such until they embrace the loving arms of deviancy, or whatever.
In the long run, if this is all old news by Election Day 2024, it'll likely be forgotten, and more importantly, the vast majority of even young SJW left-wing Democratic voters are self-centered voters, like 95% of all voters, and will be reminded that Trump wants to put more reactionaries on the court, cut taxes for rich people, limit trans right, etc, make student loan payments higher, et al, and vote accordingly. I'd make a $1 bet w/ anybody here, that as long as the Israeli situation is basically back to some form of status quo, there will be no real movement of the youth vote, or a lack of turnout, beyond the lack of turnout there always is.
After all, Gretchen Whitmer actually lost ground among Muslim voters in 2022 in her re-election campaign (probably due to LGBT issues), but won by wider margin. Which is the only real trouble spot for the Biden team in 2024, since they literally do not care if some college-educated 2nd gen Muslim immigrant in Los Angeles doesn't vote.
Standard Disclaimer: Yes, lots of people are dumb, and will have simple reasons, and weird views.
The reason why Democratic views used to be more pro-Israel, is because the Israeli population used to reflect a more liberal view of the conflict, and now it really doesn't
Erm, what? What timeframe are you talking about? Israel has been moving towards more conciliatory and liberal view of the conflict for decades now. It evacuated Gaza in 2005 (forcibly uprooting many Jewish communities) and tolerates Hamas shelling the southern cities for 18 years since, with only sporadic limited response carefully calculated to punish Hamas, but not endanger their rule. One of the main reason of the current catastrophe is that Israel got so immersed in the liberal concept of "peace is inevitable, Hamas is just representing the last throes of retrogrades that can not tolerate the inevitable coming of peace, but they are weak and dying off" - that's why such thing as "peace festival" on the border with Gaza with virtually no protection beyond token security guards meant to handle people who got over their norm of mind-altering substances - became possible. That's why most of the smaller towns and villages had no armed guards and had weapons locked up - something one couldn't imagine in the vicinity of Gaza some years ago, before "peace process". Israel has been moving to the liberal side since early 90s, at least, and the more they moved there, the more the Left hated them. It's just American Jews and Israeli Left made titanic effort not to notice it, but now it became a bit hard not to notice.
we believe even terrible have the right to vote, and self-government
Do you really? The left never seems to have any problem with leftist dictatorships (too long to list here). Sure, they may recognize Kim is taking it too far, and maybe Pol Pot made a goofie or two, but otherwise dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't seem to represent any serious problem. If there are some staged "elections" where the ruling junta always wins, then everything is completely perfect. The treatment of the Islamic dictatorships seems to be very situational - while some Islamic dictatorship get some critique, most of them are silently ignored (especially the rich ones donating amply to Left's Places of Power) and surely absolutely none of them gets as much hate as Israel does.
Now, if said Palestinian government passes anti-LGBT laws or whatever
If??? If??? Are we talking about real Palestinians under Hamas (or Fatah) rule or some Celestial Palestinians existing only in Harvard classrooms?
Of course, since most Palestinians that are discernibly gay are either dead or fled to Israel years ago, this is more of a theoretical question. Hamas does not "pass laws" - it just throws you off a building.
then we'll treat them like we do other countries with no leverage on us - sanctions and such until they embrace the loving arms of deviancy, or whatever
Not only this is a lie, you know this is a lie. Many Muslim countries have such laws, and there are no sanctions.
In the long run, if this is all old news by Election Day 2024, it'll likely be forgotten
I'm not sure how it matters if it isn't. I see no group on the Left that even theoretically could switch their vote or stay home (in significant numbers) except one - American Jews. For some of them, it has been really shocking how much their parteigenossen hate them. But, unfortunately, I do not see any way that would move them to vote for Trump. It's just not something decent people do. Maybe some of them will stay home, but given that most of them live in deep blue areas anyway, it won't change anything. So, some Democrat will be elected with 70% of votes instead of the usual 89% - who cares. So, my prediction - absolutely nothing will change in 2024.
The demand for credible and competent moderate Republicans who can steal all the disaffected Democrats continues to grossly exceed the supply, which is why I'm grudgingly tolerant of a grifter like Vivek.
I'm not sure how the second part follows from the first. It's like saying "we desperately need the cure for common cold, so I am using charmed bracelets and pyramid power". The proposition that something is sorely lacking does not imply logically acceptance of something that is clearly inadequate for that purpose.
I mean, one can hope "he's clearly a grifter but may be he will fool some of the most stupid of Dems" but one can't rely on this as a plan for anything?
I said grudgingly tolerate, not endorse. Most successful politicians are lying to you out of their teeth, and at least in his case I agreed with many of the policy statements laid out by the one guy who was single-handedly running a PR campaign for him.
That's more an indictment of establishment candidates than it is full throated approval for him.
Do you really? The left never seems to have any problem with leftist dictatorships (too long to list here). Sure, they may recognize Kim is taking it too far, and maybe Pol Pot made a goofie or two, but otherwise dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't seem to represent any serious problem.
OP described himself as a progressive democrat, not a marxist-leninist.
I'm probably too far away to see minor differences, but I don't think I have seen/heard/read a lot of "progressive democrats" criticizing leftist dictators and their approach to elections. I mean, when did I have the last opportunity to see a leftist protest demanding to hold free elections in Cuba? Venezuela? North Korea? China? Anywhere where a leftist or islamist dictator holds power? I mean, a lot of Americans have opinions, as we recently found out, about how Israel's democracy must be managed, but none have any opinions on any of those? Doesn't it look a little bit weird?
When was the last time you saw ordinary Republicans protesting for those things? You can see protests for elections in Cuba, Iran, wherever, all the time, but they're pretty much always driven by diaspora from those countries.
But that's a weird way to assess the Democrat position on democracy in communist dictatorships, which has always been very public. Biden has issued statements calling for democracy in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc, against their Marxist-Leninist regimes, and maintains sanctions against all of these countries explicitly because of their lack of democracy. You might have noticed the Biden Administration this past month has been undergoing a major negotiation with Venezuela precisely for them to hold free elections.
You mentioned Islamists as well, but Obama of course lost credibility with Islamist dictators precisely because of his support for the democratic protests during Arab Spring. The think tanks and NGOs that catalogue the human rights crimes of these various countries and demand democracy are also pretty much always staffed by progressive democrats.
Of course, if you take the longer view you will Democrat Presidents taking military action against Marxist-Leninist movements quite regularly throughout the past century.
When was the last time you saw ordinary Republicans protesting for those things?
Republicans are usually much less supportive of intervening into other countries - even tyrannical ones - when they don't mess with us.
Biden has issued statements calling for democracy in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc, against their Marxist-Leninist regimes
If you look from proclamations to actual actions, though, you see that the policy towards tyrannical regimes is always softened - that happened with Obama, and that is also happening with whoever pulls Biden's strings, which some say is the same Obama. Be it Iran, be it Cuba, be it China - beyond some perfunctory words, it's never any serious action. In fact, it's plenty of the actions in the opposite directions.
The think tanks and NGOs that catalogue the human rights crimes of these various countries and demand democracy are also pretty much always staffed by progressive democrats.
I don't know what these NGOs have in their files, deep in their computer drives, but if you look on their public stance, the impression one gets is that there's about two countries that ever commit human rights crimes worth discussing - one of them is the US, and you can easily guess the second one.
Of course, if you take the longer view you will Democrat Presidents taking military action against Marxist-Leninist movements quite regularly throughout the past century.
Well, if we talk about the whole century, the Democrat party wasn't as thoroughly infiltrated by the Marxists as they are now. Marxists were mostly on the fringe, and they are full mainstream now, with wide representation in all institutions of the society. Thus, of course, what has been then and what is happening now is rather different.
Republicans are usually much less supportive of intervening into other countries - even tyrannical ones - when they don't mess with us.
This is a highly dubious claim to begin with, and largely belies your broader point about Democrats being the ones soft on foreign tyrants.
If you look from proclamations to actual actions, though, you see that the policy towards tyrannical regimes is always softened - that happened with Obama, and that is also happening with whoever pulls Biden's strings, which some say is the same Obama. Be it Iran, be it Cuba, be it China - beyond some perfunctory words, it's never any serious action. In fact, it's plenty of the actions in the opposite directions.
This is not true. Both parties have launched waves of targeted sanctions on ML countries, overseen covert and cyop warfare agaimst them, and found ways to support their opposition (Obama backed Capriles against Chavez before anyone had heard of Guaidó). Likewise, both parties have considered softening their stance for progress on things we care about: Obama considered rapproachment with a neutered, non-threat Cuba; Trump considered rapproachment with a nuclear armed North Korea regularly threatening us and our allies.
I don't know what these NGOs have in their files, deep in their computer drives, but if you look on their public stance, the impression one gets is that there's about two countries that ever commit human rights crimes worth discussing - one of them is the US, and you can easily guess the second one.
Human Rights Watch, Amnsety International, etc, write about human rights abuses in Marxist countries regularly on their public websites.
Well, if we talk about the whole century, the Democrat party wasn't as thoroughly infiltrated by the Marxists as they are now.
I was talking about the partisan structures specifically, not the government structures, and about open and openly practicing Marxists who do not hide their ideology and openly come to elections with it, not Soviet spies pretending to be regular Americans to get to governmental secrets. Maybe "infiltrated" in the hindsight wasn't the best word to use as indeed it also can be used for clandestine activities, but that's not what I meant. I meant if you are an open and genuine Marxist, and do not hide it, you would be much more at home at Dem party now than back then, and conversely, there are many more such people in the party now than there was back then. I would imagine back in Stalin's era there were much more hidden Soviet spies (who we can assume being Marxists by default) in partisan and governmental structures, and even if Russian spies are there now, they aren't probably Marxists anymore. But that's not the part I was talking about.
I'll address the other points later, hopefully, a bit busy now.
How many Marxists do you think are in the Democrat party? This is an extremely tiny group of people who consider the Democrats just as right wing as Republicans.
Finally, the "but Palestinians have bad views on x, why do you support them," is a bad argument, because as progressives, we believe even terrible have the right to vote, and self-government. Only letting people with the right views (or the right amount of land ownership) is the reactionary view. Now, if said Palestinian government passes anti-LGBT laws or whatever, then we'll treat them like we do other countries with no leverage on us - sanctions and such until they embrace the loving arms of deviancy, or whatever.
The facts on the ground and the way the culture war is wages doesn't show that this beliefs extend to the us red tribe.
If there are prominent progressive voices that have told "restriction on abortion is terrible and yet the states have a right to organize as they seem fit" I have yet to hear it.
I also don't see sanctions on Saudi Arabia related to women issues, LGBT issues and the likes while the US is lead by the probably government that has the strongest progressive voices ever.
but the polling that showed 50/50 support for Israel vs Hamas among younger voters, was likely bad polling
This poll, asking people to choose between Israel and Hamas, with no option of "neither" og "dont know" had major "you're with us or you're against us" vibe. I imagine a big chunk of the people who chose Hamas, were just annoyed at the options and decided to say "f*ck it, I guess I support Hamas then".
Finally, the "but Palestinians have bad views on x, why do you support them," is a bad argument, because as progressives, we believe even terrible have the right to vote, and self-government. Only letting people with the right views (or the right amount of land ownership) is the reactionary view.
How do you square this with massive support by democrats for government censorship.
because as progressives, we believe even terrible have the right to vote, and self-government
Unless it's state right of fellow Americans in conservative states. Want to keep a right enshrined in the Bill of Rights? We've got nukes, fascists! Don't want teachers telling kids they should cut their genitals off? Genocide! Arabs literally murder gays... well that's just their culture, self governance and all.
Finally, the "but Palestinians have bad views on x, why do you support them," is a bad argument, because as progressives, we believe even terrible have the right to vote, and self-government.
This would require that the leftists acknowledge the bad views, and treat bad views by Palestinians like they do bad views by other people who are on their shitlist. You see Queers for Palestine. You don't see calls for Gaza to stop executing gays, or stop censorship, or to embrace religious plurality.
It would also require that the leftists do the reverse--treating bad views by other people by the same standards they do Palestinians. See the abortion example someone else mentioned. Or ask whether they support Republicans who have bad views much less bad than Palestinians.
This also isn't a good standard if "bad views on X" is something that is strongly associated with violence, such as widespread antisemitic beliefs, or support of terrorism.
Finally, the "but Palestinians have bad views on x, why do you support them," is a bad argument, because as progressives, we believe even terrible have the right to vote, and self-government.
No they don't. They explicitly opposed making abortion a state issue on the grounds that wanting to ban it is a terrible view, and that the correct view should be imposed top-down.
Yes, because the majority of people in the country want abortion enshrined as a right. The fact that the system as it is enforces minority rule is not a dunk on progressives; it's a condemnation of the system.
If it's a straight majority that wants it, then they'll vote accordingly in their state elections. If you're saying that they want it to be a right even in states they do not reside in, that's a straight-forward contradiction with "as progressives, we believe even terrible have the right to vote, and self-government."
They do have the right to vote: They can rock up to their polling place, place their vote, and then loose because their policies are unpopular (or win on merits, but given the polls on that particular issue it sure seems unlikely).
The right to compete doesn't mean the right to win.
Are you saying they will lose on the state level in every state, or that changing the law in a specific state and not anywhere else somehow constitutes "minority rule"?
I'm fine w/ abortion being a "state issue," if by state issue, you mean one determined by referendums on various abortion laws.
But, red state governments don't like that very much, because it turns out even the most right-wing states don't agree with the extremists in charge of state governments on abortion law.
I'm fine w/ abortion being a "state issue," if by state issue, you mean one determined by referendums on various abortion laws.
Not sure why it has to be a referendum, but whatever, all I meant that states get to decide it without the involvement of the federal government. If you're fine with it, that's great, but that's not a majority opinion among the progressives.
On the topic of Zionism and Jewish influence in American media, I came across a twitter long post that scrutinises the notion that Zionists effectively decide American foreign policy. There are three main highlights of this post.
The State Department and the Pentagon are far more powerful lobbies, and their support for Israel is given only begrudgingly.
The increasingly high volume public statements that Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and therefore deserves American support actually signal the weakness of the Israeli lobby.
Israel receives atrociously large aid packages because it allows Congress more latitude to manipulate through the budget process, and much of the aid actually ends up in the pockets of defence contractors or are credits to purchase American arms.
I can't verify all of these statements since I'm writing this before heading to bed, but I think this is the first time I've heard someone who isn't implicitly pro-Israel take the issue of lobbying and scrutinise the claims of actual Israeli heft in the American elite. One of the replies to the post brings up an article about Pentagon backed groups in Syria fighting CIA armed militias. It's very interesting to me how intra-American rivalry between various lobbies spill over in warzones, particularly the Middle East.
I’m sure he has some more complete and subtle model of the US government than I do, but isn’t it kind of strange on its face to say “yeah the Israel lobby has special influence over US policy but it’s no big deal because the actual government departments whose job it is to handle these matters have more influence?”
As an American citizen I would find it incredibly fucked up if Israel ever overrules the Pentagon or the State Department on anything.
Your typical globalist-hater doesn't understand that America's wealth comes from being the only global superpower. While the US is more benevolent that previous aspiring claimants to that crown, they are the only ones to have actually achieved it. Now, benevolent as they may be, American supremacy is maintained through the threat of economic and physical violence.
A world where America is not the sole superpower, is a world that is unquestionably worse for Americans and the nations America protects. Now yes, some American protectorates have been coasting off the US, but that comes with them resigning their agency on matters of national determination. A world where every nation has competing alignments from its neighbors is world where the threat of war looms on every corner.
The $1.5T military spending of the US Govt, is a 'world peace spending' and in return the US gets to be the reserve currency of the world (and essential wage unilateral economic war on any nation of its choosing). Yes, that's a lot of money, but look at America's superior covid recovery vs all the other Pax-American nations. That difference is entirely owed to being able to print as many $$$$ as it likes.
From that perspective, America's military spending a total win-win. American allies get to save money on military and enjoy guaranteed peace. America gets to stay as wealthy as it likes and be the only nation that can truly impose its will on the world.
Now, the so-called global-south consists of countries that are finding their identity in a world where China is throwing its weight around. They don't value global peace, because they don't know a world before it. They don't value local peace, because they haven't enjoyed much local peace or stability during this Pax-American century. Many global south nations haven't been brainwashed (convinced) into favoring American values as baseline. They don't understand Chinese debt traps. They don't see the value in putting the nation state over the wider global religious identity. They don't value democracy in their bones, because they can't imagine majorities having favorable moderate views in their low-trust societies. Point is, they don't see the amazing win-win that Pax-Americana is. They might play along with it, they will change masters at the drop of a hat. They will dump any values they claim to hold, because it is all performative to them anyway.
That's where American global south allies come into the picture. Israel & India are the only 2 proper liberal western democracies in the region, and that matters. India is more independent and still ridding itself of its soviet scars, but Israel understands the value of Pax-Americana in its bones. And you cannot buy that kind of loyalty. It's the kind of loyalty that comes with a strong belief that any alternative than your current master is a worse one. And for that Israel gets rewarded. It is the only unconditional-American ally in the global south.
It is also why I think the America-India alliance will continue flourishing, even if India occasionally plays both sides. India (now) accepts Pax-Americana & liberal-democracy as the best overlords in their bones. Being a natural adversary to China guarantees India's 'loyalty'. Maybe not as a subject, but at least as a willing partner.
Lastly, to me, MBS (and allied Emirati Sheikhs) are the last peace of this puzzle. They might be the only practicing Muslims who have truly abandoned their global-religious identity in favor of Americanism.
The winds of change are here. The US cannot be the sole-superpower on its own. It needs allies and subjects that stay with it out of both convenience, belief and natural alignment. The EU-Korea-Japan-Canada-US nexus ensured that Global-North and its waters remained 'Peaceful' (by encircling Russia). The South exposes 2 new battle fields. Israel-Saudi-India-Australia-Japan are the 2nd front for encircling China, Oil resource & the Indian Ocean. The final front is around the South Atlantic + Southern Indian Ocean. But, Africa and South America aren't as important, so we haven't seen lines be drawn as strongly just yet. Maybe that'll emerge as the final front in 30-ish years.
So yeah, within that context, American favoritism towards Israel makes a lot of sense.
They don't value global peace, because they don't know a world before it.
Maybe I'm a bit tired right now but I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I guess the 'global peace' means the post-1945 world (or maybe the post-1989 one, I don't know), but surely the countries of the Global South all existed before 1945 and have a long history (and memory) in general.
Most countries in the global south did not exist as independant nation states pre ww2. Most were coming out of a colonial era of subjugation.
Most of these countries don't think about global peace. Their concerns have always been local to their geographic neighborhood.
Our ability to carelessly navigate across international waters
Banning the kind of explicit colonialism that marked the 19th century
Being able to trade your resources with the highest bidder, instead of one that has an army on your shores
...and many more
Having global peace enforced on us by a global superpower with a certain value system has led to the deliberate creation of this modern world. The Global South does not appreciate just how anomalous this peace is and how fickle it can be if nations start pushing too many buttons and pitting competing interests against each other to a maximum extent.
Loss of American hegemony would cause a near term recession and probably high inflation for a while, assuming it didn’t just collapse the government into balkanizing. But the USA was the richest country in the world in 1950(in a global duopoly), it was the richest country in the world in 1920, and it had only Britain as a rival for richest country in the world for the 19th century.
The US has been ‘the’ preeminent power since at least 1880. The US overtook the UK in median income by 1894 at the latest. Australia was actually the richest per capita country in the world for a long stretch at the end of the 19th century.
That's overstating the matter; the US gained the ability to enforce the Monroe doctrine sometime in the later 19th century and opened Japan, conquered the Philippines, and participated in the boxer insurrection with enough distinction to get the peace terms it wanted. The US simply wasn't the overarching superpower until 1990 even if it's been a major power since 1870 or so.
if it's an overstatement, it's certainly less of an overstatement than the original comment stating we were the preeminent power. Britain and France were superpowers, we were not. We were economically very powerful and a regional power in the Americas and Pacific islands, yes.
Your typical globalist-hater doesn't understand that America's wealth comes from being the only global superpower.
It is simply not true that being a global superpower has made America wealthy. Walterodim points out the obvious historical evidence that invalidates this. But also being a global superpower is a wealth sink not a wealth faucet.
Being wealthy is about having more stuff, and having services. It is strange to think that diverting wealth towards making items that destroy things (less stuff), and kill people (fewer services) would somehow make us wealthier.
The American economic engine operates well despite being hitched to the responsibilities of a global superpower, not because of it.
Being wealthy is about having more stuff, and having services. It is strange to think that diverting wealth towards making items that destroy things (less stuff), and kill people (fewer services) would somehow make us wealthier.
Turns out that having that sort of stuff prevents other people from fucking with your other stuff.
It’s more of an investment in security. You can get much farther in a world where everyone knows that messing with you is a death sentence than one in which that isn’t true. If we want a good trade deal for minerals in South America, the ability to say “do it or we coup you and put in someone who will” means you get a better deal than you would if your can’t do that.
Likewise having a military strong enough to invade or bomb the crap out of most countries on earth means that you can assure yourself of reasonably safe shipping lanes. No country on earth is going to mess with the US Navy, and they’re much more likely to use their resources to curb pirates attacking US or Atlantic aligned merchant shipping. It means that aligning with the Atlantic powers provides safety and defying them is dangerous.
All of those things allow global trade to flourish and benefits us in better trade and more open markets and so on. It even benefits us insofar as it deters others from trying to start wars where we’d have to use our military might. That’s also why nukes ultimately are such a boon for peace. Nobody wants the weapon used on their country so any country under the nuclear umbrella of either the USA or Russia can be sure they won’t have to fight wars.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
cjet79 6mo ago
It is strange to think that diverting wealth towards making items that destroy things (less stuff), and kill people (fewer services) would somehow make us wealthier.
Contra @me, I think purchasing collective security measures does increase aggregate wealth due to the ability of those engaged in commerce to do so with lower transaction costs than each of them covering security individually. Whether the United States does this well enough to be worth it and whether it collects appropriate rents for doing so are questions to be answered, but markets function better when they're difficult to rob.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
fartVader 6mo ago
Your typical globalist-hater doesn't understand that America's wealth comes from being the only global superpower.
Many caveats apply, but this table and other similar sources suggest that the United States was plausibly the richest country in the world by 1913 when it wasn't remotely hegemonic. I don't doubt that Americans reap benefits from worldwide hegemonic status, but the Monroe Doctrine seemed to suffice for generating quite a lot of wealth. The combination of land, resources, culture, and institutions was paying off while Americans were highly skeptical of foreign adventurism.
By 1913, there was a certain degree of obvious US hegemony, even if other powers (the British) still looked preeminent: American ships had forcibly opened Japanese markets to the West, the US had recently defeated Spain and claimed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico (and for a brief time, occupied Cuba). The Great White Fleet had circumnavigated the globe making its presence known.
Certainly not the height of American power (which we don't even know if we've seen yet, I suppose), but anyone watching would not have written them off at the time either.
As Voxel says, the US was already globally the most powerful nation, had dominion in practice over the entire western hemisphere, had embarked on a colonial adventure in Asia and had participated in the Boxer rebellion conflict in China by 1913. It was obviously already an internationalist power. One of the great tragedies of the Mearsheimer-Walt-Buchanan matrix of bullshit is that a lot of people actually believe that the US was ‘isolationist’ before 1941 or something. In reality, the US was always a participant in the general European colonial project and was always an imperial, internationalist nation, it just manifested in a moderately different way.
My personal intuition is that any inferences from an 'agricultural and manufacturing' era of the world are moot in the present. PPP is hard enough to quantify in 2023. PPP becomes completely irrelevant when you're comparing across centuries. It is the most vibes-based number you can possibly find.
More directly, Every SNP 500 company relies on having a global consumer base. In every mental simulation, if the US stops being the global superpower, it will get a lot poorer, even if other nations become similarly poor alongside it.
That being said, in a fully isolationist world, the USA would easily be the richest big country by virtue of having a large consumer base and being self-sufficient in practically every resource known to man. However, I expect it to be a much poorer and more miserable world to live in on average than what we have today.
Someone here (or maybe on /r/themotte) opened my eyes to this idea. I'm sorry I can't find the post and credit you, various searches aren't helping me find it.
There exists an apparent mini-moral philosophy of always siding with the underdog. On the surface this has good feels: always side with the weak against the strong. In every conflict, between individuals or between nations, find out who the strong one is, and find out who the weak one is. The weak one is the one you should side with.
This is not as ironclad a moral imperative as it appears on the tin. The most extreme and simple form of the imperative's flaw is such:
Suppose Mr Rogers and some random homeless guy get into a fight.
These are the facts and they are not disputed: the homeless guy demanded Mr Rogers’ wallet and he said no. So, the homeless guy attacked him. Shocking everyone, Mr Rogers fights back ferociously, sending the homeless guy to the hospital. Mr Rogers escapes without a scratch.
Digging into the homeless guy's background reveals that he has been in and out of prison a lot. For theft and minor violent offenses, except he was most recently imprisoned for pushing random bystanders off of train platforms onto train tracks. He had been arrested before anyone died. The homeless guy was released from prison a few days before he got into a fight with Mr Rogers.
Mr Rogers is a saintly widely beloved media personality with a legendary benevolence towards all.
So. Should someone here be penalized?
An underdog fetishist might say yes, Mr Rogers should be penalized because he’s actually a member of an elite class whereas the deranged homeless guy is a member of an underclass. This is a perfect example of class struggle.
In my experience, most people consider the Palestinians the underdog here, but not everyone. Some consider Israel the underdog being propped up by the US.
Anyway, while I consider it morally confused, I contend people who would condemn Mr Rogers exist, and that if you're going to spend time debating an extremely nuanced complex situation like the Israeli/Palestine conflict with others, it's valuable to at least first figure out if your debate partner would always (e.g.) side with the homeless guy against Mr Rogers.
I mean, isn't this a.k.a "Intersectionalism?" This is the foundation of contemporary progressive thought: the weakest party in a power imbalance is the one who must be favored in that conflict. Being "Woke" is seeing the world as that series of power imbalances, and "Identity Politics" is being aware of one's own membership in one or more disempowered groups.
It's also the cornerstone of dramatic fiction, which is why IMO mass media is so confluent with progressive ideas and has become their most powerful delivery system.
Being "Woke" is seeing the world as that series of power imbalances, and "Identity Politics" is being aware of one's own membership in one or more disempowered groups.
It's also why "Woke" are terrified of what they call the alt-right: because the alt-right work exactly the same way, but have an alternative (and possibly more correct) view of who is more disempowered. Which, ironically, makes the Woke a conservative [privilege-safeguarding] movement and the alt-right a progressive [privilege-shuffling] one.
I think that in many fictional narratives, the correlation between being the good guy and being the underdog is high. "David kills Goliath" is a story, "David becomes the 35th person to be killed by Goliath" is not. Hence Frodo vs Sauron, Harry vs Voldemort, Asterix vs the Romans.
Of course, in reality, the correlation between good guy and underdog is, to the first approximation, zero.
Freddie deBoer confuses me on this point, because he was once writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict and stated “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”
But he has also argued repeatedly that "punching up" and "punching down" is a meaningless framework through which to look at humour, interpersonal relationships or anything else.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
Folamh3 6mo ago·Edited 6mo ago
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”
When I read this, I think to myself, "yeah, this is why I hate Marxists". Openly admitting that it doesn't even matter who is right, they'll just always side with whoever they think is weaker is a recipe for the dissolution of civilization.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
dr_analog 6mo ago
This seems like a similar observation to Arnold Kling's three languages of politics framework. He states this as progressives thinking in terms of oppressor-oppressed dynamics, conservatives thinking about civilization-barbarism, and libertarians thinking about freedom-authoritarianism. There are obviously times where these overlap, but other times it results in people talking right past each other. I think you can see this starkly, at least for conservatives and progressives, when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Without regard to finalized policy prescriptions, the basic sympathies of progressives seem to always lie with Palestinans, who they see as oppressed, while conservatives side with Israel because it's the civilized side. Often, the language used by liberals and conservatives even puts it explicitly in those terms.
"Civilization-barbarism" is a terrible lens for international conflict, you can easily whip up people into a frenzy with atrocity propaganda - bayoneted nuns or babies taken from incubators.
Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope--are we talking about Israel vs. Hamas, Israel vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world that funds them, or Israel + its supporters in the US vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world? The homeless guy vs. Mr. Rogers scenario doesn't quite capture the dynamic of group vs. group when each side has debateable membership.
That said, I don't favor underdog analysis as a particularly useful lens, though clearly others disagree.
That said, I don't favor underdog analysis as a particularly useful lens, though clearly others disagree.
Maybe you debate people more aligned with you than I do; there are legit people who condemn Mr Rogers in this, what I consider, pathologically slanted absurd example and I often wish I had known that way ahead of time.
To me that reveals a kind of moral confusion that makes the finer scope points a more first world issue.
Yeah, that's a fair point. If someone's seriously taking the side of the homeless guy in your example, I don't know what I'd do with that information other than backing away slowly.
Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope--are we talking about Israel vs. Hamas, Israel vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world that funds them, or Israel + its supporters in the US vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world?
That's one of the interesting things about power... local power can be a massively different beast than total power, or even future local power.
"My garden may be smaller than your Rome, but my pilum is harder than your sternum", and all that.
Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope
To me, this is one of the key issues of the whole thing which makes it just a non-starter. The degrees of freedom there are in determining who is the underdog and who isn't is effectively infinite, because human capability of self-deception is effectively infinite. So if one takes on the framework of the "righteousness of the underdog," then step 1.00001 that follows immediately after this is to deem [whoever I like] as the underdog, while twisting logic in any way required to reach that conclusion. By the time we reach step 2, step 1.00001 is long forgotten, and any scrutiny about that step is shut down as picking on the underdog who has been Firmly and Uncontroversially Determined to be the Underdog in this situation. It's just naked bias and favoritism with a particularly flattering narrative that makes it easier for people to believe even when they like to think of themselves as disliking naked bias and favoritism.
This is why when I hear "punching up" and "punching down" in the context of comedy or satire or the like, I always translate "up" to "direction I want punches to be thrown" and "down" to "direction I don't want punches to be thrown;" in practice, that's what they mean and only what they mean.
A 9000 word deep dive I wrote on the Tactics and Geostrategics of the Gaza invasion and why there's a real risk that one wrong step from Israel might end in them not being able to break off or achieve a Ceasefire.
This is fantastic. My previous view was that Hamas launched the attack out of pure evil or stupidity, but after reading this I think they have a real chance of permanently crippling Israel. There is an equilibrium where if most of Israel's neighbors turn against Israel, Israel doesn't have a chance and then, I suspect, the Jewish population of Israel moves to the US, Canada, and/or Australia.
Yes: unless Arab military culture has changed in the past 23 years, the key threat to Israel is not a conventional conflict with its neighbours. A success of Palestinian human shield/"hit while crying" tactics to shift opinion (especially in the US) is more likely and more of a threat, though not necessarily likely.
I think the mistake is assuming that many Middle Eastern armies are competent. There are a handful of 'competent' fighting forces in the region - Hamas, Hezbollah, some of the Houthis, some units of the Syrian army that have better training and a good culture, some of the Iraqi Shia militias, and arguably the IRGC's Quds Force although as an actual fighting force they have a mixed record. For a successful full assault on Israel all of them would have to participate and do so extremely successfully, in addition to a poor showing from the IDF. That's possible, but not necessarily likely. It would also open the door to all of the domestic and regional conflicts that most of these groups are ordinarily dedicated to managing. Israel could fund Sunni Islamists more heavily and keep much of Iran and allies’ strength tied up in Iraq and Syria if absolutely necessary, for example.
An Islamic crusade against Israel has always been the 'primary' risk, but conversely the risk to the Saudis that the 'Shia crescent' encircles Arabia is existential in a way that Israel certainly isn't, Turkey has a strained relationship with Iran even if it isn't hostile for now, Egypt certainly doesn't want Hamas to gain in prestige because a resurgent Muslim brotherhood inevitably means some degree of destabilization. Failed ceasefire attempts have been ongoing in Yemen for years. For them to put aside their differences would take a lot.
This is interesting, and I don't disagree for some of the broadest tactical (ground war in urban combat sucks) or political (Hamas had as goals to undermine Israeli normalization and for the economics of terrorism) components, but :
I'll accept the joke about borders and despotism like a libertarian should, but as a matter of law and policy there's actually a lot of restrictions on exit or export from most modern countries. It's technically illegal to leave the United States as a citizen without a passport, there's a biometrics scan that's required for air travel and keeps getting floated for sea and land, and if you don't do all the paperwork for a serious export you'll risk getting pulled over by anything from a cop car to a literal Blackhawk depending on situation.
"Starve the Garrison" works only as a pre-modern tactic: in the modern era, any anti-Israeli forces that embeds with civilians will receive humanitarian aid before any serious literal starvation, and most of these groups have turned smuggling arms and material with aid shipments into an art form. That doesn't mean the IDF is too smart to try it (motions at Netanyahu), but it means you really need to consider other possible plans. Given other constraints (the available manpower you mention, that longer-lasting land grabs will jeopardize the Abraham Accord normalization that was the longer-term political target for the October 7th attacks, so on), I think it's more likely that the efforts in your 'gap' are going to be followed by a bombing and ground rapid strike campaign.
Looking at the West Bank from a country-level map gives a pretty misleading understanding of what's going on there. The real map looks more like this -- the clusterfuckery with Area C is one of the more sympathetic issues for Palestinians, but it also means there's a lot of IDF military infrastructure in the West Bank. Controlling the border with Jordan doesn't become perfect in that situation, but it does remain something that can be plausibly attempted.
I think you're underestimating how hard tunnel work is, and how readily it can be disrupted, and overestimating capacity. The tunnel under the falls at Niagra was excavated with dynamite, to go less than a half-mile.
A lot of the countries around Israel have the same problem: "better inside pissing out than outside pissing in". This is most overt for Saudis and the Houthis what with the religious stuff, but Egypt, Jordan, and Libya are all extremely aware that the Palestinian movement does not consider them just rulers or serious combatants. If Israel disappeared tomorrow, very few of those armed combatants would pick up a plow. To the extent Iran might reduce support, but Iran doesn't really like a lot of these other countries either, even if Iran hates them less than Israel.
That Egypt scenario is a complete nonsense. Egypt doesn't want the war no more than Israel wants the war, especially a war for Hamas which Egypt has very little use of, besides the obvious joy of making Israel suffer. It wants Israel to have all the troubles in the world, but so that it ends on the Egyptian border. The time where Egypt sponsored the Fedayin was 70 years ago.
And this turn of phrase:
As of writing Drone strikes have just exploded in Egyptian Taba by the red sea. Israel claims to have shot down the drones and blames Iran Aligned Houthi rebels in the region, claiming they were targeted towards Israel’s southernmost towns near Elat
Implying like it's just "Israel claim" which is super suspect, all while the Houthis themselves admitted they did it, and bragged about it profusely. Really, this can't be serious.
you think this is bad, Israel funded Hamas in its early days
People really should stop mentioning this in 2020s as something that is highly relevant to what happens today. It was a very brief episode in the 1980s, and treating this as - which is clearly implied here - that Israel created Hamas from the ground up and there wouldn't be any Hamas if not Israel - is just stupid and counter-factual. Yes, Israel briefly considered using (then younger and weaker) Hamas to fight Fatah, that was 40 years ago, and that idea didn't last long and was soon abandoned. Treating it as it was definitive episode in the history of Hamas and Israel is like saying "US created the USSR" because they were allies for a while in the fight with the Nazis. Even order of magnitude sillier because the ties between Hamas and Israel were never even order of magnitude that close as between US and USSR.
The Jordan angle is bullshit too, unless there's a complete collapse of Jordanian government (not mere "instability") - which they are very determined not to let happen, and are willing to kill a lot of Palestinian Arabs for that, as they amply proved in the past, exactly nothing would happen there. And to achieve such a collapse would take a direct military action from somebody like Iran. Which would a) require them to somehow cross Iraq without Saudis noticing and doing anything, not to mention Iraqis, and b) do that all right under the nose of US air carrier group stationed next door, and also them not doing anything. I don't see how it's a possibility.
The problems of fighting the tunnels are real, and the fact Hamas has been building it for 16 years is real too. But Israel also knew about them for all these years, and they consider it doable. The main problem would be time - the more Israel stays in Gaza with boots on the ground, the more pressure there will be from the Kind People of the World. And if they can easily afford to tell Europe to take a long hike off a short peer, that wouldn't fly with the US, especially not with Dems in power who has their own sizeable pro-Hamas wing to placate. That would be the main problem for Israel for the middle term.
I largely agree. Reading through it, it came across as a 'just-so' story in the same vein as the Trump-era 'how Trump could lead to a nuclear war with North Korea!' book rather than something from someone with actual experience on the subject matter. Far more of a mediocrity of geopolitical punditry by someone clearly not particularly familiar with the geopolitics, or just the regional national politics, involved.
One ripple effect of the Israel-Gaza war is the warp-speed unraveling of relations between President Biden and some of his most loyal voters: Muslims and Arab Americans. The open disdain toward Biden from many in a reliably Democratic bloc is among the many signs the conflict is quickly remaking U.S. domestic politics, with public fury over a Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis colliding with the horror of entire families in the Gaza Strip being wiped out in Israel’s retaliatory strikes.
“It’s really crazy to me that the Democratic party destroyed 20-years … worth of good will with Muslims and Arabs in just 2 weeks, losing an entire generation that was raised in the progressive coalition, possibly forever,” Eman Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago professor of comparative human development who studies Palestinian Americans, wrote Thursday on X, formerly Twitter.
In an interview, Abdelhadi said community members weren’t surprised Biden was supportive of Israel. But “the degree, the blank check,” is scary, she said, especially given the mounting civilian casualty toll. Young people already are talking about sitting out the election in protest, she said. At a recent campus event that drew hundreds of students, Abdelhadi said, she told the audience, “I think Biden has lost the Muslim vote.”
“The entire room erupted into clapping,” she recalled. “This generation was raised in a time when Muslims and Arabs were constantly in contact with Democrats, felt and were part of the progressive coalition. Now that is completely disillusioned.”
Gallup polling showed that in early 2022, for the first time in more than 20 years, more Democrats said that “their sympathies” lie with the Palestinians than with the Israelis, 49 percent to 38 percent.
Publicly the administration has been fully supportive of Israel, while behind the scenes they're attempting to restrain them; the blackout in Gaza ended after barely over a day because US officials pressured the Israelis. Biden's response has been pretty reasonable, but this may turn into a bigger domestic issue if the invasion drags on.
It could be the behind the scenes restrain was so the US would have time to get military assets into place to better defend Israel if it is attacked by another nation.
I reckon the majority of Muslims will show up for Biden out of self interest. However Michigan in particular has a big levantine Arab community who care alot about this conflict. They are also mostly 2/3rd generation so wouldn't be affected by Trumps muslim ban.
With the razor sharp margins Biden got in several swing states, this could make him really vulnerable. He won Georgia with 12 000 votes, and the state has more than 70 000 Muslims.
I also wonder how this focus on Israel will play with other minority groups, like blacks and Hispanics. I think the feeling that your president and government is beholden to a foreign government you don't really care about can be alienating to alot of these voters. Particularly when Biden is not delivering on bread and butter issues.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
rudig 6mo ago
They are also mostly 2/3rd generation so wouldn't be affected by Trumps muslim ban.
As I've said before, the mistake was made in 1965, not in 2017. Either way, the best time to not open immigration to Arab Muslims was decades ago, but the second-best time is now. Even if I those second and third generation Muslims aren't personally impacted, I would wager that Trump's policy would piss them off enough that they're vote for the opposite party in an election. If Biden's embrace of Israel alienates them to the extent that they don't vote at all, that would have to be thought of as an unmitigated win for the Trump campaign.
Republicans won the muslim vote before 9/11. While today's American muslims have a different ethnic makeup(less Arabic and more African), it's not implausible that republicans could make their margins look dramatically better by exploiting pride-type issues if democrats aren't perceived as better on Israel.
Muslims before 9/11 were essentially wealthy, largely secularized Levantines, North Africans and Iranians (plus a few black converts). Mass immigration has changed the profile as you suggest, but it’s been so total that it’s hard to see things returning to the previous situation.
There's a pretty big difference between an 80/20 split and a 60/40 split. Republicans will probably not win the muslim vote outright, but they can possibly prevent democrats from dominating it.
There is several things going on here. This is not only about islam, the Uighur situation is geographically/culturally more remote than anything the majority of muslims in the US know or understand. This is a case where optics really matter too. China doesnt broadcast the situation with the Uighurs. They deliberately go out of their way to not frame this in a religious/ethnic sense. You dont have videos of Xi invoking religious imagery of "children of light and darkness". China doesnt try to justify what is going on, they just pretend its not happening. On a global stage, China doesnt seem to have a problem with muslims. Seeing a many middle-easterns dont trust western news sources, its very easy to pretend nothing is happening with the Uighurs.
Both Israel and the palestinians on the other hand have a very active propaganda arms. The picture of Biden hugging Netanyahu will be spread far and wide. Many supporters of Israel invoke clash of civilization rhetoric that is popular on the christian right, but will rile up muslims. The toxoplasmosis of rage is in full effect here.
I've noticed this as well. You'll have secular, non-religious and well adjusted Muslims turn into borderline Jihadists over the topic of Israel and Palestine.They will also start believing in insane Alex Jones tier conspiracies. I was talking to one who told me that Hamas didn't kill any civilians at the Music Festival on purpose and they were caught in the crossfire of them fighting the IDF. Some Jews are just as bad too. There's SJW Jews who believe in intersectionality and every progressive cause that will sound like Hitler when talking about Palestinians. This issue is so toxic it's not even able to be debated. It's like the trans issue multiplied by a billion.
This issue is so toxic it's not even able to be debated
The last Model United Nations I attended would disagree, but then again it's a meme even in the US that having the reconciliation of Israel and Palestine be the objective almost inevitably ends in the delegates ending up in a deadlock haha
This issue is so toxic it's not even able to be debated.
Yes. The meme is "the most complicated geopolitical issue of all time" is not really all that accurate. There are far more complicated geopolitical issues. The complicacy is just how emotional people are about the issue, not the issue itself, which you can more or less grasp within a day or two of reading.
How do I know this? Most I talk to about this issue who have the passion of a thousand suns about Palestine don't know the history of Israel, and funnier, Palestine itself. Most didn't even know that "Palestine" was under Ottoman rule before the British.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
f3zinker 6mo ago
The complicacy is just how emotional people are about the issue, not the issue itself, which you can more or less grasp within a day or two of reading.
Indeed. The number of people who didn't get the joke was high. But maybe that will eventually include MattY himself, as his habit of stepping on rakes and then blaming the foliage for swinging too wildly continues.
There are 2 basic theories for how to win elections. One is that you win by convincing moderates who might plausibly vote either way to vote for your guy. The other is that you win by convincing your supporters to actually turn out and vote. Given the state of partisanship and the participation rate in even highly contentious elections with massive media attention, it seems likely that the second is the dominating factor in most elections. If something drains the enthusiasm of people who would have voted for you such that they fail to actually show up and vote, you can very much still lose, even if the other side is (in your opinion) objectively further from the point of view of the people who are sitting out.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
JulianRota 6mo ago
There's a third way! Dampening enthusiasm for your opponent to the extent that their people just don't show up in the necessary numbers may well be effective. I suspect it's less effective in the era of fortified elections, but even mailing something in might be too much effort for low-propensity voters that lack enthusiasm for any candidate.
I suppose it's a bit semantic, but I would consider that part of my second way. Perhaps better classified, the first way is to operate primarily on logically persuading people to support your candidate versus the other based on proposed policies. The second way is to operate primarily on the enthusiasm of strongly partisan voters to actually turn out, which would include both getting your supporters to want to turn out and vote, as well as getting the other guy's supporters to sit out the election instead of voting.
“It’s really crazy to me that the Democratic party destroyed 20-years … worth of good will with Muslims and Arabs in just 2 weeks, losing an entire generation that was raised in the progressive coalition, possibly forever,”
I'll believe it when I see it. If Palestine is your central issue you're not gonna get much help from Republicans.
If you are a socially conservative set of voters which sees no difference between democrats and republicans on your top issue while democrats are widely blamed for the erosion in your purchasing power, however...
It's not equal though. People like Nikki Haley are going around saying "finish them" like this is a video game. Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem. From any Palestinian perspective, one side is much worse than the other.
Right - Biden is going around hugging Netanyahu, but the Democratic party also contains Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. The antisemetic faction is not in control, but it actually exists in real numbers compared to the Republicans. It's like libertarians - the centre of gravity in both parties shits on your ideals constantly, but you actually have a toehold in one of them.
Trump will inevitably get questions from Evangelicals during the campaign about Israel and is going to go full “the Israelis should do whatever they want to them, they gotta teach them a lesson they won’t forget” or something, and that’ll be that. Plus there’s the “Muslim ban”, the “Sharia come to USA soon????” Fox News stories etc. Plus Trump’s immigration plan is going to at least promise (he won’t do anything in reality, but he’ll promise) to crack down on ‘chain migration’ which is one of the largest ways Muslim Americans bring over family members.
Whatever their differences with Biden, they will hold their nose and vote for him. Even sitting it out is less and less likely the more Trump’s rhetoric heats up, which it will.
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Notes -
How many Jews feel like this now? Glad you all are feeling how I’ve felt for a few years that your just an ethnic white now and hopefully we can ally. Eisman from the Big Short (funny how Jews pop up in any event) says all his family went to UPenn and UPenn is dead to them now.
I said a week or two ago if the Jews picked some random school like Eastern Kentucky it would be a top 5-10 school in a generation.
https://twitter.com/sfmcguire79/status/1720428030168895506?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
I'm not a moderator, but please don't.
Well I made the comment on purpose. Because Jews really do pop up everywhere despite their small numbers. I do it because they are an important people who contribute to civilization.
Using statistically accurate language would be clearer for the audience of The Motte.
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Snide asides like this add only heat. Please don't.
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what school is the Eisman clan going to, now?
Are they having enough kids, and willing to spend enough money, that their influence can be applied to another school?
Why isn't yeshiva university considered a top school then, when it's mostly Jewish? Is it because they get the third tier, orthodox Jews, and not the first tier IQ ashkanazi secular Jews?
Prestige comes from rankings ie research ie faculty. In many STEM (and other) fields top departments are already substantially Jewish. Jewish parents sending their kids to Yeshiva University instead of Harvard won’t affect rankings, if any YU grad wants to go into academia at the top level they’ll go to Princeton or MIT or whatever for postgrad (if they can), and then if they’re good they’ll stay or move to a similar university. Very few YU grads go into academia.
For Jewish schools to poach the best Jewish faculty from the Ivies you’d need an overt, explicit purge of Jewish faculty from Harvard etc which just isn’t likely.
so you are saying if some jews go to yeshiva it doesn’t change rankings?
so to make eastern kentucky uni the best, it requires ALL the best jews and jewish faculty to go there?
YU is the equivalent of the Jewish state school, and it is far better than the meadian state school.
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Nothing is more Lindy then universities.
The list of top universities in 1960 is substantially the same as it is today.
Lots of places have tried to improve their rankings but it doesn't seem to work. Back in ancient times, I'm pretty sure Nebraska or some random school offered me a full ride based on my PSAT score. This strategy to recruit high-IQ students clearly didn't move the needle for them.
It’s because HYPS and the tier below schools always make sure to take the absolute best even as they also make sure to take donors’/board members’ kids and the requisite diversity intake.
So if normally the top 0.3% of graduating high schoolers would go to that tier of college under a purely meritocratic system, now only the top 0.1% go (math and physics olympiad winners etc) and so do those other groups. But because IQ has a very long tail, skimming off only the top 0.1% instead of 0.3% still means they get most of the best people - even if the system isn’t ‘fair’.
IQ is fit to a normal distribution
I wrote something retarded but meant to say tail effects.
It's not tail effects either.
I know what you are trying to say, there's just no phrase for it.
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That would work if their product was education. I don't think a Harvard education is worth 200K more than free education. Now the signaling value (even if you get fired from every job you subsequently get for incompetence) and "I went to Harvard" card that you have for the rest of your life, 200K is probably a deal for that.
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So he's angry that a certain number of protestors held up signs stating, "Free Palestine from the river to the sea," and now he wants to take his ball and go home?
Okay.
Seriously, what do people like him expect? “Oh the name on this scholarship sounds kinda Jewish, I love Israel now.”
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I always thought it was ultra cringe to have these rando finance guys’ names plastered over everything in academia, which should be above that. Hopefully schools learn their lesson and stop bothering with these clowns.
Nice platitude but those clowns are the hand that feeds them.
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IDF making a lot of progress with minimal casualties https://x.com/yossi_melman/status/1721779627251695752?s=20
(likely conservative estimate) map of IDF presence / progress: https://x.com/War_Mapper/status/1721646940780191941?s=20
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I don’t think it is super significant that some Jews in Academia are anti-Zionist if the whole infrastructure of the religion is Zionist. If you consider yourself a practicing Jew and are not a Karaite, the odds are that you participate in and pay a membership to a synagogue which promotes Zionism, and the wealthier Jews of that synagogue spend money on various Zionist associations like the World Zionist Organization. Even the liberal Reform Judaism “views a Jewish, Zionist, democratic and secure State of Israel to be the expression of the common responsibility of the Jewish people for its continuity and future.” Zionism is entrenched in non-Haredi Judaism. The idea that Judaism is merely a religious community and does not have nationalistic or political aspirations a la Zionism is actually criticized by major Jewish publications,
Obviously, Jews as a whole are not “complicit” in Zionism in the sense that they bear moral responsibility and/or blame. Just like not every American in the South was complicit in slavery, not every Catholic complicit in Vatican scandals, not every German complicit in WWII. But the relationship between mainstream institutional Judaism and Zionism is still a little troubling IMO and it can’t be ameliorated with a simple “there are anti-Zionist Jews in academia”.
I don’t see it as anything other than a truth of the religion. You cannot read very far into the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible without hitting a verse (and it doesn’t matter much which book you read) that’s talking about Jews and “the land”. It’s simply part of how Judaism works, and you’d have to twist things quite a bit to create a Judaism that doesn’t have some version of Zionism in it. Judaism is an unusual religion in the modern world because of it being an ethnic religion tied to the land of Israel or Palestine. Outside of some very odd survivals of Native American religions (Lakota and the Black Hills for example) there just aren’t that many religious land claims out there.
Most of the rest of the world religions are faith based and missionary. Christian and Muslim are what they are not because of ethnic ancestry or connection to a place, but because they share a creed. Buddhism is a practice. Hinduism is a practice more or less. I think it’s hard for outsiders to understand the Zionist idea simply because it’s alien to what most of the rest of us have as a religious experience.
And yet collective, non-messianic Zionism only became popular in the late 1800’s in the context of modern European nationalism.
Going to my other example, the Lakota aren’t actively trying to retake the black hills because they’re not realistically able to. Until Palestine became part of the British Empire, there was no chance of retaking it.
True, but the project wasn’t a continuation of some ancient or medieval movement. I’m not an expert, but I believe the established view was that they would return to the promised land under the leadership of the messiah, conceived in religious and eschatological rather than practical terms. The Zionist movement that eventually produced the state of Israel arose in the same post-French revolution context as other European nationalisms of the era (e.g., Croatian, Bulgarian, Greek, Polish (based on all of what we would now call Poles considered as a whole people rather than on the political ‘nation’ of Poles in the medieval/early modern sense (which only referred to the nobility)). Having a pre-existing holy book that promised them a specific territory certainly has had its effects, but the movement was a break from the traditional Jewish religion rather than a linear development.
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Gonna drop a note here for transparency. This is not an official warning to @jewdefender, since you aren't really breaking any rules here (yet), but I want you (and your friends) to understand something:
I see you.
What do I mean by that? You got reported as follows: "hey fellow kids those white nationalists (which I'm totally not) are so wrong, aren't they?"
Which I found amusing and insightful because it is exactly what I thought the moment this new "jewdefender" alt started posting.
Dude. I am not fooled. I was never fooled. We let you do this because, well, Zorba doesn't want us witch-hunting and considers false positives worse than false negatives, and I mostly agree, and even a transparent alt can post interesting content. So fine, we'll let you keep wearing the mask until it slips. And probably even then, because as we keep pointing out, it's not being "outside the Overton Window" that gets people in trouble, it's being obnoxious, disingenuous, or belligerent about it. (Right now you're only one of those.)
But for all the people who report and DM me asking why we let an obvious troll troll, well, because. But just because we don't play whack-a-mole doesn't mean we're stupid. Just wanted you to know this.
I'll concede there is a small chance I'm wrong. I doubt it, but as I said, you aren't going to be banned for pretending to be a "jewdefender" while repeatedly posting white nationalist links and arguments supposedly for the purposes of refuting them. If you are who you claim to be, then no harm, no foul.
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To other readers this might beg the question 'why are you telling them all the signs that they are a troll'. In short, I'd like better quality trolls. To expand on that, this is a discussion forum that benefits from unique viewpoints. Its a place for people to work through ideas and sometimes current events with those that they strongly disagree. A good user brings good discussion and has interesting views. A perfectly disguised troll brings good discussion and has interesting views. The only difference in the amount of good they bring is that the good user might actually be enjoying their experience, a perfectly disguised troll is ... well they might be enjoying their time too, so maybe there is no difference. At worst they are just wasting their own time.
An imperfect troll that sits in the uncanny valley of belief systems, as you do, kinda breaks the illusion for everyone. They think "maybe this user is just uniquely bad at disguising their true viewpoints, and all the weird people I thought I was talking to are all fakes".
Not taking a stance on who this guy is but your first point seems like a line many posters here would cross in good faith.
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Oh for fuck’s sake, he’s still deleting his posts? Why do you keep tolerating this? Aside from the damage to the readability of the sub, it leaves no doubt as to who he is, there is no meaningful chance of a false positive here.
Do new users know not to delete posts? I had assumed JewDefender was someone financially / personally invested in, well, defending Jews on online forums, much like we had that one user who coincidentally would post whenever a certain Eastern European nation came up. In this case, deleting old irrelevant posts hardens their identity. I assume this happens not infrequently in online discourse. For some reason themotte comes in really high on google search results when you plug in a phrase of someone’s post. If this is case, which is mere conjecture and not accusation, I’m personally fine with it provided they make good arguments and don’t spam.
He doesn’t make good arguments and he spams.
I’m not going to waste my time presenting the false flag case again. I’ve done it enough previous times, the mods have done it in this very thread. It’s absolutely beyond doubt, but it doesn’t matter. Just ban him for deleting. Whatever he is, he will then make another alt, and at least this one won’t delete. Small mercies.
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It’s always been the same person, but the mods are reluctant to take a hard line. Anyway, it is what it is.
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I think I'm also against being trigger happy with bans, but how about an unremovable "suspected alt" flair?
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Related, but not exactly the same topic, this Tweet from a Jerusalem Post columnist in response to pro-Palestine protest marches in London really struck me:
While I am not an anti-Semite and could reasonably be described as mildly philo-Semitic, goddamn this kind of thing looks terrible from the perspective of anyone that isn't particularly Islam-friendly. To be blunt about it, I don't like Islam and wish there had never been any Muslim immigrants to Western nations. To the extent that Muslim immigration to Western nations is tolerable, it's the extent to which those Muslims practice a liberalized, watered-down form of Islam that is barely recognizable as anything other than generic monotheism with a couple idiosyncrasies of diet thrown in. Having places with women in beekeeper outfits everywhere sucks and I think most Americans and Brits that are being bluntly honest about the matter agree.
Of course, saying that out loud plays terribly, because somehow we decided that "Islamophobia" is a sin. Unless, apparently, you're Jewish, in which case you're able to write things like the above. Saying, "how are Brits supposed to live with this?" is off the table, but catering to the tiny segment of British Jews, that is an important consideration when it comes to whether having a bunch of jihad enthusiasts in London is a bad idea. If someone like me that likes Jews, likes Israel, and basically agrees with the claim in the Tweet finds this style of thinking grating, I'd wager that the anti-Semites would be just about apoplectic.
I don't understand why it's his fault that you can't criticize islam without the woke singing you the song of the oppressed.
My world-renowned and extremely rigorous vibe analysis says
he is literally one of the woke even now, and this entire ordeal has barely shaken his faith in the SocJus movementthat I am retarded and fell for an obvious troll.More options
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Whether it's his fault or not is orthogonal to the point that it sucks that saying, "this sucks for Jews" is fine, but saying, "this sucks for Brits" isn't.
You only found out now that the identity of the victim or of the speaker matters more to the woke than the facts or the content of the speech? Why is it grating or apoplexy-inducing to have people agree with you?
I quickly went through his twitter (my god, is this woke/girlbossy style tiresome).
But aside from the usual profession of faith
He seems very very focused on antisemitism, especially from other progressives. I didn’t see any condamnation of ‘white’ islamophobia.
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You're right, I should have explicitly stated that I was referring to "Islamophobia" being unacceptable in liberal circles and coding as a hard-right sentiment. The JP columnist I linked to is very much on the broader left, and I suppose I still think of that set as my ingroup.
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And every single one of those people was blasted as racist, and throttled by Big Tech. How exactly do you expect your list to prove that what they were saying was widely seen as acceptable by the establishment?
The fact that they're popular doesn't change the fact that what they're saying is seen as outside the bounds of acceptable discourse by the establishment. If they are within said bounds, then Big Tech trying to limit their reach should be a national, or international scandal.
The fact that they're able to reach their audience has nothing to do with the argument that what they're saying is seen as unacceptable in polite discourse, as opposed to a Jewish person saying literally the same thing.
If the cries of "racist" were limited to nobodies on the internet, no one would care. The problem is that they come from every respectable institution that claims to be neutral, only explicitly right-wing institutions don't do it. It is then a bit rich to hear the exact same complaint they were making from people calling them racist all this time.
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What am I looking at in that tweet? Guess I'm supposed to know that's a pro-Hamas protest?
I didn't investigate, I assume it'll be the mixed bag that a lot of these protests are, with some combination of people that would say they're just pro-Palestinian and others being more hardcore.
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To steelman, the Jerusalem Post columnist is less responding to "pro-Palestine marches", but what he sees as specifically pro-Hamas and often pro-October 7th protests. It's a little less easy to provide examples in the United Kingdom, given the officially-steep punishments for support of Hamas or violence, but to everyone's non-surprise enforcement is a more complex matter and explicit support of Hamas, intifada, or generally "from river to sea" style not-very-deniable stuff were supposedly pretty common. And the head of police decided that the police shouldn't be making charges for hate crimes acts where it's political or anything.
To break that steelman, even that has been a sin to other alliances and allegiances. Reacting to "KillAllMen" or "EndWhiteness" or Solanas fangirling or the like hasn't been acceptable in mainstream discourse for literally a decade, if not longer. For whatever these laws and rules and norms that the Post author wants to bring down might have claimed equal protection and equal restriction to all, in practice they exist to protect 'the powerless', where this is defined in some coincidentally very political directions.
So in many ways, it's 'just' that Freeman is surprised to find that groups he likes are on the other side of that scale for once. And there's certainly people for whom that's a cutting criticism, not just of their current arguments but their entire philosophy -- Chemerinsky is the punching-bag du jour, as he's provided long and significant philosophical support and institutional inaction -- but it's not clear Freeman, specifically, is a particularly central example of that set. He's no universalist hero who complained when other people's ox were getting gored, don't get me wrong, but neither was he waiting until this moment to notice that his group was often pushed to the outside.
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Think they may do a couple more big raids like this and then call it a day. Saves a tiny amount of face for the government saying they were going to go in and destroy Hamas but isn’t an actual occupation which “ex-IDF” and “ex-Mossad” types are now openly briefing the Israeli and Western press as a suicidal move.
Ex-PM Bennett recently suggested that the IDF should cut off northern Gaza and then just keep it under siege until Hamas runs out of supplies in its tunnels, which would take months to years.
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Man Israel was the last country I'd have expected to wuss out under globohomo pressure. Just go in, take control and make it known to the Palestinians that there is nothing they can ever do which would make the Israelis leave, so they better get used to a life with the Jews in charge (this is equivalent to removing your steering wheel and throwing it away in a game of Chicken) where any violence will get you branded as a hooligan/lout in the eyes of the state and treated appropriately. Give it 2 generations of this + a generous dose of the alkahest of modernity and what remains of the palestinians will be little different to low human capital occidentals, still a burden on society but by and large placated like your average domesticated westerner.
Some ritual humbling may be a more humane solution than just violence. Forbid the building and repairing of mosques and any religious noise, special tax, obligatory bowing when they pass a jew on the street...
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The end of the end of history may have been greatly exaggerated. Even the one militarist ethonationalist state Westerners can vicariously live through is getting cucked.
If Israel cannot easily go into Gaza after Jews were murdered and raped on live TV, they're not going to be able to do what it takes to "convince" Palestinians (or at least Hamas) to "get over it".
But I can see an occupation quickly convincing Israel it isn't worth it, while convincing (more) Muslims that it is very much is to fight Israel.
I think most westerners who are ethnonationalists don't really have a positive view of Israel. It isn't hard to understand why, because the existence of organisations like AIPAC and the actions of people like Frank Lowy are the sort of thing they're violently and diametrically opposed to. I don't spend much time in those circles, but a quick glance at the ethnonationalist right at the moment reveals a lot of responses to the conflict in the vein of "Alex_Jones_sipping_champagne.gif"
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This would be a really effective strategy if Israel existed in an orbiting space colony or a wizard-created demiplane. Unfortunately we don't live in a world with DnD wizards, which means Israel has to exist in the real world, and this means that it has to exist with a bunch of neighbours as well. Israel absolutely has a lot of ways to permanently solve the Palestinian "problem" (even phrasing it like that feels uncomfortable to me), but there aren't many solutions that won't immediately create a larger problem (the reaction from the broader international community).
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There are only couple of ways to deal with tunnels with acceptable casualties.
Flood them. Gas them. Blow their entrances. Start sending a shitload of automated roombas that carry grenades inside. All while you forfeit the hostages and hope hamas are honorable enough to give them a quick and clean death and not go pro streamed flayings, impalements and crucifixions.
You have drones now. Dealing with tunnels when finding out what's beyond the bend doens't involve coming into physical danger is much ,much easier.
I literally wrote roombas with grenades. But that doesn't mean that they have enough of them.
Drones with cameras go for about $500 these days.
You don't raelly need the roombas though, just knowing what's out there is usually good enough.
Israel is supposedly throwing smoke charges inside, sealing them, and then bombing all places where the smoke starts coming out. They don't seem to care at all about going down there, killing people inside is sufficient for them.
How practical are these things for navigating tunnels? I imagine you'd need a pretty good operator not to crash into walls in such an unfamiliar and cramped setting, and who knows how many of those they have, along with the crews required to maintain the equipment and protect the operator so he doesn't get attacked (I imagine the ping, the unreliable infrastructure during battle, and the blocking nature of tunnels makes it so that drone operators need to be somewhat close to the drones). And logistically, even if they cost just $500 each, do they have sheer shipping ability to keep replenishing them as quickly as they get destroyed?
You buy them off Alibaba. Or assemble them from components bought there. Russia, Ukraine are going through hundreds weekly, easily. Maybe thousands.
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Why not hope that they'll go pro stream hostage torture? You can then broadcast the Hamas atrocities to the entire world from all channels you have.
The previous round of Hamas atrocities haven't reduced the membership of Hamas's university fan clubs, so why would a new round of atrocities be any different?
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Because I don't want my people tortured.
It increasingly feels like the best shot to prevent as much of that as possible is to obtain a casus belli to bomb Hamas into the stone age.
If October 7th did not already provide adequate justification, then adequate justification does not exist.
We're talking about justification for killing more innocents to get at Hamas, not justification for a fictional surgical operation that kills only Hamas. After the initial Hamas raid, people clearly thought that the number of Palestinian civilians that can be killed and cityscapes that can be devastated in the process of exacting revenge is not zero; only recently has public opinion started turning towards "that was too much". Yet, we clearly haven't hit the absolute ceiling of how much collateral damage the public thinks could ever be acceptable; see WW2 or even ISIS in Mosul. Presumably if Hamas got closer to ISIS or Hitler in terms of total volume of achievements that piss off the Western public, there would be room for the public to tolerate more destruction of Gaza in return, up to the point of accepting literal glassing.
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It seems the adequate justification has a short shelf life and needs to be renewed every few weeks or months.
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What's going on in the West Bank right now? I haven't seen much coverage of it.
There's been some combat, mass arrests, and rocket strikes/counterstrikes, but Arabic Wikipedia -- which I will caution I trust not in the slightest (if you think American wikipedia is shameless propaganda...), and only provide as higher-end estimate -- lists an estimated 100 West Bank Palestinian fatalities since October 7th. Al-Jazeera (ditto!) says 110ish and highlights a lot of Palestine Islamic Jihad and a Hamas fighters in a randomly-selected instance.
Fatah's claimed official support for a general uprising and specifically to provide Gaza Palestinians medical aid, but the text is weirdly less bloodthirsty (repeat above disclaimer, but going the other valiance) than a lot of college campuses, damning with faint praise as that might be; whether this reflects translators rephrasing matters for public consumption, the organization not wanting to tall poppy themselves, or a result Fatah's long-lasting tension with Hamas (Hamas has gone out of its way to kill Fatah officials, Abbas keeps fucking with Presidential election dates), or some other thing, I dunno. On the other direction, Abbas has a pretty explicit disavowal of attacks focusing on civilians on Twitter... in English... for a couple days... which limits how much that could be read as intended for internal read.
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Settlers going on rampage - destroying crops, burning houses, evicting whole Palestinian villages at gunpoint (yes, unlike Israelis in Israel proper, these hilltop guys are heavily armed and unlike Gaza, Palestinians in West Bank are thoroughly disarmed).
Lots of coverage, but you have to dig up into Arabic sources to find it.
Are their guns legal? Are they formed into officially sanctioned militias or does the government just tacitly encourage it while looking the other way?
The latter. "It's not technically Israeli land, it's some no-man's land, so we won't police what our citizens do there, but we will protect them from harm".
If true, that really sucks for the people in the West Bank.
It sounds like true anarcho-tyranny. "People can harm you with impunity, but if you fight back, the government will punish you".
The limited examples of anarcho-tyranny which happen in progressive U.S. cities make my blood boil. I can't imagine how bad it would be in Palestine, where the Palestinians have no leafy suburbs to retreat to.
Again, if true.
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Damn. Brutal if true, and it feels plausible, given the incentives. Still, I’d like to see something more conclusive than a tweet about “dear friends” who are totally getting rounded up by the gestapo.
Compare @gattsuru’s estimate.
At least some settler and IDF bad action is moderately well-supported by the evidence (and shouldn't be very surprising; Price Taggers tend to be assholes). I think Susiya and Masafer Yatta (note: both these pieces are pre-Oct 7th) are more about the broader Area C clusterfuck, but there's a lot of Well-Respected Reporters giving pretty strong claims of Area C places doing variants of a commanded evacuation followed by invasive search, and I could absolutely believe the IDF and/or COGAT is doing it to fuck with them.
Some of this fuckery has escalated to death (contrast, with the caveat that I expect neither of these is giving a good factual analysis, though the jpost one seems like it's damning enough with faint praise that you don't need to by the AJZ version).
It's just an escalation of existing problems, rather than a change in type.
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Why don’t militaries support tanks with infantry?
It seems like common sense but we’ve now both in the Ukraine War, Armenian-Azerbaijan War and now in Israel, militaries seem to be convinced that tanks are fine by themselves and as a result are sitting ducks for infantry with anti-tanks weapons.
What’s going on? Why do militaries make such a dumb mistake again and again? Is there something I’m missing?
Israeli tanks have APS like Trophy that in theory mitigates a lot of the risk from RPGs.
Their vehicles are also designed to ensure crew safety above all else, even after a disabling hit.
Combining this with their low appetite for loss of human life, it might make sense to minimize the inevitable infantry casualties from dismounts accompanying vehicles by sending them in solo. Might, I have no specific insight into the outcomes of their doctrine, but for all the footage Hamas releases of close quarters RPG hits on such vehicles, footage of the burning wreckage in the aftermath seems lacking.
At the end of the day, there's no good way of clearing an urban hellhole, short of nuking it.
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Because infantry can't run this fast and mechanized infantry is vulnerable to the same anti-tank weapons. Combined arms are hard. Even the US will struggle if you take away its CAS and artillery support.
You need to send your infantry forward so they can take out anti-tank weapons, but your tanks must be close enough behind that they can take out anti-infantry weapons that your infantry will encounter. Or your infantry has to have artillery support on call, which is vulnerable to counter-battery fire.
I'm talking about regular land warfare, sending tanks into cities that haven't been completely levelled is just wasting them.
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So, this might belong in the CWR, but realistically- how much of the heightened red tribe support for Israel is wish fulfillment and how much of it is from other factors(Islamophobia, superstitious fear of opposing Israel, dislike of the people siding with Palestinians, lack of concern over settler colonialism and a general principle granting states the right of self defense, genuine pro-democracy sentiment, etc).
Let's get the elephant in the living room out of the way first- at least some portion of evangelicals really do believe we have a duty to support Israel(the state) out of something something biblical end times prophecy. Red tribers in general are likely to see actual-religious evangelicals as moral exemplars even if they don't intend on waking up that early on Sundays, but IME the way that filters down, even to the ones that go to church, is usually more "God will punish us for not intervening if Israel falls" and less actual love of Israel. This tends to be compounded by Israel's winning record; if you're looking for confirmation that there's some kind of curse inherent in opposing the state of Israel, well...
Islamophobia is probably also a factor. Yes, Christians in the region are usually not pro-Israel partisans, but the vast majority of Israel's active opponents are Muslim, and the Palestinian authority doesn't treat Christians very well(certainly not as well as Israel does). Also lots of them don't know about the opinions of middle eastern Christians, or that these are longstanding groups of locals as opposed to one or two converts from American or British missionaries.
But all that being said, the red tribe just doesn't understand why settler colonialism is supposed to be so evil, most of them don't know what a nakba is and see it as "Jews bought the land from its rightful owners, fair and square. Then the Muslims didn't like that, started a civil war, they lost and got kicked out." which is not a story that makes the red tribe think of Israel as illegitimate, and from the perspective of "Israel is legitimately established", there might have been some excesses but self defense describes most of what it did and has done. There is a difference between "we support them because they're morally justified" and "we support them because we wish we could do what they do".
Plus, Israel is a US ally. They certainly put their own interests first, but that's to be expected. Israel certainly keeps a lid on, say, Syrian and Iranian influence in a way that's very convenient for the GAE and probably worth the USS Liberty.
That's like saying that Cordyceps is the ant's ally.
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Is there heightened red tribe support? If anything it seems a little less with Tucker pulling some to America First. As you note evangelicals have been very pro Israel for decades.
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Also, not to put too fine a point on it: Israel is huhWight.
Even if most Israelis aren't white racially, it is a white post colonial European state culturally. Ingroup loyalty puts it's finger on the balance, so if you aren't sure what's going on/ don't care that much, the default position is to support team most-like-you.
's why absent any knowledge about the region, most Americans and Europeans feel better about Singapore than eg New Guinee: Even if Singapore isn't western, it's close enough for horseshoes and international diplomacy.
I think there's a lot of weight in just the fact that most internationally-visible Israelis (officials, reporters, etc) are fluent English speakers and often give press conferences in (pretty good) English. I expect the trifecta of "fluent in English", "white-appearing" and "culturally western/European-coded" is enough on its own to make the average American red-triber (maybe the average American in general?) start off somewhat sympathetic to you.
Incidentally, I learned just now (while double-checking my kneejerk "it seems like most Israelis speak decent English" assumption) that 20% of Israelis are fluent in Russian, and Russian is by a good margin the most popular non-official language spoken in Israel, not English. (Arabic and Hebrew are official.) Apparently that's entirely because of Jewish exodus from the USSR from the 1970s to the late 90s. Not being familiar with that demographic history, I don't even think I would've expected Russian to be in the top 10.
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Boy, this summary sure makes me think that you've given a particularly charitable analysis of motivations. Let's go get a big drink of water and:
Would you actually find it useful to see a steelman, or is that not really the point, here?
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I will note that at least two dozen people in my life have gotten in touch with me to let me know that I need to get right with God because this conflict in Israel is a direct sign of the end times. I'm never sure how to feel about that, prophecy and free will being complicated concepts to square together. What's the value of supporting Israel if the net outcome is already preordained?
So based off my own unscientific sample, it seems that evangelicals think things go a little deeper than that.
Of course, as a Catholic, I know not to get worked up until Russia comes to the true Church
It seems like most Israel supporters have told me that Israel falling would mean bad times for the countries that opposed it, but the reasons varied from ‘bring about the end times directly’ to ‘divine punishment’.
A number of Evangelicals consider Genesis 12:3 to be significant guidance on the issue. Option A = blessed by God. Option B = cursed by God. Make your own choices as you see fit, but do consider the remarkable lack of subtlety in the options presented.
Reality may certainly be described by a variety of interpretations, but I think most would agree that many Palestinians do not like Israel very much, and frequently act on that opinion. Also, Gaza seems like a poor place to live, given most alternatives. Genesis 12:3 is one way of connecting those observations.
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I've been reading a lot about "humanitarian aid" sent into Gaza (by now hundreds of trucks). Does anybody know any source that lists what exactly is being sent? Like this amount of flour, this amount of insulin, this amount of water, etc.? The corporate press is being its usual useless self, resorting to facts only when they absolutely have no other choice, but maybe somebody knows some more obscure, but useful publication, that track what and how many is being sent?
I am especially interested in how many water pipes and how much of fertilizer is included.
What need to drown Hamas tunnels with sewage when it's an inevitable consequence of them fucking up their plumbing?
I got your reference bro.
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Reuters Reports:
The AP has a similar statement.
In case you're thinking that 'My staff reporters were not involved in planning or executing a mass murder of civilians' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt", you're not alone. The HonestReporting summary if anything manages to undersell it, which is quite an accomplishment for a news story that involves the phrase 'lynch mob': people have since found on a photographer's facebook page a video of the man on a motorbike where the camera-holder or one of the other riders waves a grenade in-hand.
Journalistic ethics are a hard problem, and a harder one during wartime. It's typical for wartime embeds with conventional military forces to submit to often-onerous restrictions, sometimes to the point of requiring all releases to undergo pre-publication review (which should raise a number of Constitutional questions in the United States but mostly doesn't). There was a pretty major controversy in the mid-2000s after a Paris Match reporting team was on-scene at a missile strike targeting a mail carrier aircraft (Vernier-Palliez claimed that the militants had "set them up" and had no idea that they were going to commit a violent attack... though I think her claimed surprise is more than a little self-serving). And 'journalism' that's really just repackaged press releases from active members of a particular side are common enough outside of combat; the rewards are, if anything, simply greater for politics-by-other-means.
On the other hand, if your war reporting is little more than repackaged press releases from a group that slaughtered and raped civilians, while the reporting papers over all of that, this raises more than a few questions for that reporting's accuracy, as critics of journalists embedded with the IDF have long held. And that doesn't seem to be sinking in, here:
That'd be the guy with the grenade and cheerful embrace from Hamas leadership; CNN remains certain, among other things, that this summary is tots accurate and that the photographer's ties to Hamas' military arm tots don't leave any room for suspicion. Mahmud's main remaining photos on the AP database have at least been corrected to note that the dead 'Israeli soldier' was in fact a pacifist Israeli-German dual-citizen.
Okay, but these people weren't exactly weekly bylines. Indeed, they're just one of countless on-the-ground randos that various press agencies sent money and lent legitimacy. They're also just the ones dumb enough and unlucky enough to get caught, but let's leave that aside for now. One bit of that legitimacy is people believing the repackaged press releases, but a deeper one is the ability to wear and mark press credentials, a matter that has historically been considered worth protecting. There's even been clear cases where the IDF has wrongly killed journalists, and been criticized at length for it.
That just became far more difficult to maintain as a norm.
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So, there was some talk in this thread (or the previous one) about why the Israel/Palestine issue is such a big one in progressive circles, as opposed to country x, y, or z. Well, there were some decent historical and cultural explanations, I think one reason that really didn't get brought up is because there's actual disagreement within the wider left-leaning coalition is why there's more fire, on both sides.
So, as an actual progressive Democratic partisan, let me explain a bit.
Putting aside actual tankies or the 11 Lieberman Democrats left, if you put the median Bernie & the median Biden primary voter in 2020, and had them talk foreign policy, there would be wide agreement - Iraq was a mistake, we were in Afghanistan too long, Russia is bad and Ukraine needs our defense, but American foreign policy has been too hawkish in general, and so on. So, there's no spice, outside of the occasional Twitter dunk of somebody who had a bad take on Iraq in 2004, but even that's kind of hackish and old news to most Democratic voters at this point.
But, there would be actual disagreement on Israel & Palestine, especially if both sides were intelligent median voters because it's an actual complicated issue. At the moment, polling shows the median Democratic voter view is along the lines of, "the Israeli government are a-holes, Hamas is terrible, and the hostages need to be released, but Jesus, the IDF seems to be going overboard on this, and oh yeah, the surrounding governments are full of instigators."
Now, the more progressive voter would be more harsh on the Israeli government, more friendly to the Palestinian population, and so on, but the polling that showed 50/50 support for Israel vs Hamas among younger voters, was likely bad polling. The reason why Democratic views used to be more pro-Israel, is because the Israeli population used to reflect a more liberal view of the conflict, and now it really doesn't, plus wider changes in the makeup of the Democratic coalition.
Finally, the "but Palestinians have bad views on x, why do you support them," is a bad argument, because as progressives, we believe even terrible have the right to vote, and self-government. Only letting people with the right views (or the right amount of land ownership) is the reactionary view. Now, if said Palestinian government passes anti-LGBT laws or whatever, then we'll treat them like we do other countries with no leverage on us - sanctions and such until they embrace the loving arms of deviancy, or whatever.
In the long run, if this is all old news by Election Day 2024, it'll likely be forgotten, and more importantly, the vast majority of even young SJW left-wing Democratic voters are self-centered voters, like 95% of all voters, and will be reminded that Trump wants to put more reactionaries on the court, cut taxes for rich people, limit trans right, etc, make student loan payments higher, et al, and vote accordingly. I'd make a $1 bet w/ anybody here, that as long as the Israeli situation is basically back to some form of status quo, there will be no real movement of the youth vote, or a lack of turnout, beyond the lack of turnout there always is.
After all, Gretchen Whitmer actually lost ground among Muslim voters in 2022 in her re-election campaign (probably due to LGBT issues), but won by wider margin. Which is the only real trouble spot for the Biden team in 2024, since they literally do not care if some college-educated 2nd gen Muslim immigrant in Los Angeles doesn't vote.
Standard Disclaimer: Yes, lots of people are dumb, and will have simple reasons, and weird views.
Erm, what? What timeframe are you talking about? Israel has been moving towards more conciliatory and liberal view of the conflict for decades now. It evacuated Gaza in 2005 (forcibly uprooting many Jewish communities) and tolerates Hamas shelling the southern cities for 18 years since, with only sporadic limited response carefully calculated to punish Hamas, but not endanger their rule. One of the main reason of the current catastrophe is that Israel got so immersed in the liberal concept of "peace is inevitable, Hamas is just representing the last throes of retrogrades that can not tolerate the inevitable coming of peace, but they are weak and dying off" - that's why such thing as "peace festival" on the border with Gaza with virtually no protection beyond token security guards meant to handle people who got over their norm of mind-altering substances - became possible. That's why most of the smaller towns and villages had no armed guards and had weapons locked up - something one couldn't imagine in the vicinity of Gaza some years ago, before "peace process". Israel has been moving to the liberal side since early 90s, at least, and the more they moved there, the more the Left hated them. It's just American Jews and Israeli Left made titanic effort not to notice it, but now it became a bit hard not to notice.
Do you really? The left never seems to have any problem with leftist dictatorships (too long to list here). Sure, they may recognize Kim is taking it too far, and maybe Pol Pot made a goofie or two, but otherwise dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't seem to represent any serious problem. If there are some staged "elections" where the ruling junta always wins, then everything is completely perfect. The treatment of the Islamic dictatorships seems to be very situational - while some Islamic dictatorship get some critique, most of them are silently ignored (especially the rich ones donating amply to Left's Places of Power) and surely absolutely none of them gets as much hate as Israel does.
If??? If??? Are we talking about real Palestinians under Hamas (or Fatah) rule or some Celestial Palestinians existing only in Harvard classrooms? Of course, since most Palestinians that are discernibly gay are either dead or fled to Israel years ago, this is more of a theoretical question. Hamas does not "pass laws" - it just throws you off a building.
Not only this is a lie, you know this is a lie. Many Muslim countries have such laws, and there are no sanctions.
I'm not sure how it matters if it isn't. I see no group on the Left that even theoretically could switch their vote or stay home (in significant numbers) except one - American Jews. For some of them, it has been really shocking how much their parteigenossen hate them. But, unfortunately, I do not see any way that would move them to vote for Trump. It's just not something decent people do. Maybe some of them will stay home, but given that most of them live in deep blue areas anyway, it won't change anything. So, some Democrat will be elected with 70% of votes instead of the usual 89% - who cares. So, my prediction - absolutely nothing will change in 2024.
The demand for credible and competent moderate Republicans who can steal all the disaffected Democrats continues to grossly exceed the supply, which is why I'm grudgingly tolerant of a grifter like Vivek.
I'm not sure how the second part follows from the first. It's like saying "we desperately need the cure for common cold, so I am using charmed bracelets and pyramid power". The proposition that something is sorely lacking does not imply logically acceptance of something that is clearly inadequate for that purpose.
I mean, one can hope "he's clearly a grifter but may be he will fool some of the most stupid of Dems" but one can't rely on this as a plan for anything?
I said grudgingly tolerate, not endorse. Most successful politicians are lying to you out of their teeth, and at least in his case I agreed with many of the policy statements laid out by the one guy who was single-handedly running a PR campaign for him.
That's more an indictment of establishment candidates than it is full throated approval for him.
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OP described himself as a progressive democrat, not a marxist-leninist.
I'm probably too far away to see minor differences, but I don't think I have seen/heard/read a lot of "progressive democrats" criticizing leftist dictators and their approach to elections. I mean, when did I have the last opportunity to see a leftist protest demanding to hold free elections in Cuba? Venezuela? North Korea? China? Anywhere where a leftist or islamist dictator holds power? I mean, a lot of Americans have opinions, as we recently found out, about how Israel's democracy must be managed, but none have any opinions on any of those? Doesn't it look a little bit weird?
When was the last time you saw ordinary Republicans protesting for those things? You can see protests for elections in Cuba, Iran, wherever, all the time, but they're pretty much always driven by diaspora from those countries.
But that's a weird way to assess the Democrat position on democracy in communist dictatorships, which has always been very public. Biden has issued statements calling for democracy in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc, against their Marxist-Leninist regimes, and maintains sanctions against all of these countries explicitly because of their lack of democracy. You might have noticed the Biden Administration this past month has been undergoing a major negotiation with Venezuela precisely for them to hold free elections.
You mentioned Islamists as well, but Obama of course lost credibility with Islamist dictators precisely because of his support for the democratic protests during Arab Spring. The think tanks and NGOs that catalogue the human rights crimes of these various countries and demand democracy are also pretty much always staffed by progressive democrats.
Of course, if you take the longer view you will Democrat Presidents taking military action against Marxist-Leninist movements quite regularly throughout the past century.
Republicans are usually much less supportive of intervening into other countries - even tyrannical ones - when they don't mess with us.
If you look from proclamations to actual actions, though, you see that the policy towards tyrannical regimes is always softened - that happened with Obama, and that is also happening with whoever pulls Biden's strings, which some say is the same Obama. Be it Iran, be it Cuba, be it China - beyond some perfunctory words, it's never any serious action. In fact, it's plenty of the actions in the opposite directions.
I don't know what these NGOs have in their files, deep in their computer drives, but if you look on their public stance, the impression one gets is that there's about two countries that ever commit human rights crimes worth discussing - one of them is the US, and you can easily guess the second one.
Well, if we talk about the whole century, the Democrat party wasn't as thoroughly infiltrated by the Marxists as they are now. Marxists were mostly on the fringe, and they are full mainstream now, with wide representation in all institutions of the society. Thus, of course, what has been then and what is happening now is rather different.
This is a highly dubious claim to begin with, and largely belies your broader point about Democrats being the ones soft on foreign tyrants.
This is not true. Both parties have launched waves of targeted sanctions on ML countries, overseen covert and cyop warfare agaimst them, and found ways to support their opposition (Obama backed Capriles against Chavez before anyone had heard of Guaidó). Likewise, both parties have considered softening their stance for progress on things we care about: Obama considered rapproachment with a neutered, non-threat Cuba; Trump considered rapproachment with a nuclear armed North Korea regularly threatening us and our allies.
Human Rights Watch, Amnsety International, etc, write about human rights abuses in Marxist countries regularly on their public websites.
Nonsense.
I was talking about the partisan structures specifically, not the government structures, and about open and openly practicing Marxists who do not hide their ideology and openly come to elections with it, not Soviet spies pretending to be regular Americans to get to governmental secrets. Maybe "infiltrated" in the hindsight wasn't the best word to use as indeed it also can be used for clandestine activities, but that's not what I meant. I meant if you are an open and genuine Marxist, and do not hide it, you would be much more at home at Dem party now than back then, and conversely, there are many more such people in the party now than there was back then. I would imagine back in Stalin's era there were much more hidden Soviet spies (who we can assume being Marxists by default) in partisan and governmental structures, and even if Russian spies are there now, they aren't probably Marxists anymore. But that's not the part I was talking about.
I'll address the other points later, hopefully, a bit busy now.
How many Marxists do you think are in the Democrat party? This is an extremely tiny group of people who consider the Democrats just as right wing as Republicans.
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The facts on the ground and the way the culture war is wages doesn't show that this beliefs extend to the us red tribe.
If there are prominent progressive voices that have told "restriction on abortion is terrible and yet the states have a right to organize as they seem fit" I have yet to hear it.
I also don't see sanctions on Saudi Arabia related to women issues, LGBT issues and the likes while the US is lead by the probably government that has the strongest progressive voices ever.
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This poll, asking people to choose between Israel and Hamas, with no option of "neither" og "dont know" had major "you're with us or you're against us" vibe. I imagine a big chunk of the people who chose Hamas, were just annoyed at the options and decided to say "f*ck it, I guess I support Hamas then".
Yeah, any poll without a none of the above/no opinion option I throw out as junk, even if it agrees w/ my views.
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How do you square this with massive support by democrats for government censorship.
I'd say you'd need to be more specific. What claim are you making here?
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Unless it's state right of fellow Americans in conservative states. Want to keep a right enshrined in the Bill of Rights? We've got nukes, fascists! Don't want teachers telling kids they should cut their genitals off? Genocide! Arabs literally murder gays... well that's just their culture, self governance and all.
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This would require that the leftists acknowledge the bad views, and treat bad views by Palestinians like they do bad views by other people who are on their shitlist. You see Queers for Palestine. You don't see calls for Gaza to stop executing gays, or stop censorship, or to embrace religious plurality.
It would also require that the leftists do the reverse--treating bad views by other people by the same standards they do Palestinians. See the abortion example someone else mentioned. Or ask whether they support Republicans who have bad views much less bad than Palestinians.
This also isn't a good standard if "bad views on X" is something that is strongly associated with violence, such as widespread antisemitic beliefs, or support of terrorism.
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No they don't. They explicitly opposed making abortion a state issue on the grounds that wanting to ban it is a terrible view, and that the correct view should be imposed top-down.
Yes, because the majority of people in the country want abortion enshrined as a right. The fact that the system as it is enforces minority rule is not a dunk on progressives; it's a condemnation of the system.
If it's a straight majority that wants it, then they'll vote accordingly in their state elections. If you're saying that they want it to be a right even in states they do not reside in, that's a straight-forward contradiction with "as progressives, we believe even terrible have the right to vote, and self-government."
They do have the right to vote: They can rock up to their polling place, place their vote, and then loose because their policies are unpopular (or win on merits, but given the polls on that particular issue it sure seems unlikely).
The right to compete doesn't mean the right to win.
Are you saying they will lose on the state level in every state, or that changing the law in a specific state and not anywhere else somehow constitutes "minority rule"?
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I'm fine w/ abortion being a "state issue," if by state issue, you mean one determined by referendums on various abortion laws.
But, red state governments don't like that very much, because it turns out even the most right-wing states don't agree with the extremists in charge of state governments on abortion law.
Not sure why it has to be a referendum, but whatever, all I meant that states get to decide it without the involvement of the federal government. If you're fine with it, that's great, but that's not a majority opinion among the progressives.
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On the topic of Zionism and Jewish influence in American media, I came across a twitter long post that scrutinises the notion that Zionists effectively decide American foreign policy. There are three main highlights of this post.
The State Department and the Pentagon are far more powerful lobbies, and their support for Israel is given only begrudgingly.
The increasingly high volume public statements that Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and therefore deserves American support actually signal the weakness of the Israeli lobby.
Israel receives atrociously large aid packages because it allows Congress more latitude to manipulate through the budget process, and much of the aid actually ends up in the pockets of defence contractors or are credits to purchase American arms.
I can't verify all of these statements since I'm writing this before heading to bed, but I think this is the first time I've heard someone who isn't implicitly pro-Israel take the issue of lobbying and scrutinise the claims of actual Israeli heft in the American elite. One of the replies to the post brings up an article about Pentagon backed groups in Syria fighting CIA armed militias. It's very interesting to me how intra-American rivalry between various lobbies spill over in warzones, particularly the Middle East.
I’m sure he has some more complete and subtle model of the US government than I do, but isn’t it kind of strange on its face to say “yeah the Israel lobby has special influence over US policy but it’s no big deal because the actual government departments whose job it is to handle these matters have more influence?”
As an American citizen I would find it incredibly fucked up if Israel ever overrules the Pentagon or the State Department on anything.
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Related tangent.
Your typical globalist-hater doesn't understand that America's wealth comes from being the only global superpower. While the US is more benevolent that previous aspiring claimants to that crown, they are the only ones to have actually achieved it. Now, benevolent as they may be, American supremacy is maintained through the threat of economic and physical violence.
A world where America is not the sole superpower, is a world that is unquestionably worse for Americans and the nations America protects. Now yes, some American protectorates have been coasting off the US, but that comes with them resigning their agency on matters of national determination. A world where every nation has competing alignments from its neighbors is world where the threat of war looms on every corner.
The $1.5T military spending of the US Govt, is a 'world peace spending' and in return the US gets to be the reserve currency of the world (and essential wage unilateral economic war on any nation of its choosing). Yes, that's a lot of money, but look at America's superior covid recovery vs all the other Pax-American nations. That difference is entirely owed to being able to print as many $$$$ as it likes.
From that perspective, America's military spending a total win-win. American allies get to save money on military and enjoy guaranteed peace. America gets to stay as wealthy as it likes and be the only nation that can truly impose its will on the world.
Now, the so-called global-south consists of countries that are finding their identity in a world where China is throwing its weight around. They don't value global peace, because they don't know a world before it. They don't value local peace, because they haven't enjoyed much local peace or stability during this Pax-American century. Many global south nations haven't been brainwashed (convinced) into favoring American values as baseline. They don't understand Chinese debt traps. They don't see the value in putting the nation state over the wider global religious identity. They don't value democracy in their bones, because they can't imagine majorities having favorable moderate views in their low-trust societies. Point is, they don't see the amazing win-win that Pax-Americana is. They might play along with it, they will change masters at the drop of a hat. They will dump any values they claim to hold, because it is all performative to them anyway.
That's where American global south allies come into the picture. Israel & India are the only 2 proper liberal western democracies in the region, and that matters. India is more independent and still ridding itself of its soviet scars, but Israel understands the value of Pax-Americana in its bones. And you cannot buy that kind of loyalty. It's the kind of loyalty that comes with a strong belief that any alternative than your current master is a worse one. And for that Israel gets rewarded. It is the only unconditional-American ally in the global south.
It is also why I think the America-India alliance will continue flourishing, even if India occasionally plays both sides. India (now) accepts Pax-Americana & liberal-democracy as the best overlords in their bones. Being a natural adversary to China guarantees India's 'loyalty'. Maybe not as a subject, but at least as a willing partner.
Lastly, to me, MBS (and allied Emirati Sheikhs) are the last peace of this puzzle. They might be the only practicing Muslims who have truly abandoned their global-religious identity in favor of Americanism.
The winds of change are here. The US cannot be the sole-superpower on its own. It needs allies and subjects that stay with it out of both convenience, belief and natural alignment. The EU-Korea-Japan-Canada-US nexus ensured that Global-North and its waters remained 'Peaceful' (by encircling Russia). The South exposes 2 new battle fields. Israel-Saudi-India-Australia-Japan are the 2nd front for encircling China, Oil resource & the Indian Ocean. The final front is around the South Atlantic + Southern Indian Ocean. But, Africa and South America aren't as important, so we haven't seen lines be drawn as strongly just yet. Maybe that'll emerge as the final front in 30-ish years.
So yeah, within that context, American favoritism towards Israel makes a lot of sense.
Maybe I'm a bit tired right now but I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I guess the 'global peace' means the post-1945 world (or maybe the post-1989 one, I don't know), but surely the countries of the Global South all existed before 1945 and have a long history (and memory) in general.
Most countries in the global south did not exist as independant nation states pre ww2. Most were coming out of a colonial era of subjugation.
Most of these countries don't think about global peace. Their concerns have always been local to their geographic neighborhood.
Having global peace enforced on us by a global superpower with a certain value system has led to the deliberate creation of this modern world. The Global South does not appreciate just how anomalous this peace is and how fickle it can be if nations start pushing too many buttons and pitting competing interests against each other to a maximum extent.
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Loss of American hegemony would cause a near term recession and probably high inflation for a while, assuming it didn’t just collapse the government into balkanizing. But the USA was the richest country in the world in 1950(in a global duopoly), it was the richest country in the world in 1920, and it had only Britain as a rival for richest country in the world for the 19th century.
The US has been ‘the’ preeminent power since at least 1880. The US overtook the UK in median income by 1894 at the latest. Australia was actually the richest per capita country in the world for a long stretch at the end of the 19th century.
economically, perhaps. but our armed forces (and hence ability to project power) was comically bad until rearmament in the late 30s
That's overstating the matter; the US gained the ability to enforce the Monroe doctrine sometime in the later 19th century and opened Japan, conquered the Philippines, and participated in the boxer insurrection with enough distinction to get the peace terms it wanted. The US simply wasn't the overarching superpower until 1990 even if it's been a major power since 1870 or so.
if it's an overstatement, it's certainly less of an overstatement than the original comment stating we were the preeminent power. Britain and France were superpowers, we were not. We were economically very powerful and a regional power in the Americas and Pacific islands, yes.
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It is simply not true that being a global superpower has made America wealthy. Walterodim points out the obvious historical evidence that invalidates this. But also being a global superpower is a wealth sink not a wealth faucet.
Being wealthy is about having more stuff, and having services. It is strange to think that diverting wealth towards making items that destroy things (less stuff), and kill people (fewer services) would somehow make us wealthier.
The American economic engine operates well despite being hitched to the responsibilities of a global superpower, not because of it.
Turns out that having that sort of stuff prevents other people from fucking with your other stuff.
The US goes far beyond the point of securing property.
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It’s more of an investment in security. You can get much farther in a world where everyone knows that messing with you is a death sentence than one in which that isn’t true. If we want a good trade deal for minerals in South America, the ability to say “do it or we coup you and put in someone who will” means you get a better deal than you would if your can’t do that.
Likewise having a military strong enough to invade or bomb the crap out of most countries on earth means that you can assure yourself of reasonably safe shipping lanes. No country on earth is going to mess with the US Navy, and they’re much more likely to use their resources to curb pirates attacking US or Atlantic aligned merchant shipping. It means that aligning with the Atlantic powers provides safety and defying them is dangerous.
All of those things allow global trade to flourish and benefits us in better trade and more open markets and so on. It even benefits us insofar as it deters others from trying to start wars where we’d have to use our military might. That’s also why nukes ultimately are such a boon for peace. Nobody wants the weapon used on their country so any country under the nuclear umbrella of either the USA or Russia can be sure they won’t have to fight wars.
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Contra @me, I think purchasing collective security measures does increase aggregate wealth due to the ability of those engaged in commerce to do so with lower transaction costs than each of them covering security individually. Whether the United States does this well enough to be worth it and whether it collects appropriate rents for doing so are questions to be answered, but markets function better when they're difficult to rob.
It's possible to spend too much on security and to spend too little. I think the US is massively over spending.
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Many caveats apply, but this table and other similar sources suggest that the United States was plausibly the richest country in the world by 1913 when it wasn't remotely hegemonic. I don't doubt that Americans reap benefits from worldwide hegemonic status, but the Monroe Doctrine seemed to suffice for generating quite a lot of wealth. The combination of land, resources, culture, and institutions was paying off while Americans were highly skeptical of foreign adventurism.
By 1913, there was a certain degree of obvious US hegemony, even if other powers (the British) still looked preeminent: American ships had forcibly opened Japanese markets to the West, the US had recently defeated Spain and claimed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico (and for a brief time, occupied Cuba). The Great White Fleet had circumnavigated the globe making its presence known.
Certainly not the height of American power (which we don't even know if we've seen yet, I suppose), but anyone watching would not have written them off at the time either.
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As Voxel says, the US was already globally the most powerful nation, had dominion in practice over the entire western hemisphere, had embarked on a colonial adventure in Asia and had participated in the Boxer rebellion conflict in China by 1913. It was obviously already an internationalist power. One of the great tragedies of the Mearsheimer-Walt-Buchanan matrix of bullshit is that a lot of people actually believe that the US was ‘isolationist’ before 1941 or something. In reality, the US was always a participant in the general European colonial project and was always an imperial, internationalist nation, it just manifested in a moderately different way.
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My personal intuition is that any inferences from an 'agricultural and manufacturing' era of the world are moot in the present. PPP is hard enough to quantify in 2023. PPP becomes completely irrelevant when you're comparing across centuries. It is the most vibes-based number you can possibly find.
More directly, Every SNP 500 company relies on having a global consumer base. In every mental simulation, if the US stops being the global superpower, it will get a lot poorer, even if other nations become similarly poor alongside it.
That being said, in a fully isolationist world, the USA would easily be the richest big country by virtue of having a large consumer base and being self-sufficient in practically every resource known to man. However, I expect it to be a much poorer and more miserable world to live in on average than what we have today.
Yeah, I would agree with all of that.
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Is your debate partner an underdog fetishist?
Someone here (or maybe on /r/themotte) opened my eyes to this idea. I'm sorry I can't find the post and credit you, various searches aren't helping me find it.
There exists an apparent mini-moral philosophy of always siding with the underdog. On the surface this has good feels: always side with the weak against the strong. In every conflict, between individuals or between nations, find out who the strong one is, and find out who the weak one is. The weak one is the one you should side with.
This is not as ironclad a moral imperative as it appears on the tin. The most extreme and simple form of the imperative's flaw is such:
Suppose Mr Rogers and some random homeless guy get into a fight.
These are the facts and they are not disputed: the homeless guy demanded Mr Rogers’ wallet and he said no. So, the homeless guy attacked him. Shocking everyone, Mr Rogers fights back ferociously, sending the homeless guy to the hospital. Mr Rogers escapes without a scratch.
Digging into the homeless guy's background reveals that he has been in and out of prison a lot. For theft and minor violent offenses, except he was most recently imprisoned for pushing random bystanders off of train platforms onto train tracks. He had been arrested before anyone died. The homeless guy was released from prison a few days before he got into a fight with Mr Rogers.
Mr Rogers is a saintly widely beloved media personality with a legendary benevolence towards all.
So. Should someone here be penalized?
An underdog fetishist might say yes, Mr Rogers should be penalized because he’s actually a member of an elite class whereas the deranged homeless guy is a member of an underclass. This is a perfect example of class struggle.
In my experience, most people consider the Palestinians the underdog here, but not everyone. Some consider Israel the underdog being propped up by the US.
Anyway, while I consider it morally confused, I contend people who would condemn Mr Rogers exist, and that if you're going to spend time debating an extremely nuanced complex situation like the Israeli/Palestine conflict with others, it's valuable to at least first figure out if your debate partner would always (e.g.) side with the homeless guy against Mr Rogers.
I mean, isn't this a.k.a "Intersectionalism?" This is the foundation of contemporary progressive thought: the weakest party in a power imbalance is the one who must be favored in that conflict. Being "Woke" is seeing the world as that series of power imbalances, and "Identity Politics" is being aware of one's own membership in one or more disempowered groups.
It's also the cornerstone of dramatic fiction, which is why IMO mass media is so confluent with progressive ideas and has become their most powerful delivery system.
It's also why "Woke" are terrified of what they call the alt-right: because the alt-right work exactly the same way, but have an alternative (and possibly more correct) view of who is more disempowered. Which, ironically, makes the Woke a conservative [privilege-safeguarding] movement and the alt-right a progressive [privilege-shuffling] one.
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I think that in many fictional narratives, the correlation between being the good guy and being the underdog is high. "David kills Goliath" is a story, "David becomes the 35th person to be killed by Goliath" is not. Hence Frodo vs Sauron, Harry vs Voldemort, Asterix vs the Romans. Of course, in reality, the correlation between good guy and underdog is, to the first approximation, zero.
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Freddie deBoer confuses me on this point, because he was once writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict and stated “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”
But he has also argued repeatedly that "punching up" and "punching down" is a meaningless framework through which to look at humour, interpersonal relationships or anything else.
When I read this, I think to myself, "yeah, this is why I hate Marxists". Openly admitting that it doesn't even matter who is right, they'll just always side with whoever they think is weaker is a recipe for the dissolution of civilization.
Agreed.
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This seems like a similar observation to Arnold Kling's three languages of politics framework. He states this as progressives thinking in terms of oppressor-oppressed dynamics, conservatives thinking about civilization-barbarism, and libertarians thinking about freedom-authoritarianism. There are obviously times where these overlap, but other times it results in people talking right past each other. I think you can see this starkly, at least for conservatives and progressives, when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Without regard to finalized policy prescriptions, the basic sympathies of progressives seem to always lie with Palestinans, who they see as oppressed, while conservatives side with Israel because it's the civilized side. Often, the language used by liberals and conservatives even puts it explicitly in those terms.
"Civilization-barbarism" is a terrible lens for international conflict, you can easily whip up people into a frenzy with atrocity propaganda - bayoneted nuns or babies taken from incubators.
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Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope--are we talking about Israel vs. Hamas, Israel vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world that funds them, or Israel + its supporters in the US vs. Hamas + the wider Islamic world? The homeless guy vs. Mr. Rogers scenario doesn't quite capture the dynamic of group vs. group when each side has debateable membership.
That said, I don't favor underdog analysis as a particularly useful lens, though clearly others disagree.
Maybe you debate people more aligned with you than I do; there are legit people who condemn Mr Rogers in this, what I consider, pathologically slanted absurd example and I often wish I had known that way ahead of time.
To me that reveals a kind of moral confusion that makes the finer scope points a more first world issue.
Yeah, that's a fair point. If someone's seriously taking the side of the homeless guy in your example, I don't know what I'd do with that information other than backing away slowly.
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That's one of the interesting things about power... local power can be a massively different beast than total power, or even future local power.
"My garden may be smaller than your Rome, but my pilum is harder than your sternum", and all that.
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To me, this is one of the key issues of the whole thing which makes it just a non-starter. The degrees of freedom there are in determining who is the underdog and who isn't is effectively infinite, because human capability of self-deception is effectively infinite. So if one takes on the framework of the "righteousness of the underdog," then step 1.00001 that follows immediately after this is to deem [whoever I like] as the underdog, while twisting logic in any way required to reach that conclusion. By the time we reach step 2, step 1.00001 is long forgotten, and any scrutiny about that step is shut down as picking on the underdog who has been Firmly and Uncontroversially Determined to be the Underdog in this situation. It's just naked bias and favoritism with a particularly flattering narrative that makes it easier for people to believe even when they like to think of themselves as disliking naked bias and favoritism.
This is why when I hear "punching up" and "punching down" in the context of comedy or satire or the like, I always translate "up" to "direction I want punches to be thrown" and "down" to "direction I don't want punches to be thrown;" in practice, that's what they mean and only what they mean.
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Israel Could really lose this one
https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/israel-could-really-lose-this-one?r=1b6v2r
A 9000 word deep dive I wrote on the Tactics and Geostrategics of the Gaza invasion and why there's a real risk that one wrong step from Israel might end in them not being able to break off or achieve a Ceasefire.
Your theory :
1.) Egypt lets jihadists into gaza
2.) Israel is forced to attack Egypt ?
I think it goes
2.) Gaza turns into ISIS-P
3.) No one gives a shit when israel levels the place
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This is fantastic. My previous view was that Hamas launched the attack out of pure evil or stupidity, but after reading this I think they have a real chance of permanently crippling Israel. There is an equilibrium where if most of Israel's neighbors turn against Israel, Israel doesn't have a chance and then, I suspect, the Jewish population of Israel moves to the US, Canada, and/or Australia.
We've seen that twice before. Israel had a chance.
Yes: unless Arab military culture has changed in the past 23 years, the key threat to Israel is not a conventional conflict with its neighbours. A success of Palestinian human shield/"hit while crying" tactics to shift opinion (especially in the US) is more likely and more of a threat, though not necessarily likely.
https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/meria/meria00_den01.html
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I think the mistake is assuming that many Middle Eastern armies are competent. There are a handful of 'competent' fighting forces in the region - Hamas, Hezbollah, some of the Houthis, some units of the Syrian army that have better training and a good culture, some of the Iraqi Shia militias, and arguably the IRGC's Quds Force although as an actual fighting force they have a mixed record. For a successful full assault on Israel all of them would have to participate and do so extremely successfully, in addition to a poor showing from the IDF. That's possible, but not necessarily likely. It would also open the door to all of the domestic and regional conflicts that most of these groups are ordinarily dedicated to managing. Israel could fund Sunni Islamists more heavily and keep much of Iran and allies’ strength tied up in Iraq and Syria if absolutely necessary, for example.
An Islamic crusade against Israel has always been the 'primary' risk, but conversely the risk to the Saudis that the 'Shia crescent' encircles Arabia is existential in a way that Israel certainly isn't, Turkey has a strained relationship with Iran even if it isn't hostile for now, Egypt certainly doesn't want Hamas to gain in prestige because a resurgent Muslim brotherhood inevitably means some degree of destabilization. Failed ceasefire attempts have been ongoing in Yemen for years. For them to put aside their differences would take a lot.
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This is interesting, and I don't disagree for some of the broadest tactical (ground war in urban combat sucks) or political (Hamas had as goals to undermine Israeli normalization and for the economics of terrorism) components, but :
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That Egypt scenario is a complete nonsense. Egypt doesn't want the war no more than Israel wants the war, especially a war for Hamas which Egypt has very little use of, besides the obvious joy of making Israel suffer. It wants Israel to have all the troubles in the world, but so that it ends on the Egyptian border. The time where Egypt sponsored the Fedayin was 70 years ago.
And this turn of phrase:
Implying like it's just "Israel claim" which is super suspect, all while the Houthis themselves admitted they did it, and bragged about it profusely. Really, this can't be serious.
People really should stop mentioning this in 2020s as something that is highly relevant to what happens today. It was a very brief episode in the 1980s, and treating this as - which is clearly implied here - that Israel created Hamas from the ground up and there wouldn't be any Hamas if not Israel - is just stupid and counter-factual. Yes, Israel briefly considered using (then younger and weaker) Hamas to fight Fatah, that was 40 years ago, and that idea didn't last long and was soon abandoned. Treating it as it was definitive episode in the history of Hamas and Israel is like saying "US created the USSR" because they were allies for a while in the fight with the Nazis. Even order of magnitude sillier because the ties between Hamas and Israel were never even order of magnitude that close as between US and USSR.
The Jordan angle is bullshit too, unless there's a complete collapse of Jordanian government (not mere "instability") - which they are very determined not to let happen, and are willing to kill a lot of Palestinian Arabs for that, as they amply proved in the past, exactly nothing would happen there. And to achieve such a collapse would take a direct military action from somebody like Iran. Which would a) require them to somehow cross Iraq without Saudis noticing and doing anything, not to mention Iraqis, and b) do that all right under the nose of US air carrier group stationed next door, and also them not doing anything. I don't see how it's a possibility.
The problems of fighting the tunnels are real, and the fact Hamas has been building it for 16 years is real too. But Israel also knew about them for all these years, and they consider it doable. The main problem would be time - the more Israel stays in Gaza with boots on the ground, the more pressure there will be from the Kind People of the World. And if they can easily afford to tell Europe to take a long hike off a short peer, that wouldn't fly with the US, especially not with Dems in power who has their own sizeable pro-Hamas wing to placate. That would be the main problem for Israel for the middle term.
I largely agree. Reading through it, it came across as a 'just-so' story in the same vein as the Trump-era 'how Trump could lead to a nuclear war with North Korea!' book rather than something from someone with actual experience on the subject matter. Far more of a mediocrity of geopolitical punditry by someone clearly not particularly familiar with the geopolitics, or just the regional national politics, involved.
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White House scrambles to repair relations with Arab, Muslim Americans
Publicly the administration has been fully supportive of Israel, while behind the scenes they're attempting to restrain them; the blackout in Gaza ended after barely over a day because US officials pressured the Israelis. Biden's response has been pretty reasonable, but this may turn into a bigger domestic issue if the invasion drags on.
It could be the behind the scenes restrain was so the US would have time to get military assets into place to better defend Israel if it is attacked by another nation.
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I reckon the majority of Muslims will show up for Biden out of self interest. However Michigan in particular has a big levantine Arab community who care alot about this conflict. They are also mostly 2/3rd generation so wouldn't be affected by Trumps muslim ban.
With the razor sharp margins Biden got in several swing states, this could make him really vulnerable. He won Georgia with 12 000 votes, and the state has more than 70 000 Muslims.
I also wonder how this focus on Israel will play with other minority groups, like blacks and Hispanics. I think the feeling that your president and government is beholden to a foreign government you don't really care about can be alienating to alot of these voters. Particularly when Biden is not delivering on bread and butter issues.
As I've said before, the mistake was made in 1965, not in 2017. Either way, the best time to not open immigration to Arab Muslims was decades ago, but the second-best time is now. Even if I those second and third generation Muslims aren't personally impacted, I would wager that Trump's policy would piss them off enough that they're vote for the opposite party in an election. If Biden's embrace of Israel alienates them to the extent that they don't vote at all, that would have to be thought of as an unmitigated win for the Trump campaign.
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Muslims are a tiny minority aren't they? What are they going to do, vote Republican?
Republicans won the muslim vote before 9/11. While today's American muslims have a different ethnic makeup(less Arabic and more African), it's not implausible that republicans could make their margins look dramatically better by exploiting pride-type issues if democrats aren't perceived as better on Israel.
Muslims before 9/11 were essentially wealthy, largely secularized Levantines, North Africans and Iranians (plus a few black converts). Mass immigration has changed the profile as you suggest, but it’s been so total that it’s hard to see things returning to the previous situation.
There's a pretty big difference between an 80/20 split and a 60/40 split. Republicans will probably not win the muslim vote outright, but they can possibly prevent democrats from dominating it.
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It isn’t just Muslims themselves but certain sympathizers. You don’t need a huge number for reduced turnout to result in an R victory.
Also if you will always vote and vote one party, then that party doesn’t really have to do anything for you.
Yup, that's why two party system is terrible.
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not voting at all would harm parties* for which they are voting now
*ok, party, due to USA duopoly
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It seems likely there are some internal power struggles going on behind the scenes in the Democratic party over this. Consider that one of Minnesota's representatives recently announced his intention to run against Biden for the Democratic nomination (despite almost no chance of success) and around the same time local Muslim community leaders issued Biden an ultimatum to call for a ceasefire by Oct 31st or lose their votes. The fractures in the Republican party have been center stage recently due to the fight for the speakership, but the Democratic party isn't looking to be in that much better shape.
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There are quite a few in Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. And they can vote for a third party (which is pretty much how Hillary Clinton lost swing states in 2016)
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The modal Muslim is going to have a hard time finding a political party even 1/1000th as anti-Israeli as they would like anywhere outside of Gaza.
The Palestine topic is a mind-killer of absolutely comical proportions for most Muslims.
What would the response be to, "Why don't you also get upset at China for how it treats Muslims?"
China doesn't control the (a) Holy Land.
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Anecdotally. Just pure red hot rage and goalpost shifting and whataboutism.
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There is several things going on here. This is not only about islam, the Uighur situation is geographically/culturally more remote than anything the majority of muslims in the US know or understand. This is a case where optics really matter too. China doesnt broadcast the situation with the Uighurs. They deliberately go out of their way to not frame this in a religious/ethnic sense. You dont have videos of Xi invoking religious imagery of "children of light and darkness". China doesnt try to justify what is going on, they just pretend its not happening. On a global stage, China doesnt seem to have a problem with muslims. Seeing a many middle-easterns dont trust western news sources, its very easy to pretend nothing is happening with the Uighurs.
Both Israel and the palestinians on the other hand have a very active propaganda arms. The picture of Biden hugging Netanyahu will be spread far and wide. Many supporters of Israel invoke clash of civilization rhetoric that is popular on the christian right, but will rile up muslims. The toxoplasmosis of rage is in full effect here.
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I've noticed this as well. You'll have secular, non-religious and well adjusted Muslims turn into borderline Jihadists over the topic of Israel and Palestine.They will also start believing in insane Alex Jones tier conspiracies. I was talking to one who told me that Hamas didn't kill any civilians at the Music Festival on purpose and they were caught in the crossfire of them fighting the IDF. Some Jews are just as bad too. There's SJW Jews who believe in intersectionality and every progressive cause that will sound like Hitler when talking about Palestinians. This issue is so toxic it's not even able to be debated. It's like the trans issue multiplied by a billion.
The last Model United Nations I attended would disagree, but then again it's a meme even in the US that having the reconciliation of Israel and Palestine be the objective almost inevitably ends in the delegates ending up in a deadlock haha
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Yes. The meme is "the most complicated geopolitical issue of all time" is not really all that accurate. There are far more complicated geopolitical issues. The complicacy is just how emotional people are about the issue, not the issue itself, which you can more or less grasp within a day or two of reading.
How do I know this? Most I talk to about this issue who have the passion of a thousand suns about Palestine don't know the history of Israel, and funnier, Palestine itself. Most didn't even know that "Palestine" was under Ottoman rule before the British.
Matt Yglesias has a solution:
All we need to work on is [3] and the rest falls into place! Seems like it might be a problem...
Things were just so much more honest when the troublesome step was "???".
Indeed. The number of people who didn't get the joke was high. But maybe that will eventually include MattY himself, as his habit of stepping on rakes and then blaming the foliage for swinging too wildly continues.
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There are 2 basic theories for how to win elections. One is that you win by convincing moderates who might plausibly vote either way to vote for your guy. The other is that you win by convincing your supporters to actually turn out and vote. Given the state of partisanship and the participation rate in even highly contentious elections with massive media attention, it seems likely that the second is the dominating factor in most elections. If something drains the enthusiasm of people who would have voted for you such that they fail to actually show up and vote, you can very much still lose, even if the other side is (in your opinion) objectively further from the point of view of the people who are sitting out.
There's a third way! Dampening enthusiasm for your opponent to the extent that their people just don't show up in the necessary numbers may well be effective. I suspect it's less effective in the era of fortified elections, but even mailing something in might be too much effort for low-propensity voters that lack enthusiasm for any candidate.
I suppose it's a bit semantic, but I would consider that part of my second way. Perhaps better classified, the first way is to operate primarily on logically persuading people to support your candidate versus the other based on proposed policies. The second way is to operate primarily on the enthusiasm of strongly partisan voters to actually turn out, which would include both getting your supporters to want to turn out and vote, as well as getting the other guy's supporters to sit out the election instead of voting.
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I'll believe it when I see it. If Palestine is your central issue you're not gonna get much help from Republicans.
If you are a socially conservative set of voters which sees no difference between democrats and republicans on your top issue while democrats are widely blamed for the erosion in your purchasing power, however...
It's not equal though. People like Nikki Haley are going around saying "finish them" like this is a video game. Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem. From any Palestinian perspective, one side is much worse than the other.
Right - Biden is going around hugging Netanyahu, but the Democratic party also contains Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. The antisemetic faction is not in control, but it actually exists in real numbers compared to the Republicans. It's like libertarians - the centre of gravity in both parties shits on your ideals constantly, but you actually have a toehold in one of them.
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Trump will inevitably get questions from Evangelicals during the campaign about Israel and is going to go full “the Israelis should do whatever they want to them, they gotta teach them a lesson they won’t forget” or something, and that’ll be that. Plus there’s the “Muslim ban”, the “Sharia come to USA soon????” Fox News stories etc. Plus Trump’s immigration plan is going to at least promise (he won’t do anything in reality, but he’ll promise) to crack down on ‘chain migration’ which is one of the largest ways Muslim Americans bring over family members.
Whatever their differences with Biden, they will hold their nose and vote for him. Even sitting it out is less and less likely the more Trump’s rhetoric heats up, which it will.
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